It's not necessarily better than salary.

It's more like, IF you're in the situation where you have equity and don't want to wait for / be dependent on an exit (and whether the exit is big enough), this offers a solution.

Fees aren't as high as what gus_massa is figuring, because we don't finance early stage startups.

Plus in a lot of cases we enable long-term capital gains tax rates. (If you exercise your stock options early and end up owning the shares for 12+ months, the money you make is taxed at a lower rate – long term cap gains.)