founder-comp-playbook

founder-comp-playbook is a skill for Claude Code from LeadMagic/gtm-skills. It costs 141 tokens per session (2,776 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for founders setting pay and equity packages for sales hires, including target earnings, quotas, budgets, and negotiations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan compensation for account executives, sales development representatives, and sales leaders, and to prepare offer or counter-offer discussions.
Why use it?
It helps founders balance attractive offers with limited startup cash and remaining runway.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument; mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Part of the gtm-skills plugin — 196 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to plan compensation for account executives, sales development representatives, and sales leaders, and to prepare offer or counter-offer discussions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/founder-comp-playbook
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add LeadMagic/gtm-skills --skill founder-comp-playbook
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/LeadMagic/gtm-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install gtm-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 196 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for founder-comp-playbook

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/founder-comp-playbook/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/founder-comp-playbook)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/founder-comp-playbook"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/founder-comp-playbook/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for founder-comp-playbook

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/founder-comp-playbook"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/founder-comp-playbook.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 141 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,776 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00141 $0.02776
Opus 5 $0.00071 $0.01388
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00555
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00278

Measured 5d ago against content hash 7ca85e251a67, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

founder-comp-playbook scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/check-output.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/founder-led/founder-comp-playbook/SKILL.md · 240 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 240 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Founder Comp Playbook

Overview

Founders lose hires in two ways: underpaying with mystery (candidate ghosts after RepVue check) or overpaying with hero OTE (runway dies in 9 months). Cash-constrained founders must negotiate with total package math — OTE, quota, equity, ramp, and trajectory — not emotional number-matching.

This skill is the founder-specific comp layer: what you can afford by ARR stage, how to value equity honestly, employer negotiation scripts, and when to walk. Canonical GTM comp strategyexecutive-compensation/references/gtm-compensation-strategy.md (Pattern 35). IC bands + templates → gtm-role-descriptions. Close mechanics → gtm-recruiting. VP/CRO clauses → executive-compensation.

Not legal advice. Offer letters → employment-compliance.

When to Use

  • "How much should I pay my first AE?"
  • "Candidate wants $20K more — what do I do?"
  • "How do I explain our equity grant?"
  • "Can we afford a VP Sales?"
  • "Founder comp budget for sales team"
  • "Negotiate without matching Google cash"
  • "What quota goes with $140K OTE?"
  • "Post-acquisition retention comp" / "earn-out employment package"

Authoritative Foundations

  • Jason Lemkin. Founder closes 10–20 deals before first AE. VP Sales before ~$2M ARR: high failure rate. Don't hire title before motion.
  • Mark Roberge. Quota:OTE ~5:1 — if you raise OTE, raise quota proportionally or you overpay for under-delivery.
  • David Skok. Payroll + S&M as % of ARR must fit unit economics; comp is not separate from CAC.
  • Bridge Group / RepVue (2025–2026). Candidates arrive with crowdsourced attainment data — your posted range must match reality.
  • Sam Jacobs / Pavilion. Executive hires expect multi-gate variable and peer calibration — not handshake promises.

Step-by-Step Process

Phase 1 — Can You Afford This Hire?

Load references/founder-comp-budget.md. Quick guardrails:

Company ARR Max fully-loaded sales payroll % ARR Typical first hire
<$500K Founder only + contractors No FTE AE yet
$500K–$1.5M 15–25% ARR 1 full-stack AE
$1.5M–$5M 20–35% ARR AE + SDR or 2 AEs
$5M–$15M 25–40% ARR Manager + pod
$15M+ Board-modeled VP / CRO

Read the full file on GitHub · 240 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 240 lines · 141 tokens per session scan A 7ca85e251a67

Subscribe to this mod's changes

founder-comp-playbook is a skill published in the GitHub repository LeadMagic/gtm-skills (48 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 141 tokens to every session and 2,776 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

cialdini-influence

Applies Cialdini's seven principles of ethical persuasion -- Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, Scarcity, and Unity -- to business contexts including sales, marketing, fundraising, and negotiation. Use when designing conversion funnels, optimizing sales processes, preparing…

fatihguner/foreman · 88 tokens

multichannel-campaign-builder

Use this skill when someone needs a complete outbound sequence written — every touch across LinkedIn and email, not a single cold email. Produces three distinct angles to choose from, then the full sequence with each message ready to send, calibrated to the campaign type and channel mix and self-checked against a…

swan-gtm/gtm-skills · 139 tokens

budget-pacing

A budgeting procedure that compares spending so far this month with the monthly target and forecasts the likely month-end total.

logly/mureo · 129 tokens

inbox-digest

Scan the last 48 hours of unread newsletters, news emails, and blog digests. Summarize what's relevant to your work. Trigger when the user asks "what did I miss", "any interesting newsletters", or as part of the morning briefing ritual.

etrebels/claude-code-growth-os · 57 tokens

company-cfo

Monthly CFO close for Genesys Growth (single-director UK Ltd, GBP base) — pull cash + revenue from Xero (read-only) with Wise CSVs as historical cross-reference, categorize and reconcile, compute end-of-month cash via the transaction-sum method, update a forward scenario projector, and write the monthly snapshot…

matteotitta/genesys-skills · 167 tokens

marketing-feedback

Turn what sales hears in the field into marketing actions. Trigger when a meeting note or call recap surfaces a recurring objection, a competitor mention, the buyer's own language, a missing proof point, or a win/loss reason — or when the user says "log this for marketing", "what should marketing know", or "field…

etrebels/claude-code-growth-os · 71 tokens