Say the Number: What Founders Really Pay Themselves
Part 1 of a series on the parts of running a company we would rather sweep under the rug.
I have been building companies for twenty years now. Three of them, so far. In that time I have sat across from investors and shared everything: the model, the market size, the slide where I explain why this time is different. Boards get my numbers. Shareholders get my numbers. Some of them get numbers I have not even fully believed in yet.
But my own paycheck? My co-founder's? What we quietly agreed to pay ourselves at 2 a.m. over a kitchen table, or didn't agree to at all? That almost never leaves the room.
I do not think I am unusual here. Every founder I know does this. We hand our financial model to a stranger in a pitch meeting and hand almost nothing to the founder sitting next to us at a conference, the one asking the same questions we are too proud to ask out loud. What do you pay yourself? How did you land on that? Am I underpaying myself, or am I just bad at this? We ask each other in whispers after the panel ends, then go back to not saying the number.
There is always an exception. Someone's books are more open than mine. But the pattern is real enough, twenty years in, that I want to name it. So this is the start of a series on the parts of running a company we would rather sweep under the rug. Not the pitch deck version of building a business. The real one.
Part one is the earliest, and I think the most quietly painful: what to pay yourself in the early years.
The bootstrap number is a decision, not a default
Most founders back into their first paycheck. Pay everyone else first, see what is left, call whatever survives a salary. I did this too, early on. It is not a compensation decision. It is an accident with a bank statement.
Here is what I would tell a founder starting today, and what I try to do myself now. Before you touch the money, sit down with whoever is building this with you and decide two things together: how much of your own pool you are willing to invest, and the number you will pay yourselves every single month, starting now. Not once you hit some milestone. Now.
The number matters far less than the habit. My first company, back in college, paid us a dollar an hour. Closer to a gesture than an income, but it was consistent. My second company paid sporadically, whatever was left, whenever it existed, and I felt that inconsistency in ways that had nothing to do with money. My third company set $1,000 a month from day one, and it remains my favorite model of the three. Not because the number was generous. It was not. Because it was a number, paid every month, without renegotiation.
That consistency is the whole point. It sets a precedent early: you get paid along the way, not eventually, not once you have proven something to everyone but yourself. Founders who skip this step are not more committed to the mission. They are just making it harder to keep going.
Then you scale it on purpose
The second decision comes later: what happens when there is more money. Revenue climbs. Or you raise. The instinct is either to keep living like the early days, wearing it as a badge, or to jump straight to market rate the moment there is real cash, as a reward for having survived this long. I understand both instincts. Neither one is a decision. They are reflexes.
Ask the same question you would ask about any other line in your model. Does raising this number move the business forward, or does it just feel good to finally exhale? Founder pay should trace back to something real: revenue that can absorb it, or capital raised specifically so the team can build without one eye on personal runway.
After my last company raised a $2.5 million seed round, we moved founder pay to $8,000 a month, then to $10,000 not long after. The executive team landed close to the same range, sometimes above it. That was not generosity. It was math. The round was sized to include real salaries. The roles had grown into ones a market would pay for. And underpaying the people running the company was its own quiet risk, one that shows up later as burnout or resentment instead of a line item.
Put it in the model, not just in your memory
Twenty years in, here is what I have learned separates founders who get this right from founders who do not. The ones who get it right treat their own pay like any other assumption in the model: reviewed, revised, written down. Not decided once a year in a hallway because someone finally worked up the nerve to ask.
The ones who get it wrong tend to land in one of two places. They underpay themselves indefinitely, wearing it as proof of commitment until burnout cashes the check instead. Or they overcorrect the moment there is real money, paying themselves like the company has already succeeded before the model can carry it.
There is no universal right number. I wish I could hand you one. What there is, is a right process: set something, pay it every month, and revisit it on purpose as the business changes, with the same discipline you would give any other assumption you are building your future on.
Say the number
None of this is a secret. It is only unsaid. And I have come to believe the cost of that silence is not abstract. It is founders making this decision alone, from scratch, with no one to call, because the people who already made it kept the number to themselves.
I am done keeping mine to myself. So here is an honest invitation, founder to founder: what do you pay yourself, and how did you land on it? Tell me. I want to build this series with the people living it, not just write it from memory.
Cheers,
Ashley
This Week in Business publishes weekly at bampt.co/learn. You can also catch it on Substack at bampt.substack.com and on Instagram @bamptco.