The myth of startup founders needing no or ridiculously low salaries before they can get their business to be profitable exists because of the privilege of entrepreneurs who can rely on their social support system, family/inherited wealth, and the lottery of birth.
Investors regularly (and loudly) claim to be investing in teams, but someone with privilege is far more likely to be funded because they don’t need to be paid a living wage to survive while their business kick-starts. The investors mythicise this and make it sound like some kind of heroic sacrifice by young entrepreneurs. It isn’t. That entrepreneur who forgoes a living wage as salary from the funding they get does not in fact need it to survive, or to feed their family. There is no sacrifice.
This is simply one more way in which the startup world creates its own reservations (Note that I did not put ‘reservations’ in quotes because I am not mocking affirmative action; what I am doing is pointing out that this is a reservation upper castes have had for millennia and somehow this does not get spoken of in the same breath as the other, more recent one). This keeps the younger, more energetic, more passionate, more hopeful entrepreneurs from the lower castes, minorities, and other backward classes out of the game automatically (and via an unspoken contract) while ring-fencing the funding to those who are, for the lack of a better word, lucky enough not to need to be paid a salary to simply put food on the table.
But you won’t hear of this over the loud din of VCs and entrepreneurs speaking of ‘merit’ and ‘hard/smart work’. You won’t hear this in the glorification of the ‘hustle’ or ‘can-do attitude’. You won’t see this in the ‘inspirational’ posts by freshers and the ’30-things-I-learnt-before-30′ ones by privileged youngsters, or the ‘respect the hustle’ ones by well-funded founders trying to fill in their quota of posts and engagements on LinkedIn and Twitter.
You won’t hear this because no one wants to say it, hear it, or accept it. All we want to do is to sit there and pat our collective privileged backs for ‘going through tough times’ before seeing ‘success’, empathising with other Gadgils and Deshpandes, Mishras and Tyagis, Guptas and Bansals, Iyers and Nambiars, Banerjees and Gangulys, Mittals and Thapars, and tut-tutting and telling each other over our single malts how the current generation simply does not have the ethos of the grind like we did while growing up.
Well, Slàinte fucking Mhaith, you pricks.
P.S: What is the solution? Not only do VCs and Angel funds need to take on board their investment teams more and more people who understand what oppression is, what living as a minority is, what growing up poor means, what going to school where you are the first one in your family, sometimes the entire village, feels like, but they also need to consciously invest in 85% of the country, which is not upper caste, urban, non-government-school-educated, or English-speaking. In fact, some time ago, I wrote about this. What else? Yes, they need to fix this salary issue. If you are going to invest whatever it is, whether US$100,000 or US$1,000,000 into a team of founders, surely you can pay them a wage where they don’t have to keep looking over their shoulders every day to make ends meet, feed their families, and once in a while, go to a movie or buy a beer. And yes, stop making heroes of those who can afford not to take a salary. They have already won the genetic lottery and can do without the extra few bucks for a bit.
