 Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes. Hi, everyone. It's great to see you. Look at all these people here at Slush. We are back this year, even bigger and better, to ask, to play back your data that you gave to us, both Slush and Kriandum in partnership, to answer the question, the most asked question. What should I pay myself? I'm Michelle Coventry. I'm the head of talent at Kriandum, one of Europe's top VC firms. And let's just run through what we're going to cover. So we'll begin by setting the scene. We'll have a quick run through how we got to this data. And then we'll talk through the results and insights. And then afterwards, I'm going to bring a founder up on stage from our portfolio, Dr. Lisa Smith from PreWave. So why do we care about getting this right? Well, in my role as head of talent, as I mentioned, I co-pilot with our founders in our portfolio. And anything to do with people and talent topics tends to come my way. We commit as one team and have been in operation for 20 years, investing in founders at the very earliest stage of your journey. Seed and A are our sweet spot. So 20 years on and over 100 active portfolio companies, we've endured three recessions. And the deal team appear to be pretty good at picking winners since we've rode along with around 20 unicorns. And as they just mentioned, currently one in six in the portfolio is currently a unicorn on its way to DecaCon status. Compensating your teams at every level and every function is a weekly, well, as she said, probably a daily ask from our founders. But definitely every week, multiple people will ask this question for your teams. And as an ecosystem, we're really well served by paid for compensation platforms. I can imagine three or four going through my head at the moment where you can log on there and see what does this person in this size company at this level, what should we be compensating them? But not so on the founder side. So it was this initiative that we took last year with Slush as to why we're here today to give you what is now 12 months worth of data. It's a free tool. And it's not just for you. It's also to point your investors to and also your board members when you're having those discussions. So we have 700 founders from almost 50 cities across Europe that have inputted into the survey. We combined this with last year's data. So total data collected now is around 1,200 data points. And it's going to remain open now. And it will be dynamic and always free for you. We also then pinged a lot of our friends that we co-invest in in the VC platform teams and other talent roles. And they also distributed it within their portfolio companies. The survey has remained exactly the same, except this year we did add one more question, which are who are your investors? Just to see if we could learn if some investors were advising more or not. But all in all, it's exactly the same. So what do we ask for? We ask for base. We ask for bonus or variable compensation. We also look at equity. We look at where you're based to see whether that matters, so your location. We look at how you spend your time. What's your main role? We look at your gender. We ask your gender. We also look at total funds raised and the last round. And then our analysts get to work. So they're not here today, but a big shout out to Richie and Kay, who spent two weeks crunching and slicing your data in various different ways to give us what we're just about to go through. All of this is live publicly tomorrow. I mentioned we started open sourcing 12 months ago. Just want to quickly show you how things have changed in the last year. Not much, to be honest. Just a 9% uptick in earlier stage founders. So bootstrapped and pre-seed stage. We've seen that data number volume increase. And the distribution across geographies has remained fairly consistent across Europe, except we have seen a small 4% uptick in founders in the Nordics. But I think before we go any further, one lesson here is one thing to remember. Top tip is when you're looking at any compensation, it's always going to be difficult to compare like for like. It's not always the same people that you're comparing like for like for. So first up here, we have salary by stage. And on the horizontal axis, you've got bootstrapped all the way through to series B. The bars are median salary, and it's all in euros. This whole presentation is in euros. And the orange line represents the 2022 data. What we see is founders' salaries generally top out a little below $150,000, which might indicate a more measured approach amidst a difficult economic and funding environment. Bootstrap companies are the highest increase in median, very modest. It's small this year. It's 4%. And while we can't be certain of the cause, it could be the profitability that's now required for the next stage, or it could be the potential lack of risk that some of the co-founders are taking. But on the precede side, we see another small uplift. And that was the only other group of 2%. And again, hard to pinpoint why this is, except we have seen a larger number of new pre-seed funds in Europe actually starting up, which may have contributed to more capital coming into that stage business. And therefore, they feel more comfortable. But it's hard to say. On this slide, we look at