61–70 of 104 posts
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…
Did the $1M salary founders get paid $1M at Google previously? I’d expect there is a quite strong correlation here since it’s much easier to justify to your board/equity in that case.
And just because you’re 50, that doesn’t mean you made it past Senior. Similarly, you could get to Staff+ before 30 if you are exceptional.
If I were an outside investor in my startup, I would demand this. If a founder was living high off my dime I would be very worried that they would cut and run the moment the gravy train dried up. Startups run better when all the players have significant 'skin in the game'.
Also, any breakout for startup subtypes? (SAAS, fintech, web3, health tech, AI/ML etc.)
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Near the end, I had a happy hour or dinner with one of the co-founders. He told me that if he had to choose again (giving up his engineering job vs. starting up the company), he doesn't know if he would choose the start-up route again.
Just some food for thought. It's great playing the CEO or the founder and betting on yourself but at the end of the day, the financial trade-offs could be life changing (especially given the salary/stock options provided by top tech companies).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would be nice to have data available on this.
If the company is not public, there are no dividends. Crazy that stuff like this needs to be explained on a tech site.
Would be good to show the median.