By opening up everyone's salaries, it will only hurt the startup culture...
This is completely true, though perhaps not for the reasons you put forth. "Startup culture", as it currently exists, is a mechanism for VCs to consume recent CS grads who don't know how much they're worth and extract as much value from them as possible before they get a family/house/realization of how they should actually be compensated. Startups and VCs use their information asymmetry as regards salaries to exploit this inefficiency in the compensation market.
Imagine if by paying 20k extra, you can get one of those mythical "10x rockstar" engineers. Would you remove your ability to hire him?
You haven't removed your ability to hire them at all by being transparent about compensation -- you simply now have to be able to justify that to your team. If you are unable to justify it, that should tell you all you need to know about what "10x" means.
Recognizing that someone is tricking you by using guilt to convince you to suppress your own salary is the first step of learning how to negotiate effectively.
This is completely true, though perhaps not for the reasons you put forth. "Startup culture", as it currently exists, is a mechanism for VCs to consume recent CS grads who don't know how much they're worth and extract as much value from them as possible before they get a family/house/realization of how they should actually be compensated. Startups and VCs use their information asymmetry as regards salaries to exploit this inefficiency in the compensation market.
Imagine if by paying 20k extra, you can get one of those mythical "10x rockstar" engineers. Would you remove your ability to hire him?
You haven't removed your ability to hire them at all by being transparent about compensation -- you simply now have to be able to justify that to your team. If you are unable to justify it, that should tell you all you need to know about what "10x" means.
Recognizing that someone is tricking you by using guilt to convince you to suppress your own salary is the first step of learning how to negotiate effectively.