I received a commissioned report on CTO compensation this morning—excellent reading. It’s well-researched, with a solid breadth of data across stages and sectors.
But this slide on fiat compensation for tech leaders really stopped me. The numbers for Growth-stage and beyond match what I see in my own network. But Early-stage and Bootstrapped?
Are there really many CTOs at pre-seed or seed companies drawing £120K–£130K salaries—with £17K–£21K bonuses on top? In companies where every pound should be fuelling growth, that seems… generous. And that’s before considering equity, which is usually the key incentive at this stage.
I trust the team that commissioned the report, but note that the consultants that built the report are in executive search industry so perhaps there is a slightly perverse incentive to inflate salaries. However it’s worth noting the data comes from 585 tech leaders—about 17% (~100 people) in early-stage companies. So it’s doesn’t appear to be an outlier or simple manipulation, and it likely reflects a real trend.
For me, it raises an interesting question: how much are senior tech leaders extracting from early-stage ventures—both in OpEx and equity? Now layer in the broader shift we’re all feeling: the AI maelstrom is here, and it’s changing everything.
We used to talk about tech as a moat. Increasingly, it feels like a conveyor belt. Ironically, we can return to the iodiom I heard most during the Big Data boom – data is the new oil. Data sure was the new oil, and those AI refineries are your new moat.
It feels like AI is starting to erode tech roles from both directions:
- From the top, product and strategy leaders are taking on more technical thinking, aided by agentic tooling.
- From the bottom, junior engineering tasks are being swept up by increasingly capable AI copilots.
That leaves many of us—senior engineers and CTOs alike—straddling a strange middle. Unless we’re working in deep tech, our long-term value may depend less on our ability to architect distributed systems, and more on our ability to interpret, translate, and lead in a very human way; or maybe we’ll need to get more comfortable in the murky middle—working alongside silicon teammates who never sleep and don’t care about options.
Which brings me back to compensation. Maybe early-stage salaries are rising because the ask of a CTO is changing. Founders want technologists who can code and pitch. Who can lead teams and help fundraise. Who can build, but also narrate.
But if that’s true, it’s worth asking: are we earning these salaries by being builders of fragile things, or are we drifting into a class of extractors—hedging risk with high pay while early-stage ventures struggle to stay alive?