[majormajor]

In an age of 10 million dollar seed rounds there's more ability than ever for startups to pay competitive salaries to non-founders.

I did the early-employee-recently-out-of-college thing a while back, they weren't able to raise nearly as much; my boss would've LOVED to have the money to retain me when I got a closer-to-market offer from another company.

[misiax]

I feel your pain but unless your startup has a decent revenue inflow any changes to permanent costs, which should read salaries, are difficult to justify.

You obviously need a strong and motivated team to build something great. But - in the current conditions - if you are unsure as a founder when the new round may come any increase to salaries may not be taking you to product market fit and a stable revenue stream.

[Hermitian909]

The other option, of course, is to give employees more upside. I've had a few founders offer me founding engineer at a salary equivalent to theirs with 1% of the upside in an IPO scenario despite very similar risk profiles (not to mention what would happen in acquisition).

Actually it's probably worth mentioning acquisitions as one of the things that's severely reduced the appeal of working for a startup. After failure the most common exit for a startup is acquisition. As an employee this almost always means you get zeroed out and founders regularly walk with 7 figure pay days (or higher). I know they exist but I've yet to meet an employee who made any money in an acquisition for under a billion.

No one will offer you any sort of protection for this scenario, why bother?