The 2022 Founder Salary Report

Overview

Salaries by Funding Level

This section looks at how much founders are paying themselves, relative to the amount of funding that their company has raised. While our responses came from a wide spectrum of funding amounts, answers overall skewed between $100K and $3M in funding, with over 40% falling into this range.

Bootstrapped vs. VC-Backed Salaries Breakdown

Founders who are VC-backed are more likely to have higher salaries compared to their bootstrapped counterparts. Of the founders who paid themselves between $100K and $200K annually, on average, 91% of them were VC-backed while only 7% were bootstrapped.

About 50% of bootstrapped founders pay themselves between $1-$100K annually while more than 60% of VC-backed founders pay themselves between $50K and $150K a year.

Bootstrapped companies were defined as those with no funding while VC-backed salaries are defined as those with some investor capital.

Breakdown of Salaries by Funding Level^*

Salaries by Company Size

This section looks at how much founders are paying themselves, relative to the number of full-time employees (FTEs) at their company.

Our results here skewed toward smaller companies, with nearly half of respondents employing 5 people or fewer. Only 8% of respondents employed more than 25 FTEs. We used the number of FTEs to approximate both size and sophistication. As businesses grow, their needs become more complex, and their employee count tends to grow as well.

Breakdown of Salaries by Full-Time Employees

Salaries by Geography

This section looks at how much founders are paying themselves in specific locations. By examining salaries in the context of their geography, we attempt to control for cost-of-living differences that might distort the overall averages.

60% of our responses were either from respondents who were Remote or based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We list these locations specifically below.

Average Salaries by Location

Breakdown of Salaries by Geography

Deep Dives by Geography

Geography plays a major role in a startup's overall finances and salaries. In this section, we'll provide further context by looking at funding and company sizes that are remote, or within the SF Bay and NYC areas.

For this report, we are only providing deep dives for these three geographies. In future reports, we hope to gather more robust data from other areas, and offer deep-dive analysis for more regional markets.

SF Bay Area

Salaries

Funding

Full-Time Employees

Breakdown of Salaries by Funding Level

Breakdown of Salaries by Full-Time Employees

New York City Area

Salaries

Funding

Full-Time Employees

Breakdown of Salaries by Funding Level

Breakdown of Salaries by Full-Time Employees

Remote

Salaries

Funding

Full-Time Employees

Breakdown of Salaries by Funding Level

Breakdown of Salaries by Full-Time Employees

Thanks for reading!

We hope this report gives you a good sense of what other founders are doing for salaries, and we hope that it serves as a useful guide in discussing founder compensation with your cofounders and your investors.

We’d like to end with a little bit of a philosophical note: there’s no magic number for what you as a founder should pay yourself. Market comps of course matter, but ultimately the question is a highly personal one: what salary is needed to allow you to focus your efforts on making the business successful?

In particular: if your salary is too low, you’ll spend a bunch of time and energy stressing out how to make your rent payment or how to cover your childcare costs—and all that stress distracts you from making your business successful.

So in short, the correct amount to pay yourself (company funds permitting) is not a specific dollar amount: it’s enough so that you can focus all of your energy on creating a successful company.

We’re wishing you the best of luck with your business!

Methodology

The 2022 Founder Salary Survey was conducted over a five-week period starting in May 2022, during which we reached out to founders through our extended networks and elsewhere online. We received a total of 516 responses. Over 60% of our responses were from either remote Founders or Founders in the San Francisco Bay Area.