12th Annual CompStudy Survey: Participate by July 31st, Get Free Compensation Data

Our annual Entrepreneurship and Compensation surveys are under way right now. If you participate, you'll get free access to detailed compensation data.

In the coming days, I will be getting back into a regular blogging routine, tackling new founder issues, covering new parts of the issues we've already tackled, and starting to delve into portions from my upcoming Founding Dilemmas book.

In the meantime, we're nearing the end of the 2011 CompStudy surveys.  The surveys focus on private companies in the Technology and Life Sciences industries. We have conducted them annually since 2000. (I collaborate on the surveys with two professional services firms: executive-search firm J. Robert Scott and Ernst & Young LLP.)  Last year, more than 700 private startups participated, giving us an extremely detailed dataset to help you understand the market for executive talent.

As in past years, survey participants will receive free access to our sophisticated reporting/analysis website, including salaries, bonuses, and equity holdings for C-level and VP-level executives.  To qualify for the free access, please complete the questionnaire by July 31st, 2011. Click here to go to the survey site.

If you're an investor (VC, angel, etc.) and you get your portfolio companies to participate, both you and the participating companies will get free access to the site.

If you participated last year, we should be able to pre-fill some of the data that would not have changed, making it quicker for you to participate now. (If you did not participate in the past, participating now will make it quicker for you to do so next year!)

All survey submissions are kept completely confidential; submitted information is seen only by me and the core research team, the analysis site will only show slices for which we have multiple data points, and we do not even list the names of participating companies.

Below is a screen snapshot of one part of the reporting site, showing some of the detailed data slicing you can do.  Focusing on the left-side controls, you can slice the data using the following dimensions (going from top to bottom):

• Geographic region
• Position (the 11 most common C-level and VP-level positions)
• Founder status
• # of employees
• Company revenues
• # of financing rounds completed
• Industry segments

As I described in my inaugural blog post, the core of my research data -- e.g., all of the charts I post here and the econometric tables in the journal papers that underlie my blog-posts -- comes from these surveys. So participating in the survey will help you get scarce private-company compensation numbers, provide data for future blog posts about issues you're facing, and help me continue doing the research that serves as the foundation for this blog, and as the backbone of the upcoming Founding Dilemmas book!