250 CEOs Confessed Their Pay. Half Earn Less Than Their Staff.

Founders know their company's revenue, margins and growth rate cold. Ask what they personally take home and they go quiet. So in late August 2026, Hampton asked 250 founders and CEOs anonymously. Nearly half pay someone on their team more than they pay themselves. Fifteen take a $0 salary, and six of those take more than $500K on top of it. 39% of bootstrapped founders take $500K+ beyond their salary, while not one venture-backed founder reported more than $300K.

This is a solo episode: no guest and no net worth breakdown. Daniel goes through the survey data, the research behind it, and the tax rules that make "pay yourself a tiny salary" risky advice.

He also covers how founder salaries change as revenue grows, the compensation that never shows up on payroll (credit card points, vehicles, real estate), what senior teams get paid, why equity doesn't replace market pay, why being personally broke changes your company decisions, and a three-question exercise to check your own pay.

Below you'll find my summary of the episode along with the entire transcript.

And by the way...this podcast, the concept of it came from Hampton. Hampton is a private, highly vetted community for high net worth founders started by Sam Parr. Members range from companies doing 3-5 million in revenue all the way up to hundreds of millions. The reason we started this podcast is because there are amazing conversations about money and growing companies that typically happen only behind closed doors, and we thought it would be awesome to share all of this information. If you're a CEO, founder, or business owner, check this out. New Moneywise episodes come out weekly.

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Now, below are the notes and the full transcript.

The Numbers

• 250 completed surveys (296 records, 46 incomplete), collected anonymously from Hampton founders and CEOs in late August 2026. Most answers were ranges, so medians use band midpoints.
• Median founder salary: about $150K at companies under $10M in revenue, and about $400K at $30–50M.
• About 47% pay at least one functional leader more than their own base salary. Under $1M in revenue it's 13 of 15 (87%). Above $20M it's still about 35%.
• 15 founders take a $0 salary. Six of them report $500K+ in additional compensation.
• Bootstrapped: 180 respondents. 70 of them (39%) take $500K+ on top of salary.
• Venture-backed (seed–Series C): 58 respondents. 53 take under $100K extra, and not one reports more than $300K.
• Outside benchmark (Kruze, 2026): median VC-backed CEO salary about $159K. Seed ~$153K, Series A ~$203K, Series B ~$216K.
• Perks off the payroll: roughly a third mentioned credit card points or rewards. Vehicles and real estate came up repeatedly.
• Company-wide bonuses: 5% of companies under $1M in revenue (1 of 20) vs. 44% above $1M.
• Senior team pay: sales leaders earn the most, HR the least. No one put an HR leader in the $400K+ band.

Founders Are Often Not the Best-Paid Person in the Building

Revenue can grow by tens of millions of dollars while the founder's salary stays in a normal executive range. Almost half the companies surveyed pay a senior employee more than the CEO. Research points the same way: Noam Wasserman studied more than 1,200 executives at 528 private companies and named the gap the "founder discount." It shrinks as companies grow.

Josh Payne bootstrapped StackCommerce and sold it for about $80 million. He paid himself $0 at first, then $60K, $75K, $90K, about $150K, and eventually about $250K plus bonuses before the sale. The business got big long before his salary did. Salary is only the first layer of what a founder makes.

Bootstrapped vs. Venture-Backed: Two Different Pay Systems

This was the biggest split in the survey. Almost four in ten bootstrapped founders take at least half a million dollars a year beyond their salary, through distributions, bonuses, profit sharing or other owner economics. Among venture-backed founders, nobody crossed $300K.

A bootstrapped company can pay its owner cash now. A venture-backed founder takes a salary now and bets on equity later. "The paycheck is really only half the bet." Comparing one model to the other can make you feel wildly underpaid or wildly overpaid for no good reason.

Why "Tiny Salary, Big Distributions" Is Bad Advice

For an S corporation, the IRS requires a shareholder who works in the business to take reasonable compensation before non-wage distributions, and it can reclassify distributions as wages. David Watson, an accountant, paid himself $24,000 a year in wages plus much larger distributions. The IRS challenged it, and the Eighth Circuit upheld the government's position.

A low salary also caps retirement savings. S corp distributions don't count as earned compensation for plan contributions. The 2026 overall 401(k) additions limit is $72,000 before catch-up contributions, and what you can actually put in depends on your W-2 pay and your plan's rules. The question to ask is what salary you could defend for the work you actually do. "Boring is really good when the alternative is explaining your creativity to the IRS." (Not tax advice. Talk to your CPA.)

