I did some hand-wavy math, here: https://medium.com/@kwindla/what-kind-of-silicon-valley-comp...
Dan Luu did some, too, here: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
Whereas working for faang type companies, a l5 is more or less guaranteed to make $300k a year. $500-750k is doable without being a “brand name”. Timing and luck, but the spread is much smaller.
Startup founders have made a devils deal with vcs to underpay employees. You know it. Unless you issued preferred stock to all 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.
https://www.workatastartup.com
"Join the next Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Stripe, or Instacart". Reminds me of Ben Affleck in Boiler Room.
Yes, yes, there is always things more important than money and they have all that too as well. They can afford good leadership, good management, talented ICs. I can go on and on.