The following interview is a conversation we had with Warren Lebovics, Co-Founder of Pequity, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $19M Raised to Build the Future of Employee Compensation.
Warren Lebovics
Yeah, thanks for having me. No problem.
Brett
So, before we begin talking about what you’re building there, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Warren Lebovics
Totally. So I’m originally Canadian, now American. I grew up in Toronto. I went to the University of Waterloo. I’m a product and design person. I worked at some companies that were crazy cool back in 2008, like Sony BlackBerry had a blast there and then dove into the startup world. And so I spent a bit of time starting my own companies, or I guess I should call them projects, because I think a company takes on a different kind of form. But starting my own projects built a couple of Android apps and really it was always in product and design. I eventually made my way to the Bay Area, where I joined as one of the early designers at a very small series, a startup called Refresh. And about a year into that, we got acquired into LinkedIn. And when I joined LinkedIn, I kept making this joke to everybody, which I now see how obnoxious it was a couple of years later.
Warren Lebovics
But I kept saying, hey, I’m still a startup guy. I’m going to be here for exactly 366 days and then I’m on to the next startup. And the joke was on me because I wound up sticking around at LinkedIn for about four years. I absolutely loved it. And I spent most of my time managing the design team that works on the homepage newsfeed, thinking about content creation, consumption. And then I left to get back to the startup roots. And it was my first or I guess second foray into HR Tech, where I joined a company called Jumpstart, where I led product and design there for about a year before I got tagged in to co-found Pequity. And so Pequity I know we’ll get into a little bit later, but it is it’s a compensation SaaS product. It helps you run all your compensation workflows.
Warren Lebovics
It’s really intended for the kind of upper mid market, small enterprise folks and with proactive pay equity built in and infused throughout it. So we’re about three and a half years into Pequity now. We have a team of about 45, and it really is the best job I’ve had yet.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. And to double click on some things you mentioned there about your history. So let’s talk about LinkedIn. I’m sure that was an incredible experience. I’m sure you learned a lot there. What would you say is the number one thing that you walked away with?
Warren Lebovics
LinkedIn was incredible. It’s funny. It’s actually hard to distill it into one thing. And I think I could if I really tried. I’ll kick off with a few things I feel like I walked away with. One of them was an understanding of what a really strong culture looks like and how to keep that infused as you were building out your own company. And not just make it a poster on a wall, but make it something that you actually live and breathe in and a continuous practice. And then another one is compassionate leadership, which is something that Jeff Weiner would still, I think, to this day, talk about a lot. And it fell into some things about how you give feedback and really how you run meetings and how you go about your day to day work. But the one thing that I really took away from it is, especially coming from a startup, I felt like I knew a lot about design, and I seemingly did it well, but I got to then be surrounded by just the most incredible designers, about 300 of them, when I joined LinkedIn.
Brett
Wow.
Warren Lebovics
And I feel like I got the kind of design master class or pseudo master degree that I didn’t know I needed until I got it.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. And two other questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. As a Founder and entrepreneur, what CEO do you admire the most, and what do you admire about that?
Warren Lebovics
So, as hinted in my earlier response, I think the CEO I admire the most is Jeff Weiner. He leads with compassion. He’s such a bright person. He was the person who came into LinkedIn and took them from kind of this scrappy startup into this really viable business. And one of the tenets of how he ran the company was with humor. And I’m a big believer. I know that with my age bracket, I missed the mark on being a gen z. And I respect that there’s a group of people who kind of stand up and put boundaries on their time and their efforts and their work. And the reason why they do that is because you’re expected at this point in time to put so much of your life into work.
Brett
Right?
Warren Lebovics
And so I think there’s a very fair expectation where I know that we millennials don’t always have this, but there’s an expectation of, hey, work has to be great, and it has to serve me, and it has to be fulfilling. And I feel like Jeff Weiner understood that and provided that for his company even before it was an expectation or popular.
Brett
Nice. That’s a good call out. And what about books? Non LinkedIn? Related here what book has had a major impact on you as a Founder and this can be a business book or a personal book as well.
