Underpaid Startup Early Employee Career Advice
Bear with me, long rant: I have been working for a series-A fintech startup in San Francisco for 3y after graduation as a software engineer. Current compensation is 95k salary. I was the 10th employee to join this company, and now we have 30 people in total. Last year, I was promised a raise for this year since I have been constantly delivering excellent results. I also work till late at night and on the weekends very often to keep the gear moving in such a small company. There are also on-calls, so sometimes I have to wake up in the middle of the night to troubleshoot. However, very recently my CEO told me that they would raise my salary after series B instead, which is probably going to be next year. And he promised me it’s going to be a big raise + more equity. Except for the bad work-life-balance and the low salary for SF standard, I like the work I am doing. Should I stay for another year and hope it’s not another empty promise? Or should I abandon this ship? Also another fact: A lot of people have come and go; most got fired and some move to a different company. Is this normal for a startup this size?
Oof, I made 108 + overtime as an intern, and I had about 20hrs of overtime per week.
That’s great. I don’t get overtime pay
That’s the trade off between startups and larger companies. If you leave now can you keep your options? They should be able to give you a raise before series B. 30k isn’t that much for them...
U can start looking and if u get a better offer, use it to negotiate higher salary or leave
It would be difficult to negotiate because it’s a small company and I don’t want to hurt the relationship with my CEO
Then just keep working there?
CEO is playing the carrot-donkey game with you. Move on
Here’s what you do. You need to make it clear you cannot wait another year. Either they give you significantly more equity now - why would you want to wait for it to dilute at series b and get less? They can issue that now if cash is a concern. Or you pack your bags and get paid more for your hard labor. It concerns me that there is high turnover for a series A company. It signifies weak management. Usually a result of strong founder personalities micromanaging everything.
Don’t worry about equity, OP. Don’t pretend this startup or any other will pay as much as FAANG. You should’ve already gotten enough equity to make some cash in the 0.001% chance the startup liquidates. Now is the time to bunker down and start Leetcoding. And I fucking hate Leetcode.
You're not being valued. Get out of there asap.
I've been in a similar boat -- the overtime, the on-call, etc., and after 6+ years and significant positive growth and a few quarters of failing to hit our marks, the investors forced a sale, and all Common Stock cancelled outright in a private acquisition. I lost out on about $300k in fair-market salary in that time, and all my precious equity was worth a grand total of $0.00. Let this be a cautionary tale. If they cannot (or will not) pay you a competitive wage and refuse to provide you the room for the work-life balance you need to be most effective at your job, then they do not value you enough to keep you.
Wow, thanks a lot for sharing this. Which round of funding where you in? And did you see any other red flags?
I joined after seed and before round A as one of the first five engineers. Things looked really good through B and C rounds, but in year 4 we had a surge in sales team growth that failed to drive proportional revenue growth and resulted in a RIF -- we were still growing, acquiring other startups, landing good customers etc., So the warning bells didn't really go off for me. In year 5 transparency into company financials was drastically reduced, and by the time I was halfway through year six the writing was on the wall that our churn rate was getting out-of-hand, which was taking a toll on the company financials. I left a couple months before the acquisition happened.
Startups are shady and may lie and cheat you. Have you seen the cap table or liquidation preferences? Do you have your shit in writing? No? Jump to FANG.
Cut loss and leetcode.
Also all the TC posts on Blind make me feel really bad about my TC. Im not sure how many of those posts are real though
They are real. You should move on