Man, sorry for that it seems that you got into a toxic startup culture. My startup was a bit like this 10 months ago, the other founders were all about making sacrifices and working 999h per week. However, nothing was working out properly.
I've made some drastic change to our culture to be more empathic, transparent and based on trust. Since then its way more enjoyable for everyone and we are way more productive. Salary for our employee are still under market, but we increase them whenever we have the chance and the financing. We aim to get to 10% above market value so that everyone is confortable. Also we've cut the 80h per week bullshit. If someone is working that much he is most likely doing a crappy job and needs to prioritize his day properly.
Here is a series of concept/book I've implemented that drove the change:
- Objective and Key Result: the only work that matter is those explicitly tied to the objective. There is a good book on that.
- The book Drive, it helped us understand how to create a motivating environment for our employee.
- The book Traction, it gave us a set of tools to make the business run smoother.
- Effective DevOps: It gave us a blueprint on how to structure our technology developement and team interaction.
- Peopleware: This was one of the best book that we've implemented. We moved to a remote-first company based on trust, we don't track time anymore and we don't care when people work. All that matter is objective attainement and the wellbeing of our employee.
Let me known if you want to chat about this.