Our annual Entrepreneurship and Compensation surveys are under way right now. The surveys focus on private companies in the Information Technology and Life Sciences industries. (We have conducted the survey annually since 2000 for IT companies, and since 2003 for Life Sciences companies.)
Survey participants receive a free, detailed “Compensation Report” that provides position-by-position summaries of salaries, bonuses, and equity holdings for C-level and VP-level executives. (I collaborate on the surveys with three professional services firms — executive search firm J. Robert Scott, law firm WilmerHale, and Ernst & Young LLP — that produce the Compensation Reports.)
At the company-status level, the Report breaks out the compensation and equity data by:
- # of financing rounds completed
- Company revenues
- Stage of product development
- # of employees
- Geographic region
- Industry segment
It also breaks out the data by founder vs. non-founder (a.k.a. founder discounts) and other relevant dimensions.
All survey submissions are kept completely confidential; submitted data is seen only by me and the core research team, the Compensation Report only includes summary data for which we have multiple data points, and we do not even list the names of participating companies.
So if you’re a senior executive in a private IT or Life Sciences company and are interested in participating, please hop over to the survey site and select which of the two surveys applies to you. (If you haven’t participated in the survey before, click on the New User button. If you have participated before, you can enter your old Login ID and have a lot of the data pre-filled for you, so that it will be a lot quicker for you to complete the survey.)
As I described in my inaugural blog post, the core of my research data — e.g., all of the charts I post here, and the econometric tables in the journal papers that underlie my blog-posts — comes from these surveys. So participating in the survey will both help you get scarce private-company compensation numbers and help me continue doing the research that serves as the foundation for this blog!
This research report is by far the best out there. The various cuts on the data are very helpful. One dimension that is missing, however, is whether or not the executive (or candidate if you’re hiring) has “done it” before. Years of experience has some correlation with “done it” but what really matters is whether the executive has been in the job before at a successful startup. Companies generally pay up for that experience and they under pay when an executive is stepping up (say from a Director-level position, or is first-time in a startup). I’m not sure how you’d work that into questionnaires in the future, but one suggestion would be to count the number of “done its” (i.e. that position in a startup for at least a year before).