Having been employee #10 a couple times now, there is a lot of that even when you aren't a founder. It would be nice if the 'de-risk your life' stuff this article describes for founders was also available for early employees.
If you want to get wealthy, there are more efficient, less effort ways. If you want to suffer with low chances of success based on all available data, well, help yourself to the firehose of startup jobs.
I’ll take the lottery ticket over me any day, not because I suck, but because I am human. Even exceptional humans fail. I don’t drink the exceptionalism koolaid.
The startup failure/success rate already have some level of "smart, motivated staff" baked in. So you're really making a bet on how much better you are than the average early stage startup employee.