Maybe it's just my age showing, but going to work somewhere because they're buying you an iPad seems totally ludicrous. One would think that with a $90,000 salary, a $500 tablet should not be a deciding factor.
you know they’d do great in a small environment working a million hours a week
Erm, no. That may be just great for a spotty kid in his first or second job, but someone seasoned with a wife and kids isn't really going to be thrilled with putting in startup hours for an iPad2, or the kind of stock options startups are offering. This is another reason why they're having trouble recruiting: the small pool of young people with few responsibilities that have the right skillset.
Looking over the jobs pages of some of these companies it's interesting to note how many of them expect you to make your new job there "the primary focus of your life". For instance, go google for
"primary focus of your life" intitle:jobs
and you get:
Quora: "You should be ready to make this startup the primary focus of your life"
Udemy: "You should be ready to make this startup the primary focus of your life"
GoPollGo: "you should be ready to make working on GoPollGo the primary focus of your life."
Bubbli: "you should be ready to make Bubbli the primary focus of your life."
So yeah, probably not a good fit for someone with a wife and kids.
Could be more of a corporate culture statement than compensation...
I remember one of the promises my manager made me at IBM in the early 90s crisis was that he couldn't necessary be competitive in compensation but I would always have access to the coolest equipment and people... Yes he actually kept that promise, I managed to get one of almost every RS/6000 before they were publicly released in my lab...
The haircut part is about not having to leave campus and go do errands on a weekend, so your weekends can be about having fun (or more realistically, doing more work for the startup ;-)). It's actually pretty handy, being able to tuck away a 20-minute haircut appointment in between two meetings.
There are also laundry (Facebook), massages (Google), mini-day spas (Microsoft; maybe? private to employees but not clear on pricing), etc. Haircuts are very much in theme with "work and live on-campus" approach.
