[exac]

In my career I've seen startups "shut down" and lay off the NA team.

I've seen venture capital acquire startups for essentially nothing laying off the entire product team aside from one DevOps engineer to keep everything running. I've seen startups go public and have their shares plummet to zero before the rank-and-file employees could sell any shares (but of course the executives were able to cash out immediately). I've seen startups acquired for essentially nothing from the lead investor.

In none of these scenarios did any of the Engineers receive anything for their shares.

Yet every day people negotiate comp where shares are valued as anything more than funny money.