Founder Compensation: A Founder''s Guide to Salary, Equity Splits, and Vesting That Survive the Next Round
Two conversations decide whether a founding team makes it to Series A: how you split the equity and what you pay yourselves. Both are awkward, both are usually rushed, and both compound for a decade.
Once you have raised institutional money, there is a rough salary band VCs expect founders to sit in. It is lower than market for the role and it is deliberate.
Pre-seed / bootstrap: $0 to $60K. Whatever the business can afford. Most founders pay themselves nothing until the first check clears.
Seed (after ~$1.5M raise): $90K–$130K in high-cost cities, $70K–$110K elsewhere.
Two rules: 1. All founders get the same salary. Different salaries are one of the fastest ways to poison a founding team. The equity split does the differentiation. 2. You are paying yourself to remove distraction, not to be rich. Enough to cover rent, health insurance, childcare. Not enough to buy a nicer car.
If you take a salary meaningfully above the band, sophisticated investors will price it in during diligence. It signals two things: you are optimizing for personal cash and you may not need the next round as urgently as you say.
If a founder has real obligations (dependents, medical, primary breadwinner), take the salary you need to not be desperate. Discuss it with the board, put it in writing, do not hide it. Investors are much more forgiving of a founder who explains than of one they discover.
The default answer for a two- or three-person team is equal splits, or something very close to it (55/45, 40/30/30).
You do not know today which co-founder will end up carrying the company two years from now.
Small differences in the split (10 vs. 15 percentage points) look enormous in year one and irrelevant at exit.
The person on the short end of a very unequal split will resent it exactly when the company needs them most — during the hardest 18 months.
One founder had the idea, quit their job first,…
Split…
