“Founders comp has been almost universally mismanaged over the last ten to twenty years.”
If you ask the average person on the street whether founders are paid too little, they’ll almost certainly say no. But the reality is that go-forward compensation for founder CEOs is way less than that of a replacement CEO.
On this episode of World of DaaS, Tod and I do a deep dive into founder compensation. Tod is a serial founder and the CEO of Pipedream, so he has a deep understanding of founder comp and lots of experience with the negotiation process.
This isn’t something that gets talked about much in the world of startups, so Tod and I focus on exploring ways to solve this problem and tactics founders can employ to restructure their compensation. We discuss performance-based compensation, talking to your board about comp changes, and how to think about structuring your compensation long-term as a founder.
We also talk about why it’s important for founders to be able to negotiate the comp they need: They’re almost always the best person to run the company.
We post videos twice a week on all things tech, data, and venture capital, so make sure you subscribe:
For a deep dive on go-forward pay for founder/CEOs (with data), I wrote a piece on this on my Substack, which you can read here.