There are other reasons people enjoy working at startups.
I currently work at a large org, decent team, the pay and hours are good, they look after their people pretty well. I'm pretty happy, but...
But getting anything done is a pain, because every project ultimately touches at least 5-10 different teams - legal, compliance, couple of systems teams, operations, security, risk/grc (different department from technical security!), supplier assurance (sub department of risk), privacy (different department from legal & security!), architecture, marketing, brand (different from marketing for some reason), etc. These are just the ones I remember talking to in the past year, sometimes other "interested" teams come out of the woodwork. For example, if your project touches "retail" there's a whole separate world there.
There are good reasons all these different department exist (enforce best practices / scar tissue / to protect the org), but most of those people have no interest in the success of your project and have no "skin in the game". They are free to govern you to death because they have no other real work to do. They don't have to ship anything and do not bear the costs of the requirements they impose. The tendency is therefore for compliance requirements to escalate.
New people come in, excited about doing things, and you watch them slowly get crushed as the sum of all the external requirements and legacy tech forces endless delay and compromise.
Startups let you ship more, with less "oversight" and assume different (often broader) responsibilities. If you're lucky, and in a high-trust competent team, it feels low friction. A lot of people (including me) enjoy that.
I’m not sure I understand the question. Are you implying that there are no other reasons to work for a startup, other than exposing yourself to risk? Might I suggest rock climbing or skydiving instead of startups?
The economic case for working at a startup is the risk. High risk of failure but a chance at a big payoff. He's probably saying that it's already accepted that that risk is there if you work for a startup.
I think the point is that for most employees, there is no chance of a "big payoff" (where "big" = 10X what you'd have made at an established company paying market wages).
In theory I own 1% of a startup worth $10m, but that will likely get diluted further and come to nothing. Even if it doesn't, I could have easily made an extra $100,000 over 3 or 4 years by just getting higher paying jobs at a regular company. And 1% is very high for employees, most of whom have a lot less equity.
The point is unless the startup becomes bigger than Google, most employees will lose out financially vs. working for a BigCorp.
