[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.