The incentives at a typical corporation are also not setup to encourage "nobody cares" attitudes. Employees are paid whatever the results are, unless they do something egregiously bad. They have every incentive to care about their effort and motivations - that's what they get fired for - and no incentive to care about results. That's diametrically opposed from an equity-owning cofounder (who basically can't be fired, unless the board forces them out) but doesn't get paid anything unless the company succeeds.
You could argue that this is the reason why anyone would accept a salaried employment position. In a well-run knowledge organization, employees have just as much freedom as startup founders do. The difference is risk assignment: under an employment agreement, the employer assumes the risk (and reward) that the product may fail despite the employee's best efforts, while in a startup, the founder assumes the risk that the company may fail for reasons outside his control. (The incentives issue actually falls out of this as a form of moral hazard.)
Note that the alternative of paying everyone by results doesn't always work either. Many financial firms use this approach. The problem is that realistically, in a decent-sized organization, people don't have a measurable effect on outcomes, and results will be dominated by randomness anyway. If you pay for results but results are not under the worker's control, you end up incentivizing risky behavior, because the worker's upside is potentially unlimited but their downside is generally capped at "everything they own". This was the problem at Enron, LTCM, and many hedge funds in the financial crisis.
You could argue that this is the reason why anyone would accept a salaried employment position. In a well-run knowledge organization, employees have just as much freedom as startup founders do. The difference is risk assignment: under an employment agreement, the employer assumes the risk (and reward) that the product may fail despite the employee's best efforts, while in a startup, the founder assumes the risk that the company may fail for reasons outside his control. (The incentives issue actually falls out of this as a form of moral hazard.)
Note that the alternative of paying everyone by results doesn't always work either. Many financial firms use this approach. The problem is that realistically, in a decent-sized organization, people don't have a measurable effect on outcomes, and results will be dominated by randomness anyway. If you pay for results but results are not under the worker's control, you end up incentivizing risky behavior, because the worker's upside is potentially unlimited but their downside is generally capped at "everything they own". This was the problem at Enron, LTCM, and many hedge funds in the financial crisis.