There's nothing at all mythical about a 100k / year job where you work 40 hours a week. There are plenty of coders out there making at least that much by pumping out enterprise Java 9 to 5 for insurance companies and banks. You don't even have to be very good, you just need to not completely suck, stick around for long enough, and know when and how to ask for more money...hell, if you go the consulting route, you can make that much on a 20 hour work week at $100 an hour, which is not very difficult to get to if you're good and pick the right clients.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong by pointing out a startup that's given 20% to their first employee after raising a seed round.

You won't likely find that. But what you will find is startups that are willing to offer their early employees wages fairly close to market rates (though to be fair, we don't know in this situation whether the person in question's salary was near typical market rates, we just know that he was deciding whether to take a 50% cut in it), which is (if I'm reading correctly) what the article is suggesting people look for rather than settling for shitty wages and delusions of Facebook-level growth.

I can't think of many people in real life that have ever seen much more than a nice bonus as the result of employee-level ownership in a company, and I think that's the lesson to take away from this - equity should not usually be a deciding factor in your employment decisions, nobody's typically going to offer you enough for it to matter very much.