> Honestly, it's hard to believe that one person who isn't actually producing/outputting anything can create that much value
I'm not going to attempt to justify the number, but this statement is incorrect. Value is provided by working on the right thing. I work for a startup, and ~20% of my time is spent figuring out what we're working on/if we need to pivot, and the other 80% on doing some of that work (with other developers). The 20% of time that I spend choosing what we're working provides an order of magnitude more value to the company than the 80% of my time that I spend developing, and I suspect that as we grow that gap will continue to grow.
If you're only picking what to work on, them how does anything get done? The people executing on that decision are the ones providing the tangible value. I may get downvoted for this, but I think it's stupid that people get paid obscene amounts for making some decisions and having fancy dinners with other big shots. Then they justify making 100x or 1000x what the actual workers do.
> If you're only picking what to work on, them how does anything get done? The people executing on that decision are the ones providing the tangible value.
The situation isn't quite as black and white as that. I'm not just sitting there picking randomly out of a list, I'm ensuring that the people who _are_ providing "tangibles" are providing tangibles in areas that are important to our company and team. Imagine a person can do 5 tasks per week, but they decide to focus on area A which is interesting to them, but not valuable to the project, and area B is something that actually benefits the team/project. By directing those people from area A to area B, you provide a huge value gain. Now consider the fact that I ensure that 10 people are working on area B insead of area A, not just 1. The value of my decision is proprtional to the value of the outcome of all of those people, and if I make a wrong call we're probably done for.
> I think it's stupid that people get paid obscene amounts for making some decisions and having fancy dinners with other big shots. Then they justify making 100x or 1000x what the actual workers do.
It's an enormous stretch to go from "people who execute those decisions create more value" to "people get paid obscene amounts for making some decisions and ahving fancy dinners/justify making 100x what the actual workers do". I did say in the comment you replied to that I'm not going to try justify the specific number, but as an early employee in a 25/30 person startup, you are not getting paid 100x what the people who do the work are for making some decisions.
I'm not going to attempt to justify the number, but this statement is incorrect. Value is provided by working on the right thing. I work for a startup, and ~20% of my time is spent figuring out what we're working on/if we need to pivot, and the other 80% on doing some of that work (with other developers). The 20% of time that I spend choosing what we're working provides an order of magnitude more value to the company than the 80% of my time that I spend developing, and I suspect that as we grow that gap will continue to grow.