&gt; I didn&#x27;t say they were built on the charity of the system, just that they were built using the system.<p>So a college kid &quot;uses the system&quot;, that system being the college, and by your logic they should be required to donate a certain percentage of their future earnings back to the college they went to because without that system they wouldn&#x27;t have achieved their success?<p>That of course would be insanity. The college and the student already agreed upon a price the student should pay for their education, and when they graduate and the bills are paid, everyone is square. Companies within the larger systems in place in our country are no different. They pay money to file with the state, they pay taxes on all their profits, they pay payroll taxes which means they have to compensate their employees higher than they might otherwise, they pay regulation taxes, environmental taxes, etc. But most importantly, they pay people to work, which to me is exactly what they should be doing. By paying people for their labor, companies <i>are</i> paying for the system that provided for those people.<p>&gt; This toxic thinking that a twentysomething takes more risk by trying to start his own company while early in his career deserves orders of magnitude better compensation for the risk he took, over many career people that will have to be persuaded to risk their career and reputations on this new company, who have families, mortgages, and serious obligations to others?<p>It sounds so easy from your armchair, doesn&#x27;t it? When it&#x27;s not your future on the line. When it&#x27;s not you that has to bear the full brunt of failure if you don&#x27;t succeed.<p>If Zuckerberg hadn&#x27;t taken the risk to drop out of a highly prestigious school, from which he could have leveraged to land any number of low risk, highly lucrative jobs, to create Facebook, then 10s of thousands of high paying jobs wouldn&#x27;t exist today. That kind of risk deserves a great reward, and wouldn&#x27;t you know it, Zuckerberg is every bit as interested in the general welfare of his fellow humans as the rest of us are.<p>&gt; You act like the first 50 employees of your stupid app company aren&#x27;t taking a risk too. But they get 0.01%, while the founders get...? Fairly early on, you literally don&#x27;t have enough time in a day to do it all yourself, even if you wanted to, so you&#x27;re quite literally taking credit for more risk than you were actually able to take.<p>They are taking guaranteed salary and benefits and a little bit of equity, too. They understand exactly the amount of risk they took on and if they don&#x27;t they&#x27;re incredibly naive. If they were to offer their services for no compensation then they would absolutely deserve more equity. But if they only do so after it&#x27;s clear the company is well on its way to being successful then how does that represent any risk whatsoever? Where were they when nobody believed in the company and the founders were pumping in their own savings and taking no salary whatsoever? Until you&#x27;ve gone through that, you can&#x27;t understand what the risk is truly all about.<p>&gt; Considering Paul Graham&#x27;s essay about how most of the work is ahead of you even when you start adding employees, how is the risk so skewed towards initial conditions versus the long path ahead?<p>Sure, most of the work is ahead of you, but that work is done by people <i>who get guaranteed salaries and benefits</i> and who can simply find a new job if the company goes south (with unemployment benefits waiting to soften the blow). People flock to successful companies because they are often too risk-averse to start their own, but just because they do good work doesn&#x27;t mean they are somehow entitled to the equity of a company, especially if they&#x27;re receiving industry standard compensation for their efforts.