Story time. I'm an accomplished Director of Design, with 16 year career in product design and frontend engineering (a rare combo).
I joined a startup a few years ago as the first employee, at a heavy discount, with the understanding that when we raised series-a I would be bumped up to industry standard in salary. I even gave up some equity as part of this deal. Given I was the first employee, we didn't have everything ironed out and in writing. A few slacks, nothing hard.
I do everything from management, marketing, frontend, design, managing two teams and multiple projects at a time.
Fast forward to today and we successfully raised a very very good series-a funding, 10s of millions of dollars. What happens? I've been informed that I will not be getting my agreed raise due to a failure by the engineering team which resulted in us losing a partnership I've been working on for a few quarters.
This is the 3rd time I've been dicked around by greedy owners of startups I've help build from nothing.
Lesson learned here, as an experienced tech worker never work for a startup unless you're being paid market value or are a founder. You'll do half the work at an established company with better career guidance.