Looking for Private-Venture Compensation Data? (2008 Version)

Our annual Entrepreneurship and Compensation surveys are under way right now. Want to participate? 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.) This year, we decided to move up the surveys by a couple of months, in order to get the Comp Reports to participants sooner.

If you participated last year, we should be able to pre-fill some of the data that would not have changed, making it quicker for you to participate now. (If you haven’t participated in the past, participating now will make it quicker for you to do so next year!)

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, delves into board compensation, and presents data on how things change as ventures evolve.

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 click over to the survey site, select which of the two surveys applies to you, and “Begin Survey.” (From there, 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.) Also, if you’re an investor (VC, angel, etc.) and you get your portfolio companies to participate, both you and the participating companies will get a free copy of the full Report.

As I described in my inaugural blog post, the core of my research data — e.g., all of the charts I post here (more coming in my next post!) and the econometric tables in the journal papers that underlie my blog-posts — comes from these surveys. So participating in the survey will help you get scarce private-company compensation numbers, provide data for future blog posts about issues you’re facing, and help me continue doing the research that serves as the foundation for this blog!

2 Comments
  1. Hello, I did not find a way to contact with you directly. Please, if you have any time send me your e-mail address as I have a question concerning a survey.( The survey we conducted is on mass media exposure)

  2. Really enjoyed it, I wanted to click out and you kept pulling me back in! Many thanks and keep up the great work!

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