I don't think that's necessarily true. In a small company, you often don't have the money to hire all the employees necessary to run a project like you would in a company with appropriate funding. In exchange for giving up your free time for such an arrangement, you should expect appropriate compensation (stock options, stock grants, deferred bonuses, etc). But to a large extent, it's a gamble and the potential employee has to evaluate the entire situation for him/herself to determine if it's worth the risk. Now that's not to say that there aren't plenty of small companies that aren't also terribly run, but I don't think you can say it's a planning failure in the general case.