I feel your pain but unless your startup has a decent revenue inflow any changes to permanent costs, which should read salaries, are difficult to justify.
You obviously need a strong and motivated team to build something great. But - in the current conditions - if you are unsure as a founder when the new round may come any increase to salaries may not be taking you to product market fit and a stable revenue stream.
This is actually a spot on comment recalling the true startup/software mindset.
I miss the old days of building software just for the pure joy of hacking things together to create value, first for myself.
The physics of software/SaaS market became severely disturbed in the last decade by free marketing money pushing the most shiny products as wide as possible without making the technical side work first (Looking at you, Clickup).
We strongly need hackers to become motivated and concentrated again to build great new things. Far from FAANGs and far from GPT-is-the-answer theme.
Just two-three hackers working together late nights over shared pizzas on something smart.
Building is the answer. And even likely so in the current reality of failing corporate promises which will take us into 2024 or even 2025 easily. The new, adjusted financial forecasts for public companies are just being published (these won’t be nice) and we are still to reach the bottom in demand for software developers.
Let’s not waste this time and build something great.