Rob Walling

I couldn't make hard decisions with incomplete information.

I didn't know how to do that.

And then it took me another five to, I don't even know, five to ten, five to eight years to really feel into it and to be confident in my own ability to trust my founder gut and to develop my founder gut to the point where I was making good decisions because that's what being an owner level thinker requires.

So to recap that, I do think generally it's more senior and experienced.

If I was going to hire someone, I would generally be thinking about years on the job as at least a proxy.

And of course then you have to evaluate, because again, someone can be 15 years in and still be a task level thinker.

Second question is, in your experience, what is the compensation range for U.S.

or North America?

Because obviously in Canada, someone might be 20% or 30% cheaper.

And this is the compensation range for owner-level thinkers.

This is really hard to answer because it depends.

So you can get someone who has the raw material, who is a great project-level thinker and is itching to be an owner-level thinker and really run their own thing, but they've never been allowed to.

And so they're right on that cusp.

It's hard to tell, we're going to talk a little bit later about how to evaluate or how to identify project and owner level thinkers.

But if you get someone right on that cusp who becomes an owner level thinker within the first year or two of working for you, then obviously you can get them at a certain salary range.

And if I think US or North America, I mean maybe 80, 90,000.

But if I think of someone who has the experience and has been allowed to stretch their legs and really drive an org,

and really be an owner-level thinker and they were kind of paid commensurate based on their value, you were definitely looking at low to mid six figures.

However, it depends on where they live.

I know task-level individual contributor developers living in the Bay Area who are making $500,000 a year.