Chris Degnan claims startup CROs earn more than public company CROs
Chris Degnan · Why Anthropic Are Causing a Comp Crisis & Why You’d Never Hire From Salesforce or ServiceNow · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · May 23, 2026 · at 47:31
Chris Degnan, former CRO who scaled Snowflake from $0 to $4B ARR, compares executive compensation in private startups versus public companies on 20VC.
0:00 / 0:05exact quote · 5.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“It's better to be a CRO of a startup than it is a CRO of a publicly traded company. You'll get paid more.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Chris Degnan
Founders should eliminate Customer Success and hire technical sales engineers
“Yes. Get rid of them. Build a professional service organization. Hire more SEs who can do it. Customer success. Look, people think that's blasphemy. I get it. I don't believe in it. I inherited our customer success when Frank came in and he gave it to me. I go…”
Former Snowflake CRO calls Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi a dick and liar
“I, you know, I strongly dislike the CEO of Databricks, but I think Mike, cause he's a dick and he's a liar, but you know, I look, I think at the end of the day, if I, if I'm honest about it, I think the two companies as a combined entity, that would be a amazi…”
Salesforce salespeople are terrible hires because they are just order takers
“Salesforce. Terrible. Terrible. Because they have no idea how to sell. They, they're order takers. To your point earlier is they don't, if you go to a place that's just an order taker, they'd have no idea how to do it. They have no idea how to sell.”
Degnan: Forward deployed engineers are glorified professional services staff
“The forward deployed engineer is a glorified professional services person. If you're a really good engineer, you do not want to be a forward deployed engineer. You want to work on the core product.”
Degnan: Salespeople at mega-funded AI startups are passive passengers lacking skill development
“These companies all, pretty much everyone's a passenger, because there is no accountability. You're not learning anything from a sales, you know, perspective. Eventually that will come to bite you in the, in your butt, in your career.”