Capstacker
founders should not pay retainers
Many founders postpone a senior hire because they cannot afford the market rate yet, or they make the hire and expose their runway too early.
Here's how you can structure compensation around your cashflow by tying or backloading larger payments to company milestones:
Signatur Biosciences (YC 22) closes the pay gap with a premium, paid as a one-off bonus once their next round closes. Say the gap runs ~£20k over 12 months. They apply a 1.5x multiplier, pay £30k after close, and then move the base closer to market.
Vestd Inc. takes a different route because they are pre-seed. Their recent CTO opening reads like this: equity + a six-figure deferred salary that activates at profitability or seed funding.
Pre-seed or scale-up, milestone pay can change how you hire permanently.
1 Comment
I like that you're reframing compensation around milestones instead of fixed cash.
The part that's easy to overlook is that milestone-based pay doesn't just change affordability—it changes incentives. The milestone has to be something both the company and the hire genuinely believe they can influence, otherwise it risks creating uncertainty instead of alignment.