Our Founder
Compensation Guide
We created the Creandum Founder Compensation Calculator to determine what founders across Europe should pay themselves at different stages of their funding story. Launched in 2022, the tool now includes responses from more than 1,000 founders across Europe.
We are currently in data collection mode to keep the insights fresh and accurate.
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Once the data is refreshed, we will bring the calculator back up in November 2024.
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Fill out our formOur 2022 Report
We wrote up our findings from our 2022 survey in partnership with Slush.
Our aim was to build Europe’s most significant founders’ compensation data set. We sent the flare-up for Europe’s incredible founders, with the help of drawing from Slush’s diverse community. After two weeks, we exceeded our goal of 500 and spoke to almost 650 entrepreneurs across 47 European cities that we combined into 8 regions. We removed incomplete or unclear responses.
Keeping funds within the company means swifter profitability, demonstrates discipline, shows an “all in it together” mentality, and an ability to focus on their product and services rather than fundraising.
This is all the more important in the early stages because you need to give away a lot of equity for the money you raise. Series A is typically 10% and that only grows with more investment. The lower your expenses, the longer the run rate, and the better it is for you, your co-founders and your business.
Of course, “pay yourself just enough to not think about money” has as many answers as there are founders. The compensation needs and expectations of a founder straight out of university with no dependents, versus one who’s come from a big bank and has three kids, will be very different.
So use your investors as a sounding board. This research and our Compensation Calculator provide a good benchmark and a starting point for this conversation. Your investors and talent partners can then help you navigate the nuance of your particular situation, providing the necessary distance and context, sharing information about the space in which you and your business are operating, and what they’ve seen with other portfolio companies. They will help you figure out what you and your business actually need to get through the next stage of growth and hit the milestones successfully.
No surprise, but as a company matures and goes through progressive funding rounds, founder salaries tend to increase. But what does that mean founders are actually taking home?
We found that on average (mean), bootstrapped and Pre-Seed founder salaries are around €50,000. By Series B this has climbed to almost €150,000. So when considering your own compensation, straying too far above these salaries can act as a red flag to investors, particularly in the earliest stages.
But once you’ve raised a couple of rounds, and proved you can hit critical targets, you can start to compensate yourself more. A new funding round is generally viewed by VCs as a significant de-risking of the company because you’ve achieved certain milestones, you’ve grown the company to a certain size and, based on those accomplishments and the new funding, you can reach the next milestones in that journey. So the growth of compensation is a reflection of how much you’ve put into the company at that point — a back payment for the blood, sweat and tears you’ve poured into the business.
But how are salaries impacted by the actual amount raised? Are heavily funded startups paying their founders considerably more? Yes and no.
For companies that have raised up to €1m, the average founder salary is below €50,000. However, once a company has cumulatively raised over €50m, founder salaries are around €155,000 on average.
Salaries do tend to grow in line with funding, but they plateau at around the €11m mark at an average of €125,000. The median figures, however, are a little more linear, which perhaps tells a different story, or this could just be an outlier in our statistics. Then they tend to stay at that level until funding tops the aforementioned €50m.
At pre-seed and seed stages, location has little to no impact on salary. But from Series A onwards, it’s all about the UK, where founders make almost €70,000 more than founders in any other region. This makes sense, as salaries in general tend to align more with the US. And there’s a higher volume of well-funded startups in the UK plus a rich ecosystem. The UK has produced 122 billion dollar companies and is home to a further 258 startups on potential future unicorn track, more than double any European neighbour. And despite Londonʼs leading position, Bristol and Oxford also rank among the top 20 European hubs for startup investment in 2022.
The lowest salaries are in the Baltics and CEE. But it’s worth bearing in mind that these countries generally have a lower cost of living, so the salary discrepancy is not actually as marked as it first appears. Also, these regions are less well established, meaning there’s less data and fewer unicorns against which founders can compare themselves. That said, these regions are fast becoming more mature, with some breakout hubs emerging. Estonia has raised the most investment per capita of any country in Europe, with €1,967 per person, versus €1,112 per person in the UK, and VC investment in Lithuania grew 990% from 2020–21.
When it comes to industry-specific salaries, like location, salaries at Pre-Seed and Seed stages don’t really differ too much from industry to industry.
But once you hit Series A, it’s fintech founders that tend to take home the most, earning an average of €160,000. Considering the amount of money that has been invested in that space in the last couple of years, that’s hardly surprising. While fintech investment fell by 32% year on year in 2022, it’s still the most well-backed industry, raising $21.5bn globally in Q2 of this year. It’s particularly marked in the UK, where it accounted for half of all UK funding in 2022 — $7.8bn raised across 172 rounds — with London raising more fintech investment than any other global hub this year, including the Bay Area.
This also reflects the fact that fintech founders tend to come from high-paying jobs in banking, finance and management consulting, having higher salary expectations as a result. And as soon as investors are involved, founders may look to align their salaries with others in the sector.
At seed stage, there is a large pay gap, with female founders taking home €15,000 less than their male counterparts. And when we look at cumulative funding, early-stage female founders that have raised €1–3m, on average, earn about 25–30% less than male founders. This gap grows even more with higher funding, only starting to level out above the €50m mark.
This finding fits the broader trend. While VC investment overall has surged in recent years, the numbers haven’t leapt forward for female founders at the same pace. In 2021, companies founded solely by women raised just 2.4% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups in the US. Teams of mixed gender, meanwhile, managed to secure 17%.
The gap is clear, but the reasons behind it are not. Do female founders value themselves less than male founders? Are there biases at play on the part of investors and boards? Whatever the reasons, it’s something that female founders and investors need to address and use to guide their compensation conversations in future.
The biggest equity diluter is how many co-founders you bring along. This is well known, but the data hammers home the point that you’re deciding on your compensation at a fundamental level right at the very beginning before you even talk to an investor. Who — and how many — you choose for your co-founders is perhaps the single most defining choice on how your venture will pay out and how your compensation is structured along the whole journey.
Two or three founders seem to be the norm, although Ali Tamaseb, a partner at DCVC who analysed more than 200 unicorns between 2005 and 2018, discovered that 20% of all billion-dollar startups were set up by a solo founder.
Two founders versus six co-founders is a very different journey. It has a material impact on your wealth creation. You’re already greatly diluted before you even get to Series A, and your freedom of movement is more restricted throughout the life of your company. Also, it can be hard to move as fast with several people at the helm.