| You don't understand. A lot of the time, founder CEOs decide their own salary, as well as that of their employees. Why would a founding CEO want to shorten their runway by paying MAANG salaries to themselves an others? It decreases their likelihood of success by shortening runway and burn. As soon as the funding that VCs give founders is wired to the bank, the founders are playing a zero-sum game with every dollar. Their job is to decide the best allocation of capital. A startup, by definition, is a team in search of a business model. They're not profitable or self-sustaining. If you're Google or Meta, you have at least a chance of saying "for every dollar I pay this engineer working on ads, I get this many dollars back." And sometimes that return/salary ratio is very large, so it makes sense to pay them a ton. That reasoning does not apply to startups. That is, you earn your high salary by contributing to a profit-making product. When your product or profit do not exist, you get compensated in options so that your incentives align with those of the business as a whole. VCs invest progressively larger sums as an idea is proved out and risk is eliminated. I don't see any other world that makes sense. Most overfunded startups die before they ever find product market fit because they hire too many people, have a hard time pivoting, and lose their hunger. Given the choice between hunger and complacency, I'd say founders with hunger are probably more likely to succeed that complacent ones. Earning a MAANG salary makes you complacent, all other things being equal. |
For the love of god just pay yourself a decent living wage. We don't need founders who spend half their time in a food line or burns out due to personal cashflow issues.