I built a compensation database…

Specifically for Finance and Product employees at startups.

Why do this? Well, when interviewing for my last two roles I didn’t know how much I should be asking for. More specifically, I had zero idea how much equity to ask for. And I found it’s a common situation - companies have asymmetrical information (and reps) when it comes to compensation negotiation. And no employee is going to shell out $15,000 for a Mercer license.

So I took it into my own hands to build something for my peoples working at private tech companies (Seed through Series E). Here are the roles we have data on:

Within Finance:

  • Finance Associate, Finance Analyst, FP&A Analyst

  • Senior Finance Associate, Senior Finance Analyst, Senior FP&A Analyst

  • Finance Manager, FP&A Manager

  • Senior Finance Manager, Senior FP&A Manager

  • Finance Director, Director of Finance, FP&A Director

  • Senior Finance Director, Senior Director of Finance, Senior FP&A Director

  • VP of Finance

  • CFO

Within Product:

  • Associate Product Manager, Junior Product Manager

  • Product Manager

  • Senior Product Manager

  • Product Lead, Lead Product Manager, Group Product Manager

  • Product Director, Director of Product Management

  • VP of Product / Head of Product

  • CPO

Paid readers get access to the reports for any of the positions above.

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What you’ll receive is a report relevant to early (Seed) through late stage (Series E) private tech startups across three vectors:

  • Total Cash Comp: Base + Bonus

  • Equity as a Percentage: Fully Diluted Equity Ownership

  • Equity as a Dollar Figure: Value of Equity Ownership

Factors that influence where an individual falls in terms of percentile:

  • Time Since Last Fundraise: Companies generally "top off" the ESOP, or increase the pool, after each funding round. This is so they can grant equity to new joiners, based on their seniority and skill set. So there's generally more equity available to employees right after a recent round.

  • Age of Company: Companies that are only a couple of years old have a “cleaner” cap table, which means they have less points tied up in the past and more available for future hires.

  • Number of Employees at the Company: A Series B company with 100 employees on board vs a Series B company with 250 employees is in a better position to grant more equity.

  • Personal Experience in Role: Self explanatory. The skillz pay the billz.

Where does this data come from, you ask?

Kidding!

I incorporated tens of thousands of datapoints from other compensation databases (which would be too expensive for a single person to buy), smoothed it for variations by geography and experience level, and then wrote a script to weight it based on your specific scenario inputs.

To give you an example…

And a taste of some illustrative outputs:

I hope this is a welcome benefit, as I’m determined we succeed together.

And if $150 per year can (hypothetically) get you another $15,000 in annual equity or cash value, I think we’ve nailed it.

(Link to benchmarking tool below for paid readers)

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