How much are you really worth?
In today's job market, not knowing your market value can mean missing out on thousands of dollars a year — but the taboo around discussing pay means it can be tricky to know if you're getting a good deal or not.
This is even more the case at ultra-competitive Silicon Valley startups, where huge swathes of salaries are often tied up in equity offers that can net employees multi-million-dollar windfalls if the business takes off.
Business Insider has previously obtained and published some of the results of extensive salary-compensation surveys conducted by buzzy technology venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which provides a window into exactly how much top executives at up-and-coming startups are getting paid.
We are now releasing further data on top sales roles at startups in the American technology industry, from CROs to directors of sales, to shed more light on what execs in the sector should really expect to take home.
Andreessen Horowitz — often referred to as a16z — annually surveys more than two-dozen executive search firms about more than 4,000 job offers that are made to executives across roughly 30 different roles. The positions range from chief executive officer (CEO) to senior vice president of technology to general counsel, at both consumer and enterprise startups across America, and at multiple stages of funding, reflecting the size of the companies in question. (When startups take outside funding from investors, it's typically referred to in "Series." Excluding early seed funding or angel-investment, Series A is the first major round of outside of funding, Series B is the second, and so on.)
Select the job title and the type of compensation you're interested in from the interactive graphic below:
To explore the complete data, which ranges from engineering roles to product, business, and marketing, check out our full feature here. A few things to note on the data above:
- This data was collected in 2017, and refers to offers made up to 2016 — so offers made for similar roles today are likely to be higher because of inflation and increased demand for talent in the technology industry.
- Some roles have more data available than others. For the most popular roles, like Sales VPs, this means you can explore the differences between enterprise and consumer salaries — while for others, like CROs, only combined "All" data is available. And in the case of VPs of Post-Sales, a16z only presented enterprise salary data.
- This data also does not reflect any startup founders' potential salaries and shares of equity. It refers only to the offers made to outside hires, so if a (co)founder holds a sales role they may have significantly larger shares of the company they created than detailed here.
- And it does not break out on what terms hires are offered equity — for example, whether it is theirs immediately as an outright grant, subject to conditions, or will vest over a period of years.
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