I'm adding my answer on quora now. Many hugely disruptive breakthrough technologies will require massive upfront funding before revenue is possible, but perhaps those kinds of startups are not accessible to those in YC. This was supposed to be a message to companies that start with $250K to not just spend money building a team and tech-demos assuming more funding will get them to revenue-generating products.
It seems you paid yourself large salaries.
What was your burn rate?
I paying myself $1K salary and only because of the minimum wage law.
Even paying $3K to 4 people gives you ~ 21 months run
We had more people on our team than the four founders, and we had higher expenses being in separate apartments.
I like the way Stripe was built on a long vacation in Buenos Aires. If you're doing something that only requires internet to be built, your entire team could go on a several month vacation after demo day and it might result in a 50% lower burn rate depending on where you go, and probably 50% higher output.
