> In the unlikely event equity is worth anything, converting it to cold hard cash is not always straight forward.

People rarely seem to understand this. A successful exit doesn't necessarily mean employees will get paid. A friend experienced this when Google bought the start-up he had been at for 2 years. Employees had to wait a year for an earn-out period. They had to re-interview for their positions, and fired if they didn't meet Google's impossibly high standards.

(edited to clean-up a grammatical error)