Why nobody publishes what venture pays

We check every open role on this site: 298 roles across 63 firms at render time.

The number that publishes a salary is 0.

That is an unusually small public comparison set. The absence of a reliable public salary market is worth explaining, because the explanation tells you more about how the industry works than any salary table would.

Why the industry does not publish

Four reasons, in rough order of how much they matter.

Because the number is not one number. Venture compensation is a base, a bonus that may or may not exist, and carry, which is a share of profits that may be worth nothing or may be worth more than the rest combined. Publishing the base alone tells you almost nothing about the offer, and publishing the carry honestly means publishing your fund's economics.

Because the fund's economics are private, and pay reveals them. Salaries come out of the management fee, which is a percentage of assets. Publish the salaries and a reader with a calculator can work out the fund size, the fee, and roughly how many people it supports. Most firms treat that as their business rather than yours.

Because every offer is negotiated individually. A twelve-person firm has no salary bands. It has twelve arrangements, several of which the partners would rather their colleagues did not see side by side.

Because they do not have to. Pay transparency rules bite hardest on employers hiring at scale in specific jurisdictions. A fund posting one role a year, often from a jurisdiction it chooses, is the least exposed employer in the economy.

What this means for you, concretely

Every number you have read is a survey or a memory. Including the confident-looking ones with charts. They are compiled from voluntary responses, they skew towards the firms and levels that respond, and they are usually a year old. That does not make them useless. It makes them a prior, not a fact.

You will be negotiating without a comparable. The other side knows what they paid the last three people. You know what a blog post said. That asymmetry is the actual cost of the industry's silence, and it falls entirely on the candidate.

Ask early and ask plainly. In a market with no published data, asking for the range in the first conversation is not pushy, it is the only instrument available. A firm that will not give you a range before a case study is asking for unpaid work with an unknown payoff.

The part that matters more than the base

For anything below partner, the carry conversation is where the money actually is, and it is where the misunderstanding is worst.

David Beisel↗ of NextView Ventures cites survey data showing only 11 percent of analysts and 39 percent of associates receive any carry at all. So the base case at junior level is none.

And where carry exists it vests slowly. Beisel notes vesting on carry often runs six to eight years, and warns firms sometimes use extended vesting to quietly reduce the real value of a package. Put that against a seat that Mark Suster↗ of Upfront Ventures describes as usually two to three years and out, and the two do not overlap. Whatever has not vested when you leave, you leave.

The full mechanics, including the seven questions to ask before signing, are in carry explained before you sign.

What we will and will not do about it

We will not print an estimate and format it like data. If a firm publishes a range on its own listing, you will see it on that listing. If it does not, you will see a dash, and the dash means we do not know rather than that the role pays badly.

What we can tell you honestly is the shape of the market rather than the price of it: which firms are hiring, at what level where the firm states one, in which city, and for which function. That is checkable, and we check it every six hours.

If the industry starts publishing, we will show it the day it appears.

Related

Carry, explained before you sign. What each level on the ladder actually does. Or the roles open right now, which is a more reliable guide to this market than any salary table.