Friends,

Do you ever get whiplash from going 100 miles per hour to zero in a short space of time?

That’s where you find me now. The 31st of July was the culmination of months of intense work resulting in what was the inaugural Startup People Summit (PS: it was amazing).

Then just a few short days after, I had my wisdom teeth removed… yep, talk about a celebration.

But what it did do, is force me to take the whole week off after the big event to recover.

Aside from being semi-zonked on painkillers, the break has actually been kinda nice. Forced downtime is always hard (I get complacent easily) but now that I'm nearing the end of it, I can tell how much I needed it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s that I’ve been letting my work routine get the better of me. It’s always hard when you’re trying to build something new. Doubly so when you enjoy it.

But now I realise that I need to focus more on building a lifestyle I can enjoy for the long term. I’m definitely thinking about how I can adjust my work hours in 2026 in an attempt to balance a successful business with a lifestyle I enjoy.

Something like 6 hours per day, 4 days per week feels feels good for me personally.

I had a part time job once (4 days per week) and it was honestly the best. Nothing beats 3 day weekends. It's the perfect amount of time to get through those boring adult chores, do something fun, and enjoy some decent downtime to recover.

Have you ever worked a pattern like that before? If you have, I'd love to know how it worked for you.

Ok, over to this week's edition, with some of the best stories and articles I've come across this past month.

Matt

Welcome to The Wrap Up, a monthly digest of interesting news in and around startup compensation, and what it means for you.

I was an immediate fan of Athyna’s novel approach to ESOP as soon as I heard about it. But in this piece, we get to hear their Founder, Bill Kerr, go one further on how their benefits stack creates, as he calls it, ‘negative churn’ — in that they welcome back almost as many employees as leave. It’s also resulted in successive quarters of record setting engagement scores for the company. A great read not only on benefits, but the Founder’s mindset, as Bill talks about how he sees benefits as an investment that both keeps talent and frees capital for growth.

A lot of my early career was focused on building pay practices that were based on reports and datasets that told me what everyone else was doing. And in hindsight, it’s crazy. You’re letting your biggest investment as a company (salaries), be dictated by an anonymised report, as if the other companies each know what they’re doing, when in reality they’re all doing the same. In this article (featuring yours truly) you get a taste of how these ‘market-led’ approaches are pretty detrimental for companies, and how by being ‘market informed’ we can truly adopt an approach that see’s the market, choosing a place within it based on the goals and strategy of the business. Critical reading for those wanting to step into a commercial People role and bring the company's biggest cost to bear in a way that brings a nod of approval from the CFO and other execs.

In news that will surprise precisely no one — when asked to give salary advice for a role, LLMs are giving lower salary figures to women than men. There’s a lot to be worried about in this and I think, if anything, it gives us all good reason for why embedding these tools into critical systems and processes (like compensation) needs to be done incredibly diligently. But I think we’d all be lying if we didn’t know this was the default state of LLMs which, after all, are just a reflection of the society we’ve created.

So I love two things about this article. One is the huge dataset being brought to bear and the macro insights it gives. The second is the implication it has on salary benchmarking, especially in a world where people can more easily move between occupations. What it makes me wonder is, if the ease with which the supply of talent can shift to meet the demand is high, will it result in a broad band of salaries that encompasses multiple job families (a HR and Finance job family for example). If it’s easy enough (especially when AI-enabled) to change profession, then are the underlying skills themselves really changing or just being applied in a contextually different way? Lot’s to think about here and maybe something I should write more about in a future edition. Let me know your thoughts and whether you ever think we’ll see this consolidation of salary ranges based on occupation.

I talk a lot about how the world of compensation has changed in the past 5 years. Live salary data, HRIS integrations, comptech, etc. has all been accelerating this. But what this piece from Lovable’s Head of Growth made me realise, is that I think we’re in for more of it, particularly in the form of AI-native employees. Especially when it comes to job architecture. Traditional architecture is based on things like ‘how many direct reports’ a role has or the ‘impact’ you have across the business. It’s clear from this piece that AI is going to make these measures relatively obsolete. AI-native employees might not even have direct reports, and yet be able to have a drastic impact across the breadth of the company. Launching new products, doing what used to take a team, is all about to become the norm. The question is how will this impact job level frameworks that are grounded in traditional design? Will we see an AI track alongside the Individual Contributor and Manager tracks, or will it result in some other chance? Let me know your prediction.

By now, just about every tech-CEO has followed in the footsteps of Tobias Lütke in announcing that AI is the future and we should all be using it before hiring more people, and just generally in our work every day. Some CEO’s, no doubt in a bid for more views, are even going so far as to say everyones jobs (including theirs) are threatened by AI. So it makes sense that in the biggest workplace revolution to happen for some time, companies need to be ensuring they’re not only seeing this shift happen internally, but hiring for new people that have this capability. Enter Zapier, who kindly shared how they’re going about this, for us all to learn from. I’d love to know if you or your company have gone to this extent, or if AI is still relatively informal.

Not long ago we heard about $100M offers being made to some of the top AI talent in the world. Well, in a move that only continues to emphasise how competitive this space is, we’re now hearing of $1B offers… We’ve officially entered an era where AI researchers are being paid more than professional sports stars. To make things crazier, the $1B offer was rejected on the grounds of culture and mission. Which just goes to show that even at those incredible amounts, salary still isn’t everything. This article gives a look inside how Levels.fyi are charting the change in Meta’s compensation philosophy based on this new world we’re entering of hyper valuable AI talent.

Here’s two things that may also be of interest to you: