[untog]

A Chief Anything Officer should probably be paid more than engineers, or they shouldn't have the words Chief and Officer in their title.

And that seems like a very developer-centric viewpoint. Yes, good customer service can add a lot to a company's bottom line. Some companies have huge engineering issues and need engineers to solve them. Some companies have huge sales issues and need sales people to solve them. Some companies have huge customer service issues and need customer service agents to solve them.

[digz]

Disagree. The founders of my company (including me) are paid less than almost everyone else that works with us.

I know few rigorous investors that would stand to pay their CEO/founders more than ~80k a year, at least until it's clear the company is maturing. Also, as a founder with significant equity, I'd much rather put as much of my salary that I can spare (My wife and I need to eat, pay rent, etc.) to go towards bringing in (and keeping) top sales or technical talent. If you believe in my company, the math works out very well.

I also do the occasional angel investment, and frankly, I'd be pissed to see a business I invested in run like this. Two annual international offsite trips? What?! You're building an app to schedule tweets. This is not rocket science. Get to work!

[jmduke]

Buffer is posting $2M annual revenue this year, if I recall correctly. Their paychecks aren't being signed by investors -- they're being signed by customers.

[stephencanon]

Given that the listed salaries total 1.7M, which ignores payroll taxes and benefits, and they presumably have at least some expenses beyond payroll, at least part of their paychecks are likely coming from investment.

[digz]

Never mind the two international off-site trips they take everyone on each year.

Look, not saying they can't do it.. just saying as an investor, I'd wouldn't support it. Money is after-all fungible. It doesn't matter if sales are paying for 100% of the salaries or not... if there's money being left on the table that can be reinvested into the company by either bringing in new/better talent or retaining your top talent, I would be angry. The founders already have high incentive to stay as long as they can satisfy basic needs on their salary. Employees with little equity do not unless they are paid competitively.

[invalidOrTaken]

I upvoted you, but now I regret it. Not because this was a bad comment, but because I realize now that I disagree.

"Chief" and "highly compensated" are not necessarily joined at the hip. It should be possible to have a C-level exec with most of their compensation variable and dependent on company performance or certain metrics, rather than a whopping base salary.