Explore Salaries and Equity at AngelList | Hacker News Reader

Explore Salaries and Equity at AngelList

angel.co

147 pointsrmah60 comments

NYC, mobile developers, most jobs are in the 70-80k range with 1-3% equity. That is a low salary at a small amount of equity for someone with a relatively in-demand skillset.

Please check my maths: in the best case scenario, if you get 3% equity and assume 33% dilution on that equity after an A-round and the company has a 10% chance of a medium 25MM exit, the EV is around $50k. If you assume the same developer could have made a $120k salary with no equity elsewhere that company would have to exit within 1.25yrs for it to be +EV which is probably not feasible.

Someone please check my maths as I am looking at exit values from a 2006 study: http://qph.cf.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-77bb58e10c69517534aaac1...

According to Glassdoor:

Sr. Software Engineer at Google, on average (sample size of 189) make $145K on average with $63K bonus for $200K per annum.

So for an average equity of 1.125% for developer (according to angel.co) and average salary of $93K, a startup has to make a non-diluted exit of 8.56 mil on the first year, 17.1 mil on the second year and 25.6 mil in the third year to justify the opportunity cost.

Of course, not every developer can make $200K per year but just food for thought of working for startup vs. BigCo.

That's not taking into account other important factors:

    * Work on a new potentially game-changing product as part of the founding team
    * Join a small team where you'lll have more say in the production direction and company growth
    * Opportunity to grow responsibilities as the company grows
    * Gain startup experience and expand your network
    * Potential huge upside you'll never get at $150K/year + $50K bonus balanced by high risk of failure

I've worked at both the "BigCo's" (including Google) and "cool new" startups. In summary, it is almost pointless to compare working at big companies and startups.

The variance within both groups is much larger than the differences between the groups. There are pretty good, and very boring big companies. There are amazing, and hugely terrible startups. To find something that you will enjoy you have to evaluate each opportunity separately based on your preferences, not choose a company size first.

All these "important factors" are as much of a marketing tagline as they are an actual benefit. In some startups they might be the case. Probably yes if you are employee number 1-2 but not 10-20, let alone 100-200. But in comparison to some other startups a big company may deliver more value for all of them.

Company size is still meaningfully correlated with certain facts and so the distinction ahead of time is meaningful despite the large variance within each group.

In other words, for various reasons (like learning, wearing multiple hats, building up a network, the desire to start a startup) it makes sense to decide ahead of time to work at a startup versus a big company. As long as you work with great people on a mission you are passionate about.

The first three and half of the fourth can be had at Google, though perhaps not to the same degree.

Those numbers don't take into account vesting. Assuming vesting 25% per year with no acceleration on change of control, the exit must be around $38M for any year 1-4. Assumning 20% equity dilution every year, the number goes up to $45M by year four.

glassdoor is inaccurate for google. 200k / yr is too low for a Sr Software Eng. The all in comp is quite a bit higher. And there are a lot of engineers who make a lot more than this...

And that's assuming your utility function is linear in dollars, which of course it's not.

I would take job postings on AngelList with a grain of salt. We're keeping an eye there quite a bit recently, and it seems there are strategic reasons (as in make it look like you are doing well to investors) to be posting jobs on a site like AngelList more than the practical ones. I'd say the equity numbers are probably closer to reality than the salaries (I'd be shocked if you as a developer got more than 3% at any company that is beyond seed round). Of course early-mid stage startups aren't going to just flat out offer lots of money, they are trying to make their runway last as long as possible.

Hey, this is Nivi from AngelList. Please let me know if you have any questions. And please keep the comments coming. We are iterating on it right now.

are you going to internationalize the salary for non US locations.

£ for the Uk and Eros for the Eurozone countrys (BTW for some eu countrys you need to mention if you get the 13th Month or not)

We don't track of what currency job postings are in, so the stats for non-USD job listings would be confusing. Some people are posting in USD, others in Euros, etc.

It's something we should do.

For now, you can see what jobs we have in any location at angel.co/jobs (filter by location).

Could you add in sys admins and devops?

1-3% equity for an employee of an early stage startup sounds ridiculously low. Are employees taking less risk than founders ? I think unless you pay salaries at standard market price they should be considered founders.

Wrong. There's a big difference between taking $20-50K less per year in salary and chugging away for years with little or no pay. Whether you're full-time as an entrepreneur trying to make a startup or slaving away in your free time, when you could be out partying, there's an inherent risk in time and money that is not the same as a simple pay cut.

In my opinion founders chug away for years with little or no pay because they love it. If someone think of it as a sacrifice towards achieving billions then they should be doing something else. You have to enjoy the process. Quantifying your sacrifices in "Fun" is harder than calculating your financial risks and I think equity should be based on that. Partying all the time is not a bad idea if you love it.

Regardless of how 'fun' something is you're choosing to risk your time and money on an idea (rather than another idea or another job). I have a ton of fun at my day job. That doesn't mean they should pay me less, because then I could go work for someone else who appreciates my value and hopefully have fun there and make better money. Fun or how much I love it is a separate issue.

I think you can't use subjective measures like 'enjoyment' when doing this sort of calculation.

I feel the best way to split equity is to make the standard salary "swappable" with equity. let me give an example:

say 1 founder, 1 early employee. At the start, there is $100k in the bank that the founder put in (or otherwise managed to get). Founder has 100% equity, so each 1% equity is "worth" $1000;

first year, lets say the employee worked and produced $100k worth of value. Lets further say the normal rate is $100k for that employee. So the company has $200k worth of value, even tho there is only $100k in the bank. The employee could take 0% equity, and $100k in money. Or, 50% equity, and $0 money (and all scale variation in between).

