What do you do with $500K? It's such a small amount. If you want to hire a single great developer, that amount will buy you his time for a year, maybe two.
We take pay cuts to work at a startup in favour of equity, not every startup needs a former FAANG Staff engineer in SF, and the idea is for the money to last about a year. If it’s lasting two, investors will be upset the company is turning into a lifestyle business. Get traction and re-raise.
They made it work with $125k, I don’t understand the push back with 3x as much money.
And let's face it. 500k salaries are definitely overpaid. No one in the world other than FAANG engineers get that salary and they are definitely not the best software engineers out there.
