By the Numbers

By Gareth Price · Last updated

The research behind the book, in one place

In short: In LeadDev’s 2026 survey, 54% of CTOs felt emotionally drained at least weekly, up from 24% a year earlier. A study of 655 firms found that AI coding agents raised pull requests by 35.7% but resolved issues by only 13.7%. And no rigorous study tracks founding CTO replacement; the nearest finds 52% of founder-CEOs replaced by the third round.

This page collects the research figures from the chapters of Applied Alchemy in one place. Each one links to the chapter where it appears and carries the same citation, so you can read it in context before you quote it.

Where the November 2026 revision replaced an older figure with a newer one, only the newer figure appears here, and figures that the revision history records as wrong have been left out. These are other people’s numbers. My own experience as a CTO appears in the chapters as narrative, not as data, so it has no table here.

The Role

Who becomes a CTO, and how the job changes as the company grows.

Finding Source Chapter

Nearly 80% of successful technology companies have either a founding CTO or a technical CEO, in an analysis of 200,000+ career profiles across 200 companies

Index Ventures, 2024[1]

Introduction

70% of CTOs previously worked as software developers; only 14% had held a VP of Engineering title

STX Next, 2021[2]

Introduction

A founding CTO spends 70%+ of their time coding at 1–15 employees, 10–40% at 15–45, under 10% at 45–250 and none at 250+

Jarjoura, 2021, with stages from Nyblom, 2023[3][4]

Chapter 1

A founding CTO’s job changes at each growth stage, roughly every 18 months; if all goes well, they go from coding most of the time to out of the code in five years or less

Jarjoura, 2021[3]

Chapter 1

44% of CTOs spent more time on hands-on coding and code review than a year earlier; 37% of engineering leaders said their hands-on responsibilities had grown, up from 25% in 2025

LeadDev, 2026[5]

Chapter 1

The share of new US startups with a solo founder rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025

Carta, 2025[6]

Chapter 2

92% of US CTOs are men and 76% are white, with an average age of 51 at established companies, across more than 8,600 profiles

Zippia[7]

Chapter 2

Tenure and Replacement

How long CTOs last, and why they leave. No rigorous study measures founding CTO replacement rates by funding stage; the nearest large study tracks founder-CEOs.

Finding Source Chapter

52% of founder-CEOs have been replaced by the third financing round, and nearly three-quarters of those replacements were involuntary, in a study of more than 10,000 founders

Wasserman, 2008[8]

Chapter 16

Replacing founders improves company outcomes, particularly when the replaced founder is a C-level executive who leaves entirely, across 11,929 VC-backed firms

Ewens & Marx, 2018[9]

Chapter 10

Of the founding CTOs she has seen fired, 70% could not communicate with the board and other non-technical stakeholders, 30% were not strategic enough, and none were fired for their technical skills (one adviser’s practice, not a survey)

Chalmers, c. 2023[10]

Chapter 3

CIO and CTO average tenure is about 4.3 years in the top 1,000 US companies, against 6.9 for CEOs and 3.5 for CMOs

Korn Ferry, 2020[11]

Chapter 16

CTO tenures in the United States average three to 5.5 years; the most frequent reason for termination is failing to build trust with the rest of the executive team

AKF Partners, 2024[12]

Chapter 10

Nearly 50% of senior technology executives are at risk with their C-suite peers at any given time

AKF Partners, 2018[13]

Chapter 10

45% of digital and technology officers had been in their role for five years or more; 41% of engineering leaders were considering leaving

Heidrick & Struggles, 2024; CTO Craft & Albany, 2025[14]

Chapter 10

34% of CTOs had considered moving back to an individual contributor role in the past year

LeadDev, 2026[15]

Chapter 16

The CEO-CTO Relationship and Startup Failure

Finding Source Chapter

84% of startups have co-founders; 73% of founding teams split equity within a month of forming; each additional social relationship in the founding team raises the likelihood of a co-founder leaving by 30%

Wasserman, 2012[16]

Chapter 3

About one in four VC-backed two-founder teams had lost a co-founder by year four, around 30% by year five and close to 40% by year eight

Carta, reported by SaaStr, 2025[17]

Chapter 3

Of 431 VC-backed startups that shut down after 2023, 70% of those with identifiable reasons ran out of capital; the root causes named were poor product-market fit (43%), bad timing (29%) and unsustainable unit economics (19%)

