Don’t starve. There’s no sense in paying yourself so little that you can’t live or will be overly stressed about paying your bills.

Have an open conversation with your investors about what you need. As is typically the case, you should be as transparent as you can with your investors on this topic and have a open dialogue about compensation.

companies that have raised $1M or less tend to pay their CEO between $75k and $125k (skewed very much to the low end of that scale – companies that have raised less than $500k tend to top out at $75k for CEO comp). Companies that have raised between $1M and about $2.5M tend to pay their CEOs around $125k.