Most of the time capital is invested after a company has proven viable or founders have an idea and are going to provide the sweat equity. It is used to speed up the process OR allow founders to cash out some of the equity.
in time, I believe we could be looking at more of a two legged stool as robotics/ai/tech doesn’t care about work conditions. Thus more companies will be extremely lean with everyone having equity.
The apples/amazons/Walmarts will tons of employees that have lower skill sets have no skin in the game. The employees with elite level tech talent will always get treated like investors because the results will truly depend on them unless they are a cancer to the org.