The Compensation Nobody Counts

In the free-text answers, about a third of founders mentioned credit card points or card benefits. Vehicles and real estate arrangements came up again and again. One Federal Reserve analysis estimated about $15 billion a year in redistribution tied to rewards cards, so points aren't Monopoly money. Whether a given reward counts as tax-free personal compensation depends on how it was earned and redeemed, which is a CPA question. "Salary is the number your payroll software knows, but compensation is the number your lifestyle knows."

Paying the Team: Bonuses, Equity, and Pay Transparency

Company-wide bonuses jump from 5% of companies under $1M in revenue to 44% above it. Daniel doesn't think $1M is a magic number. You just need some economic room before a bonus becomes a repeatable system instead of a promise you're scrambling to keep.

An NBER project surveying more than 40,000 employees found that shared upside works best when it's combined with good workplace practices and fixed wages at or above market. "Equity isn't a coupon code for underpaying someone." In a University of California study, employees who learned they were paid below their peers' median were less satisfied and more likely to look for another job. Those above the median got no matching boost. Daniel's advice: benchmark the job, pay for the job, then decide how much upside to share.

Owning Equity Is Not the Same as Being Financially Secure

Robert Hall and Susan Woodward described the venture deal plainly: below-market salary, a big ownership stake, and a lot of company-specific risk. In one of their models, a founder starting with less than about $700K of wealth would have been better off in a salaried job. "'I own a lot of equity' is not at all the same thing as 'I am financially secure.'"

In a study of sugarcane farmers in India, the same farmers scored better on cognitive tests after harvest, once they'd been paid, than before it. Financial scarcity uses up mental bandwidth. Andrew Wilkinson paid himself well early and argues that founders who starve themselves get desperate for liquidity and start to see selling as the only way to finally get paid. Pay yourself enough to make company decisions for company reasons, but don't let your lifestyle get so expensive that you can never afford to stop.

The Exercise: Check Your Own Pay

Take last year. Start with your W-2 salary and add distributions, bonuses, profit sharing and any other cash you took from the business. Then list separately the legitimate benefits the business provides that you'd otherwise pay for yourself. Add it all up. That total tells you much more than your salary does. Then ask three questions:

1. Is my salary defensible for the job I actually do?
2. Is my total compensation appropriate for the company I actually own?
3. Is the way I pay myself helping me make better long-term decisions, or is it forcing my hand?

Other Key Quotes

"Ask somebody what their company makes, and they'll tell you revenue, margins, growth rate. But ask them what they personally take home, and suddenly everyone gets super, super quiet."

"Salary by itself is a terrible way to answer the question: How much does this founder make?"

"The paycheck is really only half the bet."

"Boring is really good when the alternative is explaining your creativity to the IRS."

"Salary is the number your payroll software knows, but compensation is the number your lifestyle knows."

"Equity isn't a coupon code for underpaying someone."

"Am I making the best decision for the company, or am I just tired of feeling personally broke?"

Links You Might Like

• Join Hampton Community: https://joinhampton.com
• The Hampton Wealth Report (50+ founders worth $10M–$4B reveal their personal finances): https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr
• MoneyWise Podcast: Full episode archive

