YC Founder Salary Report 2022
How much should you be paying yourself?
Pilot launched its first Founder Salary Report in 2021 and received such tremendous feedback that when the time came to run the 2022 report, I was excited by the idea of creating something specific and dedicated to the YC community. As referenced in my original Bookface post, I often see YC alum asking what they should be paying themselves. While comp benchmarking reports exist for other ‘hard to define’ roles like Chief of Staff, there aren’t many reliable founder salary reports—and none I’d ever seen for YC. So today, I’m excited to share with you the results of Pilot’s new and improved Founder Salary Report for 2022 — including this specific YC edition! I want to start by thanking all the founders who participated in the survey — this is quite a rare snapshot of real-world data gathered from over 230 YC startup founders across the globe.
This report will give you a sense of what your peers are doing, and what the trends are for companies like yours. I know you’ll enjoy this report, and I hope it’s a useful guide in discussing founder compensation with your co-founders and your board.
A final note about this report: this survey was only circulated on Bookface and email addresses were not collected. Please feel free to share this data with other YC founders, but be mindful about posting it elsewhere. 😀
Overview
Annual Salaries
Comparing salary data across all respondents, a few overall trends emerged. Founders often start with a low salary, and about 2% of our respondents pay themselves zero salary. Nearly half pay themselves less than $100,000 annually.
Funding
Almost 83% of founders reported funding between $100K and $10M, with 37% reporting funding between $1M and $3M.
Salaries by Cohort Year
As expected, funding for earlier cohorts are higher than more recent cohorts — however, 2019’s cohort has seen almost 10% higher average funding levels than that of 2018. Similarly, we see average 2019 FTE’s slightly higher than of the 2018 cohorts. On the salary front, average salaries show less variance than funding levels with 2021 and 2022 average cohort salaries only about $50 apart.
Average Salary by Cohort Year
Average Funding by Cohort Year
Average FTE by Cohort Year
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 $1M and $5M in funding, with over 55% falling into this range.
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 13% 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.
Over 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!
I hope this report gives you a good sense of what other YC founders are doing for salaries, and that it serves as a useful guide in discussing founder compensation with your cofounders and investors.
I’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.
Thanks again, YC founders, for helping me put this together and allowing me to share it with you!
- What is your annual salary? (in USD)
- What is your job title?
- When did you start the company?
- What YC batch are you part of?
- What city is your company principally based in?
- How many full-time employees does your company currently have?
- How much money have you raised?
- Anything else we should know?