Being any more generous than you need to be to attract good people and get them to work hard is being too generous, hence, not a good business decision, hence, the founders would not be "good" founders.
"felt (mostly) left out of the party" is perhaps accurate, although the engineer in question was one of the four founders (see my longer recent item in this thread).
Based on what happened to him I'd have to wonder if later employees got much more than beer money.
