As someone who was a 1st employee at a small startup (who made the mistake of accepting 50% below salary for a few percentage points of equity), this rings very

As someone who was a 1st employee at a small startup (who made the mistake of accepting 50% below salary for a few percentage points of equity), this rings very true to me. However, my empathy goes out to early-stage (pre Series-A companies)...how do you get those engineers then if you, yourselves, have no money and know that equity doesn't pay the bills. Is it through revenue/profit sharing? Cause I would imagine if I wanted to start my own company, and I was looking for someone post-founders in a pre Series-A environment, I can't imagine my seed investments would give me enough cushion to hire near market rates. Just playing devil's advocate here, but I wholeheartedly agree we need to compensate startup employees better.