Several years ago, I did a bit of research into founder compensation and created a simple model that calculates what a typical founder salary might look like based on a few input factors. The post became surprisingly popular — not because it was based on particularly extensive benchmarking research (it wasn’t) but because “How much should I pay myself?” is a question that every founder needs to answer, and there had been little data or guidance available.
Since the post is now more than five years old and got a little rusty, I thought it was time for an update. Luckily, we recently led an investment in Figures, the leading compensation benchmarking platform in Europe, so naturally, we’ve teamed up with Figures for this post and the updated calculator.
The notes and charts below provide additional details on the dataset and the methodology used for the model and I’d recommend that you give it a quick read. But if you’d like to head over to the calculator right away,