10. What is the salary of a founder whose startup has been acquired by a big player like Google or Facebook? My salary after being acquired by Adobe and being made a corporate Vice President was $250,000 a year with a 40% potential bonus paid at CYE. The bonuses were only partially paid, being redistributed to my business unit. I was one of the lowest paid corporate VPs in the U.S., however. You have to look at the “whole package” and understand how the retention, claw- back, earn-out, and other provisions work to get the full picture. Be it carrots or sticks, salary won’t be the full picture as a founder if you are acquired. 11.What is the average annual return for a startup founder? I’ll take a stab at actually answering it. Because I have thought about it a lot. I think, as a true founder, you need to either: • Make about 5x what your salary would have been for the risk to be worth it from a purely economic perspective. • For repeat founders, make 5-10x what you made on your last start-up for it to be worth it. Re: the first bullet, e.g., you are a senior professional making $200k a year, you need to make at least $1m a year for each year of your start-up for it to be worth it economically. (This is not easy, especially if you don’t magically get acquired in the first 12 months.) If $100k, then $500k for each year, etc. Otherwise, you’ll be too upside down on risk -- assuming you left a job you liked. (If you left a job/career your hated then for your first start-up economics probably don’t matter that much.) Why 5x? The first year, maybe you make close to nothing. The second year you almost go bankrupt. The third year your salary is still very low. It may take 5 years for your salary to catch up to where it was and by then in your old career you would have advanced 5 years in that time... on the way to Director, VP, wherever... So my rough math, you have to make at least 5x what you would need have to cover SAASTR.COM 10