Well if you're getting paid a salary, it's not the case that it's riskier for you. You get to enjoy some of the benefits of a startup (culture, equity, etc) without having to go through the period where you're living on credit card debt and ramen.
It's risky in the sense that the chance of a meaningful payoff is much smaller. I don't mind living on ramen for a while if it made the "dream" tangible.
If the difference between a founder and an employee were, say, 5x to 10x the equity, being an employee may make sense, but if it's 100x-400x range it just makes the employee stock options look pathetic.
That's true, but culture, equity, are not tangible. The hours and the effort are very tangible. Startup employees put in a lot of effort, in some cases as much as the founders, depending on the culture. There are few circimstances where you'd want to put in such an effort for a negligible expected reward.
