In a start up with a team of 10 or less (including all roles), it's critical everyone is excited about what the start up is doing.
Actually if you look at the history of success stories, the core team was always filled with those who believed the vision. Start ups that have failed, most likely did not fail due to the team having too much passion for their product.
99% of startups don't solve hard problems (it seem hard to them because they are inexperienced and excited but in all reality not so challenging ) , that doesn't mean they don't have good business idea but technical aspect is mostly easy , challenges usually come with scale which happens later
financial upside for 0.2% equity end 100Mil exit is --> 200000 at best and that is not much so where is that upside for somebody taking 80K instead 140k over 4 years ? Not to mention that probability of that happening is low to start with
in small startup it would be essential to have extremely qualified people , excitement should be secondary
I do what I do because I love it but that doesn't mean I have to do that for free or cheap so correlation between asking for fair price and not being excited (passionate) about what you do is mostly not there
I worked in couple of startups (last one had exit 500Mil) but I was paid market rate and that is mostly a reason why they succeeded (got high quality people knowing exactly what they are doing)
If the start up you worked at was sold for 500Mil while on a seed round - that's amazing! ...but I doubt it.
Did you join before Series A? For how many years did the start up exist before you joined? And how many years did it exist before it was sold?
anyhow it is just a datapoint and most likely outlier
This attitude that startups are doing engineers a favor by hiring them is hurting the startups themselves.