Full Transcript

Daniel Berk: Ask somebody what their company makes, and they'll tell you revenue, margins, growth rate, probably before you even finish the question. They know it like the back of their hand. But ask them what they personally take home, and suddenly everyone gets super, super quiet and uncomfortable. So Hampton asked anonymously. In late August 2026, two hundred and fifty founders and CEOs completed a compensation survey, and this survey wasn't just like, "What's your salary?" We asked what their companies make, whether they're bootstrapped or venture-backed, what they pay themselves in base salary, what they take on top of salary, and what they pay senior people in operations, sales, marketing, product, tech, and HR. We also asked about bonuses, equity and profit sharing, full-time employees versus contractors, and a lot of other weird stuff that you don't typically see on W-2s. And before I show you any of this, there's a little nerdy note that I have to add. The raw report actually has two hundred and ninety-six records. Forty-six are incomplete. In this video, I'm gonna go over the data from two hundred and fifty completed surveys. Most of the money questions were also answered in ranges like a hundred to two hundred thousand dollars or two hundred to three hundred thousand, that type of thing. So not always exact dollar amounts, but the findings are really cool. So whenever I compare two ranges or give an estimated median, I'm using the midpoint of that range. Translation: This is a really useful benchmark. This video is not an audit of two hundred and fifty tax returns, and this isn't a random survey of every entrepreneur in America. It's a Hampton sample. Hampton is a vetted community for founders and CEOs, and on average, they're doing twenty-five million in revenue. To qualify to be a Hampton member, you have to have at least three million dollars in revenue, three million raised, or a previous exit of over ten million dollars. So again, this survey is not what every founder in America makes. It's a very specific survey of two hundred and fifty people in Hampton, the private community for founders and CEOs. And this is what this particular group of founders and CEOs told us. Because a lot of this stuff is anonymous, I've grouped it into five private themes. When I name somebody in this video, it's because they've already told their story publicly. Okay, so now we can actually talk about the money. The first thing that jumped out about the survey is how normal founder salaries look even when the businesses stop looking normal. For companies below ten million dollars in annual revenue, the midpoint of the median founder salary band is about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. At thirty to fifty million in revenue, it's about four hundred thousand. That's a pretty big raise. But think about what happened to the company compared to what happened to the paycheck. Revenue can go up by tens of millions of dollars while founder salary is still sitting in a pretty normal executive range, and a lot of founders are not even the best-paid person in the building. Now, because these answers are ranges, I can't tell you down to the exact dollar. But if I use the midpoint of each salary band and only look at respondents who gave us at least one senior employee pay range, about forty-seven percent appear to pay at least one functional leader more than their own base salary. In other words, almost half of these companies we surveyed are paying their senior employees more than their CEO or founder. For companies doing under a million in revenue, it's thirteen out of fifteen usable responses. That's about eighty-seven percent. Even above twenty million in revenue, it's about thirty-five percent, and there's a lot of older research that backs this up as well. Noam Wasserman studied more than twelve hundred executives at five hundred and twenty-eight private companies and found a meaningful compensation difference between founders and non-founders.

Daniel Berk: His paper literally calls it the founder discount, and that difference gets smaller as the companies grow. Then a guy named Barton Hamilton looked at self-employment from a different angle. His research found that people who stayed in business for ten years had a median earnings differential of about thirty-five percent compared with paid employment. Now, does that mean all these founders should go quit and get a real job? Probably not. Owners have equity. They get distributions. They can sell the company. But that's exactly the point. Salary by itself is a terrible way to answer the question: How much does this founder make? Take guys like Josh Payne. He bootstrapped StackCommerce and eventually sold it for about eighty million dollars. He publicly talks about paying himself zero dollars at first, then sixty grand, then seventy-five grand, then ninety, then around a hundred and fifty, and eventually before the sale, around two hundred and fifty thousand dollars plus bonuses. The business was getting much bigger long before his salary looked like it. So if you're looking at salary and thinking, "This seems weirdly low for the size of this company," you might actually be right, but salary is only layer one, and this is where the survey gets a lot more interesting. Fifteen of these two hundred and fifty respondents report a base salary of zero dollars, but six of those fifteen also report at least five hundred thousand dollars in additional compensation. And I'm purposely being sort of annoyingly deliberate with that phrase additional compensation. What we didn't ask in the survey is how much did you take in distributions. What we did ask is how much you take on top of your base salary, and that could include distributions or bonuses, profit sharing, or other owner economics. The part of the survey that really stuck out to me was that there's a very clear differential between the companies who are funded and the companies who are bootstrapped. There are a hundred and eighty bootstrapped or self-funded respondents of the two hundred and fifty. Seventy of them, so thirty-nine percent, report at least half a million dollars in additional compensation. That's almost four in ten. Now, let's compare that with the venture-backed group, and here I'm defining venture-backed as seed through Series C. That group is fifty-eight respondents. Fifty-three of those fifty-eight report less than a hundred thousand dollars in additional compensation, and the other five are still below three hundred thousand dollars. Not one in the venture-backed group reports more than three hundred thousand dollars in additional compensation. That is a massive difference, and it gives you a much better way to think about founder pay. A bootstrapped founder can build a company that throws off cash to the owner right now, whereas a venture-backed founder is usually playing a completely different type of entrepreneurial builder's game. VC-backed founders have salary now and equity value later, or so they hope. You can see the same general shape in current outside payroll data. Kruze Consulting's 2026 data from US venture-backed startups puts the median CEO salary at about a hundred and fifty-nine thousand dollars. Seed CEOs average around a hundred and fifty-three thousand. Series A, about two hundred and three. Series B, about two hundred and sixteen. So when you see a venture founder running a valuable company on two hundred grand salaries, that isn't necessarily weird according to the data because the paycheck is really only half the bet for these founders. The other half is them betting on the cap table, them betting on themselves, and them betting on the future exit opportunity of the company that they are the founder of. And this is why founder compensation is really broken into two entirely different systems. One system is designed to pay you while you own the company, and the other is trying to pay you when the ownership becomes liquid.