CB Insights, 2026[18]

Chapter 3

Of Carta’s 2018 startup cohort, tracked over seven years, 62% shut down entirely, 15% reached Series B and about 1.3% became unicorns

Carta, 2025[19]

Chapter 16

Shipping, Debt and Metrics

Finding Source Chapter

Elite performers deploy 182 times more often than low performers and recover from failures 2,293 times faster

DORA, 2024[20]

Chapter 7

As AI adoption rose, delivery throughput fell an estimated 1.5% and delivery stability 7.2%

DORA, 2024[21]

Chapter 9

Changes cause roughly 70% of Google’s outages

Google SRE, 2018[22]

Chapter 7

Across 655 firms, adopting AI coding agents brought 44% more lines of code and 35.7% more pull requests but only 13.7% more resolved issues; time from review request to approval rose 56.1% (a working paper, not yet peer-reviewed)

Chen & Stratton, 2026[23]

Chapter 6

Median pull-request throughput rose 37% in a year to 1.94 per engineer per week as AI-generated code reached 52.7%; time on new capabilities held flat at 57–58% and developers' confidence in their changes fell 6.1%

DX, 2026[24]

Chapter 9

Moved code, the signature of refactoring, fell from 21% of changed lines in 2022 to 3.8% in 2026, while duplicated code blocks rose 81% over 2023, across 623 million code changes

GitClear, 2026[25]

Chapter 6

Engineers spend an average of 33% of their time, 13.5 hours a week, dealing with technical debt and maintenance rather than building new features

Stripe, 2018[26]

Chapter 5

Technical debt remained among the top four sources of developer friction in 2026, cited by 44% of 1,560 developers and engineering leaders

Atlassian, 2026[27]

Chapter 5

Technical debt typically accounts for 20–40% of the technology estate, with 10–20% of the technology budget diverted to servicing it

McKinsey, 2020[28]

Chapter 5

AI and Engineering Productivity

The fastest-moving evidence in the book. Several of these figures replaced earlier ones in the November 2026 revision.

Finding Source Chapter

92.6% of 121,000 developers use an AI coding assistant at least monthly, and self-report saving roughly four hours a week, about a 10% gain

DX, 2026[29]

Chapter 12

90% of respondents use AI at work, up 14 percentage points in a year

DORA, 2025[30]

Chapter 12

In a follow-up trial with 57 developers, AI tools cut task time by an estimated 18% for returning developers and 4% for new ones, with confidence intervals that included zero; METR called its data "only very weak evidence". This supersedes METR’s 2025 finding of a slowdown

METR, 2026[31]

Chapter 12

In periods of high AI adoption, developers completed 34% more tasks but produced 54% more bugs, with more than three times as many incidents per pull request and 31% more pull requests merged with no review, across 22,000 developers (vendor data, correlational)

Faros AI, 2026[32]

Chapter 12

The security pass rate for AI-generated code rose to 62% in autumn 2026, from 56% earlier in the year; the best models still failed more than one in four security tasks

Veracode, 2026[33][34]

Chapter 7

In a controlled experiment with 47 developers, only 21% of those with an AI assistant wrote secure code on encryption tasks, and they were more likely to believe their code was secure

Perry et al., 2023[35]

Chapter 12

The price of GPT-4-level performance on doctoral-level science questions fell by a factor of 40 a year, from about $20 to $0.40 per million tokens

Epoch AI, 2025[36]

Chapter 12

Nearly half of companies now report real value from AI, and 7.5% are classed as "future-built", in a survey of 1,330 executives

BCG, 2026[37]

Chapter 12

32% of organisations had decided against buying at least one software product or feature because they could build it with agentic coding tools

McKinsey, 2026[38]

Chapter 4

71% of corporate directors said their boards needed stronger AI skills

PwC, 2026[39]

Chapter 10

Hiring

Finding Source Chapter

Entry-level roles were 4.5% of US software development job postings in the first quarter of 2026, against 69.3% for senior roles

Indeed Hiring Lab, 2026[40]

Chapter 11

Median headcount at similar-stage startups fell 17.5%, from 57 to 47, while median funding per employee roughly doubled

Revelio Labs, via CNBC, 2025[41]

Chapter 11

Detected cheating and fraud attempts in proctored technical assessments rose from 16% in 2024 to 35% in 2025, and 40% for entry-level roles

CodeSignal, 2026[42]

