Startup founders & employees - compensation at startups has changed significantly in 2023.
Here are the key things to know:
1. Salaries for startup employees have stayed basically flat this year. Which, hey, it's better than declining but certainly not keeping up with inflation.
2. Equity packages are down 26% from November 2022. That is a STEEP drop.
And that's not because companies are now worth less than they used to be. The percentage of the company given to each new employee has fallen, for entry-level through VPs.
3. Startup hiring is moving very slowly. Carta companies hired 314,000 new people in H1 2022 and only 129,000 new workers in the first half of this year.
4. Out-of-state hires made up 58% of new hires in Q2 2023 across startups. This percentage is much smaller in some physical industries like Biotech and Hardware.
5. Startup salaries across the US have drifted closer to SF rates. Places like Charleston, Las Vegas, Raleigh, and Jacksonville all closed the salary gap with bigger cities (not entirely, but the movement was strong).
Our full State of Startup Compensation report went live this morning. We swam through the salary and equity data from 280,000 employees working at startups using Carta Total Compensation. Then added a dash of labor market data from the 1 million + employees employed at all Carta companies.
Worth your time if you are a founder looking to expand your team in the coming year, an investor advising your portfolio companies, or an employee curious about the talent market today.
Bonus - if you download the addendum at the end of the (free, ungated) report, you get our best equity information on: employee option pools, first 10 hire equity, advisor equity, board member equity, and equity for 20 key startup countries across the world.
And after all that, if you still have specific comp questions you want answered, throw them in the comments below! Link to the report will live there too.
#cartadata #founders #startups #compensation #equity #salary #jobmarket
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