The last two years haven't been stellar for startup employee salaries.
In some cases, that's because they've literally gone down. For functions like Marketing and Customer Success, the median salary has dropped 4%-5% in the past two years.
Data from US startups on Carta valued between $50 million and $1 billion. Excludes both entry-level and C-suite positions.
The picture is a little better in other places across the organization. Sales has seen 7.6% median bump over the last two years, Product and Engineering close to 4% up, Finance +2.3%.
However - in no function has salary growth outpaced inflation (which is up 8.4% over the same period according to the BLS inflation calculator).
This feels unfair, doesn't it? Unfortunately inflation doesn't really come into play for most compensation questions. Salaries are predominately affect by cost of labor rather than cost of living.
And with the layoff waves of the past 2 years coupled with reduced hiring on the part of many startups, the leverage in any given hiring negotiation has swung back towards employers. This leverage means fewer offers at the high end of the comp band, which in turn exerts some downward pressure on certain salaries.
On the plus side, salaries did rise quite quickly over the 2020-2022 period, so employees are still enjoying some of those benefits.
But no denying it's a tougher startup job market out there and that has trickled into salaries in a big way.
As always, joining a startup 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘭𝘺 for the monetary comp (in salary or equity) is a tough sell. Joining because you'll learn much faster at a Series A company than a public one? That I buy.
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