Chapter 11

40% of 3,000 US hiring managers had interviewed a candidate later found to be using a fake identity, up from 31%; 28% had advanced a candidate they suspected of dishonesty to fill a role quickly

Checkr, 2026[43]

Chapter 11

Hybrid work had no measurable effect on productivity or promotion and cut resignations by 33%, in a randomised trial with 1,612 employees

Bloom et al., 2024[44]

Chapter 11

Burnout and Isolation

Finding Source Chapter

54% of CTOs felt emotionally drained by their work at least once a week, up from 24% a year earlier, the largest rise of any role; 45% of all respondents were working more hours than a year before (CTOs were only 6% of respondents)

LeadDev, 2026[45]

Introduction, Chapter 15

22% of engineering leaders and developers were at critical burnout levels and 46% at moderate to critical levels, on the Maslach Burnout Inventory

LeadDev, 2025[46]

Chapter 15

97% of 100 tech leaders had felt lonely as a leader; 19% felt lonely "all of the time"

CTO Craft[47]

Chapter 15

50% of CEOs report loneliness, and 61% say it hinders their performance

RHR International, 2012[48]

Chapter 15

54% of founders experienced burnout in the previous twelve months, and 75% reported anxiety

Sifted, 2025[49]

Chapter 15

49% of entrepreneurs reported a lifetime mental health condition, with depression at 30%

Freeman et al., 2015[50]

Chapter 15

A single meeting-free day a week raised productivity by 35% and cut stress by 57%

Laker et al., 2022[51]

Chapter 14

Compensation and Equity

Pay figures are US, cash only, and exclude equity.

Finding Source Chapter

Founding CTOs earn 53% less on average than hired CTOs: $139,000 against $213,000 across stages

Kruze Consulting, 2024[52]

Appendix C

Average CTO cash pay is $155,000 at seed, $196,000 at Series A and $238,000 at Series B; the overall median is $166,000

Kruze Consulting, 2026[53]

Appendix C

A CTO hired at Series A typically receives about 1.0% of the company (range 0.8–2.0%)

Index Ventures[54]

Appendix C

44.6% of two-founder teams formed in 2025 split equity equally; the median split was 51/49

Carta, 2026[55]

Appendix C

Median dilution per round from seed to Series C fell from about 18% to 16% during 2025

Carta, 2026[56]

Appendix C

Only 32.8% of vested, in-the-money options were exercised in late 2024

Carta, 2024[57]

Chapter 15

60% of venture-backed companies return less than the original investment, in data spanning 1990 to 2010

Cambridge Associates, via Holloway[58]

Chapter 15

What These Numbers Can and Can’t Tell You

Most of these figures come from surveys, and a survey is only as good as the people who answer it. CTOs were 6% of LeadDev’s respondents, so its CTO figures rest on a small subsample. The best-known replacement figure tracks founder-CEOs, not CTOs, because no equivalent study of CTOs exists. The reasons CTOs are fired come from one adviser’s practice. Several AI figures come from companies that sell engineering analytics, and the largest study of AI and delivery is a working paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The AI figures also date fastest. METR’s 2025 trial, which found experienced developers slower with AI, was out of date within a year, and Veracode’s security pass rate moved within months. Treat anything about AI as a reading taken in 2026, not a constant.

What the figures can tell you is direction. CTOs are under more strain than a year ago, the role changes faster than the people in it, and AI has moved the bottleneck in software from writing code to reviewing it. Each of those holds across more than one source on this page.

Numbers like these are the easiest part of the book to quote and the easiest to misread. Each comes from a single study with its own sample, its own date and its own definitions. Follow the link, read the chapter, and check the source before you put a figure in front of your board.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. How long do startup CTOs usually stay in the role?

    Usually a few years. Korn Ferry found that CIO and CTO average tenure at the top 1,000 US companies was about 4.3 years, against 6.9 for CEOs, and AKF Partners puts US CTO tenures at three to 5.5 years. No rigorous study tracks founding CTOs specifically; the nearest, Noam Wasserman’s study of more than 10,000 founders, found that 52% of founder-CEOs had been replaced by the third financing round. Chapters 10 and 16 of Applied Alchemy cover the evidence and what it means for a CTO deciding whether to stay.

  2. How much time does a startup CTO spend coding?

    It depends on the size of the company. Daniel Jarjoura’s model puts coding at 70% or more of a founding CTO’s time up to about 15 employees, 10 to 40% at 15 to 45, under 10% at 45 to 250, and none beyond that. AI tools are pulling some leaders back towards the code: LeadDev’s 2026 survey found 44% of CTOs spending more time on hands-on coding and code review than a year earlier. Chapter 1 of Applied Alchemy sets out the four stages.

  3. How common is burnout among startup CTOs?

    Common, and getting worse. LeadDev’s Engineering Leadership Report 2026 found that 54% of CTOs felt emotionally drained by their work at least once a week, up from 24% a year earlier, although CTOs were only 6% of the people surveyed. A CTO Craft survey of 100 tech leaders found that 97% had felt lonely as a leader. Chapter 15 of Applied Alchemy treats both as structural features of the role rather than personal failings.

  4. Why do startup CTOs get fired?

    Rarely for their technical skills. CTO adviser Adelina Chalmers reports that of the founding CTOs she has seen fired, 70% could not communicate with the board and other non-technical leaders, 30% were not strategic enough, and none were fired for their technical skills. AKF Partners names a failure to build trust with the rest of the executive team as the most frequent reason. Chapter 10 of Applied Alchemy argues that the business acumen gap, not code, is what costs CTOs their jobs.

  5. Does AI make software teams more productive?

    It produces more code, but not yet proportionally more delivered work. In Fiona Chen and James Stratton’s study of 655 firms, adopting AI coding agents brought 35.7% more pull requests but only 13.7% more resolved issues, and the time from review request to approval rose 56.1%. METR’s 2026 follow-up trial estimated speedups of 4 to 18% but called its own data only very weak evidence. Chapters 6 and 12 of Applied Alchemy explain why review capacity, not typing speed, is now the constraint.

References

1. Index Ventures, Scaling Through Chaos, 2024. Analysis of 200,000+ career profiles across 200 successful tech companies. Reported in Fortune, March 18, 2024. https://fortune.com/2024/03/18/analyzed-15-years-of-data-founders-employees-most-successful-tech-startups-ever-builtand-boom-innovation/
2. STX Next, The Global CTO Survey 2021 Report. https://www.stxnext.com/cto-survey-2021-report — Survey of hundreds of CTOs globally. 70% previously worked as software developers/engineers; only 14% held VP of Engineering titles.
3. Jarjoura, D. (2021). The startup CTO growth cycle. The Unicorn CTO. https://www.unicorn-cto.com/startup-cto-growth-cycle/
4. Nyblom, V. (2023, March 22). The four stages of a startup CTO. nyblom.io. https://www.nyblom.io/blog/the_four_stages_of_a_startup_cto
5. LeadDev, The Engineering Leadership Report 2026. Survey conducted March 31–April 16, 2026, n=600 engineering leaders, of whom 6% were CTOs or equivalent. https://leaddev.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ENGINEERING_LEADERSHIP_REPORT_2026_FINAL.pdf
6. Carta. (2025, December 9). Solo founders report 2025. Carta Data. https://carta.com/data/solo-founders-report/ — The same report found solo-led companies were 30% of startups founded in 2024 but received only 14.7% of the cash raised in priced equity rounds that year.
7. Zippia. Chief technology officer demographics and statistics \[2026]. https://www.zippia.com/chief-technology-officer-jobs/demographics/ — Based on analysis of 8,676+ CTO resumes, cross-referenced with BLS and Census data.
8. Wasserman, N. (2008, February). The founder’s dilemma. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma — Based on study of 212 startups. Expanded in Wasserman, N. (2012). The Founder’s Dilemmas. Princeton University Press (~10,000 founders).
9. Ewens, M., & Marx, M. (2018). Founder replacement and startup performance. Review of Financial Studies, 31(4), 1532–1565. Based on 11,929 VC-backed firms. First study to establish a causal (not merely correlational) relationship between founder replacement and performance improvement.
10. Chalmers, A. (~2023). LinkedIn post on CTO firing statistics. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adelinachalmers_reengineeringleadership-cto-ceo-activity-7105818749395460096-Fumf — Chalmers ("The Geek Whisperer") is Top 50 Most Influential Women in UK Tech (2022, 2023), lectures at Oxford and Cambridge.
11. Korn Ferry. (2020, January 21). Age and tenure in the C-Suite. Business Wire. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200121005146/en — Based on top 1,000 US companies. CIO/CTO average tenure: ~4.3 years.
12. Abbott, M. (2024, October 29). Attributes of a highly successful CTO. AKF Partners Growth Blog. https://akfpartners.com/growth-blog/attributes-of-a-highly-successful-cto
13. Abbott, M. (2018, May 2). Why CTOs fail and what CEOs and CTOs can do about it. AKF Partners Growth Blog. https://akfpartners.com/growth-blog/why-ctos-fail
14. Heidrick & Struggles. (2024, December 9). 2024 global digital & technology officers organization and compensation survey. https://www.heidrick.com/en/insights/compensation-trends/2024-global-digital-technology-officers-organization-and-compensation-survey — Survey of 377 digital and technology leaders; the tenure question had n=364. CTO Craft & Albany. (2025, May 21). CTO Craft and Albany release latest compensation survey results, revealing key trends in technology leadership salary and equity \[Press release]. _PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/cto-craft-and-albany-release-latest-compensation-survey-results-revealing-key-trends-in-technology-leadership-salary-and-equity-302461731.html — Top reasons cited: lack of trust in leadership, concerns about culture and company performance, and work-life balance.
15. LeadDev. (2026). The Engineering Leadership Report 2026. https://leaddev.com/the-engineering-leadership-report-2026 — Full report: https://leaddev.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ENGINEERING_LEADERSHIP_REPORT_2026_FINAL.pdf — n=600; CTOs or equivalent were 6% of respondents.
16. Wasserman, N. (2012). The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. Princeton University Press. Based on ~10,000 founders across ~6,000 US tech and life sciences startups. See also Hellmann, T., & Wasserman, N. (2014). The first deal: The division of founder equity in new ventures. HBS Working Paper No. 14-085.
17. Lemkin, J. (2025). The real state of seed today: The top 10 learnings from 50,000 startups, per Carta’s latest data. SaaStr. https://www.saastr.com/the-state-of-seed-today-10-key-learnings-from-cartas-latest-data/ — Summarising Carta’s Winter 2025 State of Seed report.
18. CB Insights. (2026, March 5). Why startups fail: Top reasons. CB Insights Research. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/startup-failure-reasons-top/ — 431 VC-backed shutdowns since 2023, excluding companies with a prior exit; reasons identified for 385. Percentages exceed 100% because many companies cited multiple reasons.
19. Walker, P. / Carta. (2025). Class of 2018 analysis: 62% shut down, 15% reached Series B, ~1.3% achieved unicorn status. https://carta.com/blog/startup-survival-rates/
20. DORA Team. (2024, October). Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2024. Google Cloud / DORA. https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/2024_final_dora_report.pdf — Elite performers: 127× faster lead time, 182× more deployments per year, 8× lower change failure rate, and 2,293× faster failed-deployment recovery than low performers. Elite change failure rate: 5%.
21. Google Cloud. (2024). Announcing the 2024 DORA report. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/announcing-the-2024-dora-report
22. Google. (2018). Example error budget policy. In The Site Reliability Workbook. https://sre.google/workbook/error-budget-policy/
23. Chen, F., & Stratton, J. (2026, November 6). Artificial intelligence in the firm: Bottlenecks in software production \[Working paper]. Harvard University. https://fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf — Job market paper, not peer-reviewed; covers 445 million work events for 720,542 workers at 655 firms, January 2021 to August 2026.
24. DX. (2026, July 22). DX releases Q2 2026 State of AI Impact in Engineering report. getdx.com. https://getdx.com/news/dx-releases-q2-2026-state-of-ai-impact-in-engineering-report/ — Covers April–June 2026, with trend data from Q3 2025; system telemetry combined with survey data from 500+ organisations.
25. GitClear. (2026). The maintainability gap: AI code quality in 2026. https://www.gitclear.com/the_ai_code_quality_maintainability_gap — 623 million analysed changes, 2023–2026; 2026 figures are year-to-date. See Chapter 12 for full treatment.
26. Stripe. (2018, September). The developer coefficient. https://stripe.com/files/reports/the-developer-coefficient.pdf — Methodology: Harris Poll partnership, thousands of C-level executives and developers across 30+ industries.
27. Wiggers, S.-J. (2026, October 27). Developers reporting double-digit weekly time savings from AI fell from 68% to 26%. InfoQ. https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/10/atlassian-devex-2026/ — Reporting Atlassian’s State of Developer Experience 2026: 1,155 individual contributors and 405 engineering leaders; self-reported. See also Boyagi, A. (2026, October 20). AI is making developers faster. It’s also exposing what’s broken in software delivery. Inside Atlassian. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/development/developer-experience-report-2026
28. Dalal, Patenge, Krishnakanthan, & Münstermann. (2020, October 6). Tech debt: Reclaiming tech equity. McKinsey Digital. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/tech-debt-reclaiming-tech-equity — Survey of 50 CIOs at financial services and technology companies with >$1B revenue.
29. Tacho, L. (2026, February 11). Keynote at The Pragmatic Summit, San Francisco. Reported in Orosz, G. (2026, February 24). The future of software engineering with AI. The Pragmatic Engineer. — DX survey: 121,000 developers across 450+ companies. See also AI Native Dev report (58,330 developers, 352 companies): average savings of 3.6 hours/week for regular users.
30. DORA. (2025). Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2025. Google Cloud. https://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/ — The 2024 DORA report found a 1.5% dip in delivery speed and 7.2% drop in system stability for every 25% increase in AI adoption.
31. METR. (2026, February 24). We are changing our developer productivity experiment design. https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/
32. Faros Research. (2026, April 12). Ten takeaways from the AI Engineering Report 2026: The acceleration whiplash. Faros AI. https://faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways — Correlational telemetry comparing each organisation’s periods of lowest and highest AI adoption. In Faros’s 2025 report, bugs per developer had risen 9%. Faros sells engineering analytics software.
33. Tischler, N. (2026, July 28). 2026 GenAI code security report: AI is writing more of your code but security hasn’t caught up. Veracode Blog. https://www.veracode.com/blog/2026-genai-code-security-report-ai-risk/ — Large models averaged 53%; medium and small models 51%.
34. Tischler, N. (2026, October 29). Fall 2026 GenAI code security update. Veracode Blog. https://www.veracode.com/blog/fall-2026-genai-code-security
35. Perry, N., Srivastava, M., Kumar, D., & Boneh, D. (2023). Do users write more insecure code with AI assistants? Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Copenhagen. https://arxiv.org/html/2211.03622v3 — Peer-reviewed. 47 developers, controlled study.
36. Cottier, B., et al. (2025, March 12). LLM inference prices have fallen rapidly but unequally across tasks. Epoch AI. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends
37. BCG. (2026, September 30). Applied AI Index 2026 \[Press release]. https://www.bcg.com/press/30september2026-ai-starting-to-pay-off-companies-generate-value — 7.5% future-built, a further 41% scaling.
38. McKinsey & Company. (2026, August 25). The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI. McKinsey QuantumBlack. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai — n=1,719. Self-reported: a decision not to buy, not a measured outcome. Nearly half of "AI high performers" reported such a decision, against 31% of other respondents.
39. PwC. (2026). 2026 annual corporate directors survey. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/pwc-2026-annual-corporate-directors-survey.html — Reported in Corporate Compliance Insights. (2026, September 23). Boards say they need more from management on AI. https://www.corporatecomplianceinsights.com/boards-say-they-need-more-from-management-ai/ — Approximately 600 US public-company directors. PwC reports the combined figure as 82% rating the information fair, poor, or not provided.
40. Aidala, F., & Puri, S. (2026, July 23). The labor market is tilting toward seniority. Indeed Hiring Lab. https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/07/23/the-labor-market-is-tilting-toward-seniority/ — Seniority assigned by task-based text classification, not job titles.
41. CNBC / Revelio Labs. (2025, October 16). The AI effect? These tech startups employ 17.5% fewer workers than 5 years ago — despite raising 50% more money. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/16/tech-startups-hiring-fewer-workers-raising-more-money-as-ai-grows-revelio-labs-data.html
42. CodeSignal. (2026, February 25). CodeSignal detection systems identify and stop record-high cheating attempts as assessment fraud more than doubled in 2025 \[Press release]. https://codesignal.com/newsroom/press-releases/codesignal-detection-systems-identify-and-stop-record-high-cheating-attempts-as-assessment-fraud-more-than-doubled-in-2025/ — Figures are attempts detected and flagged, not successful circumvention.
43. Checkr. (2026, October 15). 68% of hiring managers say AI-powered fraud is outpacing detection, Checkr report finds. Checkr Blog. https://checkr.com/blog/hiring-hoax-2026-ai-fraud-outpacing-detection — The Hiring Hoax 2026; online survey of 3,000 US managers involved in hiring, September 11–16, 2026.
44. Bloom, N. et al. (2024). Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. Nature, 630, 920–925. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2 — RCT at Trip.com; N = 1,612; zero effect on productivity/promotions; 33% reduction in resignations.
45. LeadDev, The Engineering Leadership Report 2026. Survey conducted March 31–April 16, 2026, n=600 engineering leaders. https://leaddev.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ENGINEERING_LEADERSHIP_REPORT_2026_FINAL.pdf — Note: CTOs or equivalent were again only 6% of respondents, so the CTO-specific figure rests on a small subsample.
46. LeadDev. (2025). The Engineering Leadership Report 2025. Summary: Kapani, C. (2025, June 24). Burnout is on the rise as layoffs reshape the tech industry. LeadDev. https://leaddev.com/culture/engineering-burnout-rising-2025-layoffs-reshape-tech-industry — n=617 engineering leaders and developers, MBI-based methodology.
47. CTO Craft. What we know about loneliness at the top and its hidden costs \[Survey of 100 tech leaders]. https://ctocraft.com/blog/what-we-know-about-loneliness-at-the-top-and-its-hidden-costs/
48. Saporito, T. J. (2012, February 15). It’s time to acknowledge CEO loneliness. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2012/02/its-time-to-acknowledge-ceo-lo — Based on RHR International CEO Snapshot Survey.
49. Partington, M., & Dharampal-Hornby, M. (2025, February 26). More than half of founders experienced burnout last year. Sifted. https://sifted.eu/articles/founders-mental-health-2025 — Based on survey data; climate tech founders reported 63% describing mental health as "bad" or "very bad."
50. Freeman, M. A., et al. (2015). Are entrepreneurs touched with fire? UC Berkeley/UCSF. https://michaelafreemanmd.com/Research_files/Are%20Entrepreneurs%20Touched%20with%20Fire%20(pre-pub%20n)%204-17-15.pdf — IRB-approved, self-report survey (n=242 entrepreneurs, n=93 comparison group).
51. Laker, B., Pereira, V., & Budhwar, P. (2022). The surprising impact of meeting-free days. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-surprising-impact-of-meeting-free-days/ — Study of 76 companies across 50+ countries. One meeting-free day per week: +35% productivity, −57% stress.
52. Kruze Consulting. (2024). Startup CTO salary guide. https://kruzeconsulting.com/blog/startup-cto-salary/ — Based on anonymised payroll data from 250+ VC-backed startups.
53. Snyder, D. (2026, August 10). Startup C-suite salary guide 2026: CEO, CTO, COO pay. Kruze Consulting. https://kruzeconsulting.com/blog/startup-c-suite-salary-guide/ — Base cash pay from anonymised payroll data; excludes equity. Snyder is Vice President of Finance at Kruze. See also Kruze Consulting. (2026, August 11). New Kruze Consulting data reveals COOs, not CEOs, command the highest pay at growth-stage startups \[Press release]. PR Newswire. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-kruze-consulting-data-reveals-coos-not-ceos-command-the-highest-pay-at-growth-stage-startups-302848793.html
54. Index Ventures. OptionPlan: Allocation considerations and benchmarks. https://www.indexventures.com/optionplan/ — Based on 20,000+ option grants across 1,650+ startups. See also Carta H2 2024 compensation data: https://carta.com/data/startup-compensation-h2-2024/
55. Carta. (2026, June). Dynamic duos: Two-founder teams are divvying up their equity more equally than ever. https://carta.com/data/two-founder-teams/ — 44.6% of two-founder teams formed in 2025 split equity equally, the highest rate in a decade; median split 51–49.
56. Carta. (2026, February). State of private markets: 2025 in review. https://carta.com/data/state-of-private-markets-q4-2025/ — Median dilution across seed to Series C rounds fell from about 18% to 16% over 2025; Series B fell from about 15% to 12.9%.
57. Carta. (2024). Annual equity report 2024. https://carta.com/data/equity-report-2024/ — Exercise rate: 32.8% of vested, in-the-money options exercised in Q2 2024.
58. Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation (citing Cambridge Associates). https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation — "Between 1990 and 2010, about 60% of venture capital-backed companies returned less than the original investment."