Very true. Most of the people I know working at startups, myself included, had no delusions of becoming Mark Zuckerberg or winning it big. Startups can provide a great quality of life with good benefits for employees and the big pay off can be a very small motivation for some.
Given the Kafkaesque horror that is most mainstream big-business programming/ops work, startups represent a significant quality-of-life improvement for programmers - an improvement worth trading some salary for. Maximizing salary while minimizing risk isn't and shouldn't be the only motivation for us. I could go on about how stupid mainstream economics and journalism are about this, but why bother?
