If you look at the whole picture, you will see that “to align employees with company goals” is simply “to incentivize employees to make shareholders richer”.

Shareholders usually own 90+% of the stock, while employees ownership is in single percentages at best. That includes early employees.

The deal for Capital is very simple: give away few percents of stock and make Labor grind tirelessly to increase value of Capital by orders of magnitude.

Percentage wise everybody wins, both Labor and Capital (so called not zero sum game), in absolute terms however the distribution tells a different story.

Another counter-example: Imagine startup fails or is acquired at decreased valuation: will be it zero sum or not?

Well, employees options are wiped out first, VC capital gets first claims to money pool, Founders have second claims after VCs (or would have made liquid in separate deals), while regular employees are the ones who screwed.