salary by total funding. We have total funding along the horizontal. And the bars are showing average salary. Again, the orange line indicates the median. On average, the biggest jump is 3 to 10 million raise up to 20 million euros raise at a 30% increase. And then again, almost the same, 3 to 50 million raise. The largest median jump of 72% is between 0.1 and 1 to 3 million raised. But there is more to this, which we'll come to. We'll just dive into bonuses first and then come back to that. OK, bonus by stage. First of all, the first thing to note on this slide is the vertical axis only goes up to 25%. So only one in four of you actually pay yourself a variable component to your total compensation. So a bonus, effectively. And it does this strange Nike tick thing, which again, no reason as to why given. But our estimation is investors join you along the journey at pre-seed. And the mechanism of paying yourself dividends potentially or taking a bonus out of a profitable bootstrap business then goes away. And then obviously when it comes down, it goes to one in 10. So I don't want people to get excited about paying a bonus. Just remember, it's one in 10. Only one in 10 of you pay yourself a bonus, otherwise it's non-existent. Now we look at location. So does it actually matter where you live was the question? And here we've got the geographic regions along the horizontal axis. The bars are average. Salary and the orange line is the median. So what we see is over a 12-month period, UK founders have continued to report the highest median. And then the next is the DAC region. And unfortunately for the Baltics, this is the lowest. The most affected regions of any salary decrease were the Nordics and Benelux with minus 15% over this last 12-month period. And the least affected were the UK and Southern Europe at minus 4%. So overall, medium salaries have dropped across every region. I'm so sorry to give you this news, but I think it is a reality of the world that we've been living in and the cost of living crisis that many geographies have been handling. And potentially it implies that founders are actually taking one for the team. They're taking a hit on their own salary to protect others. Then we asked you by industry. Which industry do you kind of category do you fall into? Just to see whether that has any impact on pay. And it turns out that it actually does. So along the bottom here, we've got industry, B2B SaaS, consumer and fintech. And then we have them by stage in the different bars. Over the last 12 months, we see both B2B and fintech both taking an increase of 6%. Whereas consumer has taken a decrease of 2%. Consumer salaries though at the bootstrap stage have rebounded in the sense that they were paying themselves around 8,000 a year. And now they're taking 25,000 a year. But the largest decline was the fintech founders of Series A companies, where the median was falling 18%. We then asked you how you spent your time and which role you either held the title for or which hat you wore. And we do recognize that in the very beginning as a very early stage founder, you're wearing all of the hats, multiple. And that changes over time. Or it could be that you have multiple co-founders and you each take a different hat. So when we ask what was your main role and how you do spend your time, you'll see that the CEO is ranked fourth. I don't know if this is surprising or not. To me, it's not because I work with compensation data all day. But our CRO founders, our commercial founders, the folks that are leading sales are the highest paid median at around 90K, which is 25% higher than the next well-paid, which is finance and then tech. Gender. Okay, female, green, male, gray. Nothing much has changed in the last 12 months, afraid, ashamed to say. And this is where I put my hands up as well. We see parity at pre-seed stage. So we've got stage along the bottom. We do see parity at pre-seed stage. So this is very positive. We should celebrate this. But the delta creeps in at seed of around 13%. 13, one, three. Why? But that said, when we look at our respondents, we have six times more men represented in the respondents survey itself, which made us scratch our heads. And then we thought, okay, does that mean that we need to market this survey more to female founders? And the answer came back. This is representative of the industry right now. So hands up, we didn't collect any data for series B, female founders. And that's something that coming out of this is something that we commit to changing. So watch this space. Penultimate slide. I bet you're all loving this, death by PowerPoint. But penultimate slide. And we want to talk about ownership, which is obviously massive in terms of this is where founders get their ultimate payday. So along the bottom, along the horizontal, we've got equity percentage on the vertical and stage along the horizontal. And medium for the same time last year depicted by the orange line. Unsurprisingly, founders share decreases as your company matures through dilution. And I think it is important to mention now that the number of founders, the number of people you've co-founded your company with, that number exponentially increases the dilution factor along the journey. And just sort of stay mindful of that. Like really matters. And I don't know