I've started several companies and also been a first employee (and so have a number of my family members), and I've experienced multiple situations (and seen others second hand) where subsequent employees contributed more than at least one of the founders. This includes everything from founders being unmistakable liabilities to even one case where a 50% owning founder ended up doing quite literally nothing but playing online poker and silently attending meetings for his entire tenure, which lasted half a decade.

The problem with the issue is what constitutes "deserving" of a larger share of equity. Obviously there are different perspectives on this, but in terms effort, there certainly are many cases where employees eclipse founders. I literally just finished a conversation 30 minutes ago with a c-level exec about how the one founder of her company who is still present (there were two) never actually did anything other than give talks and never had anything to do with operations or strategy.

Even in the case of taking on risk, a founder with enough personal wealth and/or strong professional network that failure doesn't severely impact them is certainly not taking as much risk as an employee who is living paycheck to paycheck.

In short, I've seen more than enough cases where strong, effective employees worked harder, took more risk, and contributed more to the success of the company than one of the founders. I'm not sure by what metric the founder "deserved" more equity in those cases besides being there from the beginning.