Twice that? Easily? Color me skeptical...

I was pulling in more out of high school. Trust me, half is being generous.

True, an engineer could make twice as much, but discussing compensation rather than strategy might be missing the forest for the trees.

Why do the Mailpiles believe privacy is the best angle to help people the most in taking email back? If you were to work on only one thing to fix email, would privacy be the most important thing to work on?

The counterargument here isn't examples of specific cloud services like Dropbox that people can trust. It's an argument for general global security. Organizations like the United Nations Security Council and NATO generally provide a much stronger joint defense against evil than individual pieces of armor offered to citizens.

Huh, I mental math failed, but grats on your success.

4166/month is only $50k/year. It's easy for software developers to make more than $100k/year, especially in the bay area.

Sadly, in the Bay Area $4166 is almost exactly what an exempt employee making $100K actually takes home every month.

No, if they were making $100K, then taxes and witholding, etc. will leave them with roughly 65% of their gross.

So they'd actually be taking home closer to $5416 per month.

Still "sad" (given that average rental rate on a two-bedroom apartments is $2K+ per month in the general bay area), but not quite as much.

We will be doing this legally, which means paying ourselves salaries and paying taxes etc. etc.

I wasn't implying otherwise; and the figure I provided is what a typical employee should see in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I was just saying that the figures others were reporting were overly pessimistic.

Yes, but if they are collecting $100k to fund their work on this project over the next year, they will still be paying taxes ON TOP of that.

Ya, just had a flashback to a former paycheck...

Engineer salary in SV is $100-$200k a year.

Yes, twice, salaries in Silicon Valley for engineers are $150k +/- depending on experience and ability level.

There certainly are engineering jobs at $150K and higher, but every survey I've seen -- and this more or less matches the offers I've seen -- suggests the median engineering salary here is just a little over $100K.