[yellowstuff]

That can't possibly explain all the difference. Mean family income is $115k, still lower than what they have for average salary in any region. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAFAINUSA646N

If this is meant to be a representative sample of the US, the data doesn't pass the sniff test. They don't provide enough context to understand how else we should understand it.

[bdowling]

> Insights from this report represent data collected from Sequoia’s Employee Experience Surveys (2017 – 2021), anonymized information and trends from our database, and Dataforest surveys. Dataforest is refreshed periodically with updates from new survey submissions.

The data here appear to come from salary surveys of working individuals. The US Census Bureau data appear to be reports of income from all sources for all persons, which appears to include children 14 and over, full-time students, disabled persons, retired persons, and other persons unlikely to be reporting a salary to Sequoia.

[eigen]

the Fed counts all people over the age of 14. using the same population, the median income is ~$36k [1] so over half of the population makes less than 2/3 of the mean personal income.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

also, this report only covers a listed number of "departments" and leaves off many lower wage occupations. retail, child care, most unskilled labor, etc dont appear to be included in the Strategy, Sales, Design, Engineering, Leadership, etc.