Investing in Pave

People are a company’s biggest asset and investment. Companies spend billions of dollars on recruiting, paying, managing, and trying to retain talent, as people are the lifeblood of a company. In fact, the average Fortune 500 company spends 50-60% of total spend on labor, and that percentage is even higher for an early stage startup. Companies are now recognizing that transparency around compensation is at the heart of all recruiting, promotions, and employee retention conversations.  

Today, compensation is broken for both companies and employees. Companies typically manage compensation in a manual, unwieldy way with limited data. Chief HR Officers (CHROs) are forced to plan and communicate compensation across dispersed spreadsheets and emails between HR, finance, managers, and the candidate. To benchmark offers, companies currently pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for manually collected annual compensation data; this data is immediately stale and often difficult for companies to put in their own context. Employees and candidates suffer, too. They are often left in the dark about how to interpret and value the equity portion of their compensation. As a result, employees often feel undervalued and churn, and candidates struggle to understand the upside of their equity compared to their Google/Facebook offers. The entire process, which is meant to reward employees, is often painful and leads to suboptimal outcomes.

As I spent time talking to CHRO leaders and founders trying to address the problem of compensation transparency, one company clearly surfaced to the top – Pave (formerly Trove), which offers a suite of real-time tools that helps companies plan and communicate total compensation. Today, Pave offers a single source of truth around compensation data for CHROs to do merit cycle and scenario planning, and for candidates and employees to visualize how their compensation evolves over time. And all of this integrates with HR information systems (HRIS), eliminating hours of tedious data entry.  

Customers like Checkr, Allbirds, Thoughtspot, and Instabase rely on Pave to manage compensation planning and communication. When we spoke to these customers, what made us even more excited was how employers and employees alike loved using Pave. We heard how it “cut down 75-80% of the time to complete a merit cycle,” how some candidates viewed their offer letters in Pave “up to 10 times a day as they evaluated their offers.” Pave will bring to market the first ever, API-driven, real-time compensation database. By simply connecting via APIs to your HRIS, application tracking system (ATS) and cap table software, Pave can dynamically provide access to real-time, contextualized compensation data. Employers will no longer need to rely on stale, irrelevant data as they create compensation plans. Similar to how LinkedIn owns the world of recruiting by owning the online resume data and recruiting workflow software, we believe Pave has the opportunity to own the world of compensation, employee rewards, and beyond.

Ultimately, at this early stage, we invest in people. From the first moment we met Matt, we immediately knew he was meant to build something transformative. His fresh perspective and boundless ambition and enthusiasm for tackling compensation are incredibly infectious. When talking to his early customers, we heard over and over how much they enjoyed working with him, how eager he was to build a solution to their frustrations, and how even in the earliest days they were willing to take a chance on Pave because of their faith in Matt to deliver. 

We’re thrilled to be partnering with Matt and team, and to lead Pave’s Series A. Through Pave, we believe employers will better manage their greatest asset and compensation will truly become a reward.

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