100 units isn’t 100% of available cash and equity. It’s the minimum number of units that founder (investors) think they can get employees to work for. Most of the time in well funded startups they can afford to pay 200 units of cash and 500 units of equity. But the founders (investors) would rather take 50000 units of cash and 50 million units of equity for themselves and only pay employees 90 units of cash and offload their risk onto the employees so that they have greater reward and lesser risk.

Their argument is that no one will start a business (by investing their time or their money) without minimizing the units of cash and equity given to employees per whatever the market will bear. How do you address that?