Knowing what to pay employees is a universal problem. Startups in particular struggle with compensation as they compete with other startups for talent.
b Roger LeeThe issue has been raised repeatedly when 401(k) provider Human Interest was founded. He reached the level of a unicorn in August 2021 and today has around 700 employees. (Lee is not involved in the company’s day-to-day operations, although he remains on the board.)
“Finding worker compensation was one of our biggest sources of frustration,” Lee told TechCrunch. “We were using like 1,000 spreadsheets to track and determine salary, equity, raises, pay ranges and discounts.”
“It was impossible to get an overview of workers’ compensation to make sure we were paying people fairly and competitively.”
So in the year In October 2021, he teamed up with his former Harvard classmate Teddy Sherrell. get started Comprehensive In an effort to solve the problem. The company is emerging from a seed round earlier this year, including a $6 million seed round led by Inspeed Capital and participation. Floodgate, SV Angel as well as founders and C-level executives of Rippling, Wealthfront, Pilot.com, Thumbtack, Public.com and others.
Comprehensive’s target customers are startups, the world Lee knows, he started two of his own, as well as Layoffs.FYI – Layoffs Tracker – at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. The first customers include Mercury, LaunchDarkly, Clearbit, Titan and Clever.
Several startups have emerged in this space in recent years. In August, Complete A 4 million dollars were collected. As TC’s Anita Ramaswamy wrote at the time, “Series A start OpenComp It has a similar product aimed at high-growth companies looking to improve recruitment and retention, … powered by YC Compound He wants to help tech workers understand their own compensation.”
Lee hopes to make his offerings as comprehensive as possible to help him stand out from his competitors. For example, he wants to help startups with all aspects of compensation in their organization – going beyond salary and advising on compensation reviews, employee relations and pay analytics.
“Worker’s compensation is more complex and high-stakes than ever because of the current trend of remote work and inflation and the focus on DE & I,” he said.
Many groups involved in the process and data scattered across multiple systems argue that the issue is beyond manpower. Lee is hoping that with Comprehensive, companies will have “visibility to view compensation-related information in one place.”
“A company can’t really make an informed decision on compensation when the company’s data is in the CID system,” Lee added. “We’re thinking of unifying all this data.”
Image Credits: Comprehensive
He emphasized not only the general employment of workers. It’s also about employee retention. Lee estimates that employee compensation represents 70-80% of startups’ total costs — the biggest expense “by far.”
“Now more than ever, startups want to know that the money they spend is being used to reward and retain top performers,” Lee said.
Comprehensive operates a SaaS model and charges companies a subscription based on their size. The 10-person startup plans to use the capital for growth and continued hiring.
Alexa Von Tobel, founder and managing partner of Accelerated Capital, believes the HR technology stack “will continue to evolve.” Compensating for moving to the cloud is a thorny and complex technology challenge ripe for innovation.
“Compensation has fundamentally changed in the past year, and Comprehensive was born to meet this special time: different compensation expectations, salary inflation, increased public demand for compensation and reviews of pay gaps, and more distant companies with more,” Von Tobel wrote through. email.
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