This is such a laughably unprovable claim. "Few people who have the vision, motivation, and skill" is equivalent to saying "few startups succeed". It's just a truthism. It's equally likely that few companies are lucky enough to have a talented and motivated team of engineers.
Finding someone who thinks they have it all and will be the next big billionaire is easy. Finding a group of people who know what work needs to be done and can put their nose to the grindstone to match the "vision motivation and skill" is the hard part. Just look to google, the holy grail of tech visionaries. No one doubts that Page and Brin have vision/motivation/skill but they readily admit that their initial team of engineers is what carried them and they rewarded them like it.
What you're advocating probably feels good for the ego though... everyone loves imagining having demi-god-like status. For me it's always interesting to look at what people are fighting for. "The founder deserves 100 million, not 80 million, pay the engineers less!" At the end of the day it's just greed.
Finding someone who thinks they have it all and will be the next big billionaire is easy. Finding a group of people who know what work needs to be done and can put their nose to the grindstone to match the "vision motivation and skill" is the hard part. Just look to google, the holy grail of tech visionaries. No one doubts that Page and Brin have vision/motivation/skill but they readily admit that their initial team of engineers is what carried them and they rewarded them like it.
What you're advocating probably feels good for the ego though... everyone loves imagining having demi-god-like status. For me it's always interesting to look at what people are fighting for. "The founder deserves 100 million, not 80 million, pay the engineers less!" At the end of the day it's just greed.