Warren Lebovics
Yeah, so I know that you and I were joking about this a little bit together, but when it comes to books, for me, I typically start them because I want to learn from them and I want to dive in and get all the golden nuggets out of them. And my favorite books are the ones where it’s less about the content and less about the overall takeaways and more about the feeling that I wind up getting where it’s like a quick epiphany in a sentence or a paragraph that winds up driving some sort of action or future strategy. For myself, one book that comes to mind is how to Decide by Annie Duke. So Annie Duke is a former professional poker player and I think that would qualify her more than anybody to be able to talk about decision making and making split second decisions and quick frameworks to think through it.
Warren Lebovics
And there was one piece in particular that stood out to me tremendously, which is this concept of resulting. So if you would ask somebody, hey, you made a decision like, let’s talk about moving to a new state. So let’s say we’re based in San Francisco and we decide that we’re going to move to Pennsylvania, for example, let’s say we move there and we realize, hey, we don’t have any friends here, or it’s not what we thought, or it’s too cold and I don’t like the weather. And overall it feels like I didn’t make a good decision. When you look back at the original decision of moving to New City, was it a good decision or a bad decision? And most people would look at that and say, well, it was a bad decision because it had a bad outcome. But that’s actually not the way to think about decision making.
Warren Lebovics
You make a decision with the data you have and then there’s an outcome based on that decision. Now if you knew, hey, this place is cold and I really don’t like the cold. Or nobody my age is there. Nobody in my industry is there, but I’m going to move there anyway because I feel like it then, yeah, it might be a bad decision. But if you do the research and it’s like, well, actually, this is an up and coming tech little bubble over here. There are people our age or people who want to be friends with, we have family nearby, we have this, we have that, and we still don’t like it. It might have been a good decision with a bad outcome. And so for me, that’s something that guides how I make decisions going forward is there’s a very big difference between a decision and an outcome and you can’t base the quality of a decision exclusively on that outcome.
Brett
Wow, that’s fascinating. I know it’ll be reading this weekend, so thank you.
Warren Lebovics
If you pick up any golden nuggets, feel free to drop me some too.
Brett
Sounds great. Well, let’s talk about the origin story behind the company and tell us a bit about your Co-Founder.
Warren Lebovics
So the very interesting, and I think unique thing about Pequity is that my Co-Founder is also my wife, Caitlin canop, and she is a really big reason, if not the reason why we started Pequity together. A little bit of background, you know, my background now product and design for a long time, a little bit of exposure previously to HR SaaS, and Caitlin was and is a compensation expert, and she was a compensation manager for pretty much her whole career. She got a master’s in HR. She wound up at Lockheed Martin in an HR role. She then spent four years at google on their HR comp embeds team as well, where she saw what a really well oiled comp machine could and should look like at google. After about four or so years at google, she wanted to dive into a smaller company and see if she can influence a comp program from the early stages.
Warren Lebovics
So she joined cruise automation, which Brett, you being in San Francisco, I’m sure you’re familiar.
Brett
Yes, of course.
Warren Lebovics
Yeah. So for those who aren’t, and by the way, I say this because we’ve been spending more time in pennsylvania and New York and Toronto, and people go, cruise, I don’t know what that is, but it’s a self driving car company. I believe that it is owned by general motors, I think. And so she joined as employee number 180, and when she joined in, she was tasked with, hey, create a comp program in just a couple of weeks. They were moving really fast. Their goal is to grow, I think it was two x quarter by quarter, which is just an insanity goal for anybody who is growing a company and hiring people. It’s a tough thing to do. They did it a year and a half in. They wound up growing to about 1500 total employees. And I think they’re well past that now because it’s been a few years since but Caitlin had to or she built that pay program.
Warren Lebovics
She actually snuck a software engineer onto her team to help with connecting the applicant tracking system into pulling data from there, pulling data from the HRIS, because to make comp make sense, you need both candidate data and employee data. And most ATS are focused on just the candidate data, and then hrs are focused on just the employee data. So you really needed to build something custom. And her solution was spreadsheet based with, I think, some app script involved and a little bit of zapier thrown in there as well. For those who are hearing these terms for the first time, we use it on the Daily in HR. SaaS ATS is an applicant tracking system, so to list off a couple of popular ones greenhouse Lever. It’s essentially the portal where you run your candidate process through and then eventually make offers to them as well.
