In fall 2022, we teamed up with Gerald Lou and Union Square Ventures, one of the most prominent and well-regarded investors in tech, to tackle a critical topic that many early-stage companies find confusing: compensation. It’s often a mysterious world of corporate-sounding jargon and expensive consultants – but it doesn’t have to be.
We created Running Compensation As Your Side Job — a presentation to help startups of 25-150 employees build a stage-appropriate compensation structure based on best practices, in plain English. At these companies, someone other than the founder is usually stepping up to design a compensation plan that’s both strategic and relevant, but they often haven’t done it before.
We explored big, practical questions like:
- What are compensation bands and how many do we need?
- Which roles should I create compensation bands for, and which shouldn’t I?
- Where can I find accurate and high-quality compensation data without spending the earth on it?
- How do I take those data and make sensible compensation bands from them?
- Should we adjust pay based on location, and if so, how?
- How do we know who we should be competitive with and how much they are paying?
The session brought clarity to these challenges, with actionable insights and real examples. You can find the deck for Running Compensation As Your Side Job here.