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Docstoc cofounder’s next startup uses crowd info to show how much you should be paid

Docstoc cofounder Jason Nazar on stage at the 2016 LAUNCH Festival on March 3 2016
Image Credit: Ken Yeung/VentureBeat

Docstoc cofounder Jason Nazar is back with a new startup called Comparably, which provides transparency about wages and insights into company culture. The service breaks down compensation based on various factors including company size, location, money raised, as well as gender. The company has started by providing information on the tech industry, but there are plans to expand to other areas in future.

“Our mission is to make work better, and the first way to do this is to provide transparency around compensation and culture,” Nazar told VentureBeat in an interview. Comparably is free for employees and offers complete anonymity. Plus, while you’re getting information to advance your career, you’re also providing valuable insights that will benefit other people who use the site.

Comparably

Users can log in using their email address or LinkedIn —  the service will only take their email address and company details, not any identifiable personal information. From there, users can select the job title, the size of their company, its current growth stage, funds raised, how many years of experience they have, and their gender. The service also lets you measure your compensation against your coworkers (you’ll have to authenticate using LinkedIn).

Providing transparency around the relative salaries of male and female employees is one of the things Nazar and his team believe will make Comparably stand out. The company wants to be a leading resource in addressing the gender pay gap, which it believes it can do by detailing compensation across hundreds of job titles.

Comparably

To encourage participation, the service utilizes surveys that are simple and offer a “quick payoff” — giving you a clear sense of how you’re compensated compared to your colleagues.

All the salary data passes through an algorithm to ensure that it’s valid. While there’s no way to know for certain what an individual person makes, Comparably relies on statistical data from various sources to determine whether your claim that you received $120,000 for a job that pays on average $75,000 is correct. If the system detects an abnormality, it won’t include that salary in its data set for others to reference.

There are currently 70 job titles listed in Comparably, and while the company admits that the available titles won’t be a perfect match for everyone, there’s an ongoing effort to make that selection as complete as possible. The service will support 10 cities at launch, including Los Angeles; San Francisco; Seattle; and Washington, D.C. These were selected as having a “statistically significant amount of tech data,” and additional cities will be added in the future.

Comparably

Compensation isn’t the only thing that Comparably looks at. The section on company culture supports anonymous conversations so peers can talk to one another about issues in their company and industry. Nazar said it’s not a forum for bashing companies but rather designed to offer a transparent view of what’s really going on at a firm.

There are some similarities between Comparably and Glassdoor, but Nazar claims that his company offers the most “accurate and relevant salary data that anyone has seen.”

“We fundamentally think that we can make work better for millions of companies and employees, starting with compensation and culture. It should be a level playing field and will be positive for everyone in the long run,” Nazar explained.

Comparably hopes to give employees the tools to better evaluate their current employment and future options. Companies will be able to use the data to find real, meaningful ways to “evolve, improve, and grow.” “Over time, there will be a lot of ways where work can be made better for people, but this is the most important part to start,” Nazar said.

Comparably

Nazar started working on a new business after stepping down as CEO at Docstoc, following the company’s acquisition by Intuit for reportedly more than $50 million (it was shuttered in December). Reports surfaced at the end of last year that his new venture was called Crew32 and had raised $5.2 million, although the company later revealed the correct amount to be $6.5 million.

Investors include Crosslink Capital, Upfront Ventures, Lowercase Capital, Alpha Edison, Crosscut Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, Cornerstone OnDemand, 500 Startups, Rincon Venture Partners, and others.

Working alongside Nazar are Yammer cofounder George Ishii, DebtMarket cofounder and former Docstoc chief operating officer Mike Sheridan, and InvestedIn cofounder Yadid Ramot.

Comparably is available on the Web — no mobile app currently exists.

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