Imagine that you were making 200K a year before you founded the company. And being a founder you've taken a 40K salary. Suddenly its been 5 years, your startup is doing well with 2M of revenue per month but your still making 40K/y as the founder.
Lets say an exit is possible after 4 years of more work. For all intents and purposes, your founders have blown through their savings and are watching as their former (regularly employed) friends are buying houses (at least putting down large down-payments) and driving nice cars while he/she is living in some crappy apartment to keep costs down.
In this scenario, the sane thing in my mind is to help out the entrepreneur so that he can focus on making the company huge instead of quitting the startup so he can get a job paying $300K which would let him buy a decent house for his kids.
Everything in life is negotiable. Even the present terms in a termsheet are negotiable and I feel that this could certainly be one of them.
No founder/CEO of a profitable startup who was making $200k/yr before starting the company and then takes a VC A-round is making $40k/yr in her fifth year at the company. No such person is making $40k/yr the day after the first round of funding they take.
Lets say an exit is possible after 4 years of more work. For all intents and purposes, your founders have blown through their savings and are watching as their former (regularly employed) friends are buying houses (at least putting down large down-payments) and driving nice cars while he/she is living in some crappy apartment to keep costs down.
In this scenario, the sane thing in my mind is to help out the entrepreneur so that he can focus on making the company huge instead of quitting the startup so he can get a job paying $300K which would let him buy a decent house for his kids.
Everything in life is negotiable. Even the present terms in a termsheet are negotiable and I feel that this could certainly be one of them.