Warren Lebovics
Or host your job posting boards, for example. And then HRIS is human resource information system, so the most popular ones I can think off the top of my head are workday, ADP, bamboo, HR, and that’s where you house all your employee data, their benefits, and, yeah, that’s mostly where all your employee data lives. And so after cruise, caitlin decided to get into consulting. She tried to take a break, but her break was consulting. And it turned out that her network of HR leaders that she met across all these other companies before had then dispersed and landed as heads of HR, or heads of people at all these other companies across the bay area, new york, you name it. And they called her and said, hey, can you do what you did for me at cruise, or can you repeat what you did at google and come in?
Warren Lebovics
We’ll pay you $20,000 for a couple of weeks of work to get that up and running. And they knew it was going to be a spreadsheet deliverable. So the funny thing is, at the time, caitlin was also convinced that she wanted to start her own company, and she was also convinced that she wanted to do it with me, which I was still on the fence of, because I had not really operated in a family business environment before. But caitlin had. She grew up in that. And we tried a couple of funny things, like we actually opened a pop up bakery in San Francisco on weekends while were still working full time. And that was both a blast and terrifying at the same time. I could tell you that I’m probably the worst front of house person I’ve ever come across, and I’m sure other people who came over to our bakery.
Warren Lebovics
We also started a couple of different projects, marketplaces. And after caitlin did about 20 of these consulting projects, she came to me and said, hey, I know we’ve been toying around some different business ideas, and I think I have one that we really need to dive into. And she brought me through the process. She walked me along, she told me she was up to, and I couldn’t believe that something like that didn’t exist yet. And I kept asking questions going back to ATS and hrs, like, well, why doesn’t live there? Why doesn’t it live there? Why doesn’t this exist? And she had all these amazing answers. And really the reality is that right now, or I guess at this point, this was three years ago, but there were really only legacy tools that didn’t do it particularly well or were super rigid or spreadsheets, and those also broke.
Warren Lebovics
So I more or less immediately quit my job at the time, where I was leading product and design at a small company where we had just raised a Series A and decided to dive headfirst into it. We actually met our very first engineer on Reddit, where Caitlin reached out the day that we decided were going to do it. She reached out to Reddit in the I think it was like the for hire subreddit, and just said, hey, we’re working on a comp project. Anybody interested? Somebody reached out from Romania. Her name’s Iona, or IO as we call her. And the crazy thing is, that’s been three and a half years. She’s our very first engineer and she’s still with us and loving it too, which is super cool.
Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. Some follow up questions there. How do you deal with conflict? Let’s say that there’s. How do you not have that ruined dinner with your wife and vice versa? How do you have personal issues not crossing?
Warren Lebovics
Yeah. So Caitlin is the strongest communicator I know. I can’t claim that I am even close to the communicator that she is, when something that’s been funny with us is that whenever we took every step in our relationship, we would have this contract that we would actually sign together. We’d write out and sign it. So when we moved in together for the first time, caitlin brought up this idea of a contract and she said, hey, let’s disarm the nukes. Let’s write out what will happen, like what we’ll do. Let’s say we break up. What happens? Who moves out? Who stays? Do we both move out? What do we do here? If we break up because of this reason? Because of that reason, how do we solve that in advance? And that way we have essentially an action plan for if bad things happen. And so we did something very similar with the company where we know and going into it, we had this thought of, what if it gets in the way of our relationship?
Warren Lebovics
What if it’s something where one of us isn’t performing well? What if one of us does something personally that then impacts the professional side? And so we have quite literally a contract and an action plan for how to resolve any of those issues.
Brett
Wow. So any cheating, you automatically lose.
Warren Lebovics
Yeah, pretty much exactly.
Brett
What’s the other husband wife team is. It canva.
Warren Lebovics
It might be canva. I think eventbrite is a husband wife team. The interesting thing is that now that we’re doing it and we’re getting more exposure to other founders, we’re seeing that there are more people who do it. Indeed, it’s something where it’s the best thing that I’ve ever done and I feel like we’ve ever done. They do tell you when you’re looking for a Co-Founder, it’s going to feel a lot like a marriage.
Brett
Right.
Warren Lebovics
It’s somebody who you have to trust tremendously. You have to have just the deepest and open, most open communication with. And for us, walking into it, we’re like, hey, we actually have all that already. Now let’s just figure out the whole working together thing. Most people have to go and figure out how to work with total strangers. Let’s see if we can crack this. And it’s been super rewarding, super fulfilling. And one thing that’s really nice, Brett, I’m curious if you ever experienced this in the past, is in some relationships you may be with somebody who doesn’t really understand what you’re doing or why you’re working so hard, or why you’re pulling the late nights and weekends to bring something to life. And with Caitlin and I, there’s no question when it was two in the morning and we wanted to go to sleep, we both knew why weren’t going to sleep.
Warren Lebovics
Right. And it was because were building Pequity, or because we had something we wanted to solve, or because we had this idea and we just had to solve it that night. And there was no yeah, I guess there’s no misalignment or misunderstanding into why we’re prioritizing working so hard and we got to do it together. Yeah.
Brett
My fiance and I joke, or I joke, I should say that it’s like dating a civilian. She’s an aunt as well. And this relationship worked very well because of that, because she gets it, she understands it. We can talk about problems. And when I dated civilians in the past, they just didn’t understand the pain that we have to go through day to day sometimes. And I, of course, understand their pains that they have to deal with.
Warren Lebovics
Exactly. I do find that I think entrepreneurs pair well together, and sometimes they pair really well when they’re working on the same team. Other times, not so much. But I also find that investors and entrepreneurs understand each other too. So most of the investors I know are coupled up with entrepreneurs or other investors.
Brett
Yeah. Take a note of sense. Now let’s dig a bit deeper into the actual product. So when we’re looking at your customers who are paying you today, how would they articulate the benefits that they get from your platform?
Warren Lebovics
So Pequity is really made up of, I’d say, three core products. We have some periphery around it, but the way that I like to talk about it is that it’s compensation solutions for modern enterprises. So whether you’re looking for a streamlined comp process or guidance on pay strategy, something that we have that’s really unique is we have the software coupled with the expertise to help make sure that your company has whatever it needs to succeed. So I know that sounds a little bit vague, but I’ll kind of dive into each one of these. So we have our three core product offerings are ranges, which is building, maintaining, sharing ranges with robust permissions, like your pay bands, for example, and then offers which is all about giving recruiters the right data at the right time so that they can make the best, most competitive but also most fair offers to candidates.
Warren Lebovics
This also includes some really nifty visual offers that have branding built in as well. And then there’s comp cycle management, which I would say is what people think of first when they think of compensation. It’s how you run your merit cycles, your promotions and things like that. And what we’re doing is taking all these processes and really infusing design into it so that it doesn’t feel like it’s outdated. Black boxy, I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t remember how to use this thing. Experience which I definitely felt as a hiring manager in the past, but more so an experience that managers love, where they have proactive pay equity built in, and then for companies. That want either a second opinion or maybe not necessarily that they don’t have in house compensation expertise, because they typically do, but it’s usually one or two folks and they want to talk to Pequity, who we have teams that look across the entire market and are able to say, well, actually, here’s what we’re seeing across the market with Comp.
Warren Lebovics
And we can tell you whether or not your ranges are competitive. We can tell you whether or not strategies are likely to resonate or not resonate. And we can help you essentially execute on your comp strategy way faster and with a lot of insight that you.
Brett
Wouldn’T otherwise get interesting. And what’s the trigger for customers? Does that have anything to do with the pay transparency laws that keep coming out or what’s triggering them to start looking for a platform like yours?
