Earlier quoted context omitted.
In practice, the terms founder/cofounder/founding-employee are fuzzy and granted based on mutual agreement among those present. Every early pivot or talent-acquisition or rebranding or product launch could reasonably reset the 'founding team', if that's the spirit of the participants. To limit the term only to the person with the idea overemphasizes ideation. To limit the term only to the person who first writes chec…
"but all the team are also 'founders' in a reasonable, non-hagiographic sense of the word." I suppose, but who is taking all of the risk? A founder takes a loss if the company loses and wins when the company is profitable. An employee doesn't take a loss (in a sense that they are paid a regular salary no matter what).
If the big-F Founder has a richer set of post-failure options than founding employees – and gets more beneficial notoriety even in failure – they may in practice be risking less than early employees.