I don't agree with that... I would want all the early employees to be rewarded for taking a chance on that. I would want to go the other direction and give restricted stock (which can be early exercised) when the valuation is low and with less than 10 year vesting (such as the standard 4-year vesting with 1-year cliff), it's in the employees' best interests and costs the company nothing. Of course, down the road after later rounds the common stock valuation becomes prohibitively expensive and then it probably makes sense for stock options. But at least back in my day it seemed the common thing was to give restricted stock to founders and stock options to employees. Not sure if that's still a common thing or not?