Excited to share our latest State of Startup Compensation report covering the first half of 2024.
The market has essentially returned to "normal" after the insanely hot times of 2021/2022 and the cooler times of late 2022 into 2023. Salaries are starting to tick back up at historically normal rates and equity grants have found new footing. All that said, here's what I'm paying attention to for the rest of the year:
- There's been a trend towards shorter vesting schedules for equity grants at publicly traded tech companies (and even absent shorter vesting schedules, either back-loading or front-loading new hire equity grants). This hasn't really bled over to private companies yet, but will it?
- Many employees who received new hire grants at valuation highs, are coming due for refresh grants at entirely new (and potentially lower) valuations. How will companies respond? There's a tricky balance here of managing dilution, paying attention to market, managing internal equity, and rewarding high performers.
- The world continues to move in the direction of more pay transparency rather than less. Just about all pay transparency regs focus on salary and, to some extent, other benefits. Will equity compensation start to receive the same scrutiny? Even with higher quality sources of equity benchmarking data for startups, there's still a ton of variation which leads me to think that this is an area ripe for pay equity issues (and transparency can help here, along with a well structured program).
For a deeper dive, download the full report now: https://lnkd.in/gJ-p8gtV
------------------------------
Josh Steinfeld
------------------------------