Seems like a very gloomy view of start-ups. I'm not quite sure in what kind of universe the founders are last in line to take in profits from a start-up. If that is the case anywhere, I'd strongly encourage those founders to get out of there and come to backwards old England and start a start-up without professional investors. However, I don't think that's the case. The evidence doesn't support that idea.

Certainly, joining a start-up as an employee "to get rich" would be the wrong idea. But I imagine many of us here are founders, and though we're not doing our start-ups for the sole purpose of getting rich, the fact that it's a possibility is certainly important. Would you bother working on your start-up if you knew for sure that it would never make you more money than you could make burger-flipping? (directly or indirectly)