How much to pay your engineer? This startup will tell you

It's a universal problem to figure out what to pay employees. It's difficult for startups to get compensation as they compete with each other for talent.

The issue came up multiple times when Roger Lee co-founded Human Interest, a 401(k) provider that now has over 700 employees. Lee is still on the board, but he is no longer involved in the day to day operations.

One of the top sources of frustration was figuring out compensation for employees. We used 1,000 spreadsheets to track salaries, equity, raises, pay ranges and offers.

It was difficult to make sure that we were paying people fairly and competitively.

In October of 2021, he and his former Harvard roommate started Comprehensive to address the problem. The company is emerging from stealth today, announcing a $6 million seed round raised earlier this year led by Inspired Capital and including participation from Floodgate.

Lee is familiar with the target customers of Comprehensive, having started two of his own and launched Layoffs.FYI. Customers early on include Mercury, LaunchDarkly, Clearbit, and Clever.

In the last few years, a number of startup have arisen. Complete raised $4 million in August. A startup called Open Comp has a similar product geared toward high-growth companies looking to improve their recruitment and retention.

Lee wants Comprehensive to stand out from the crowd by being comprehensive. It wants to help startup companies with all aspects of compensation within their organization, going beyond salaries to also advise on compensation reviews, employee communication and pay analytic.

Recent trends of remote work and inflation and the focus on DE& I have made employee compensation more complex and higher stakes.

The issue goes beyond human resources with multiple teams involved in the process and data scattered across multiple systems, according to him. Lee hopes that Comprehensive will allow companies to see compensation-related information in one place.

It is not possible for a company to make informed decisions on compensation when comp data is in a silo. We're trying to unify all that data.

The image is comprehensive.

He emphasizes that comprehensive isn't just about recruitment. Retention is also part of the equation. The biggest expense of a startup is employee compensation, according to Lee.

Lee said, "Now more than ever, startups want to know that the money they're spending is being used to reward and retain their high performers."

A subscription is charged based on the company's size. The startup wants to use its capital to grow.

As the HR tech stack continues to shift to the cloud, Von Tobel believes that compensation is a tricky and complex tech challenge that is ripe for innovation.

Comprehensive was born to meet this specific moment: more remote companies with disparate compensation expectations, salary inflation, increased needs for compensation disclosure and assessments for pay gaps, and more.

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