Compa: Reimagine Compensation

Arun Penmetsa
Storm Ventures
Published in
3 min readJan 29, 2024

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Compensation is a critical part of building and motivating any team. It is the biggest expense for most businesses. Naturally, compensation intelligence and management is a vital part of any organization. HR teams invest heavily in establishing strategy and guiding principles, understanding the market, designing approval processes, and educating managers.

Despite this, the state of the art solutions today are based on surveys from companies like Radford. These are outdated, incomplete, and unreliable. As a result, compensation lacks real time data and is largely managed in spreadsheets causing companies to overpay or miss out on promising candidates. Compensation strategies are often a combination of art and science, which leads to inconsistency, bias, and bad decision-making.

This is an enormous problem. As we looked across the market, it became clear that a real-time compensation data platform would provide a huge strategic advantage to its customers in accessing and retaining the best talent and managing budgets.

“Compa Index fills a clear gap in the market…accurate, verified, offer data, which complements the more traditional ‘in-seat employee’ survey data.” — Rahim Bhayani, Head of Global Compensation at Elastic

Real Time, Relevant and Intelligent

Compa is that platform. Compa integrates with applicant tracking systems to gather and analyze offers data across roles and geographies. There are 3 key reasons why Compa is a game changer for compensation:

  • To access Compa’s data set, businesses have to share their offer data first, growing its data set and value with each new customer. Compa anonymizes and then normalizes this data across companies to give a real time, global view of compensation data. For the first time, industry leaders like Nvidia, Workday, and Autodesk are sharing their valuable data and now rely on Compa to make compensation decisions. In the last 12 months, Compa’s data set has grown over 10x.
  • Compa also offers predictive insights helping companies offer the right compensation packages across various geographies and markets. They also help with internal reporting by tracking win rates, offer history, and pay element analysis. This is especially important as markets remain volatile and as access to top talent is super competitive. The result is that Compa’s customers see increased acceptance rates for offers, lower costs, monitor trends, and are much quicker to reach changes in the market.
  • Finally, Compa’s co-founders Charlie, Joe, and Taylor have decades of experience building and scaling compensation and rewards solutions at Mercer, Juniper, Workday, Meta, and many other leading organizations. Their focus on building the best product for compensation leaders has made it clear to us that they are the perfect team to innovate in this space.

Compa represents a paradigm shift in the industry and we are thrilled to partner with the team. If you are a business leader focused on attracting and retaining the best talent, the team shares their insights here. If you’d like to join them on their journey, Compa is hiring!

“Charlie’s experience and knowledge as a compensation leader gives me confidence in Compa’s ability to build a product that will be valuable as an input into our compensation processes” — Mason Stubblefield, VP of Compensation at Nvidia

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