Warren Lebovics
I do think that’s kind of a new trigger and it is one trigger where they see the pay transparency laws, they know they have to report, but they’re not really sure what to report on. So that’s definitely one in. I’d say that the biggest trigger though is that most of these companies are still using either very legacy software or spreadsheets. And the ones that we talked to are using spreadsheets because they have such unique and flexible compensation and pay programs that existing tools just can’t possibly handle it. And when they do, there’s a lot of custom work. It’s very rigid. Managers are really confused or planners are confused when they use it. And that’s where Pequity really thrives, is that we built it from a user experience mindset and flexibility mindset first with comp expertise baked in. And so they come to us because they have a process that works in spreadsheets but it only works for a really short time and it breaks down really easily.
Warren Lebovics
And so they’re looking for a process or a product to help them continue to grow their comp programs across ranges, offers and comp cycle, but to meet the flexibility that they expect or that they need for their mid market or small enterprise or even large enterprise employee base?
Brett
And how do you convince them to give up the spreadsheet and especially a company that’s on them for so long? What are you saying and what are you communicating to get them to make the jump?
Warren Lebovics
So it totally depends on which product they’re looking into. But when it comes to for ranges, for example, they have to really strictly permission who sees what comp data? Comp data is really sensitive, right? You don’t want your employees seeing the hiring manager’s pay range or even their pay especially. And so when you think about ranges, they’re able to put their data into one place once and then they set the permissions for whoever needs to see it once and then everybody gets it when they update their ranges, which they will inevitably do, because pay is becoming so much more, I think, fluid. As people are leaving these or I guess as they left these metros over the last couple of years, they’re starting to come back, they’re still going. And there’s a lot of confusion of what should I be paying these people, what’s competitive?
Warren Lebovics
I don’t know. And how do I disseminate this information across my company in the best way possible? And so normally what they’d have to do with spreadsheets is, yes, they would have the flexibility of a spreadsheet, but then they’d have to make 500 different spreadsheets for the different people who need to look at it. And when they update their ranges, they have to do it all over again. And that is just such a pain. And so with Pequity, they do it once and whenever they update it, everybody sees only what they should see. And so that right there saves them months of work, which is just a huge sell and it directly correlates to time and money saving. So that’s with ranges, comp cycle is the same thing where they want to be able to use a tool because they want their managers to have a wonderful experience.
Warren Lebovics
If you ask most hiring managers and comp planners at companies how they feel about their comp planning tools, they either don’t care or really dislike it. And so what comp teams really want is for their managers to feel like, hey, I know what to do here, I know how to make decisions, I know how to collaborate, I know what I should be offering this person and I know why. And that’s what Pequity offers. And it offers the flexibility of the spreadsheets or the uniqueness that they’re used to, but it’s all in a software that they can really have the control that they need over that. And then with offers there’s this kind of funny tension between talent or recruiting and comp, where talent wants to close the best candidates possible. The best candidates are expensive. And then the comp team is looking out for the company saying, hey, we set a budget and we can’t go over it.
Warren Lebovics
So even though this person’s asking for more, we built ranges for a reason and we want to follow those. And a lot of why there’s tension is because the recruiter is not given access or doesn’t have access to the Comp data that they need. And it’s not just the ranges, but it’s also well, how does this compare to people who already enroll and how does this compare to market data? And that’s what Pequity offers, is the ability to bridge the gap there and also just generally reduce pay errors, like accidentally bringing somebody into the range of San Francisco when they’re living in Nebraska.
Brett
And this is probably a dumb question, but who does the compensation team report to? Is it HR or the head of people? Or is it the CFO in finance?
Warren Lebovics
That is such an amazing question. Funny enough, we’ve seen both. I think what’s most common is that Comp would report into HR, but we have seen Comp report into finance too. And Comp does bridge that line or straddle the line between HR and finance.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. How big is the company when they start to have a dedicated compensation team? Is there like a size range where it starts to make sense that you see?
Warren Lebovics
Yeah, I think so. I think that from what we see, at least with our customer base, we see on the early side, it’s around like 100 to 250, but we see it become a very big pain point necessity around 300 to 500. And that’s where you start bringing in real Comp expertise.
Brett
Got it. Makes sense. Can you share with us any numbers that show the progress and growth and adoption that the platform is seeing?
Warren Lebovics
Yeah, I can. I think this past year, even with 2022 being kind of a funky year, we still more than doubled growth and doubled revenue. And the year before that being a very exciting year, we atexed our revenue.
