What’s the Difference Between Founder Shares and Founder Shares for Current Job at a Startup?

One of our most frequently asked questions is about founder shares — specifically, what’s the difference between founder shares and equity granted for current job?
In this week’s PC Data Drop, we’re giving you the answer using a real-time CEO data table pulled directly from the Thelander platform — filtered for companies with $50M–$89.9M in total financing.

— % Fully Diluted Share Non-Founder: The percent of fully diluted shares granted to a non-founder CEO as part of their total compensation package. The median here is 5.0%.
— % Fully Diluted Shares Founder: Percent of fully diluted shares awarded for being a founder. The median is 6.0%.
— % of Fully Diluted Shares Founder for Current Job: This is the one that trips people up. This is equity granted separately to a founder who also holds an executive position — compensation for the job they’re doing, not for having started the company. The median here is 4.0%.

Why does this matter? When you’re benchmarking a founder-CEO’s equity, you want to separate what they earned at the founding table from what they’re receiving as an executive. This metric is the apples-to-apples comparison to non-founder executive equity. It answers the question: is this founder being compensated fairly in their executive role, independent of their founding stake?

Want to see how your own mix of cash and equity stacks up to market? Regardless of your role or title, participate in the Thelander Private Company Compensation Survey today and you’ll get access to real-time compensation data tables — just like this one — at no cost for every job title you fill out

Categorised in: Data Drops

This post was written by jthelander