Apple, Google, and Facebook all make around $1m revenue/employee and employ around 100,000 people. (Profit/employee is about $300-400k, incidentally.) While the average SV engineer isn't working at one of these companies, doesn't this mean that there are perhaps tens of thousands of engineers who are on average producing $1m/year in revenue?
(If not, it seems like you need to argue for an extremely skewed distribution of the value that individual engineers are adding based on quality or area of expertise.)
If one of these $1m revenue/year ("1MRPY") engineers starts a company with n 1MRPY engineer friends, is it so crazy to suggest that they might produce $x * n million worth of value over x years? (Even if they just build infrastructure and never turn a profit?) Or that they might be worth $4 * n million in revenue over a four year earn-out to an acquiring company?
(If not, it seems like you need to argue for an extremely skewed distribution of the value that individual engineers are adding based on quality or area of expertise.)
If one of these $1m revenue/year ("1MRPY") engineers starts a company with n 1MRPY engineer friends, is it so crazy to suggest that they might produce $x * n million worth of value over x years? (Even if they just build infrastructure and never turn a profit?) Or that they might be worth $4 * n million in revenue over a four year earn-out to an acquiring company?