Great to see such candid comments and this clearly shows you actually really care about this startup's mission "Compound is entirely focused on helping you—the employee—understand and manage your equity."
(Full disclosure: I've been following this founder for a while to see him do great things)
"there are some absolutely ridiculous ideas, most of these companies will fail miserably and would NEVER have been seeded during a recession"
So, to state the obvious here, recession is actually one of the best times to start companies or join solid startups to earn early-employee equity: fortune rewards the bold. And to some extent, that's the best concentrated personal wealth investment if you choose wisely which early-stage startup to join, especially when you don't have lots of cash sitting around to "buy the dip" from public market. So why not "join the dip" to take advantage of the recession years (golden era, blessing in disguise) to become equity rich coming out of the other side?
I believe it's true that many/most non-VC-funded startups don't give employee equity, but don't you think this situation actually also needs to change? Just like now remote/distributed work is all the rage, in 5-10-20-25yrs when most/many other companies also give employee equity for them to have the opportunity to "earn concentrated wealth" from 'investing in" what they work on at the company?
I see Compound's mission very aligned with employees at all kinds of companies of different time, start from a smaller focus market (VC-funded startups), to serving majority of the planet in the future :)