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.
It's 2 a.m., first company, kitchen table, calculator app open, spreadsheet with negative numbers, decision made together with cofounder about what they'll pay themselves, that's usually the moment. Let me open there instead of leading with the twenty-year summary.
I'm in a glass-walled conference room, laptop turned to face the venture partner across the table, clicking through to the slide that explains why this time is different. Total addressable market. Unit economics. He leans in, taps the screen at slide fourteen, asks a question I've heard from eight different investors this year. I know the answer before he finishes asking.
Then, almost as an afterthought, on his way out the door: "What do you and your co-founder pay yourselves?"
I laugh it off. Change the subject. He lets me.
Twenty years and three companies later, that's the pattern I can't unsee. I'll hand a stranger my financial model, my burn rate, numbers I haven't fully believed in myself. But ask what's actually in my own bank account — what my co-founder and I agreed to over a kitchen table at midnight, or never got around to agreeing on at all and the door closes.
I don't think I'm the exception. I've watched other founders do the same swap, backstage at the same conferences: full financial models exchanged with strangers, then voices dropped to ask each other, half-joking, "Am I underpaying myself, or am I just bad at this?" Then the next panel starts and nobody says the number out loud.
So, a series. Not the pitch-deck version of building a company. The real one. Starting with the part that stings quietest: what you pay yourself in the early years.
College. Twenty years old. We paid ourselves a dollar an hour — closer to a receipt than income. But it was the same dollar every week, and I didn't know yet how much that consistency was worth.
Company two. We paid ourselves whatever was left after everyone else got their check. Some months that was something. Some months it was a conversation we avoided. I told myself this was scrappy. It wasn't a compensation strategy — it was an accident with a bank statement, dressed up as commitment. What it actually did was put a low hum of instability under every decision I made that year, for reasons that had nothing to do with the money itself.
Company three. This time we sat down before we needed to and set it: $1,000 a month, starting immediately, no renegotiation. Not a generous number, probably not even a defensible one. But it was ours, and it arrived every month like a fact rather than a favor. Of the three, this is the version I'd hand a founder starting today — decide the number and the appetite for personal investment together, before you touch the money. Not once you've proven something to everyone else. Now.
Then the money changes, and a second decision arrives, and it's a different kind of hard. Company three raised a $2.5 million seed round. The instinct splits two ways: keep living like it's still the early days, wear the sacrifice like a badge, or swing straight to market rate the moment there's cash in the account, like a reward for surviving this long. Neither is a decision. They're both reflexes wearing decision's clothes.
We asked the number the same question we'd ask about any other line in the model: does raising this move the business forward, or does it just feel good to finally exhale? The round had been sized to include real salaries. Our roles had grown into ones a market would actually pay for. And I'd started to understand that underpaying the people running the company doesn't disappear — it just changes shape, shows up later as burnout, or resentment, or a slow leak nobody can name. So we moved founder pay to $8,000 a month, then $10,000 not long after. The executive team landed close behind us, sometimes ahead. Not generosity. Math, finally caught up to the truth of the thing.
Here's what twenty years and three companies taught me, and it isn't a number — I don't have one to hand you, and anyone who does is guessing. It's a process: set something specific, pay it every month without renegotiating each time, and revisit it on purpose as the business changes, with the same rigor you'd bring to any other assumption you're staking your future on.
I keep thinking about that glass conference room, how easily I handed over every number that mattered to the business and none of the ones that mattered to me. I don't have a tidy ending for that scene yet. But here's a start: I'm done keeping mine to myself.
So — founder to founder — what do you pay yourself, and how did you land on it? Tell me. I'd rather build this series with the people living it than 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.