It just confused me. How does anyone do well out of a failing startup? By jumping ship early? By going to a competitor? Surely there are no golden parachutes, right?
There definitely are golden parachutes. In my experience, when a startup is going to die, it will thrash around a bit before it quits living.
Most recently, the company was running out of money (~3 months runway), no significant progress was made on the large new funding round we were looking for, and a small round wouldn't do any good since there were big (expensive) milestones to meet. With about 2.5 months left, we laid off about 80-90% of the staff to extend the runway.
Most employees were let go with two week severance packages and about 1 week's worth of insurance. "Critical" employees stayed and were given sizable 'retention' packages with big bonuses if new funding was arranged.
For me, the applied skills I learned at a startup made me a much more attractive prospect. I can speak from experience about the relative strengths and weaknesses of machine learning models on real data, instead of the somewhat sterilized and over-used datasets often passed around in academia. It means a higher salary when I did jump ship into corporate-land.
Plus, it was just plain fun. Startups are the closest thing to the intellectual excitement and curiosity of grad school I've found in the private sector.
