It feels noble at first. Paying yourself a low salary.
You’re “only the founder,” after all. Every pound you don’t take home is a pound that can be reinvested — another hire, another ad campaign, another month of runway. And you’ve got investors now, so of course you want to signal commitment. “I believe in this! I’m all in!”
For the first year or two, it even feels good. Like a rite of passage. Scrappy, sacrificial, proof that you’re different from those corporate friends you left behind.
But then time passes. The company grows. People on your team earn more than you. You’re still on £40k. Enough to survive, but not enough to move house, not enough to build a life. Your partner says they understand: “It’s for the long term.” Deep down, it begins to grate.
Your mates in their corporate jobs are still moaning about office politics, but they’re on six figures now. They’ve got nice cars, holidays, pensions. You’ve got… LinkedIn posts and a bridge round.
Emotional debt
What you thought was frugality turns out to be something else: neglect. It doesn’t just hit your bank account. It hits your spirit. Your energy.
After five years of underpaying yourself, the real debt isn’t financial. It’s emotional. It’s resentment. Like technical debt in your product, but built up — in you.
You start to feel bitter towards your own company. The business you created becomes the thing that’s holding you back. You start blaming investors, employees, the market. But really, you’re blaming yourself. You chose this. You are complicit.
Ironically, you’re scared to bring it up. Scared that asking for a pay rise in your own company will make you look weak, greedy, or uncommitted. It’s ridiculous but I’ve seen it enough times to know how true this is. It feels hard to value yourself in your company.
What a lot of founders seem to forget is that you’re the founder. You can pay yourself what you want. You can mostly do what you want. None of this would be here if it wasn’t for you.
When you finally do it — when you raise it with your board, your cofounders, your investors — nobody will bat an eyelid. You name a number. It sounds reasonable. If anything, it’ll still be too low. It’ll be the same when you come to ask about secondaries. It’s not a big deal to anyone else. Just to you.
You go home, tell your partner, and they’re relieved. At last, you did something for your family, not just the business. Next month, when the new salary lands and there’s money left over, you’ll feel lighter. You’ll take a decision you’ve been avoiding. You’ll get some energy back.
A good and fair salary
I remember when we raised our very small seed round. We paid ourselves as founders a £40k salary. We were 25 at the time, that was fine. In 18 months we were doing £1m ARR. I felt like being brave at the time and bumped us up to £70k; two years later it was £90k. Every time I was looking behind me as if someone would “find me out”. The hilarious thing is we didn’t even have a board, so I didn’t even need permission to do this. Just permission from myself. When we raised an institutional round our founder salaries started to look out of place, because C-level hires we were forecasting for were all £100k+. Whenever I’ve negotiated a founder salary, or helped another founder do the same, I’ve rarely experienced push back. There are very few arguments against the founder paying themselves a good and fair salary. The days of founders sacrificing salary, especially in funded startups, are over.
Secondary requests are a bit trickier and can depend on the size of the investment round and the narrative around it. But generally from what I’ve experienced and seen, most secondary requests don’t get shot down by anyone if they’re reasonable with decent justifications. In my experience it’s usually the founders’ lack of confidence in asking for them, or a lack of confidence in the business to actually make secondary share sales happen.
In my first startup that failed, I paid myself like a student and the company operated like a university project run by kids. In my second, I paid myself a decent, respectable salary all the way through and we operated the business like adults (mostly). Respecting yourself, your time and your worth towards your own business is crucial — it’s foundational and means you take everything and everyone else seriously. It means you don’t scrimp on other quality talent. You don’t feel resentful paying an engineer £120k a year, because you don’t resent what you’re paying yourself.
Paying yourself properly isn’t just about money. It’s about respect. It’s about remembering that you matter. That your business doesn’t exist without you.
Stop being a martyr. Start valuing yourself as a founder.
