Pre-IPO the venture is likely not profitable, so you'd be getting a share of zero. Companies that are VC-backed are going to be held to an expectation of a big payoff, and will be in general discouraged from offering incentives that uncouple employee incentives from an exit. If I understand this right, it's part of why founders have started to be allowed to sell some of their vested shares at funding events, it gives them some more financial runway as the company's timeline stretches out (you don't want the optics of the CEO of your $50m series C to be eating peanut butter and ramen, etc.)
I do think profit sharing would be a good lever for a bootstrapped company that is already profitable and wants to give key employees skin in the game.
Note GP asked about revenue sharing, whereas you discuss profit sharing. That's not the same thing.
Salespeople and sales partners are often compensated with a sales based commission, which is a revenue sharing scheme. It's common and expected, and practiced everywhere there's deal flow.
Technical people can rarely prove "ownership" of revenue, so they can't leverage that in negotiation and are left with "general" ownership through options or RSUs or whatever. There's nothing inherent or natural (or unnatural) about it. If money flows through you, you can usually demand to keep some of it. If it doesn't, you usually can't.
The point is: You can see which sales rep closed which deal and therefore can see what they brought in. (While a good sales rep assigned to a bad territory or losing a big deal last minute, after long negotiations, due to product quality suffers)
Imma technical role that relationship isn't there as much. Sometimes one can implement a feature a specific customer (group) wants, sometimes a specific bug fix, but most of the time the value an individual enginees brings in is not separable.
The point is: Sales team needs to _share_ with the team that is actually giving the salesperson a viable product. After all, we can “see what they [the developers] brought in”.
How much did the devops guy bring? How much did the qa guy? The help text writer? The support person?
In most profitable software companies, it is indeed shared with through bonuses and RSUs, but it is not a well defined / easy to understand revenue share or profit share scheme.
This is such a silly thing to argue about. Sales are very dependent on product quality, availability and dare I say delivering features customers need when they need them.
With sales, it is very easy to tell which specific people are responsible for any specific deal. That's why sales compensation usually includes a share of revenue.
With product development, unless you have a very small team working on the product, it's nearly impossible to tell which specific people were responsible for a specific chunk of revenue. When someone buys a product, it's hard to determine which specific features were responsible for the deal.
I do think profit sharing would be a good lever for a bootstrapped company that is already profitable and wants to give key employees skin in the game.