It plays well to the audience, but it&#x27;s effectively less than two years of salary, when you consider the high marginal taxes (depending a bit on whether they were ISO&#x2F;NSO, etc).  Given he was significantly under-market for four years, it&#x27;s not a particularly good payout.<p>Remember that everyone who joined early was taking a gamble on a high risk, high reward company.  You see an OK payout for him, but you don&#x27;t see the 0 payouts for the people who bet on the wrong horse.  So if joining a startup as an early employee is changing from high-risk high-reward gamble to instead high-risk OK-reward, that&#x27;s a problem.