QUIT. I am going to join the chorus of people telling you as much. Get the fuck out now. Get. The. Fuck. Out. Staying on board after a payroll miss as an employee is a terrible fucking idea. If you stick with the effort after a pay miss or even a cut, you are an equal with the founders and you are invited to all the investor meetings (whether you want to go is up to you). No fucking exceptions ever. People will take advantage of you, not respect you for being "a nice guy", if you work for them on bad terms.

I made this fucker of a mistake. It was 2008, after the economy imploded. Unrelatedly, I have PTSD which had started throwing panic attacks at me and, for a period of about 3 months, I was unemployable (or thought I was) until I figured out how to manage the attacks. (Now they are no big deal. Very fucking annoying, but I know what they are and can resolve them in 5-20 minutes at worst.) So I was damaged, but I have this extreme work ethic which leads to a false sense of desperation that impels me sometimes to take horrible jobs just to "be employed", and this was one case of that. I had savings, but I needed to feel like I was doing something. So I joined a startup on "deferred cash" which is essentially a zero-interest loan to your employer. Don't ever fucking do that. Oh, and my salary (what I would have been paid once we got funding, which by the way never fucking happened) was still a 40% drop from what I had earned at the hedge-fund job before that. Talk about a loser fucking move. If you undersell yourself (false desperation) people will pick you the fuck off.

Then I went to Google. I had burned lots of savings and, after egregious drama and a huge financial loss, I was a fucking headcase and I made the mistake of disclosing my problem and I had a sadistic pigfucker of a boss who gaslighted me to see what would happen, and ultimately had a two-day-long hypergraphic episode on a 10k mailing list. I found out later that he had a history of using false performance problems to get people to disclose medical problems and then fucking with people who were sick because he enjoyed watching them break down. I found at least three cases, some paid substantial severances. HR knew about the problem but did nothing because the manager had a reputation for "delivering". If I hadn't been coming off a horrible startup, I wouldn't have been nearly as vulnerable and he wouldn't have been able to break me (I'm a normal person with an abnormal past, and 95+ percent of the time I can keep it in the fucking past) and that pigfucker bully would have attacked someone else.

Bad startups will ruin your fucking life. No exaggeration. I have a pre-existing aggravator but normal people melt down just as hard. In fact, I think it's worse for them because they're not used to insanity and don't recognize it as such when it hits them, so they actually buy into the insane thoughts they start having when the world goes to hell on them (I don't; I'm a veteran of that shit). You will lose lots of money and credibility. Your career will end up in the toilet. Sometimes people will maliciously damage your reputation and you'll seriously consider hiring a hit man, but you can't because you have no fucking money.

Payroll miss == Get the fuck out. Now. No exceptions. Do NOT fuck up your life for these people. They aren't worth it.