If you look from investment perspective, Programs like Y Combinator and other incubators take 6-10% of the equity for $20000 seed money and mentoring. Why can an early developer/designer can't ask for 6-10% for working for $20k-$50k less than their market value. They are literally investing $20k+ in your company and adding value by doing work.

How do they pay their bills with 'no pay'. The trust fund?

It's risk/reward. Let's say it takes you 2-3 years of savings to save up enough to live 1 year without a salary. If you're committed to your startup you could take no pay at all to try to start your business. It's risky, some would say foolish, but that's why you have the upside of all the equity. Once you start offering someone enough of a salary to get by, even if it's less than market price, they still don't have as much skin in the game as someone "risking it all." I'm not saying you should risk it all, I'm just saying some founders choose to.

The graphs bother me. Okay, so 61 Python developer positions offer 0.5-1% and 59 offer 0.25-0.5%; presumably 0.5% is more common than 0.49 or 0.51, so where is 0.5 categorized? Which value is inclusive in the range and which is exclusive?

Since the graphs tend to be split on relatively common values they don't add much insight to the job postings.

Good point. This is fixed. Ranges are now .25-.4%, .5-.9%, etc. Thanks for the feedback. - mischa @ angellist

Now what about 0.401%?

Kidding :)

A mobile developer with iOS skills makes 65k in San Jose but 90k+ in all the little cities around it. Something must really suck about San Jose. ;)

Practically though, this exposes their underlying data source. Averaging across limite data sources can suck sometimes.

Thanks, good feedback. We cleaned up the locations.

To be sure, it looks like a first alpha. Maybe they hired a new JS person over the holidays and this is their first deliverable.

Perhaps my perception of the cost of living multiple for the bay area is distorted, but I can't believe that anyone is working as a developer there for the lower side of that curve.

Those offerings seem comparable to what I see here in Atlanta.

What's the startup scene in Atlanta like? I visited MailChimp there and attended a conference a few months ago. I live in Greenville, SC and we have an interesting little hub here.

Honestly, I'm kind of one off from the startup scene. I have quite a fews friends and acquaintances involved in it, but I've always worked for small to lower mid size stable companies or firms designed to stay small.

But that said, my somewhat outside opinion is that things are going well and getting better. There are some good hotspots of startup activity with hypepotamous (http://www.hypepotamus.com), Atlanta Tech Village (http://atlantatechvillage.com/), Flashpoint and a couple other accelerators.

Combined with the human and other resources from Georgia Tech, other colleges, and I think its a good place to be.

Ah, I feel like I have been scooped. I have been working on the same thing. Except mine is a scatter plot with all 4,500 jobs at once, so use Chrome. No fancy searching yet. Check it out at

http://labs.radiantmachines.com/al/

Interesting, but not sure how useful the chart is. It might have more utility with some aggregation in there.

It isn't really fully baked yet. I have been using it for myself to see the clusters of salary vs equity for certain keywords and roles. I need to move the backend to the web.

That is cool, I was thinking of building something similar so I've been doubly scooped. Nice work!

Cool! Hope you keep working on this. Lots of ways to slice this data.

These seem to be job listings. It would be great to see the fill rate. Of job boards out there, Angellist is the best about showing salary/equity. The companies that they attract are very early stage though, so salaries are fairly low.

a lot lower than i expected - also would love to see the package (so $150k + .5-1%) distribution.

I question why equity is on a bar chart as it's not a directly comparable attribute. 1% of a 100,000 units is incrementally different from 1% of 10,000 units.

It does at least "set a bar", so I could potentially say "well on average 1% of the company for a developer is average."

I don't understand your statement about how 1% of 100,000 shares is different from 1% of 10,000. How is it different?

You reminded me of the startup I did where we would offer people 1% of the company, and the candidates would say "that's only 2000 shares. This other company is offering me 50,000 shares."

It can get depressing trying to hire people sometimes.

Well there are two ways to go with that. You can keep your number of outstanding shares small, and then only hire people who are good at math. Or you can keep your number of outstanding shares enormous, so that you can offer people grants in the 100,000 or even million shares range, and get the people who are just looking for a lot shares.

Sounds like you may need to revise your screening process... these people should not get this far.

We were hiring developers, not finance people.

I'm not an employer, but a developer not understanding how percentages work would be a red flag to me.

By about 900 shares.

Joking aside, though, I don't think it's different at all in this context.

Of course it's different if you are comparing it to the same scale units. But if you are talking about 1% of the company, it doesn't matter.

No seattle/portland?

Just added these. We don't have enough listings in Portland to show data, but Seattle is now there.

Mind adding Washington DC as well?

Added - thanks for the suggestion!

How about some european cities? London/Berlin?

Re: Non-US cities - we aren't keeping track of what currency job postings are in, so the data for non-USD job listings would be confusing. Some people are posting in USD, others in euros, etc.

For now, you can see what jobs we have in London, or anywhere else by going to angel.co/jobs and then filtering by location.

Was there any interest for adding Toronto, ON?

What explains certain patterns in number of available positions in each salary range for different cities? Look for example on difference in ratios between east and west coasts (compare New York and San Francisco for example). Note: I'm looking at developers' data.

need to work on the site speed for those lookups.

Quite surprising that not a single job opening has listed Perl as a skill requirement.

Is there really zero demand for Perl programmers from new start-ups?

I miss the 90s too. especially the music.

Is there really zero demand for Perl programmers from new start-ups?

It's in great demand at one of my clients, but I can't even mention the name of the business entity for contractual reasons.

Is there really nonzero demand for Perl?

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