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It's Nathan.

I just pulled the latest numbers from our salary benchmark file.

It's 44,303 real salaries across 428 SaaS companies, all annualized and anonymized.

A few things stand out:

Pay for the same role spreads wide. A software engineer in the top quartile averages $178,268. In the bottom quartile, $44,857. Experience, location, and stage move that number a lot more than most founders expect.

The senior end of the market is where the real money sits. Senior engineers, heads of product, and VPs of engineering all land between $140,000 and $185,000 at the median. When you're hiring for those seats, the offers add up fast.

I put together what a small core team actually costs at median, so you can see the bill before you sign the offers:

8 June 2026 - Nathan Latka - Visual 1

This is the part of growth I see many founders struggling with.

Hiring the people who build and sell your product is one of the biggest checks you'll write.

The revenue from those hires shows up way later.

What should you do when you need talent to grow your SaaS, but don't have money to match these salary benchmarks ?

Many founders start thinking about raising a round to cover payroll.

But you don't have to.

You can fund the hires with capital that doesn't touch your cap table.

Pay people what the market pays, keep every share.

Ken Hoppe, CEO of Modigie, did exactly that.

He needed working capital to bring on his first two hires:

A salesperson

A customer success manager

Without slowing down or taking dilution.

He used $400,000 in revenue financing from Founderpath to fund them.

The terms:

Screenshot 2026-06-04 at 5.40.24 PM

Those two hires helped Modigie reach $1.7m in revenue profitably, with every share still owned by the founders.

If you're at $1m+ in revenue and looking at a few hires you know you need, you can fund them the same way.

I'm looking to deploy capital to 5 SaaS founders this week.