My perspective on this is coming from someone who made easy money on a ridiculous business selling …

To be fair, not everyone who optimizes for cash is "obsessed with cash" or a "cash obsessed optimizer" -- life circumstances like dependent family, the oppression of college debt, etc make stability of a large corporation attractive to some, even if they would take on risk given other circumstances. Example: taking 80k/yr out of college while having to retire 2k/month of college debt, then using the rest to afford bay area rent + commuting expenses + rest of life would have been hard and arguably not a good use of a young person's early career phase. They might opt instead to work at a bigco until their debt was sufficiently retired, then with the safety net of {an established career + no debt + some money in the bank} swinging for the fences at a startup later. You're more likely to get leadership roles at startups when you have a few years under your belt anyway.

You should pay your employees their market rate. Your risk of going out of business is higher is what warrants the bigger equity. You spend all this time and salary to build a team that works like a well-oiled machine. It would be a shame to lose them to someone who simply pays the market rate. Your team is likely going to be working more than overtime helping you build your dream. You should match what FAANG's paying them, if thats your competition for talent. As they say, you get what you pay for.

> the original goal should be, primarily, totally disconnected from money. Any monetary benefits should be a side effect of providing value. Value is a funny word here. You have a business if you create value for both your users/customers and yourself . You don't have to monetize on day one, but how you create value for yourself needs to be at least a fuzzy part of your vision from inception.