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Taking a company public is usually the crowning achievement for entrepreneurs lucky enough to build a successful business.
Besides the pride they take in turning a scrappy startup into a reputable company underwritten by big Wall Street banks and valued and traded by public markets, they usually reap an enormous cash windfall. That's the prize for taking a risk and building something new. But what happens after that to executive compensation?
It turns out things are quite different for founder-led public businesses, such as those on our list of Founders 40 companies, compared with companies that go public without the influence of the founder. That's according Pearl Meyer, an executive compensation consulting firm.
"For founders there really is no trend," Pearl Meyer says. "There are so many variables and they don't follow any particular formula."
By contrast, non-founder chief executives of newly public companies see their salaries go up somewhat predictably. Average base salaries for the heads of software companies, for example, spike by an average of 18.3 percent, according to Pearl Meyer's 2013 data, its most recent. CEOs of life sciences companies see a smaller salary bump of about 10 percent.