Founder Salary Confessions: How Much Should You Pay Yourself? AMA with 3x Founder Waseem Daher
Hey Product Hunt! I'm Waseem Daher, co-founder of Pilot, the largest startup-focused accounting company in the US. I'm a 3x founder (my previous ventures were acquired by Oracle and Dropbox) who's raised over $120M from Sequoia, Stripe, Jeff Bezos, and more.
Today we're releasing our 2025 Founder Salary Report with data from 1,800+ founders, and the findings might surprise you:
Founder salaries dropped 43% in the past year
AI founders are bucking the trend (paying themselves more)
Bootstrapped companies jumped 57%
Only 5.4% of founders pay themselves nothing (down from 9% last year)
We founders talk endlessly about burn rates, runway, and valuations—but no one talks about what they pay themselves. It's time to change that.
I decide what's featured on the leaderboard - AMA w/ Gabe from Product Hunt
Hi everyone, Gabe here! I lead curating Product Hunt's leaderboard.
First thing I will say is that if I could feature every single product that works, I would. I love supporting makers and demoing products. I actually try to test every single thing that gets hunted every day... which is A TON. But I view our job as to surface the most interesting, novel, useful, and innovative products - daily. Now we may not always get it right, the process isn't perfect, but we're trying to do right by the community.
AMA w/ James & Tim (founders of posthog)
hey! we run posthog, the toolkit for building successful products - a single platform for building products, talking to users and shipping new features. we are 5 years old, have 140k customers and are making multiple $10s of millions of revenue.
no question's too weird. we're super transparent so will probs overshare anyway. plg? fundraising? yc? working with your cofounder? why we publicly document all our bad decisions? our allergy to enterprise sales? we've an open book so ask us anything!
I'm the ElevenLabs CEO - what do you want to do with voice AI but can't? (AMA)
Hi Everyone! Solving AI audio end-to-end means tackling both generation and understanding - from text-to-speech to speech-to-text and everything in between. At ElevenLabs, we’re working on breakthroughs in AI audio that bridge research and real-world use. Ask me anything about what we’re building, the challenges of scaling AI speech models, and where this space is headed. Also keen to hear what you’ve built with ElevenLabs!