Founder Salary : $110K-140K

What's market for a founder's salary(US)? It seems to be around...

$100K -140K (Seed)

Like many things in startup land, there has been and currently are various views on this.

Peter Thiel famously said, "The lower the CEO salary, the more likely it is to succeed". And the famous 'Ramen Profitable' essay from Paul Graham - which is are both a bit dated. But the prevailing sentiment these days seem to be for founders to be paid a real (but not large) salary.

So what are founders paying themselves? Based on various sources, a startup founder at a seed stage are paying themselves around $100K-140K.

Pilot recently published a survey of 750 startup founders and published a report <here> which has the average at $121K and mean $115K for 2023. But interestingly says that 40% of founders pay themselves less than $100K. The report has come great breakdowns so I highly recommend checking it out.

Kruze Consulting has the average at $145K (2023) with Seed stage founders getting somewhere around $130K-135K.

They also published the following chart for 2022.

Fast Company recently (Sept 2023) published an article that says that...

The median founder salary for startups with five or fewer employees was $93,000, while the median for more than 50 employees was $200,000. The highest salary for fewer than five was $500,000, and the highest salary for more than 50 was $400,000.

Again, lots of nuances here. So know the market and make informed decisions.

Other sources

https://openvc.app/blog/startup-founder-salary : lots of other resources included

https://www.deel.com/blog/how-to-pay-yourself-as-a-startup-founder