Few million dollars split by how many people? A small startup that provided a decent exit for me was sold for 50M EUR. I got 100K from that - the company had over 1000 shareholders. That's not really life changing amount of money, was barely enough to get a mortgage for my small apartment (30% of the price).

BTW the company was failing. If we didn't sell we'd have 0 very soon. It's really not as easy as "well let's just grow I guess".