Brett
Wow, that’s impressive. Especially given everything that was happening in the tech ecosystem last year.
Warren Lebovics
Yeah, 2022 was a very fun year to be a Founder.
Brett
How’s 2023 for you so far? We’re only a few weeks in.
Warren Lebovics
Yeah, I mean, honestly, it’s off to a really good start. We are still seeing some funkiness in the market, right, where we’re seeing massive companies go through these really big layoffs. But the weird or the interesting thing is that they’re actually not slowing down too much on hiring. So they’re going through less, but they’re still hiring. And even still with Pequity, were very intentional about building across really all compensation needs. And every company always needs Comp solutions.
Brett
Indeed.
Warren Lebovics
So whereas in 2021, when offers were flying off the shelves, that was really the product that were highlighting was, hey, check out offers, check out ranges is going to help you a lot. And then 2022, 2023 is really the year of Comp cycle and ranges, which is, hey. We have employees, we want to retain them. We want to make sure that they feel valued and that we’re if you think about Comp, which is attracting retaining talent, that being really your mission and your goal. 2022, and so far 23 are focused more on retention.
Brett
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. And talk to me about market categories. I know we touched on ATS and a few others there. Think about your market category. Are you transforming the existing one or creating a totally new one?
Warren Lebovics
Yeah, so we’re creating a new one. The way that we’re, or what we’re calling it’s compensation tech or compensation SaaS. And in particular with Pequity, I think the unique thing about us is if you think about SaaS software as a service, we take it one step further, which is software and a service. And so we really are pioneering this compensation tech environment where we got questions all the time, Brett, when were raising our early fundraising rounds, where the question is what differentiates you from an ATS, what differentiates you from an Hrs? Why are people going to take their budget and put it in that? Are you creating new budget that you need to find, or are you taking budget from other places? And the honest answer is that every company needs compensation software, and some Hrs have little bits and pieces of it, but it doesn’t really do what it needs to do.
Warren Lebovics
Some ATS have little bits and pieces, but again, neither of them have the visibility into each other’s realm, which is for the ATS, they don’t really have visibility into employees, and for the his, they don’t have visibility into candidates. And so companies are recognizing that they’re already spending all the money on Comp consultants and on their Comp team and on these range creations and builds. And they’re spending a lot of money, and they’re able to actually save money by going to products like Pequity, which is going to do it all for them for a much cheaper price point.
Brett
Interesting. And what have you done, would you say, to really rise above all the noise in the market? I don’t know the exact number off the top of my head, but I think it was like 15 or 20 billion raised by HR tech startups last year. How are you rising above all that noise?
Warren Lebovics
Yeah, it’s been a really exciting couple of years for HR tech. I actually think it’s exciting. A couple of years ago, some of the early investors that we spoke to like, oh, I don’t know, HR, I don’t know, and then the pandemic hit and suddenly it’s the hottest market. And the way that I think about it personally is if you’re not in a highly competitive market, I think it’s worth reassessing if the market’s big enough and if you’re actually going to be able to make a dent. But really what we focus on is we’re just focused on building the best product and providing the best service possible for our customers. And that does show. So in an environment where there’s a lot of competition, where there are a lot of new faces popping up and saying, hey, we do all this stuff, for us, one thing that we pride ourselves on is really the integrity of the product that we offer, right?
Warren Lebovics
And so we don’t oversell. We really do want to just provide an amazing experience. And frankly, between you and I think we can probably oversell even more just from making sure we’re not leaving value on the table for customers visiting our marketing site or asking about what does Pequity do? But we want to make sure that we just wildly exceed their expectations. And at the end of the day, we have had customers go to competitors because maybe it’s a tad cheaper, but it’s not really a premium product. Or the competitor says that they can do something that they actually can’t do yet that Pequity can, and they were able to sell it for a lower price point, but they’ve come to Pequity at the end, like, they churn off of the competitor and come to us. And so we’ve seen that as a winning strategy to date, which is just like, be ruthlessly, build the best product possible and just be amazing to your client base, and they’ll eventually come to you.
