What Should You Pay Your Startup Advisor in Equity

What Should You Pay Your Startup Advisor in Equity

Author:Β 

Peter Walker

|

Read time:Β 

1 minute

Published date:Β 

February 17, 2023

A Friday Q&A responding to founder questions: pre-seed advisors typically receive 0.1-0.25% of company equity, with the specific amount depending on...

LinkedIn: What Should You Pay Your Startup Advisor in Equity

Friday Q&A: what should I pay my startup advisor in equity?

Starting a new project where I crowdsource questions every week and dig into the Carta data set for one answer on Fridays!

So if you want yours answered, comment with question below (and let me know if you want to be shouted out in the subsequent post).

This week's burning startup question: what do I give my advisors?

𝗣𝗿𝗲-π˜€π—²π—²π—± Median: ~0.23%

𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗱 Median: ~0.13%

π—¦π—²π—Ώπ—Άπ—²π˜€ 𝗔 Median: ~0.068%

These are median values and there is quite a lot of variability when taking into account startup industry, location, etc. Not to mention "advisor" can cover a number of different roles.

Obviously advisors in the very earliest stages are receiving a larger percentage of the company. But if you are in talks with a pre-seed advisor and they ask for say 1%, just know that's founding engineer equity πŸ˜…

Reminder: always structure advisor grants with a vesting schedule! Typically this is 2 years, but can also be based on performance criteria instead of time. Equity should always come with a vesting schedule otherwise the incentive can fall flat. But don't be scared off - as you can see from the chart, tens of thousands of startup advisors are granted equity every year.

Interested in learning more about how to compensate with equity?

Join us on March 1 for a deep dive into all things startup compensation: https://lnkd.in/gZcTRsWk

Happy advising!

#cartadata #advisors #startups #equity #compensation

Peter Walker
Author: Peter Walker
Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project.

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