Sure, and that's fair enough as long as staff gets a big enough stake. And to be clear, we did. Every single person outside the exec team/general partners on that team had an unusually high stake in the total carry. Our main investor buying us out and turning it into a boring corporate not being the end game we had in mind aside, it was one of the most enjoyable startup experiences I've had (we were a bit of a hybrid, in that while we were operating a single fund, a lot of my work was towards getting tech in place to optimize delivery of subsequent funds).

A lot of startups think it's still ok to pay under the odds once hiring staff that are getting tiny fractions of a percent, though, and at that point, the risk-adjusted value of those options is not worth taking a cut for relative to a bigger corporate with somewhat predictable share performance and liquidity.