Startup CEO Shocked to Discover Paying People More Than Revenue Doesn’t Work
Jakarta startup CEO stunned to learn that employee salaries should not exceed company revenue. CFO quietly confirms math checks out.
JAKARTA — The CEO of Jakarta-based startup Quicksy, a same-day pet food subscription platform, issued a public statement admitting that paying employees significantly more than the company earns in revenue has proven “operationally challenging.”
“I’m devastated,” said founder and CEO Dimas Ardhana. “We truly believed we could disrupt the fundamentals of accounting with scale and branding.”
The statement comes after Quicksy’s CFO, Mira Kartika, presented a document titled Monthly Burn vs Gross Revenue. The spreadsheet highlighted, among other things, that the company’s total headcount compensation was roughly 340 percent of monthly income, a ratio the CFO called “textbook unsustainable.”
“This caught us completely off guard,” Dimas added. “I thought the solution was to hire another Head of Strategic Value Amplification. Turns out, that only made it worse.”
Following the announcement, internal morale at Quicksy has taken a hit, particularly among middle managers who were promised “tech-level salaries with startup-level culture.” Some have begun quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles, while others have been spotted Googling phrases like “is FMCG that bad” and “how to go back to corporate while saving face.”
“I left a stable job in banking to chase innovation,” said one employee who requested anonymity. “Now I’m Head of Pet-Parent Engagement and my main task this week was fixing broken Shopify tags.”
When asked about future equity value, Dimas was optimistic. “We still have options. And not just stock options. We’re considering crypto tie-ins, and possibly merging with a failed edtech.”
No further questions were allowed after that.
Quicksy’s main investor, 700x Capital, responded with a carefully worded note of support.
“We believe in visionary founders like Dimas. Sometimes the market doesn’t align with bold innovation, especially when payroll outpaces revenue by a few million dollars per month. We’re watching the situation closely.”
Sources confirm no additional funds will be deployed at this time, although a partner was overheard saying, “You know, in hindsight, maybe we didn’t need 14 different marketing leads for a pet food subscription.”
Meanwhile, Dimas says he’s entering a period of reflection and “strategy recalibration,” which reportedly involves quietly unlisting job ads promising “competitive comp + mission-driven chaos.”
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