Compt in COVID- An interview with Compt’s CEO and Co-Founder Amy Spurling
A One-on-One Interview with CEO Amy Spurling from Compt
Amy Spurling, CEO and Co-founder of Compt, sat down to answer a few questions before finalizing their $1.5M funding round led by Harlem Capital, Impellent Ventures, & Slack. We explored how COVID-19 has changed how employers approach employee benefits, how Compt is on the front line in shepherding diversity and inclusivity through flexible perk programs, as well as how a serial C-level entrepreneur can embody core values around fairness in multiple successful businesses.
Listen to the whole conversation here:
Interview transcript edited for clarity and length.
Dan: I'm really excited to sit down with you, Amy Spurling from Compt, to talk a little bit about your journey, your story, as well as the organization and how it's pivoting in this new environment. What I think is fascinating- and really why I wanted to talk with you- is because Compt doesn’t really have to pivot that much...but, before I start telling your story, why don't you introduce yourself? What do you do? What is Compt?
Amy: Thanks so much for having me today, I really appreciate it. It's unprecedented times, as everyone knows and talks about, and so it's definitely an interesting time to be an early stage company and to see where your product is going to go and what's going to happen.
My background is that I've been a CFO a bunch of times, COO a couple of times, and all in growth stage tech companies. I've ridden the economic cycle: I was CFO in 2008 and we had to do big layoffs at the company I was at during the time and figure out how to grow and thrive through a really tough environment. I cut my teeth pretty early in my career doing that. When I started Compt, it was trying to solve a very specific problem: sitting over finance and HR and trying to engage employees while building a company that can ride economic cycles and not just be a product that does really well when everyone is flushed with cash but something that is even more necessary when there's an economic downturn.
Dan: Can you explain what Compt is at a very basic level?
Amy: We look at employee compensation around employee perks in particular and how that gets distributed and managed by employees. We want perks to be a lot more fair and equitable. We are a perks management software system that allows companies to align their perks with their culture, but really we allow employees to determine what “perks” means to them. We believe that personalization is key: every single employee should be able to do something entirely different and that should scale within an organization at the same time.
Dan: It sounds like Compt was designed to solve a particular problem or injustice.
Amy: Both. All of my companies that I have been part of have been scaling, adding lots of employees, and you see where you have a self-fulfilling prophecy where you keep bringing.in perks and ancillary benefits that meet the needs of your current employee base. The problem is that you keep attracting the same exact people over and over. Most companies start out homogenous, not by design but just by who's around the table in an early stage company...and then you just keep adding more of the same exact person. When you get to be a hundred and fifty people, you look around and you say, “Wow, everyone looks just like me,” whatever “me” is, and then you're trying to reverse engineer diversity and it’s very difficult to do.
We wanted to break that cycle and give companies a way to build a more diverse team out of the gate without having to spend money they don't have.
Dan: Why were people using Compt before COVID-19?
Amy: Before quarantine, people were using Compt in a super competitive labor market. It was really hard to get the skilled labor that you need. They were trying to figure out, “How do I get the right people around the table?” Salaries were not increasing and companies were bringing in all these ancillary benefits to engage people beyond the escalation of having kombucha on tap, then beer, then yoga. Instead, employers were asking, “How do I take that administrative burden down to offer basically unlimited benefits but on a budget?”
One of our customers thinks very broadly about employee perks. I saw that one of their employees had their hot water heater bust and they were able to use their Compt account to offset some of that cost. Another employee on that same team had their dishwasher break. That's not a typical “perk”- who has a hot water heater replacement as a perk, that's not a thing!- but if you're an employee, a big expense like that is a tough one to deal with. If your company allows you to get support in the way that you need in the moment you need it...that is so powerful. I get goosebumps when I see amazing companies doing awesome things for their teams.
Dan: My gym membership isn't gonna do much when I go home and I can't take a shower to clean up!
Amy: Not so helpful, right? The massage and the fun stuff is great, but sometimes you have basic needs that need to be met and if your company can help with that it creates a mutual respect and loyalty between companies and employees.
Dan: Now it's a totally different world.
Amy: A very different world. A lot of companies are using us right now to help their teams transition to being remote because they have a lot of benefits at headquarters but now everyone is scattered. They're trying to figure out, “All right, how do we support these people?”
Dan: Right, you can’t get kombucha on tap if you can't go to the office.
Amy: Exactly! That's not helpful. You can’t go to your gym or yoga but you still need support as a team. You need to be able to build out a home office.You have kids at home. This is nobody's ideal work-from-home scenario.
Dan: What have you seen so far to make that remote life more palatable to their employees?