whether that gets educated in the early stage. I just want to land that point. Lastly, we have salary by full-time employees in terms of FTEs. On average, as your company grows, excuse me, so does your base salary. But look here at around 50, look here at around 50 to 200 employees, the average and the median plateau. And then it takes up again around 200. So we thought that was noteworthy to sort of give a shout-out. And wondering why that happens. And it could just be that, reflecting the job in hands, your company, at this point, around 200, is relatively de-risk. You've found market fit. You're probably doing some sort of international expansion. And the salary increases reflective of the job in hand. And market rates. So in summary, founder salaries are down. Inflation is really starting to bite. Bonuses are on pause. And except for those that are bootstrapped. The UK still remains the highest salary spot in Europe with cost of living. Pay gap is real. Whether, just keep saying it, maybe something will change. And CROs are earning more than CEOs. You will find the founder's report on our blog, so creandom.com. And then look under stories. And this is gonna be released on Monday. So we'll put the full report with all of the findings on the website on Monday. We also, which is live now, you can check it out now, is the creandom tool, the compensation tool. So this was built by our analyst. It does contain over the last 12 months. We're gonna upload the 700 on Monday. So it'll be much better on Monday. But just to let you know that it exists. And we'd love your data. This is a free tool that you help others. You help others in your founder community. And by being data informed, your board members, your investors, and each other can actually come to the right solution for you and your company. So now, I would like to welcome to the stage Lisa Smith from PreWave. Hey, Lisa. Hi. It's great to have you here. So Lisa is, we invested in your company at the beginning of this year. Talk us through the story and how you got here today. What kind of stage? Yeah, put some color on PreWave. Yeah, sure. Yeah, hi, wow. It's exciting to be here. So yes, I'm the CEO and co-founder of PreWave. We are B2B SaaS company based in Vienna, Austria. We make global supply chains more transparent, resilient, and sustainable. And we do so by providing a technology to our enterprise clients that helps them to understand how the supply chains look like into the depth beyond the first year of suppliers, that helps them to understand where the most risky suppliers are in the supply chain networks, and it also helps them to understand what they need to do in order to mitigate that risk. So yes, Granum invested earlier this year in March into our company, and we're very grateful for that partnership. I founded the company in 2017 together with my co-founder. So we are two co-founders at PreWave. Then it's, so let's say the technology actually comes out of my PhD that happened in the five years before. And then founded the company in 2017, and then what followed was three to four tough years of finding product market fit. So yeah, not much happened, let's say, on the revenue side. And I think at the end of this, the team beginning of 2022 was about 20 people. And right now, yeah, so like 20 months later, we are 140 people and more than 150 enterprise clients. So the last 20 months were really an exciting journey for us. And what about back in the beginning, when you were thinking about founding a company and coming out of PhD Studentville, how do you and Harold have that conversation? So in the beginning, when we really just started and we didn't even have the first employee, it was let's just take enough so we can survive. So this was really very little, talking about 1,000 euros per month or something, like really just, yeah, that we could get around. Later on it was, yeah, we were working towards that we could just pay ourselves so much that we would not worry about it. So that was a bit our thinking. We always paid each other the same amount. So we're two co-founders and yeah, but this was really pre-revenue. It really fell to us. We're all working for the equity. We're not working for our salary. Otherwise we would go to some other company. So that is what felt right to us at the moment. That was also possible because we didn't have families yet to support and things like that. Families. So what happened this year? Yeah, so right, we closed around when I was nine months pregnant. So that was an exciting time, let's say, but yeah. So I got a, yeah, my second child already this year. So yes, generally the thinking about remuneration certainly changed once I have a family to support and particularly being a female founder. I mean, running a scale up and having two small kids is a challenge, yeah. And it certainly helps if you have the money basically to build up a support network. So it's particularly on the private side to get also some support for household things but also for childcare. So that really changed a bit the perspective on the remuneration side. So what did you do about it? And like, I know the answer, but I'd like you to reveal the conversation that was had to actually make that happen. Yeah, so we just talked back there. So I think founder remuneration, one thing is about