Of course there are a lot of big FAANG type companies, and there are a lot of startups with VC funding. I used to work for Google and now I’ve run my own compan

Of course there are a lot of big FAANG type companies, and there are a lot of startups with VC funding. I used to work for Google and now I’ve run my own company for the last 10 years without VC funding. I imagine there are many many countless companies similar to mine. I focus on growth and we never have a ton of money. If we get more money we put it into our current and expanding workforce. We do keep some money in the bank but only so we can make sure our company doesn’t fail at some point. But companies are fragile things, if we lose enough employees and can’t get new employees and train them fast enough we probably fail. If we raise our salaries too high and can’t get enough revenue in return we fail. If we have a sales guy who we pay $70k base with $150k commission, then he leaves for $140k base job and we have to in turn hire a $130k base salary guy with $200k commission - what do we do? (This is a real world example) - well we now have one sales guy for almost the same price as we were paying two before. Basically we need to make more money or let people go. A single sales guy can only have so many conversations so we probably need to raise our cost of our product. Which assuming our customers even accept it, will increase their costs and it just keeps repeating down the line. The current type environment is not kind to my type of company and it definitely will cause a lot of companies to fail. We have an amazing product with great demand and i think that’s what has saved us, but please imagine a company that is similar to mine. We try everything we can do to retain our employees, pretty much every dollar we make goes into employees since our product is software. When we had bad years I set my salary at $40k since i wanted the company to survive and we were still small and it made a difference. A ‘normal’ company like mine is totally restrained by cash flow, its a pretty simple equation. When you start having costs increase (i.e. salary) you have to balance it out somehow with more revenue somehow or reduced costs. A gradual increase is always better so we can start planning for it, get loans, get investment, gradually increase our price. Price shocks and huge changes are never easy to handle. I believe companies like mine are doing something good - innovating and creating good products and providing a much better service to our customers than Google and others can do by the virtue of us still being small and nimble and customer focused.