"We’ll Pay You When We Raise": The Unpaid Talent Crisis in Indonesia’s Startup Scene
Many startups in Indonesia are asking employees to work unpaid while they "raise funds." Here's why that’s broken, and what needs to change.
In the world of startups, candidates are pitched something electric. You’ll be part of a mission. You’ll move fast, wear many hats, build something that matters. It’s the dream of meaning at work, tied up with growth, autonomy, and just enough equity to believe that maybe, someday, it’ll all be worth it.
But for a growing number of people in Indonesia, that dream comes with a blank payslip. They’re lured in with vision and ambition, only to discover the business model can’t quite accommodate... salaries. Not consistently. Sometimes not at all.
And it’s not rare anymore. It’s systemic. Founders repeat the same phrases: “we’re in a tight spot,” “we’re close to closing the round,” “we’re all in this together.” People are working without pay. Some stay silent out of hope, others out of fear.
Suddenly, your role isn’t just Head of Product or VP of Ops. You’re also a silent financier. Not by choice, but by circumstance.
Deferred Salary Is Not a Business Model. It’s a Soft Default
When a company can’t pay its people, it’s not “navigating a lean phase.” It’s not being scrappy or agile. It’s defaulting on its most basic obligation: compensating labour.
But instead of handling it like a serious business problem, many founders package it as “deferred salary,” which is code for a quiet financial collapse.
Here’s what “deferred” usually means in practice:
No written agreement,
No clear repayment date,
No interest,
No meaningful equity upside.
Just vague reassurance that things will be made whole when the next round lands. If it ever does.
That makes the employee something they never agreed to be: an unsecured creditor. Not a partner. Not an investor. Not a shareholder. A lender, unpaid and unprotected.
Now flip this situation. Imagine a startup needing legal representation, a marketing campaign, or a new office space, and telling the providers, “Thanks, just bill us after our Series A.” That would be absurd. No one accepts IOUs in lieu of invoices.
But when it comes to employees, somehow this passes as legitimate. In startup culture, you’re expected to smile, lean in, and take it on the chin. Push back, and you’re not a team player. You’re “not aligned with the mission.”
What makes it worse is the one-sidedness. Banks get collateral. Investors get preferred shares. Employees?!?
Deferring salary is a quiet breach of trust. And if it’s your go-to cashflow strategy, you have a debt problem that you're outsourcing to your own team.
Founders Preserving Cap Tables While Liquidating Their Team's Trust
Many founders are more concerned with preserving their ownership than protecting their people. Even when a company is in deep financial distress, the instinct is often to guard the cap table like it’s sacred ground, while quietly asking employees to absorb the shortfall.
It’s not uncommon to see startups that haven’t met payroll in months still spending on non-essentials. Brand refreshes. Sponsoring events. Hiring senior people they can’t afford. The optics of momentum matter more than the fundamentals of sustainability. Meanwhile, the people who’ve been building the product, keeping operations running, and fronting the company to customers and partners are left unpaid, told to be patient and “trust the vision.”
In many of these cases, founders don’t take pay cuts. They don’t offer to dilute their shares. They don’t give up perks. They maintain control while transferring the financial burden onto the very people who are keeping the company alive. The logic? They need to preserve equity so they’re not “too diluted” when the raise finally comes. But if you're burning bridges with your own team to preserve theoretical upside, you're destroying value.
Dilution is a standard part of building any venture-backed company. If a founder is unwilling to give up a few points of equity to avoid harming their team, they’re hoarding.
If things turn around, the credit should go to the team that weathered the storm because if things collapse, those same people are often left with nothing. No severance. No back pay. Not even a thank-you. Trust, once lost, is difficult to rebuild. And trust is what ultimately powers teams through uncertainty.
"When We Raise" Is Not a Plan. It’s a Prayer.
In 2020 and 2021, raising money felt almost inevitable. Founders spoke in terms of “when,” not “if.” Valuations climbed on future potential, not present fundamentals. A decent slide deck, and a catchy mission could often unlock millions. In that context, telling your team “we’re raising soon” carried some weight. It was still risky, but not entirely unreasonable.
Those days are over.
In 2025, “we’re raising” is more often a placeholder for a lack of direction. A raise is increasingly unlikely in today's environment, especially for startups without strong traction or a credible path to profitability. Saying “we’ll pay you when we raise” is a gamble with someone else’s livelihood.
What makes it worse is the way this uncertainty is kept quiet. Employees aren’t told that the round is stalling or that investors have cooled. They’re just told to hang on, keep working, and trust that the money will come. In practice, “when we raise” becomes a substitute for transparency. It papers over risk with vague optimism.
And the impact doesn’t stay within one company. Word spreads quickly in a tight ecosystem. Stories of unpaid teams and broken promises travel across WhatsApp groups, LinkedIn DMs, and coffee shops. Investors hear them too. Over time, everyone becomes more cautious. Talent becomes harder to hire. Good people exit the scene entirely.
A broken promise chips away at the trust that the entire ecosystem depends on. If “we’re raising” is all a company has left, then it should be said with a clear sense of what happens if it doesn’t come through.
What a Fair, Transparent Path Looks Like
Startups are inherently messy. Founders are allowed to make mistakes. Markets shift, timelines slip, rounds fall through. That’s part of the game. But there’s a difference between weathering a storm and pretending it isn’t raining. If you’re asking your team to stick with you through a tough stretch, you owe them honesty, structure, and respect.
Be transparent. Share the runway. Lay out the scenarios. Let people know what’s at stake and how close the edge really is. Most professionals can handle bad news. What they can’t work with is silence and spin.
If a company is missing payroll, the founder’s own compensation should be the first to go. Nothing poisons morale faster than watching leadership stay whole while others absorb the damage.
Deferrals, if absolutely necessary, must be formalized. Not just a verbal assurance. Put it in writing. Set dates. Add equity, interest, or something that acknowledges the risk being taken. Treat it like a real obligation, because it is.
If you truly can’t pay people, you shouldn’t be hiring new ones. Expanding the team during a financial crisis shows poor judgment. No one should be recruited into uncertainty under the illusion of stability.
This is about ensuring fairness. If you want people to buy into your vision, don’t ask them to pay for it. Offer them a stake, offer them truth, and when you’re in trouble, treat them as partners. That’s what building real trust looks like.
This issue isn’t about one company, one founder, or one bad quarter. It’s about the erosion of trust across an entire ecosystem. When unpaid work becomes just “part of the grind,” the signal it sends is clear: your labor is conditional, your compensation is optional, and your security is secondary.
That kind of environment repels top talent. The smartest, most capable people, the ones you need in the room when things get hard, won’t stick around in a system that treats basic pay like a bonus.
And once that trust is lost, it’s hard to rebuild. Founders become suspect. Startups begin to look like unstable bets rather than bold opportunities. The whole ecosystem shifts from optimism to caution. The damage spreads quickly and quietly, and it takes years to recover.
If we accept this behavior as the norm, we stop building the kind of future we claim to believe in. A future built on trust, fairness, and value creation.
A company that can’t offer even the basics of employment isn’t building anything. It’s just surviving on borrowed time and borrowed trust. Let’s call it what it is.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we help companies build ethical, sustainable people strategies that attract and retain top talent in Indonesia. Contact us if you're interested in building responsible org structures and realistic runway plans.