Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data

An update of this is available: CTO Salary and Equity Trends 2009-2011


Todd Gitlin of Safire Partners was nice enough to compile some data on Start CTO Salary and Equity at Venture Backed Companies for the LA CTO Forum and present last year. He agreed to make this data public which is awesome. Todd is a go to resource for people looking for talent in startups. He was a great presenter to our group. I highly recommend getting to know him.
The data is a bit tough to deal with via a post, so I've shared it two ways:
And you should also take a look at Visualization of Startup CTO Equity and Salary Data.

There's a ton of great data in there that will give you a sense of comps for your particular situation. Here are a few slices of it. Of course, this doesn't really apply to the situations where I'm often involved Part-Time CTO, Technology Advisor, or Acting CTO, but this is still really good to have.
I would be very curious to hear what folks think about this.
Anyone concerned that this is above or below their expectation?
I was recently asked specifically about these kinds of numbers and I'm a bit worried that expectations between CTO candidates

Startup CTO Salary and Equity based on Stage of Company

Note: the rows are a bit out of order.
I'm a little surprised that CTO Founders with growth capital funding only have 15% of their companies. It is interesting to see the salaries of CTOs of pre-Revenue even pre-Launch companies.

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Total Funding

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Revenue

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CTO Compensation and Equity based on Location

A few items jump out at me in terms of CTO Equity and Compensation relative to geography. Caution - there is not much data for many of the geographies.
  • CTO Founders in India, have a very low equity stake.
  • CTO Founders in UK, US Mid-Atlantic, US Pacific NW, US Northeast, France, Australia have a higher equity stake.
Southern California - my primary location - looks to be about the middle of the pack.
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1 comment:

Steve Wexler said...

Tony, if time permits I'm very tempted to bring the data in Tableau and make it available via Tableau Public.