This is great. One question I've had for a while - do founders typically get one time bonuses or sell their own shares during later funding rounds? I feel like with a lot of these businesses that are successful, there's probably opportunities along the way to sell and make a few million. Especially with unicorn founders I'm often in awe that they stick with it - I'm sure they had opportunities to pocket $100 million and walk away.
This might be an extreme one, but the Bird founder appears to have cashed out $44m.
It makes sense for VCs to let founders cash out a bit -- just so you can be comfortable and focus on hyper-growth of the business rather than making short term decisions. I've heard the amounts are usually more like <3M (enough for a house and car or college for kids) and not like the example above. The more the founder cashes out, theoretically the less incentivized they are to grow the company.
