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I surveyed 500 startup founders about their salaries

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Re: I surveyed 500 startup founders about their salaries

#31

Post by MangoCoffee »

dcow wrote: post #4

I think what people often blissfully miss about founder comp is that the business literally supports the founder's entire life. Everything is a business expense. Pay yourself 50k as a little bonus and run almost everything through the business, because if you don't survive, neither does the business. You think founders are paying out of pocket for their fancy SF and NYC apartments at 50k per year living humbly? Think…

IRS just got their funding to hire more people. I'm pretty sure what used to be "not really look at" will be under microscope.

Re: I surveyed 500 startup founders about their salaries

#32

Post by aerosmile »

dcow wrote: post #4

I think what people often blissfully miss about founder comp is that the business literally supports the founder's entire life. Everything is a business expense. Pay yourself 50k as a little bonus and run almost everything through the business, because if you don't survive, neither does the business. You think founders are paying out of pocket for their fancy SF and NYC apartments at 50k per year living humbly? Think…

This is how fake news happens. I really wish we all took a bit more time to research things before we publish them, because I guarantee you there will be more people today running around and sharing this exact same fake news about founders living in apartments paid for by their startups.

Re: I surveyed 500 startup founders about their salaries

#33

Post by gillianobrien »

kleiba wrote: post #14

Salaries by Geography - it's a shame that this is US-centric, I would be very curious about the median/average salaries of European founders.

Yes - I'm optimistic that in the next iteration we can get even more data points, so that we can do some of these additional country breakouts!

Re: I surveyed 500 startup founders about their salaries

#36

Post by gillianobrien »

ghiculescu wrote: post #13

I think this study should ask founders their age. It has a huge impact, probably more than any factor they did ask. I started my first startup at 20. We were bootstrapped, so we started at $0 salaries, and didn’t pay ourselves more than 1k/month for a few years. We all lived together somewhere cheap to keep rent low. Now I have a family and stuff… it would be very hard to go back to living like that. So the range of…

Great suggestion! I think we'll ask this question in the next iteration :)

Re: I surveyed 500 startup founders about their salaries

#39

Post by j0hnyl »

Looks like nearly half of the founders surveyed are running companies with 5 or less employees. I wonder if this skews the average way down for the whole sample set. For example, if you look at the salaries reported by founders of companies with teams >25 the average salary is much higher.

Re: I surveyed 500 startup founders about their salaries

#40

Post by jsonne »

gillianobrien wrote: post #36
ghiculescu wrote: post #13

I think this study should ask founders their age. It has a huge impact, probably more than any factor they did ask. I started my first startup at 20. We were bootstrapped, so we started at $0 salaries, and didn’t pay ourselves more than 1k/month for a few years. We all lived together somewhere cheap to keep rent low. Now I have a family and stuff… it would be very hard to go back to living like that. So the range of…

Great suggestion! I think we'll ask this question in the next iteration :)

Yeah actually beyond age I would also break out "Do you have children" explicitly as that changes that calculus a lot.
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