One day left to weigh in on the question every team is asking: what should our token budget be? 🤖
Our AI Token Use & Spend Policy Pulse Survey closes tomorrow, Oct 23. Complete it to get the full report and see how your approach to budgeting, governance, and measurement stacks up against the market.
Pave retweeted
Update. Got an anonymous tip that the first product designer at Ramp (within first 5 hires), received 0.25% over 4 years for their initial grant.
That’s ~24% under the low end I modeled for hire #5, so my estimates ran high. That 0.25% would be worth ~$28.5M at Ramp today.
I reached out to @Matthewschulman and @rithikaneti at @pavecomp, and they pulled their data on equity grants across US VC-backed tech companies (chart below).
Among the first 5 employees, 0.25% sits above the median (0.16%) but below the 75th percentile (0.42%). For a product designer in the first 5, it lines up almost exactly with the 75th percentile.
And more importantly, benchmarks for “founding” roles are a bit more of an art rather than a science this early in hiring, since grants can be ultra-specific to individuals and their worth to the organization.
It can change with role, seniority, stage, growth etc, so I wouldn’t treat it as prescriptive.
It’s also just a bet on the company from the candidate’s perspective, and sometimes employers will need to flex to close a stellar candidate.
Hope my post helped shed some light on what outcomes can look like at a high growth startup, post-dilution.
Some more exciting updates coming soon between @pavecomp + @Levelsfyi. This post sparked some awesome discussion, and there’s a lot of neat data between the two of our platforms 📊
Today on generational wealth. Ramp's first 10 employees may well be sitting on $1B + in stock. Employee #1's initial stake alone could be worth over $300m
In 2019, Ramp was at $0.21 / share. Today it raised at $160 / share.
Startups typically give their first 10 hires ~5% of the company. @sama says it should be 10% minimum, and Ramp is the type of company to be on the generous side.
Especially given the talent density at the company. 1/3rd of its first 60 hires were ex-founders. By 2021, @tryramp had set aside ~1/4th of the company for employees. Most startups set aside closer to 15%.
If the first 10 got ~10% between them and never sold (via secondary / tender), their original grants alone would be worth over $1B now.
Hire #1, ~$340M
Hire #10, ~$41M
That's post-dilution (~80%). Share price still up ~760x from 2019. Not yet fully liquid ofc.
Once again, only from original grants (total could be higher)
We don’t know the true grant values, so these are estimates. Chart and assumptions below.
Pave retweeted
Update on the Ramp equity grants for early hires. Got an anonymous tip that the first product designer at Ramp (within first 5 hires), received 0.25% over 4 years for their initial grant.
That’s ~24% under the low end I originally modeled for hire #5, so my estimates ran high. That 0.25% would be worth ~$28.5M at Ramp today.
I reached out to @Matthewschulman and @rithikaneti at @pavecomp, and they pulled their data on equity grants across US VC-backed tech companies (chart below).
Among the first 5 employees, 0.25% sits above the median (0.16%) but below the 75th percentile (0.42%). For a product designer in the first 5, it lines up almost exactly with the 75th percentile.
And more importantly, benchmarks for “founding” roles are a bit more of an art rather than a science this early in hiring, since grants can be ultra-specific to individuals and their worth to the organization.
It can change with role, seniority, stage, growth etc, so I wouldn’t treat it as prescriptive.
It’s also just a bet on the company from the candidate’s perspective, and sometimes employers will need to flex to close a stellar candidate.
Hope my post helped shed some light on what outcomes can look like at a high growth startup, post-dilution.
Some more exciting updates coming soon between @pavecomp + @Levelsfyi. This post sparked some awesome discussion, and there’s a lot of neat data between the two of our platforms 📊
Where is compensation headed in 2027? 👀
Pave and Alpine Rewards surveyed companies on their plans for next year, and we are sharing what we found live, alongside our friends at Deel. We’ll cover headcount growth, salary increase budgets, promotions, pay transparency, and pay equity.
We’ll also get into how pay for AI roles works, how AI hypergrowth companies compare with the rest of tech, and what is changing for more traditional roles. 🤖
Save your spot and join Jessica Pillow, Hannah Wells, and Josh Steinfeld. explore.pave.com/compensatio…
Pave retweeted
Anthropic just published its own workforce data showing the decline in junior share across its technical teams
At 10K+ companies in @pavecomp data, this trend is consistent
If entry-level roles keep shrinking, who’s being trained to replace today’s senior talent?
Who’s winning as AI changes work? Join Pave + @Human_Capital on Oct 27 to compare AI frontier companies to everyone else. 👇
The Pave October data release is live!
👉 This month’s update includes a refresh to our variable pay and participation methodology, so the numbers you see in the app better reflect what’s actually happening in the market.
A big thank you to Ari Stern and Kevin Cheung on our Data team for helping this release go out smoothly. 💚
Some of the scariest things in compensation don’t jump out at you. They sit quietly in a spreadsheet and haunt your decisions for months. 👻
Meet the ghosts of stale data.
The good news is that these ghosts are easy to banish. When you benchmark against current market data, your pay decisions reflect today instead of whenever the data was last pulled.
Every company is asking the same question right now: what should our token budget be? 🤖
Nobody has good data on it yet and we’re changing that.
Our AI Token Use & Spend Policy Pulse Survey is LIVE. Share how your organization budgets, governs, and measures AI usage, and see how the market compares.
Take the survey by Oct 23rd to receive the full report 👉 surveymonkey.com/r/PaveAITok…
