Thanks @leighburke. I suppose that's something that's different in this crypto-era... With something like Facebook, or even Apple, people could see the company growing to an extent, before they could see that it had a share price, that the company had value. But with Steemit, the organisation can launch, and around the same time, the shares come out, and so it seems that the money came "out of nowhere".

James D'Angelo has a great video on this subject, talking about how the growth of a service like Twitter can happen without people knowing the value of the company, but with Bitcoin or other crypto, it's all out in the open, and so it seems very different.