Your comment is a bit of a giggle mate. The approach of hiring...

Your comment is a bit of a giggle mate. The approach of hiring talented people and giving them equity in a start up but on relatively low pay is exactly how Silicon Valley works.

Not only does the approach act as a brake on cash burn during R&D and revenue build phases of the company, there is the potential for large compensation upside. The downside is, of course, that the start up goes belly up. Thus high risk/high reward.

I'm fairly confident that you may not have been too bothered to work at Microsoft/Google/Amazon etc when they were start ups. I even knew several multi millionaires when I lived in Austin that got their dough by getting options at Dell and lowish salaries when they were starting up.

I think it's called "creating an entrepreneurial culture". ;-)