How much are they getting?

From a LinkedIn Article written by Dimitra Haslim

4th October 2016

We recently ran a survey on compensation in tech startups in Singapore. This topic is very much top-of-mind for many founders. Compensation data - base pay, bonus, stock options etc - are hard to come by. Existing salary surveys tend to focus on established IT companies and their roles (e.g. sales, marketing), but don’t quite capture the nuances that startups face.

So we decided to ask startup founders in Singapore. We sent out a survey that asked 4 questions. The intent was to keep the survey brief - founders are busy. We also wanted to get the information out there fast and then iterate later. Responses from 13 founders came very quickly, almost all commenting that they have been looking for compensation data.

The 4 questions we asked were:

1.     What is the monthly base salary of individuals in your executive/management team?

2.     What is their annual performance-based variable cash bonus? (As a % of base salary)

3.     How much equity did they receive?

4.     What is the total accumulated amount of funding that your company has raised?

The founders were asked to respond to these questions vis-a-vis various C- and VP-level roles [1].

[1] Abbreviations: VPE - VP Engineering; VPF- Finance; VPO - Operations; VPP - Products; VPS - Sales; VPM - Marketing.

A few other choices that we made:

1.     Geography: We polled companies that are Singapore-based and presumably with their key staff located in Singapore;

2.     Roles: We focused on senior roles, and typical titles that one might find in tech startups in Singapore; and

3.     Funding: We surveyed companies that have raised funding (Series A and later), though we included a mix of companies across funding stages. Perhaps reflective of the state of the ecosystem, there were more companies with earlier-stage funding (Series A/B) than later-stage.