We had a blow-out year with the annual Entrepreneurship and Compensation surveys, which we wrapped up last week. In the near-final tally, we shattered our record for participants on the IT side, and are close on the Life Sciences side.
Thanks to many of you who participated this year, it looks like we have full submissions from about 300 private IT companies (far more than last year’s then-record of 263). The Life Sciences tally looks like it will be almost exactly the same as last year’s record of 172 companies.
A deeper pool of respondents enables us to cut the data into even more granular categories. Therefore, for participants, the full Compensation Report (which participants get for free when it’s published in early summer) should be even more comprehensive than in the past.
This year’s survey also included the most detailed questions yet on:
- Founder backgrounds (e.g., previously founded another venture? ever worked for a private company? ever worked for a public company?)
- Prior relationships among the founders (e.g., friends or co-workers before founding? prior founding experience together? strangers before founding?)
- When and how the founders split the equity among themselves
- Intellectual property (e.g., patents held both at the company level and within the founding team)
Not only will this data have immediate use in the Splitting the Pie, Founding with Friends, and other papers, but it will also enable me to post relevant data and charts to this blog in the coming months. My next blog-post will detail some of the other “coming attractions.”
Furqan Nazeeri was kind enough to get a jump on the last item in this post: For participants in the surveys, in addition to all of the detailed slices already included in the Compensation Report (some listed here), what other items would be most useful to you? Furqan’s comment was as follows (please post here any other requests):
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).
How do we get a copy of this report?
<><>Ksub:<><><>Participants<> in the survey receive a complimentary copy of the full Compensation Report. <>Non-participants<> have 2 choices:- They can get a much-abridged version of the Report from < HREF="http://www.compstudy.com/" REL="nofollow">the survey site<>, when the Report is completed. It usually has 4 pages of summary data (as opposed to almost 50 in the full version).- They can commit to participate in next year’s survey, plus pay $500, and then they can get the full Report. If you want to pursue this option, you can contact Mike DiPierro at [email protected].
Another bit of useful info that would be great if you were to research and publish is the total size of a startup’s option pool and how that varies over time. It’d also be great to see how the portion of the pool that is authorized but not granted changes over time. I wonder if there’s some correlation between valuation of financing rounds, size of pool and likelihood of a refresh / change size of pool? Great stuff!