Daniel Berk: And if you benchmark one against the other, you can make yourself feel either wildly underpaid or wildly overpaid for no real good reason. Now let's talk about how taxes come into play here. Whenever founders talk about salary versus distributions, somebody eventually says, "Just make your salary tiny and take the rest as distributions." That's not a great rule, and it's probably a viral TikTok somewhere that someone's heard about and hasn't actually done the research on. So I did it for you. For an S corporation, the IRS says a shareholder employee who actually works in the business has to receive reasonable compensation for those services before taking non-wage distributions. Oh, that was a mouthful. And the IRS can reclassify distributions as wages when the salary isn't reasonable. Let's take a guy, David Watson. He was an accountant. His S corporation paid him twenty-four thousand dollars a year in wages while also paying him much larger distribution. The IRS actually challenged it. The case went through courts. The Eighth Circuit upheld the government's position on reasonable compensation, and it was a whole mess. So the useful question to ask your founder is not, what's the lowest salary you can get away with, but what salary could I defend for the work you're actually doing? The IRS itself points to things like your training and experience, your duties, how much time you spend in the business, what comparable companies pay, and what you pay non-shareholder employees. But there's still another reason not to mindlessly shove salary towards zero. If you're an S corp shareholder, distributions don't count as earned compensation for retirement plan contributions. So your ability to contribute through your company's retirement plan is tied to W2 compensation and the actual plan's rules. For twenty twenty-six, the overall annual additions limit for a 401(k) is seventy-two thousand dollars before applicable catch-up contribution. But don't hear seventy-two thousand dollars and decide that everyone should automatically dump seventy-two grand into their 401(k). Compensation, plan design, age, and other rules do matter. So yes, structure matters a lot, but it really comes down to the CEO or founder needs to be paid a reasonable salary, they should have clean records, there should be a CPA who understands your company's entity, and you should treat distributions as actual distributions. At the end of the day, boring is really good when the alternative is explaining your creativity to the IRS. Also, this is not tax advice. Beyond salary, there's a bunch of stuff that founders don't really mentally put in the salary bucket. In our survey, we had a free text response where a lot of people mentioned things about unusual compensation. Roughly a third mentioned credit card points, rewards, or closely related card benefits, depending on how narrowly you code the answers. Other things like vehicles show up repeatedly, and so do things like real estate-related arrangements, things like new houses or different property that they bought as compensation. What's so interesting about all this is that founders can have a lot of economic value flowing through their lives that never really show up when someone asks them, "What is your salary?" I think points are the perfect example. They feel like monopoly money right up until you buy something actually tangible with them. Federal Reserve researchers have found that rewards card systems create meaningful transfers between different groups of consumers. One Fed analysis estimated roughly fifteen billion dollars a year in redistribution associated with rewards credit cards. So credit card points are not like imaginary monopoly money, but that also doesn't mean that every business card reward is automatically a tax-free personal compensation. The facts matter, especially to the IRS, and how the reward was earned matters.

Daniel Berk: How it was redeemed can even matter, and that's a CPA question, not a Daniel Berk Moneywise question. So talk to your tax advisor. For this survey, I think the useful takeaway is a little bit simpler. When you're figuring out what the business is really doing for you financially, don't stop at the payroll. Salary is the number your payroll software knows, but compensation is the number your lifestyle knows. Our survey also asked what the senior team typically makes. The most commonly reported senior function is operations. After that was product and engineering, sales, marketing, tech, and then finally, HR. And somewhat not surprisingly, sales is the highest-paid functional leader by median compensation band in this example and in the survey. And the lowest was HR. In fact, among respondents who reported compensation for an HR leader, nobody put that person in the four hundred thousand-plus band. Then there's a company-wide bonus that a lot of people reported on. Below one million dollars in revenue, only one of twenty respondents say the company pays one at all, only five percent of the companies. But once you get above a million in revenue, it was a hundred out of two hundred and fifty, so forty-four percent. It feels like a meaningful threshold. It's not because one million dollars is a magic number, but because you need economic room before a company-wide bonus becomes a repeatable compensation system instead of this random promise that you made a bunch of people and had to deliver good on. And beyond that, there's stuff like equity. In the bootstrapped companies, there's an interesting association between very high estimated founder cash compensation and lower likelihood that the C-suite gets traditional equity. A large NBER research project used surveys from more than forty thousand employees to study employee ownership, profit sharing, and stock options. The strongest results showed up when shared upside was combined with things like good workplace practices and fixed wages that were already at or above market. Put simply, equity isn't a coupon code for underpaying someone, and there's still another study that founders should know about. Researchers studying University of California employees randomly made some workers more likely to look up coworkers' salaries. The people who found out they were below the median for comparable peers reported lower job satisfaction and more interest in finding another job. The people above the median didn't get an equal and opposite happiness boost, which to me is a very human result. It sounds like exactly what I'd expect. People don't judge their compensation in a vacuum. What they're usually asking is, compared with who? How much money do I make compared with this person who maybe I feel equal to or peers with? So my read on this data point is that you should benchmark the job, pay the job, pay a reasonable salary for what that person is completing with their job, and then decide how much upside you want that person to share in with the company. So at this point in the video, you could watch this whole thing and conclude that the goal is to extract as much cash as legally possible. But I don't really think that's the lesson. I think there's a better question. What are you as a founder optimizing for? A bootstrapped founder may want durable cash flow and control of the company, and a VC-backed founder may willingly take less cash because the bet is concentrated in future equity opportunity. Robert Hall and Susan Woodward studied that latter model, venture-backed entrepreneurship, and they described the basic deal pretty bluntly. The entrepreneur takes a below-market salary, owns a big piece of the company, and carries a huge amount of company-specific risk.

