They offered two senior hires half their salary. Both said yes.

In August 2022, beehiiv did $24,634 in revenue.

Not $25k. Tyler Denk published the Stripe screenshot, and the number under the August column is $24,634. It appears in his own account of the month, written 8 September 2026.

That month, roughly eight people were running the company with about $1.75 million in the bank. Earlier in the year, they had lost their CTO and friend, Andrew Platkin. They were coming out the other side of it and were deep in conversations with two people they badly wanted to hire — a new CTO, and a Chief of Staff to help Denk operationalize the business:

• Noah Pryor, for the CTO role. By Denk's account, the first hire at Teachable, where he became

CTO and scaled engineering past 85 people.

• Preeya Goenka, for Chief of Staff. Denk knew her as Morning Brew's customer success manager

at Sailthru, back when he was at Morning Brew. By his account she was, by then, a VP at a no-code AI startup that had raised over $28 million.

Denk's problem came down to one number. Matching what those two were already earning would have committed roughly 40% of the company's bank balance to two salaries.

The two obvious moves were both bad. They could lower the bar and hire people they could afford — but, in Denk's phrase, you don't build an A+ company by hiring B+ talent. Or they could pay the market rate and put a company doing $24,634 a month at genuine risk of not existing.

He found a third option.

The offer

Start both of them at half what they asked for. Then raise each salary three times at fixed revenue milestones:

• First step-up — $100,000
• Second step-up — $150,000
• Full asking salary — $200,000

There was equity too. Denk notes that they offered more of it than usual because the candidates were carrying more risk than usual.

His estimate at the time was that beehiiv would clear the top step in 10 to 14 months.

He quoted a slower date than his own numbers implied

Denk gives you both sides of the arithmetic: the starting revenue and the growth rate. beehiiv was compounding at roughly 25% month over month.

Run it forward from $24,634. At a sustained 25%:

• $100,000 — ~6.3
• $150,000 — ~8.1
• $200,000 — ~9.4

(That is our arithmetic on his two published figures, not a schedule he printed.)

The founder's own estimate of 10 to 14 months sat entirely above what his own growth rate implied — but the two ends are not equally interesting. His optimistic end ran about eighteen days late, which is noise. His pessimistic end ran 4.6 months late, which is not.

So the honest reading is narrower than "he sandbagged." Denk describes revenue as predictably scaling at 25%, and a founder who widens a 9.4-month projection into a 10-to-14-month band is doing ordinary conservatism. The point is what he did with the conservatism: he quoted the band rather than the point estimate. A founder who quotes the aggressive number asks the candidate to underwrite the founder's optimism. Denk quoted a number he expected to beat.

They cleared the milestones.

What actually changed hands

Underneath the story, the structure is a risk transfer, priced.

The company was taking a risk either way. It could underhire, or it could run down the bank. Denk moved part of that risk onto the two candidates and paid them for it in equity. Both of them were now paid partly in the outcome rather than in cash. That is the part he is pointing at:

This proposal perfectly aligned incentives for everyone.

He is even more direct about the offer's second function:

It was also a really incredible stress test to vet their belief in the team and our vision.

That sentence cuts both ways. A candidate who takes half pay against milestones is demonstrating conviction. A candidate who declines is not necessarily demonstrating its absence. They may have a mortgage, dependents, a visa, or simply a correct read that an eight-person company a few months after a death in the leadership team is a real risk.

The offer selects for conviction and for the financial cushion to act on it. Those are not the same trait.

Denk got two people who had both.

When you can make this offer, and when you are just cutting pay

The mechanism is copyable, but it requires a precondition most founders will fail.

You need a growth rate that makes the milestones near-certain. beehiiv had one, and the published Stripe series bears it out. Without a real trajectory, the identical offer is a pay cut with a narrative attached, and a senior person will read it that way, correctly, in the first meeting.

Three things separate the two versions:

1. The milestone is a company metric, not a personal one. Monthly revenue is visible to

everyone, arrives on a known date, and cannot be re-scored at review time. "When we hit our goals" is not this. A number is.

1. The path is auditable before signing. Not a projection — the actual historical series, with

the growth rate visible in it. Denk does not say whether he showed his numbers to Noah or Preeya, and the screenshot he later published runs to December 2022, months after the offer. So treat this one as the requirement rather than as something beehiiv is on record as doing.

1. The equity is uplifted enough to matter. They are financing you at a below-market rate. Denk

says only that there was "a bit more" equity, given the risk — which is the right direction and an unknown size. If the uplift is a rounding error, you have not priced the risk. You have just moved it.

beehiiv had the first outright, and the third at least in direction. The second is the one nobody can check, and it is the one most companies making this offer skip.

Where they landed

By 2026, Noah Pryor is still CTO, now leading roughly 50 engineers. Preeya Goenka has moved on from Chief of Staff to Chief Customer Officer, running relationships with the largest customers and partners.

In August 2022, the company could not afford two salaries. It now employs an engineering organization more than six times the size of the entire company at the time.

The number to keep is not $24,634. It is 40%: the share of the bank two hires would have taken, the number that made the conventional options bad, and the reason a founder went looking for a third one.