100K generally pays for about 5 months of a highly talented programmers salary+ overhead. It may depending on funding levels extend a startups runway by less than 1 week.
Compare successful Authors and find making 200k/year is far from the top. Why? Because sometimes highly productive people doing the same task are less than 10% as efficient as others. Dentists, Athletes, Programmers, Lawyers, Sales People, Architect, and most other complex jobs have a huge range of talent once you cross highly productive.
EX: JK Rowling made well over 50 million per year working on HP. 1% of that is 500k which is still extremely high for an author.