the salary that you get, right? But there's also things like secondary, right? And I think there's something that is in the startup scene not really well discussed amongst founders. So that's why I wanted to share. It's something that is typical only for later rounds. So it basically means that in a round you're selling a small part of your shares, yeah? Because it can very easily happen that on paper you're already millionaire but in the end at home you can almost not pay your invoices, right? But what has happened to me as a coincident more or less we had, or to us, we had a round that was massively oversubscribed. So basically then investors were starting to ask, do you maybe wanna sell a small part of your own shares? And we were never really considering that. We didn't even know this was possible, to be honest. I always thought that, obviously, it's not gonna happen anytime soon. But yeah, this enabled us to take a bit of the chips off the table, let's say, a very small part and if you consider it in the round and so on. But for me personally, that was quite a lot of money. And that, yeah, I mean, we need to be serious. I mean, money just gives you options, right? Yeah. In my case, yeah, now two small kids at home, yeah? I was, I'm living in an area in Austria where there's not too many childcare facilities. So I was like, okay, how are we gonna do this, right? I'm a CEO of this company. We're growing quickly, hyper-grows, yeah? And then at the same time, my mom was considering, yeah, to, like, she was, she's working for more than 40 years, but she would still have three years to work. Yes. And, but she was really like, I would much rather take care, help you at home and with the children than to continue this job. So it just gave me the option to tell her, okay, maybe you can help us at home and I can financially support you for the next three years until you officially retire. And that has been, for me personally, a real game changer. And this is probably just one example of the freedom that it can give you if you're thinking about, yeah, like this second year. Thanks very much for sharing that. It's a really personal story and I think it takes great courage to sort of share that with other people that there are options if you have that discussion. How fans set their own salary also has, it's a beacon really, it's a philosophy whether you call it that, it's an approach for how you set your team's salary. So maybe we could just touch on in the final few minutes on how you think about that. And also the stage of growth that you're at bringing on new executive talent and their sort of compensation requirements. Can you just give us an insight as to how those two things marry? Yeah, so generally I think we as founders shouldn't be the best paid people in the company and we would, from my point of view, then we would do something wrong because we're trying to attract really talent on a level that, yeah, almost have respect when I send to my VPs. So yeah, so I think generally for us, the discussion about the founder remuneration was always a lot easier because we know we are working for that equity part in the end. But then VP level or even C level, that's I think the hard part because you're bringing in people from different companies with different standards from different regions and you need to create a bit of a system that makes sense, right? And I think, and it also comes down to your values, like things like that, like do you wanna give out company cars and all of these things? I think that can create quite tough conversation, that's I think quite challenging. But in the end for us, it's important that it has some logic in there. It's not transparent, let's say in our company for everyone, like in many companies. But to me, I always try to think about it if it would be transparent, it should make sense somehow. But it's certainly a big challenge. Just you've just touched on something that we haven't talked about before, but I just wanna inform everyone that not so long ago, a couple of months ago that EU directive has been that pay transparency is coming across the pond, started in the States last year and at the beginning of this year in certain regions and it is coming to Europe. It will probably be in place for 2025. So to your point about setting your approach as if it were transparent so that you can actually stand behind every decision that you've made along the way about your team. So I think it's a really important fundamental to start thinking about getting right because all companies will have to report on salaries moving forward. So I couldn't give great news, salaries are up, couldn't say that this year but just wanna say a huge thank you to Lisa for sharing her founder story on a topic that doesn't get spoken about too much and we haven't got too much data. I also wanna say a massive thank you to this community slash to have, you know, you had the shout out, you got the survey and you really responded. We do this for you so please keep that data coming and we really appreciate you contributing and checking in on it regularly and we'll continue to build it as long as you need it. So thanks very much to all of you and all of our friends and Lisa and yeah, we'll be doing Q&A next door shortly. Thanks very much indeed. Have a good day. Bye bye.