#158: $33M Growth Equity After Friends/Family Funding to $10M ARR - Alan Miegel

14 snips

Aug 22, 2025

Alan Miegel, co-founder and CEO of BetterComp, shares his journey of launching a leading compensation management platform. He discusses moving from founder funding to raising $33 million in growth equity, emphasizing the importance of community among B2B SaaS founders. Alan highlights the challenges of maintaining control while securing investments and shares how he prioritized his co-founders over his earnings. The conversation also touches on scaling from $1 million to $10 million in revenue, emphasizing customer relationships, innovation, and strategic funding for future growth.

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INSIGHT

Neutral Data Layer Wins Complexity

BetterComp helps large companies combine and analyze multiple compensation datasets to set market-based pay.
The product is data-agnostic and focuses on reconciling datasets with varying cadences.

INSIGHT

Single-Tenant Pain Avoided By Multi-Tenant SaaS

Pure multi-tenant SaaS with continuous releases accelerates innovation and simplifies customer feedback.
Single-version deployment avoids duplicative engineering across products.

ADVICE

Raise Minimum Viable Funding

Raise just enough capital to reach the next milestone and preserve optionality.
Use convertible notes and small friend-and-family checks to sell only tiny slices early on.

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Alan Miegel is co-founder and CEO of BetterComp, a modern compensation management platform for larger companies to manage compensation datasets to set market-priced salary benchmarks. Alan and his cofounders started the company in 2019 with founder funding, then raised angel funding as convertible debt from his friends in the tech industry.

They shipped their first “minimum sellable product” in 2020 and grew revenues steadily, doubling every year from $1M in 2022 to almost $10M in revenue in 2025. BetterComp now has over 80 employees and 200 customers.

In July of 2025, BetterComp raised a combined $33 million in growth equity funding from Ten Coves Capital and venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank. Alan and his cofounders still own a majority of the company. Now they have more resources and support to build on what has worked so far, enabling them to grow even faster and become a market leader.

Quote from Alan Miegel, cofounder and CEO of BetterComp

“Early on I didn't pay myself anything. Then I paid myself enough just enough to max out my 401k contribution, with no taxable income. I made a promise to my founders, my co-founders that I was going to pay them before I paid myself.

“I always paid my co-founders more than I made. That's still the case now. As the CEO, you think of it like you are the last one to get paid in this equation. You're not doing this to make money now, you're doing this to make money down the line.

“And you ask a lot of other people to make sacrifices, you ask them to make less than what they're used to making, so you have to put them first. Because if they see you putting yourself first, they're not gonna think they're the most important thing in the business, which they are..”

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