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💸 How $1m-$100m Founders Manage their Wealth

💸 How $1m-$100m Founders Manage their Wealth

Today's gems take less than 3 minutes to skim

Joel Hansen
November 17, 2023

Hey, this is Napkin Notes: we tell you how the smartest founders spend their money so that when you scale, sell or IPO your startup idea, you know how to be wise with your winnings 💪

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Enough politics, let’s get to the goods.

Our Newsletter Menu

📰 News recap
💸 How wealthy founders spend their money
💡 Startup ideas that could make you wealthy
🗓 More demo days coming up
🤣 Laugh of the week

📰 News You Missed:

Christmas trees are up. NFT prices are down. And Sheryl Sandberg’s new VC fund just backed Cercle. Airbnb acquired an AI startup for ~$200M that was started by the Siri Cofounder. Nepal banned TikTok. And Apple TV netted $100m by upping its monthly subscription price $4 to its 25 million users. Talk about a lucrative Secret Santa gift. 🎁

💰 How Wealthy Founders Spend Their Cash

Ever wondered how wealthy founders save, earn and spend their money? So have we; especially when a spicy recession is looming.

So when we saw that our friends at Hampton just dropped a 2023 Wealth Report of their members (which are mostly $1m-$100m net-worth founders), we had to scroll through and pull out some goodies.

For today’s deep dive, we wanted to share some things you can’t google. So we dig into:

💸 How these wealthy founders earned their $$
💸 The # of hours they work per week
💸 What they pay themselves
💸 And where they re-invest their capital

Growing up, money can be a taboo topic. But it shouldn’t be. And Michelle agrees with us. So we’re gonna spill some beans and drop some gems.

Because it’s Napkin Notes and we do what we want to please our readers.

To give you some context on the people who answered their survey, they are:

58% were in the $1 to $10 million net worth range.
89% obtained their wealth through tech entrepreneurship and ownership in a private company
Ages spanned 31-50
75% were married;
Half had 1-3 kids

Now that you know the starting line-up, let’s dive into their answers.

📌 How did these founders earn their wealth?

The report showed that 89% of survey respondents built their wealth by starting a company. 58% were in the $1 to $10 million range. You can see the other breakdowns in the visual.

- Hampton

📌 How do they allocate their savings?

The report found most wealth is tied up in:

- personal company stock, with public stocks, bonds, real estate, and cash being the other major allocations.

- Crypto, and angel investing were also common-but-small parts of most allocations (~7% or less across the board).

- They also asked people about how they’ve changed their allocation recently in light of 2023. The two most popular answers were “No change” (40%) and “Moving to more cash” (18%)

- Hampton

📌 What #1 service do they want to hire?

💡 Startup idea alert: Fascinating to see that “among those with a net-worth of <$1 to $20 million there’s a strong desire for tax specialists. Whereas those in the $20 to $100 million camp are in search of family offices.

- Hampton

📌 How much do they pay themselves as founders?

Reported take-home pay ranged from $70k to $26 million with the median for each group shown to the left, and the overall count shown below. Interestingly, there’s quite a range of take-homes within each wealth level, but they mostly cap out around $1-$5 million per year.

- Hampton

📌 How many hours do they work per week?

- Working 40 to 60 hours per week is normal regardless of wealth

- It’s actually uncommon to be below 40-60 hours, no no matter how wealthy one was.

- When they asked about both personal and real estate debt (focused exclusively on their primary residence, not investment properties) 30% of respondents carried no debt on their homes, and a full 70% chose to carry no personal debt either.

- Hampton

Liked these 5 stats?

Click here to download the full report Hampton wrote.

You never know when you’ll need it 💰