There is no dataset explicitly outlining salary levels at early stage companies, but we can see salaries from tech companies prior to IPO. The data below shows the salaries of 198 tech company CEO’s at IPO. A few observations stand out:
Some of the best CEO’s take the lowest salaries. For instance, Marc Benioff of Salesforce took a salary of $1 at IPO, Patrick Shiong of Nant Health took no salary, Jack Dorsey at Square took only $3,750, Brian Chesky at AirBNB took $110,000, and Jeff Bezos at Amazon took only $64,333. There is a caveat: these individuals were independently wealthy before the IPO (from selling shares or previous companies) and they do get large annual options packages.
$340k is the median for a very successful company. The median salary of $340k is for the CEO of a company about to go public.
Other forms of comp. Note the median bonus was $143k and median option grant had a value of $82k. Take a look at that average Options Comp figure though — $5,274352. There are outliers especially prior to IPO. Before the IPO, some of the founders took options worth fantastic sums. For instance, James Park of Fitbit ($7.5mm), Dick Costolo of Twitter ($11.3mm), Scott Painter at True Car ($5.2mm), Brian Armstrong at Coinbase ($59mm), and Drew Houston at Dropbox ($109mm, not a typo), among others all took home nice option packages the year before IPO. As a CEO, so long as you’re driving fantastic growth and value, it’s not out of line to expect additional option grants as a CEO. It’s actually market, and good investors have no problem rewarding CEOs that are performing.
Salaries have gone up over time. The median level of CEO ownership has risen since 1998. From 1996 to 2007, the median during that period was $214k.
We hope the data above is helpful in setting salary expectations as you become successful and headed towards IPO.
Thank you for your readership. See more blogs and SaaS data at blossomstreetventures.com. Email the author at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com.