[majormajor]

To play devil's advocate - since we're talking about "pay yourself less than Google" not "pay yourself nothing" - what would happen if someone was throwing tons of money around and telling founders (and early employees, while we're at it, who also take less than Google et al) to pay themselves several more hundreds of thousands of dollars a year?

They'd attract a lot of people to fund, for sure.

You'd lose a bit of a filter around risk tolerance to try to weed out scammers, though. There are absolutely a bunch of people who would take that money with no intent or ability to deliver a solid company in the end.

So they'd probably want to be EXTREMELY selective; moreso than Google by far since there the financial loss is smaller both absolutely ("one bad hire's salary for 6-12mo" vs "a multi-million dollar seed investment") and likely as a percentage of revenue/bank account.

I think they'd either get ripped off and disappear in a few years or just be small and stay small and not make a huge difference overall.

It doesn't seem entirely different than the attempted Softbank "de-risk startups by picking a winner early and pouring in crazy $$" approach.

[majormajor]

Riffing on this too, the other bit of it - from a founder and early employee POV - is that at a startup, money is quite literally time.

Oversimplification: pay yourself 2x and have a 6mo runway, or take x and have a 12mo runway. If you aren't expecting to give up quickly, and don't want to just try to fall back into a Google job after 6 months if it is struggling to find traction, you're gonna want the longer runway.

And time turns back into future money because if you're doing a startup you're also likely considering the potential upside. Most startups don't get there, but if you just wanted to play the aggregate numbers, that would probably already stop you[0]. So you want to get more customers, you want to raise that next round, etc, and all those things are helped by runway. Most startups fail - but the ones that spend faster fail faster.

[0] why work for $GOOG for 12 months at a startup then have to look for a new job when it fails instead of just working for $GOOG at Google with job security?

[waterhouse]

In theory, you could pay yourself 2x for 6 months, then 0x for 6 months if the startup lacks money but seems worth persisting at. I think it's not especially rare for founders to work for temporarily zero pay early on. Seems like the main difference between that and "1x for 12 months" is providing an incentive to yourself for the last 6 months, and signaling that to others.

[foobarian]

There could be some ways around that. They could pay these would be founders in IOUs which can be cashed in for a generous amount of money once some condition is met, such as the company becoming successful or going public. :^)

[dclowd9901]

I’m not sure this argument tracks as well as the top one.

The pay that founders and early players get is nothing to scoff at — many folks would be quite very happy for that pay and would happily fake their way to it. What’s preventing _that_ from happening?