> Why would anyone want to work for your startup when they can get much higher salaries working for larger companies?
As much as I agree with the "lottery ticket" mentality, this line of thinking has been popular to parrot on HN for at least 5-10 years. And as far as I'm aware, startups don't have much trouble attracting senior talent. So until that changes significantly, they are going to continue offering lower salaries and bigger lottery tickets for as long as they can. Why would they do otherwise?
Admittedly I'm just speaking from conversations within my own network, but if hiring this kind of talent was significantly difficult then I'd expect to see broad, industry-level changes to how startup compensation was done. Companies can't survive if they can't hire people, and yet the same ISO practices remain aside from a few recent trend setters. So it seems most of the eligible candidate pool is still accepting this form of compensation.
As much as I agree with the "lottery ticket" mentality, this line of thinking has been popular to parrot on HN for at least 5-10 years. And as far as I'm aware, startups don't have much trouble attracting senior talent. So until that changes significantly, they are going to continue offering lower salaries and bigger lottery tickets for as long as they can. Why would they do otherwise?