Yeah my point is that it’s comfortable enough.

If you are growing your emergency fund then you aren’t really living paycheck to paycheck right? You’re putting money off to the side. Tho perhaps you’re not putting aside much for, like, travel.

Plenty of smaller startups not hitting that level, especially when they’re lean. And I think up until this raise Oxide was lean!

(To be honest given this finding raise I could see a salary increase for oxide across the board, to help with that)

That's true, but I still consider 3-6mos emergency fund to be a basic necessity, since living in the startup world you never know when you may need to use it.

A while back I interviewed for a startup that was asking me to work from 6am to 8pm for about 75% of what I make right now working regular 9-5 at a different startup. It was super early stage so that level of commitment was understandable but I can't imagine very many engineers with families willing to take that much of a paycut. But that's the name of the game, right? When you're early stage you can't afford to pay much but you need your product done yesterday. Thats probably why most startups fail. Cheap quality talent is hard to come by, at least stateside. Offshore developers can be cheap and amazing (someone living in India making $100k USD would probably be considered royalty) but if you don't have someone from that part of the world to vet the devs it could end up being more expensive in the long run.