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Founders Salarys

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18 pointsvinnyglennon21 comments

> I interviewed 10 founders across continents:

While I applaud the idea, this is an extremely small sample size. All the more since it's then divided into US salaries and EU salaries.

There are 10 data points, divided in 6 subcategories. It's hard to do meaningful statistics.

And we don't know if EU means Denmark or Romania.

Ah that's right. So there's only one or two people sampled per subcategory.

That would be very small indeed, I interpreted it "favorably" as as 6 interviews but each did yield more than 1 datapoint per category.

I raised <$1M in 2023. I considered the minimum salary I would be comfortable with and decided on $75k. Kind of funny to see that lines up exactly with this tweet.

If you're hoping to strike it rich, is a founder's "salary" really what matters to the founder? I'm sure it does day to day, but I'm not sure it's their main focus.

The tension is that investors don't want to invest in founders paying themselves, but they also don't want founders distracted by personal financial constraints.

Comfortable but kept hungry.

Taking less money than what you would have earned as an employee seems counter intuitive to me.

The salary reported here is well below market rate. I would definitely have enough savings to tank taking a lower salary for 1-2 years, but ideally I like to keep that for emergencies.

Is this what founders are doing now? Or maybe these founders are just so well off personally that taking a lower salary doesn’t mean anything.

Take much lower salary now, for potential far greater gains in the future.

Sure. I understand that aspect. But “potential” doesn’t pay the rent/mortgage/food/car/utilities/daycare/auto insurance/health insurance.

Are founders taking loans? Using personal savings until potential converts to real? Taking loans from retirement fund (401K)?

I don't get what is calculated here.

  ~ $75k/y salary above 100k raised

What does it mean and what should it prove?

That question is largely why I'm not on Twitter much at all.

I wish someone could give a little more context, or ... I wouldn't be yelled at for honestly not knowing and asking. I get folks being Socratic is a common troll tacit but it's so bad that you can't not know and ask sometimes without being mistaken for a troll.

They're telling you average salary grouped by how much has been raised by the founded company when the interview occurred.

So for companies that raised at least 100k but but not more than the next band of 5m, the average salary was 75k.

except that "average" is like 1 or maybe 2 MAX data points, so I wouldn't read too much into this.

At the low end that's almost the entire amount raised for just the founder's salary.

There is a simple rule in business, if you don't want your databases to be stolen and go to competitive organizations, then keep employee salaries under control. The cost of this bar depends on the country. For example, in Russia, such a reasonable bar averages $ 2,130 per month.

Clearly didn’t ask Elon musk

is that monthly, after taxes ?

from the image: "/y" - annually

ah my bad, too short attention span :-)

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