What you’re saying about the motivations of candidate sourcing is not reflected in my experience as a startup ceo or an engineer at a large tech company.

That would make you a wildly uncommon start-up CEO, to the point that it’s too fantastical to believe, given the ubiquitous, widespread low compensation paid in start-ups (even after accounting for an unreasonably favorable liquidity event and generously agreeing to assume an equity price from that to apply to non-liquid equity at the time of an offer).

Start-up pay is so universally bad compared even to low or mid tier public companies. I’m not sure it could be possible to use start-ups as any kind of counter argument to a question of low pay.