Three global founders weigh in on how they compensated themselves through their businesses, and how to balance preserving runway and covering personal financial needs.

Ask a founder what they pay themselves and watch the room go quiet. Compensation is one of the last true taboos in startup culture: while everyone has an opinion on it, few share the truth. Most founders quietly wrestle with it alone, either paying themselves nothing and calling it sacrifice, or guessing at a number and hoping no one asks questions. Both approaches are costing them.

Three founders cut through the silence and share what they actually did: the numbers, the timing, and what they wish they'd known sooner.

Kruze Consulting's 2025 research found the average US startup CEO salary was $161,000, up 14% from $141,000 in 2024. Pay varies by stage: seed-stage founders averaged $147,000, while Series A founders averaged $203,000.

Nicole Zalys, founder of Villiers & Co, sees the same mistake repeatedly: founders either skip pay entirely or severely underpay themselves.

“You need to factor in a realistic market rate for your role, as that's a real cost of running your business,” she explains. “Ignoring it doesn't make you profitable, it just masks the truth and creates a distorted picture of whether the business genuinely works.”

We spoke to three global founders who opened up about how they decided to pay themselves, when to optimize for longer-term gains, and what they wish they’d known when starting to take a salary from their company.

Expert insights: paying yourself as an early-stage founder

After six months of no pay, Henry LeGard, co-founder and CEO of fake account detection AI tool Verisoul, aimed to pay himself and his two co-founders less than the market average.

“I never wanted it to feel like we were asking the company for too much,” he says. “Founder pay should feel reasonable, not extractive.”

Verisoul’s three co-founders also decided to split equity evenly, which removed tension early and kept everyone aligned.

Felix Lee, founder and CEO at global mentorship platform ADPList, admits to forgetting to pay himself for the first year of business, given how many other priorities were front of mind while building his company.

And Shreya Prakash, CEO at fractional talent marketplace Flexibees, first started taking a salary after their Seed round in August 2024 that was agreed with her lead investor.

But should every good founder really start at $0? It depends who you ask.

What time is the right time? Three founders share when they started to take a salary

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To learn more about how to save time as a founder by automating your bookkeeping, read our 2026 guide to streamlining key accounting workflows (including processing multi-currency payroll) here.

From Nicole’s point of view, founders could consider a lower base salary supplemented with growth-related bonuses, or salary increases tied to revenue thresholds, profitability milestones, or successful funding rounds.

“I've seen founders take modest salaries in the first few years, then increase once the business hits agreed benchmarks,” she says. “This demonstrates financial discipline to investors while creating a clear path to fair compensation.”

How does fundraising influence founders' pay?

Raising venture capital also changes the pay conversation, because founders are no longer just managing their own money, but a pool of external capital that comes with its own expectations.

For Shreya at Flexibees, knowing that the company needed external funding to achieve scale influenced how and when she took a salary.

“We have grown fast, and there is immense opportunity since AI is creating fractional jobs and more people want to work flexibly, so raising external capital made sense,” she said. “For the first few years, all our resources including salaries that the founders could have taken went towards growth and the capital raise.”

Some founders took investors’ advice on board when setting leadership team salaries, while others cautioned that maintaining independence from investors on topics like compensation is important.

Navigating the tradeoff: livable pay vs. company runway

Whether you decide to take investors’ compensation cues or benchmark your salary against industry averages, a core tension remains: every dollar taken out of the business is one that doesn’t go towards building the product and growing the company.

“Not paying yourself comes with real risks,” Henry at Verisoul says. “If you take on too much financial stress, it makes it harder to run the company well and creates pressure that can bleed into the business.”

For Felix at ADPList, the most crucial factor is preserving energy as a founder and safeguarding against burnout. “Founders who romanticise poverty are optimising for a good story, not a good company,” he says.

Instead of raising their salary, another strategy founders may consider is to sell some of their stake for cash to alleviate financial pressure.

But there’s a limit to this: cashing out too much can raise red flags with investors, and founders could be selling at a lower valuation than their shares may eventually command.

There are also tax considerations to keep in mind when determining pay over the long-term, including any “use it or lose it” tax allowances for dividends and salaries that reset annually.

“In the UK, it’s far more tax-efficient to take £50k consistently each year than to take nothing for several years and then withdraw £250k in one go,” accountant Nicole says. “Planning your remuneration strategy with an accountant helps you avoid leaving money on the table that you've legitimately earned, and that the tax system allows you to take efficiently.”

Ultimately, every founder’s situation is different. There’s no single right answer, but the worst approach is not thinking carefully about your compensation altogether.

“If you have a savings cushion that lets you plough profit back into the company with little to no salary, you can afford to wait to raise at the right valuation and protect your equity,” says Shreya. “On the other hand, if you’re early in your career or the sole earner in your family, you may not have the luxury of waiting for a higher valuation.”

The impact of money — or lack thereof — is about much more than numbers in an account or dollars on a term sheet. Without a steady or sufficient paycheck, founders may be adding financial strain to an already challenging career path.

Felix’s one regret is not paying himself earlier, and feeling zero guilt about it.

“The most misunderstood part is that your startup doesn't need you broke, it really needs you focused,” he said. "Nobody tells you that underpaying yourself is a form of self-sabotage disguised as sacrifice."

Managing pay across currencies, markets, and compliance layers gets complex fast. We’ve pulled together a practical guide if you want a deeper dive.