{"id":2494,"date":"2025-01-06T05:19:30","date_gmt":"2025-01-06T05:19:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/?p=2494"},"modified":"2025-01-16T07:46:09","modified_gmt":"2025-01-16T07:46:09","slug":"the-case-for-lower-salaries-in-startup-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/business\/the-case-for-lower-salaries-in-startup-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"Cash poor CEOs are good for growth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Number of words: 171<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO\u2014that\u2019s one of the single clearest patterns I\u2019ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary. It doesn\u2019t matter if he got used to making much more than that at Google or if he has a large mortgage and hefty private school tuition bills. If a CEO collects $300,000 per year, he risks becoming more like a politician than a founder. High pay incentivizes him to defend the status quo along with his salary, not to work with everyone else to surface problems and fix them aggressively. A cash-poor executive, by contrast, will focus on increasing the value of the company as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Excerpted from \u2018Zero to One\u2019 by Peter Thiel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Number of words: 171 For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO\u2014that\u2019s one of the single clearest patterns I\u2019ve noticed from investing &#8230; <a title=\"Cash poor CEOs are good for growth\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/business\/the-case-for-lower-salaries-in-startup-leadership\/\" aria-label=\"More on Cash poor CEOs are good for growth\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[60,7],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Cash poor CEOs are good for growth - BullsEye<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/business\/the-case-for-lower-salaries-in-startup-leadership\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cash poor CEOs are good for growth - BullsEye\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Number of words: 171 For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. 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