I agree, but that number for most people is not the $207k/yr Oxide is paying.
For most people that number is likely north of $500k, if not single digit millions.
Now my household income is double that, and I'm not a homeowner (I admit I do rent a nice house in a Norcal suburb) and because of remote work I'm not too concerned about the car I drive (but my wife does drive a Tesla), and after emergency fund savings, retirement, bills, and helping family out, my wife and I are still somehow still paycheck to paycheck.
I'm not sharing this to complain, merely to just express that yeah, $207k in California can be comfortable, but it's not to the "worry not about money."
$200k salary for a single person living in the Midwest? That person can probably retire early in a few years.
If you are growing your emergency fund then you aren’t really living paycheck to paycheck right? You’re putting money off to the side. Tho perhaps you’re not putting aside much for, like, travel.
Plenty of smaller startups not hitting that level, especially when they’re lean. And I think up until this raise Oxide was lean!
(To be honest given this finding raise I could see a salary increase for oxide across the board, to help with that)
A while back I interviewed for a startup that was asking me to work from 6am to 8pm for about 75% of what I make right now working regular 9-5 at a different startup. It was super early stage so that level of commitment was understandable but I can't imagine very many engineers with families willing to take that much of a paycut. But that's the name of the game, right? When you're early stage you can't afford to pay much but you need your product done yesterday. Thats probably why most startups fail. Cheap quality talent is hard to come by, at least stateside. Offshore developers can be cheap and amazing (someone living in India making $100k USD would probably be considered royalty) but if you don't have someone from that part of the world to vet the devs it could end up being more expensive in the long run.
“Paycheck to paycheck” isn’t really accurate if you can contribute to retirement, emergency fund savings, and give additional money to your family. Far from it. You could pull back on any or all of those contributions and have extra slack. Also, presumably you’ll eventually have enough emergency fund and that slack will be available soon.
I think if your kind of comfortable is needing to clear 500k or million in comp a year then you aren’t not in scrappy startup mode! This is fine but money out the door is money that then needs to get raised in early rounds
I dunno, I do think oxide for basically everyone who joins is asking for them to get pay cuts but I would really hope that people would still at least putting some stuff into savings.
And like … even if the equity is variable if people are getting even a bit of equity, that might end up as something in the end.
Saying this I think with the recent raise the comp could be made higher just to make the buffer even better. There’s definitely an opportunity cost