Amy: A lot of companies are trying to make sure that people have some connection so employees don't feel isolated. There's a lot of virtual coffee times, virtual happy hours, virtual yoga, virtual meditation...a heavy focus on mental well-being and trying to create a sense of community despite the fact that we're not sitting next to each other right now.
Dan: How have you seen Compt evolve as a business with all these changes? How are people dealing with it in your organization?
Amy: The product hasn't had to change. It wasn't like we pivoted business models or anything like that. As a team we were working remote two days a week and now we're working remote all days a week.
We changed up our meeting cadence. Every morning at 9:30- because it's late for some of us but early for some of the engineers- we do a virtual coffee where it's not about work. Sometimes we play trivia, sometimes we just chat. Several folks on my team don't drink and some have kids so virtual happy hours don’t work well. So, we socialize first thing in the morning instead and that has been really nice and we've been able to continue to bond and connect with each other without being in the same space.
You take for granted that when you're sitting in an office with somebody that you're chatting with them. You realize that when it needs to be intentional- like it needs to be right now- how much better you actually get to know somebody versus just sitting next to someone. We are getting to know each other even better which is really cool.
Dan: Have you as a leader found some new relationships within your organization based on this kind of intentionality?
Amy: Totally. We had a sales guy start in mid-January. The poor guy: his first week was in a co-working space in Boston that had a landlord issue that had nothing to do with us. The cops showed up to kick all of the co-working tenants out his first week...then we had a quarantine! He’s not from startup land so it’s all new. He and I have spent a lot more time chatting and it's been really interesting. I've gotten to know him so much better because we've had so much more interaction than we probably would have had otherwise.
Dan: That's great. Do you see this as a strategy going forward after quarantine ends? Are you going to continue trying to build these intentional relationships?
Amy: Definitely on the intentionality. We've got a very diverse team: people live all over, some with kids, different religions, not everybody drinks. A lot of what would typically happen in a tech company doesn't happen in our company. It's hard to do an out-of-work activity that we're all excited about, so it's really easy to default to nothing when there's not something that we all want to do.
I'm adding that intentionality now. I can see where that's had a really interesting impact on the team in a really positive way. It's easy. It's coffee every morning. It's not a complicated thing.
Dan: It sounds like the makeup of your organization is almost an extension of the values that you embedded in the product. You wanted a product that recognized people’s diversity and allows people self-expression and it sounds like you've built an organization that captures that mission.
Amy: That's true. From day one that's been part of the philosophy of how this company was going to be built. I personally didn't want to be another tech company that looked like every other tech company I had been part of. I don't think it's the right thing and I don't think it makes business sense to keep building companies the same way.
There's a reason why 90% of startups fail. When you look around Boston there's amazing talent but if all you do is hire MIT engineers who have all been taught by the same professors, you've got 30 years of talent who have been taught by the same people and you are going to have a pattern of behavior. Break outside that box and you will find some really interesting and different perspectives that can add to the mix. Having lots of different types of people and types of perspectives builds a better company, builds a better product, and we need a product that reflects the people that we're working with.
Dan: Looking at your career you have a lot of roles that start with the letter C: controller, CFO, COO, CEO... What kinds of things have you picked up along the way that have helped you build this mission-driven organization?
Amy: Part of it is this innate visceral reaction when things don't feel fair. Fairness is a big deal to me. There needs to be an expectation that if you do the right things, you get recognized. We actually don't negotiate salaries with incoming candidates because we're paying market rates and we share our data with them. You shouldn't have to ask for five thousand dollars more. Even if you get it, you'll then ask yourself, “Wow, did I not ask for enough? What would have happened with ten grand more?”
There's a lot of data that says that women and people of color are less likely to negotiate, which adds to the pay gap. That fairness piece is something that has been a thread throughout my career in my roles managing finance and HR. Now, building my own company, that is absolutely a core principle.
Dan: I would imagine that Compt is trying to make this remote transition easy for businesses: any plug about how Compt can help a business right now?
Amy: In the world of HR software you don't typically offer things for free. Free software, quite frankly, is a little scary if you're on the buy side which I was for years. You're wondering if this thing that impacts compensation actually even works. Living in a new world, we are offering our software free until June 1. You don't even have to put down a credit card. All we want to do is try and be a support for companies who need to transition their people to remote. You can create stipends for their team to be able to get the things they need for their office and not jam up the HR folks who are completely underwater right now.
Dan: Well thank you so much for sitting down and chatting about this. I can't wait to see how the organization grows and changes as the quarantine continues. Thank you so much!
Amy: Thank you!
