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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
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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 💪
If you were forwarded this newsletter by a bestie, subscribe here so you don’t miss the next one.
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
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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.
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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?
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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.
📌 How do they allocate their savings?
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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%)
📌 What #1 service do they want to hire?
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💡 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.
📌 How much do they pay themselves as founders?
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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.
📌 How many hours do they work per week?
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- 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.
Liked these 5 stats?
Click here to download the full report Hampton wrote.
You never know when you’ll need it 💰
📆 Wanna RSVP to Techstars Demo Day?
Grab your seat by hitting the button below or see our entire events directory here.
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🍷 Thoughts of the Week
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Now go have an awesome weekend.
💚 The Kernal Fam
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