Maybe a devil's deal, but not with the goal of under-paying employees. I know very few founders who have the highest salary at their own company, which is as i

Maybe a devil's deal, but not with the goal of under-paying employees. I know very few founders who have the highest salary at their own company, which is as it should be. Founders of VC-backed companies are making an explicity equity-vs-salary trade-off. And every founder I know would love to pay employees more. The challenge is that taking VC money is a commitment to try to figure out how to grow relatively quickly. There are never enough resources to try all the things you wish you could, on the way to product-market fit. It's perfectly reasonable to criticize this model, but it's not a model that is intended to negatively impact early stage employees. Hence the discussion in this thread, much of which is about how the economic context in the SF Bay Area employee market has changed, and how to adapt. Look at this another way: employees at early stage boot-strapping tech startups generally make less money than employees of early stage VC-backed startups.