Founder salaries at Seed & Series A in the UK & France

Founders can often feel awkward about deciding their own salary in the early years. Their previous roles or the ones they could’ve landed seem like irrelevant reference points when they’re prioritising cashflow to improve their chances of making it to the next financing. Depending on how many they are and how much capital they’ve raised, their salary can have a notable impact on runway. But different founders have different circumstances that shape their analysis of financial risk — some have the personal resources to sustain themselves on a modest pay for a while, whereas others don’t and have a family to support. And whatever the conclusion is, it then needs to be communicated to the investors, whose approval is typically required, and whose confidence in the prudent management of company capital founders don’t want to undermine.

Runway is indeed key, but over time financial strain can hamper founders’ capacity to stay fully focused on the already grueling challenge of company building. As investors, we can point out the various considerations and tradeoffs, but there’s no one right number and we ultimately back the founders’ decision.

As with many elements of running a startup, we do think that reliable and comparable benchmarks can facilitate an easier and more informed decision making for founders and their dialogue with investors. And while the specific context is crucial, knowing whether a founder’s salary is at the 20th or 120th percentile of a set of peers can be instructive.

So we analysed the salaries of founder CEOs in 60+ portfolio companies which raised their Seed round post 2018. To minimise the effect of geographical differences in the cost of living and others, we focused only on companies headquartered in the UK (almost entirely in London) and France (all in Paris) — the latter constitute less than 15% of the data set and don’t actually impact the results.

Given the developments in the European startup financing landscape since 2018 and their implications on salaries, we examined separately the companies that raised their Seed during 2018–2019 vs 2020–2022. As founder salaries may be revised over time regardless of a new financing, we also reviewed the evolution of salaries between post Seed and later on — either currently or just before their Series A.

The significant gap between the medians of the two cohorts indicates a clear increase in the initial salaries post Seed. However, that gap has vanished over time as more than half of the salaries of the early cohort were revised — of the 26, 3 went down while 14 went up — whereas only 5 out of the 36 in the later cohort were altered.

We ran the same analysis on 24 companies that raised their Series A post 2019, and found no significant difference between the two cohorts, nor over time (only 4 of these went up). And here are the final figures: