Most startups operate on a compensation split that's almost taken for granted: salespeople get commission, everyone else gets a flat salary with maybe a discretionary bonus. Jorge Lluch, co-founder of Abacum — a financial planning platform — decided to blow that up entirely.
When he announced that every employee's quarterly bonus would be tied to the same revenue target, the response from his team was blunt: he was insane.
The Case Against KPI-Only Compensation
The traditional alternative to commission-based pay is a KPI system — employees are graded periodically by their manager against a set of agreed metrics. It's structured, it feels fair, and it's nearly universal outside of sales.
But Lluch argues it creates a fundamental misalignment. Engineers, marketers, and people ops teams all contribute to revenue — just not in ways that are traditionally quantified. The product they build gets sold. The brand they distribute drives pipeline. The talent they hire and retain determines execution capacity.
"Regardless of role, everyone at a startup is ultimately measured against the same standard of how the company is performing as a whole."
At Abacum, the north star metric is annual recurring revenue (ARR), and the bonus structure reflects that: if the company hits its targets, everyone receives a meaningful payout — full stop.
How to Make It Actually Work
Lluch is clear that implementation details matter significantly. A few principles he emphasizes:
- The bonus must move the needle. A 5% bonus isn't motivating. He recommends a minimum of >15% of compensation to make the incentive feel real.
- Equity is a complement, not a substitute. Stock options carry one-year cliffs and four-year vests. Bonuses are tangible and land in your bank account this quarter. Both matter, but for different psychological and financial reasons.
- Failure has to hurt. When targets aren't met, there are no bonuses — and that's intentional. Missing a quarter triggers a team-wide postmortem to understand the gap and course-correct.
This last point is arguably the most culturally significant shift. The model isn't just about rewarding success — it's about making underperformance visible and shared across the entire organization, not just the sales floor.
The Broader Context: Startup Compensation in 2026
Lluch writes that working at a startup in 2026 means hitting ambitious targets with increasingly lean teams. That's a recipe for burnout if employees absorb all the pressure with none of the upside. Variable compensation, structured properly, is his solution to that equation.
The competition for senior talent in hubs like Barcelona, London, and New York makes retention a strategic concern, not just an HR one. Losing a key engineer or marketer at the wrong moment can derail a product roadmap or kill a fundraise.
It's worth noting that performance-linked compensation for non-sales roles isn't entirely new — large tech companies have long used RSU refresh cycles and annual bonuses tied to company performance. What Lluch is advocating is applying that logic earlier, at the startup stage, with a simpler and more direct mechanism than equity.
What This Means for Founders
For startup founders thinking about compensation design, the Abacum model raises a few practical questions worth wrestling with:
- Is your north star metric clean enough to serve as the single basis for bonuses across every function?
- Do you have the cash runway to pay out meaningful bonuses when targets are hit — and the discipline to withhold them when they're not?
- Can your team culture handle shared accountability, including the uncomfortable conversations that come with a missed quarter?
The underlying thesis is simple even if the execution isn't: stop treating revenue as a sales team problem. If the whole company is rowing toward the same number, pay them like it.
