Startup Executive Compensation Study Going Global

For several years now you’ve heard me rave about the annual survey of executive compensation at venture backed startups done by J. Robert Scott, Ernst & Young, WilmerHale and HBS Professor Noam Wasserman.  Well, I guess all that raving has gotten me a role in advising the backers of the survey on the next generation of the survey: CompStudy 2.0.

If you aren’t familiar with it, the survey asks about 300 questions of around 1,000 startup companies.  The questions focus on cash and equity compensation for executives (about 20 titles covered) and board members and then it looks at a bunch of attributes of the executives and the company.  For example, founder vs non-founder status (big difference in comp), geographic location, headcount, funding, revenue, etc.  The end result is that whether you are a hiring manager, investor or candidate the survey is a valuable tool to understand and negotiating compensation.

There are a lot of really exciting things about the upgraded study that I can’t yet talk about (more on that later), but one of them is that the survey is going global.  For the past 9 years, the study has covered the US only in two sectors (IT and life sciences).  But in 2009, the survey is going to be expanded to China, India, Israel and the United Kingdom.

So I’d love a little help from my readers here.  As part of tailoring the survey for each new country I’d like to be able to speak with several investors, CEOs and CFOs (or other folks knowledgeable about executive compensation) in each of China, India, Israel and the United Kingdom.  I checked Google Analytics and there are quite a few visitors from these countries (okay, not so many from China…yet) so please comment here or reach out to me (fn@altgate.com) if you can help.

If you can help me out by answering a bunch of questions and helping tailor the survey I’ll make sure that you get access to the survey results in exchange, not to mention being eternally grateful.