Holy shit. I&#x27;m going to send you some mail and see if I can help you out directly in about a minute, but I&#x27;d like to comment on your situation here too.<p>This is the third time this month I&#x27;ve heard of a startup &quot;CEO&quot; screwing their employees out of pay and&#x2F;or benefits, specifically exploiting &#x27;interns&#x27; or severely low-balling entry level hires who don&#x27;t know better. Startups are hard. They&#x27;re supposed to be hard - you&#x27;re trying to build something big without the resources of a big company. That means you can&#x27;t pay what a big company would pay. That doesn&#x27;t mean you get to screw people over.<p>As a founder you have three options:<p>- Do tons more work as a founder. Fill in the gaps you can&#x27;t hire for on your own, until you can pay to get that help. That&#x27;s why you get the equity, and that&#x27;s how you build your founding team.<p>- Be up front with people about what they can expect in terms of pay, especially early on. Let them know about the risk. Hope your idea and the state of the company so far excites them enough to join anyway. Work your ass off to improve their situation and get them to stay.<p>- Lie to people, obscure expectations, and basically screw up people&#x27;s lives because you want to be the next Steve Jobs.<p>The first two are not only ethical, but pragmatic. Being able to do things on your own is a prerequisite to being a founder, and it means you need to take on less investment, you get to keep more of the company. Being able to put your ass on the line by letting people know the real risks is the way to build a strong, loyal team of tough people.<p>If you&#x27;re going to be a founder, mull that stuff over. Accept that this is hard. You don&#x27;t get to pretend it&#x27;s not, because that will bite you in the ass a hundred different ways.