Abacum founder pushes revenue-based bonuses beyond sales teams

Abacum founder Julio Martinez is arguing for startup-wide variable compensation, saying the planning software company ties every employee’s quarterly bonus to the same revenue target. The company did not disclose the size of those targets, its ARR, headcount or the actual bonus amounts paid.

Martinez, a Spanish founder running New York-based Abacum, laid out the approach in a Sifted opinion essay published July 15. Abacum develops software for company planning, forecasting and budgeting. His argument is that revenue incentives should not stop at account executives, because product, marketing, people and other functions all contribute to the company’s annual recurring revenue.

The compensation model he described is simple: if Abacum reaches its combined targets, all employees receive a bonus. If it misses, employees do not get the upside. Martinez said the company’s central operating metric is ARR, and that every team is tied to it in some way, from engineers building the platform to marketing generating demand and recruiting teams hiring and retaining staff.

Extending sales-style incentives

Sales commissions are common because the output is easy to measure: a deal closes or it does not. Martinez contrasted that with functions such as engineering, where performance is often evaluated through manager-set KPIs rather than direct revenue contribution. He said he chose to move away from a split model in which sales has variable pay while the rest of the company receives fixed compensation.

Martinez said some employees initially thought the plan was irrational, reflecting how unusual revenue-based bonuses remain outside sales. His view is that startups are ultimately judged by company performance, so compensation should reflect that shared outcome.

He also argued that the bonus has to be large enough to change behavior. A 5% payout is too small, in his view, and he recommended a bonus above 15% for companies that adopt the system. He did not specify whether that figure refers to base salary, total cash compensation or another benchmark.

Cash bonuses alongside equity

Martinez said Abacum still uses equity as part of compensation, but framed it as a long-term incentive rather than a substitute for cash. He pointed to common startup vesting structures, including one-year cliffs and four-year vesting schedules, while saying bonuses provide near-term financial upside.

The argument comes with an obvious trade-off for startups: cash bonuses use runway, while equity preserves cash but delays employee liquidity. Martinez did not provide data on retention, hiring outcomes or performance changes at Abacum since introducing the model.

He linked the approach to the operating pressure facing startups in 2026, saying companies are being asked to hit ambitious revenue goals with smaller teams. In his view, employees can burn out if they carry that pressure without participating in the upside.

Martinez also said missed targets should carry consequences, not as blame exercises but as a prompt for teams to examine where performance fell short. That makes the system less like a perk and more like an operating mechanism: compensation rises when the business delivers and tightens when it does not.

For founders, the useful detail is not that Abacum pays bonuses. It is that Martinez is advocating a companywide revenue metric in place of function-by-function incentive plans, while still keeping equity in the package. The unresolved question is whether that model improves execution enough to justify the cash cost, and Abacum has not disclosed the figures needed to assess that.

This story draws on original reporting from Sifted.