Brett
Where did you learn that obsession over product? Did that come from LinkedIn, or do you think you just always have that?
Warren Lebovics
I do think that LinkedIn fine tuned it. I think that some of the other product experiences helped with it, too. And the funny thing that I attributed to is I actually think that B to C products do the best job at this, right? B to C. Feels amazing. You cannot launch a B to C product that doesn’t just feel incredible and have all these delight factors, but for a very long time with B to B, you can launch something that kind of feels like crap and it was okay, right? And you can still charge an insane price point. And one of my personal missions as a product and design person has always been make B to B feel like B to C. And so that’s something that we strive to do at Pequity. It’s something that I’ve wanted to do in most of my career stints as well.
Warren Lebovics
And it seems to pay off where when you focus on design and you focus on product. And really what it comes down to, though, is I think it’s really focusing on what the customer really needs and what’s going to absolve their pain points. And when you talk to them, even though they don’t, I think, directly ask for it, most of the time, they do want a product that feels really good because what they’re used to is Netflix and Instagram and all these wonderful experiences. So why should it be that when they’re spending eight or more hours at work, it just feels like crap and it’s clunky and it doesn’t do exactly what they want to do, but they’re paying way more money than they do for their other tools. It just doesn’t really make sense. And so that’s the angle that I personally come at it from.
Warren Lebovics
And I think we attract like minded people to join the team who really want to blow customers away with the product.
Brett
Nice. That resonates a lot with what we preach to clients. And what I preach to my team is if we want to be good at B2B marketing, let’s study B to C companies that are crushing it. That’s the place to learn. Not from another B2B company who’s just doing the same playbook.
Warren Lebovics
Exactly.
Brett
Now, last question here. Since I know we’re up on time, let’s zoom out into the future. Three years from today. What’s the company look like?
Warren Lebovics
So our mission from the very second that we started Pequity was fair pay and opportunity for all. And one of our early mentors, Frank Wagner, he is the VP of Comp at Google. And something that he told Caitlin early on was compensation is directly going to contribute to obviously pay equity and gender gaps and race gaps and just general pay gaps. And where it’s mostly going to happen, actually, is in your 500 to 5000 person companies. Now, the reason being is that they’re growing so fast, they have candidates coming in and asking for maybe out of range or out of budget comp packages. And it could be that these candidates are so incredible that they earn them, but these companies have to move faster. And so they go and they say, okay, I’ll do that. And these one off exceptions wind up trickling down to having a domino effect across their whole and across the market.
Warren Lebovics
When you bring in somebody who’s well over market rate, they eventually leave after maybe, what’s the average tenure at a tech company? 18 months. So they leave, they go to another company, and they’re expecting these really high salaries. They’re going to the Googles of the world, the Facebook’s, or I guess Meta, the Amazons, and they go, hey, I was just getting paid a million dollars at this other company. I need you to match it. And then they go, okay, well, I guess that’s what the market’s driving. We’ll have to do that. And before you know it, the market’s unfair and there are pay gaps. And so that’s why we really target the mid market small enterprise demographic. And the way we see it is that we see in three years every single company using Pequity to pay their people and having a lens into pay equity, being completely compliant with all these new pay transparency laws, and even taking a step further to push pay transparency as far as they want to push it as a company.
Warren Lebovics
So that’s where we see it. We have the team, we have the product, we have the momentum, and we just got to keep our heads down and keep delivering.
Brett
It nice. All about execution.
Warren Lebovics
It sounds like it is always about execution. Always.
Brett
Unfortunately, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we wrap. If people want to follow on with your journey as you continue to build out this company, where’s the best place for them to go?
Warren Lebovics
I think, funny enough, I’m going to reference LinkedIn again. I think LinkedIn is the best place to follow us along. You can check out Pequee.com that’ll have all the latest on our products and then definitely follow us on LinkedIn. You’ll see what we’re up to. We post a bunch of content and we share a lot of content on tips and tricks when it comes to well, I guess not really tricks, just tips and things that you need to know when it comes to compensation.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat and share your vision. This is all super exciting and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
Warren Lebovics
Thanks so much, Brett. All right, keep in touch.
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