Kausas: Pylon founders paid themselves $35K yearly salaries after YC
Marty Kausas · YC said his idea "would never work". So he lived in his office for months—then raised $17M from a... · PMF Show · Dec 19, 2024 · at 16:36
Marty Kausas, co-founder of Pylon, discusses how he and his co-founders managed their personal finances and minimized burn after getting into Y Combinator.
0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“After we got into YC, and we'll, we'll get there in a moment like, Advith Robert and I, we started paying ourselves 35 K per year, which is like the minimum salary that you can pay in California.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Marty Kausas
Standalone AI support bots struggle once incumbent platforms add native AI features
“The moment they introduced that, it's really hard to sell an AI bot on top unless you're, like, very enterprise upmarket, where, like, the scale of support tickets you have is so massive that, like, they're optimizing for, like, a percentage point, right?”
Pylon has zero 1-on-1s or all-hands, sharing monthly investor updates instead
“Otherwise we have zero one-on-ones with anyone. Like no one on the team has a one-on-one scheduled on their calendar. We don't have any, like all hands. A lot of the communication is done through, You know, I send out our monthly investor update to the entire …”
Pylon has zero managers, categorizing staff only as founders or non-founders
“Right now we have no managers, so it's just you're either a founder or you are a non-founder. So that's what the leveling looks like”
Kausas: Choose Co-Founders You Enjoy Working With Because Startups Pivot
“One of my learnings was I was just like, I just want to work with someone who's kind of similar to me who I'm going to be excited about working on any idea because we're likely going to pivot. And so I want to be able to pivot with the same people and just lik…”
Almost all billion-dollar public SaaS companies target cross-industry functions horizontally
“And when we looked at the companies that actually made it to that size, turns out they all were, almost all of them were, like, horizontal SaaS companies. And so they had basically picked markets up front and by accident or intentionally that you could sell to…”
Accepting introductions from investors who pass on your startup creates negative signal
“The other, like, common mistake I think people make is they will accept intros to investors from other investors, and I learned this from YC, that's, like, a big no-no. So, for example, let's say I talk to an angel investor, and they're like, oh, like, this is…”