One strategy I've used is to bake a raise into the negotiation. This raise should automatically kick in when the company reaches some measurable goal (MRR, ARR, MAU, whatever...not profit, not VC funding) or a certain amount of time has elapsed. The 'or' is important here as the time component should reflect your worst-case expectation for getting the raise.
There are a couple important things to keep in mind here:
1. You have to trust the other party to some extent. You have to be willing to believe they'll be up-front about the metrics and willing to execute the raise.
2. You have to be willing to work at the lower rate at least until your time component kicks in. Despite any growth projections, do not count on meeting the first criterion before the time component.
Let's use your situation as an example. You'd like to get to $35/hr, but you're willing to work at $30/hr. You've already anchored $40/hr so negotiating a follow-up raise to $35 should be doable.
Let's assume the company has 500k MAU. You might suggest a raise to $38/hr when the company reaches 1MM MAU or after six months of FTE.
If they're not willing to engage in this level of negotiation, that's fine. You've lost very little in terms of leverage and you can still take a more traditional approach.
If they are will to engage, then you have a few more knobs to turn in the negotiation process.
Of course the main risk is they'll renege on the contract, but that's always a risk (I'm assuming this is an at-will contract). You should be prepared for that. But, if they're an ethical employer and you do a good job, I bet they'll be willing to pay a bit more per hour to keep someone who now has a decent amount of domain knowledge and proven themselves to be competent and reliable.
I truly wish this were an option. I have an eight year old and a five year old. They play together wonderfully. But, since I can't let the eight year old have a gap year, I may as well have the five year old do stuff too.
The real pisser is my eight year old is one of those birthdays that can go one way or the other. She's currently the youngest in her grade. I'd love to give her a gap year from all this and just hold her back a year. She's only in the grade she is because our district in CA had strict cutoffs for kindergarten.
Sadly no. But that's because we moved from the school district the following summer. It's a bit of a sore point for me.
I have no doubt if I'd stayed there (K-6), I would have been close to fluent. After lunch was a full immersion in French. My teacher was a native speaker from Belgium. I remember having mastered counting in French, which is quite interesting considering most kindergarteners probably have not mastered counting in English.
As for an anecdote, I had one friend who stayed there through 4th grade. He still lists French as a language on LinkedIn.
[Edit] By master counting I mean having mastered the language algorithm, so to speak. Once you can count to 100, it's pretty easy to get to 200, or all the way to 999 with the knowledge at hand. It's not until one thousand that you need a new word. And, IIRC, French has a _very_ mechanical counting mechanism whereby it was even simpler. Perhaps a native speaker can weigh in here?
I had all day kindergarten in '83. First half was in English, and the second half was in French. And no, this was not a private school. This was Cincinnati Public.
I hear ya. I had to disable animations on gifs and emojis. I keep Slack on a workspace in my peripheral vision. The animations trigger some reptilian fight or flight part of my brain that kills my focus.
Does YC take any position on founders in a long-term, personal relationship, e.g. married? Has YC funded companies with such founders? If so, can you say anything meaningful about these company's success or failure?
Note: I'm specifically thinking of companies with two founders.
There are a couple important things to keep in mind here:
1. You have to trust the other party to some extent. You have to be willing to believe they'll be up-front about the metrics and willing to execute the raise.
2. You have to be willing to work at the lower rate at least until your time component kicks in. Despite any growth projections, do not count on meeting the first criterion before the time component.
Let's use your situation as an example. You'd like to get to $35/hr, but you're willing to work at $30/hr. You've already anchored $40/hr so negotiating a follow-up raise to $35 should be doable.
Let's assume the company has 500k MAU. You might suggest a raise to $38/hr when the company reaches 1MM MAU or after six months of FTE.
If they're not willing to engage in this level of negotiation, that's fine. You've lost very little in terms of leverage and you can still take a more traditional approach.
If they are will to engage, then you have a few more knobs to turn in the negotiation process.
Of course the main risk is they'll renege on the contract, but that's always a risk (I'm assuming this is an at-will contract). You should be prepared for that. But, if they're an ethical employer and you do a good job, I bet they'll be willing to pay a bit more per hour to keep someone who now has a decent amount of domain knowledge and proven themselves to be competent and reliable.