Unfortunately this is normal, because running a non-profit is hard enough that suitable candidates command high salaries. I was on an NPO board with a similar ratio and we couldn't get it down.
Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. You want high quality people to be able to focus full time on stuff like this.
If that individual is managing the process of successfully getting 1,000 people who volunteer 15 hrs/wk, which you'd otherwise have to pay let's say $30/hr including taxes, then that would be the equivalent of $22.5 million in annual revenue.
Suddenly $285K in executive compensation looks perfectly fine.
In some mostly-volunteer organizations, you will find that most of the money pays the professionals at the top, because you can't get that necessary expertise any other way.
I worked at one once right out of college, at the bottom of the full-time-paid rung, and I had interestingly conflicted moral feelings about it. I spent a lot of time with volunteers and yet I was being paid. But I needed a job, I needed to pay rent. And the tech skills I was providing literally none of the volunteers could do. It made me question whether it was "fair" that all these people's monetary donations were going to paying my salary. But then again, I wasn't the one who set rents to be as high as they were in the city where the organization put its headquarters, and student debt doesn't get forgiven just because you work for a nonprofit.
If you overspend on your salary such that you put the company in a position where the company is begging for 4 months of your salary as runway, you have failed at your job and you demonstrably were irresponsible, reckless in your spending and unable to make tough choices to ensure survival. In other words, you were not worth $285k.
Sometimes organizations simply wind up in impossible positions. Funding dries up for macroeconomic reasons that you have no control over, demand patterns change, etc.
There are plenty of failed orgs that would have failed even if they'd had true business geniuses leading them.
You could just as easily assert that paying someone $285K got the expertise that kept the organization going for an extra 3 years than it would have otherwise, because someone with less expertise would have made a bunch of worse choices that it would have run out of money 3 years earlier.
You seem to be demanding some kind of divine level of perfection here.
The SV/NorCal area is reaching that capacity. There are only so many dollars customers are willing to pay to get a quality product, service, or charitable act before the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and those dollars are what funds the compensation packages of both profits and non-profits. There is no infinite well of value (no matter what capitalism says), which means that there is a ceiling on things like salary and the things (namely residential real estate) that said salary can buy.
If you pay a person $300k to do a job because that's what the local job market dictates in SV, are you really getting the surplus value to cover that salary? Can you keep charging customers that amount? Will you do increasingly alienating things that causes negative externalities (read: regulation) to be passed that impact your business model's ability to pay that much?
You could very well be better off to hire someone at the $150k rate in a place like Kansas City or Minneapolis. Those aren't "Poducksville" but that's the competition the valley will begin to see.
Do all that and it may start to dissolve a bit.
Put another way, there aren't enough qualified candidates outside expensive cities and therefore the salaries typically tend to go up to cover those costs of living.