>when you pay your engineers 6-12 months of extra salary before you ship Money may not be the limiting factor for a startup and time is a counter-factual as yo

>when you pay your engineers 6-12 months of extra salary before you ship Money may not be the limiting factor for a startup and time is a counter-factual as you don't know the alternative. Had they not been able to hire any engineers they may have taken an extra 2 years to ship the same thing. Or maybe not. Hiring at startups is time consuming and difficult with heavy competition for good engineers. Salaries lag behind large tech companies and equity may be worth nothing. Scale isn't there so the problems are less interesting than at a larger company. And good engineers can 5x better than average in an early stage startup because there is no process and technical debt is fine (in a larger organization the 10x ones leave havoc in their wake). That may not be the right decision for a startup to make but there is a logical basis for making it.