The original story of getting rich off employee equity seems to go back to Netscape, but reading The New New Thing by Michael Lewis, I was struck by how abnormal that situation was. Jim Clark hated the VCs, identified as an engineer, seemed happy to share his winnings with everyone, and had the leverage to dictate VC terms. That story shaped tech for a while, e.g. Google bragged about how even their cooks got rich, but now 24 years after the IPO I think things have largely gone "back to normal", with investors and founders giving away less. The story's momentum still draws hopeful employees, but people are becoming more skeptical, too. Plus not every company is a Netscape or Google. . . .
That's one of my favourite books. There' also "Panic!" which is basically a curated list of newspaper articles and Lewis' columns about long-forgotten companies from the dotcom era and their business models.
What I found hilarious was Jim Clark's original vision of a "trillion dollar healthcare cost disruptor" that was Healtheon, actually IPO'd in '99, but ended up being acquired by the content mill cesspool that is WebMD.
