[muzani]

Hold up. Should it be a startup if you're not making money? What stage is it in now? Where does the money come from?

If you're transferring money to a company account then paying yourself with it, that makes no sense. If it's too early, then VCs/angels/crowdfunding won't give you money. If someone does give you money to pay your salary, take it! The purpose of early stage investment is for you to focus instead of thinking about other work, like consulting. Early stage investors rarely take over 10%. Your odds of landing a seed investment are much higher once you have revenue/validation, though, so this should be delayed until you do.

However, salaries are often taxed and startups are almost never taxed. So it's better to use company money for expenses. Training, a monitor, a chair, domain names.

[bbertucc]

We're pre-revenue. Our salaries would be covered by a few interested investors. Current thinking: Unless we get a strategic benefit from taking money from the investor, we shouldn't.

I'm really just curious if some data exists that shows startups that paid salaries survive longer than startups that don't.

[muzani]

Any data would be heavily skewed. I had about 5 projects designed to be commercial, only one of which was registered as a "startup", and that was long after making revenue. Our salary was about $40/month up until acquisition, but does that really count as paid salaries? However we took out a lot more from the bank for personal use, including flights and equipment.

We eventually sold it because we were getting into debt and the half-assed consulting we were doing to pay the bills just didn't allow us to focus on it. It would have gone much further if we could live off the salaries.