> I saw a study according to which founder salaries are much lower. According to this data source, 75% of Silicon Valley based founders pay themselves less than $75,000, with 66% paying themselves less than $50,000. Based on these numbers, even for companies that have raised more than $10M the average salary is only $81,700. This looked odd to me, and maybe the difference is due to the fact that the study is three years old. I ignored this data source for now, but again, suggestions and input are very much appreciated.

I totally appreciate a VC saying it's okay to take a decent salary, but this point seems strange to me. Why on earth ignore the data?? I doubt three years makes any difference at all. I would speculate this is more likely a philosophical difference between the US and Germany.

A founder's entire existence is spent trying to figure out how to get a company to survive its first few years. Companies that raised $10M are dying all the time. $10M really isn't that much, it buys a startup with 30-50 people maybe a year of runway. In a company that size, one or two more engineers can make a real difference, and if four founders forego $50k/year they can then hire one or two more people using the difference. They basically spend every second trying to figure out how to stretch every dollar they have, it's not surprising to me that many live their early startup years exploring just how little money they can actually live on.