Daniel Berk: In one of their models, using a particular assumption about risk aversion, an entrepreneur beginning with less than about seven hundred thousand dollars in wealth would have preferred the certainty equivalent economics of a salaried job. And seven hundred thousand is not a rule in this case, it's just one of their median findings. But the point behind this is super important. I own a lot of equity is not at all the same thing as I am financially secure. There's a psychological reason founders should care about this. There's a famous science study involving sugarcane farmers in India. They get a big chunk of their income around harvest, and researchers tested the same farmers before harvest when money was tight and afterward when they'd been paid. The same people performed better on cognitive tests after the harvest. The argument from the researchers is that financial scarcity itself consumes mental bandwidth. Look, I'm very obviously not saying an underpaid founder is living in poverty, so that's not the comparison. The point is personal financial pressure can change the way decisions feel or even the way decisions are made for founders, and that matters so much when the questions are, do I raise or do I sell or do I take this deal or do I keep going? Am I making the best decision for the company, or am I just tired of feeling personally broke? Andrew Wilkinson has talked publicly about taking almost the opposite approach. He paid himself very well early in his business and argues that founders who starve themselves can become desperate for liquidity and start treating a sale as the only way to finally get paid. You don't have to copy this philosophy, but I think the principle is super smart. Founder compensation should buy you enough personal stability that you can make company decisions for company reasons, not because you can't pay your own rent. Still, on the other side, don't let your lifestyle become so expensive that you can never afford to stop. So what do you take away from this video? Here's the exact exercise that I would do if you're a founder listening to this and think, "What does this mean for me?" Take last year. Start with your W-2 salary. Add distributions, bonuses, profit sharing, any other cash you actually took from the business. Then separately list the legitimate economic benefits the business provides that you would otherwise pay for yourself. Now tally up the total. That number is much more useful than your salary. Now ask three questions. Is my salary defensible for the job that I actually do? Is my total compensation appropriate for the company I actually own? Finally, is the way I'm paying myself helping me make better long-term decisions, or is it forcing my hand to make decisions I'm forced to make because I don't make the right amount of money? What's clear to me about this survey is that the richest looking company does not always have the highest paid founder, and the founder with the smallest salary is not necessarily taking home the least money. And the most shocking thing to me about this survey was how bootstrapped and venture-backed founders are playing entirely different compensation models with their companies. So obviously, don't take all this data and then go copy what you're hearing other companies are doing, but, like, figure out what compensation model your company should do and what makes the most sense for you as a founder. All the data points and methodologies noted in this video are gonna be linked in the description. And if this is the type of conversation that is helpful to listen to or that you wanna actually be in the room with other founders and CEOs to talk about, go check out joinhampton.com. It's an incredible community of high-growth founders and CEOs on average doing, like, $25 million. They all talk about this type of stuff with their core groups.

Daniel Berk: A core group is a group of seven other people, so eight people in a room with a moderator, and you discuss life and family and business and numbers and what the actual bottlenecks are in the way that you're growing your company. It's an amazing group, and I highly recommend checking out. Again, that's joinhampton.com. If you made it this far, I super appreciate you listening to Moneywise. Please go ahead and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. And if you love this, give us a comment. If you hate it, comment as well. Tell me why. How can I improve? I really appreciate all the listeners that come back week after week. And if that's you, thank you again for supporting me and for supporting Moneywise by Hampton. We'll see you next week.