Choosing the right leadership is hugely important for any company. Many founder-led businesses struggle with how to build out an executive team. When it’s time to make that first C-suite hire, who should it be?
Should it be a builder (CTO), a seller (CRO), someone to market your product (CMO), or someone else entirely (like a COO, CFO, or Chief Product Officer)?
Of course, the best choice will depend on the nature of your business. That said, benchmarks from Pave’s dataset provide insight into what is the most common non-founder C-level executive.
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Most Common First C-suite Hires in Tech
Our data science team took a look at companies with only one C-level, non-founder executive across our customer base. We excluded the CEO role and founders from this analysis, which resulted in a sample size of 1,947 companies.
Here are the findings for what tech companies in Pave’s dataset have chosen for their first C-level non-founder exec hire:
As we can see, CTO comes in first with 45%, followed by CFO with 18% and CMO with 12%. Note that Pave’s dataset skews heavily towards the tech sector, so it is not surprising to see tech leadership taking the top spot among this sample of companies. A CTO can help to set the foundation for engineering and product teams that will set the business up for long-term growth.
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Matt Schulman is CEO and founder of Pave, the complete platform for Total Rewards professionals. Prior to Pave, he was a software engineer at Facebook focusing on user-centric mobile experiences. A self-proclaimed "comp nerd," Matt is known for sharing data-driven thought leadership around all things compensation and personal finance.
