Reddit mentions of Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership

Your feelings are all very understandable.

Honesty time: do you think you are "leadership material", based on where you are at right now? "Should" you be in the leadership team of this scaling startup? (Keeping in mind that "leadership team" now basically means founders+exec-level people who are brought in.) Or do you have a bunch still to learn?

Depending on your answer above, you have a couple answers:

1. If the answer is "yes", go out there and start interviewing for explicitly leadership positions in other startups. "First engineer at successful [for now] co" will get you a lot of interviews and cred.
   
   
2. If the answer is "no", then you can either go find a comp-maximizing role -or- push for leadership development. If the latter, then what I'd do is go to the leadership and say that you want to develop as a leader in ways XYZ and you want the company to i) fund executive coaching and ii) build a career development plan.
   
   (ii) is obviously a mess at any high-growth startup, but what that should functionally mean is you work with a coach and then you build out how you'd like to progress, what you want to learn, etc. Any plan is going to be super fluid (at best) at a startup, but all leadership teams in high growth startups are desperate for people who make their lives easier--bring a realistic and well-defined growth plan and they'll probably glom onto it.
   
   Any high-growth company is going to be fairly flush with cash and likely will fork out for some leadership development costs, particularly if it coupled with a strong justification and development plan. And presumably they do want to hold onto you.
   
   If they won't even do that, then I'd loop back to the bigco comp maximization plan.
   
   If you're thinking about staying, I'd also go read https://www.amazon.com/Paths-Power-Insiders-Outsiders-Leadership/dp/1422101983. There are more boldly "selfish" options like doing the best to grow your own product team, absorb new hires, etc., which you could consider.