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 […]
AI Pay Premiums in 3 Charts: How To Compensate Top AI Talent
AI Pay Premiums for Software Engineers and Data Scientists: 2026 Data
CMO Compensation at Private Companies: What It Takes to Land a Top Chief Medical Officer
CMO compensation at private companies is climbing as the role becomes one of the most competitive executive searches in life science. What’s a trending role for private life science companies right now? CMOs. Last week, we hosted a Lunch & Learn webinar (video below) with Cissy Young, PhD (楊 詩華), Managing Director True Search, and […]
Equity Refresh Grants: When and How Often to Refresh Options
Equity is one of the most powerful compensation levers available to privately held companies AKA startups. We get asked weekly: How do equity refreshes work? In this week’s PC data drop, we’re breaking down what equity refresh grants are, when companies actually use them, and how to make them sustainable and strategic. All data is […]
Scientist Compensation at Private Companies: How Cash and Equity Shift by Funding Stage
Scientist compensation at private companies doesn’t just rise with each funding round—the balance between cash and equity can flip as companies grow. As private companies raise more capital, the mix shifts: cash is more available and equity is more of a commodity. Using real-time data from the Thelander Comp Planning Tool, here’s how scientist total […]
How Private Tech CEO Compensation Changes by Revenue
In this week’s PC data drop, we’re using data from the Thelander Platform looking at how median total cash, founder and non-founder equity compensation for CEOs of private tech companies shifts based on revenue. Generally speaking, the more revenue a company generates, the higher the CEOs median total cash compensation. As far as total founder […]
How Startup Executive Compensation Has Changed Since 2021
Using the Thelander YoY private company dataset, we looked to see which private company executives have seen the biggest movement in total cash since 2021. For startups with $50–$109.9M in total financing: In other words, CSOs have quietly seen some of the strongest total cash growth in this funding band—especially at the top end of the […]
Compensation Infrastructure for Startups: How Pay Plans Evolve as You Raise Capital
Building compensation infrastructure for startups is one of the most overlooked foundations of a growing company—but what does putting it in place really mean? It means building a clear job architecture and a structured salary framework. It also means moving away from ad-hoc decisions—whether driven by what an individual candidate asks for or by setting […]
Salary Structures 101
Salary Structures 101: How to Build a Compensation Infrastructure for Your Startup
What Startups Need to Know Re: Secondary Markets & Compensation
Thelander recently published the results from the Private Company Year-End Merit Increase, Option Pool & Bonus Report (available through a subscription to the Thelander Platform) – which featured new data on secondary markets given their prominence in today’s global private capital market. Here’s what startups need to know re: secondary markets and compensation. The results? 92% of private companies […]