Comprehensive.

It is review season. Somewhere in San Francisco, a People lead opens a spreadsheet named comp_FINAL_v7_USE_THIS_ONE.xlsx, prays the formulas survived the weekend, and begins deciding what hundreds of human beings are worth. This is the scene Comprehensive was built to delete.

Compensation is the largest expense most companies will ever have, and for years it has been managed with the least dignified tool in the building - the spreadsheet. Comprehensive is the counterargument. It is an AI-powered platform that pulls salary data, pay ranges, equity, raises, and offers into one place, so the people who decide pay can actually see what they are deciding.

The pitch is refreshingly free of mystique: pay people right, and stop guessing. Comprehensive blends real-time benchmarking data from thousands of companies with configurable pay-range management and pay-equity analytics. Managers get talking points instead of dread. Finance gets a number it can defend. Employees get a process that does not depend on whoever last touched the file.

Roger Lee has a habit of turning his own frustrations into companies. At Human Interest - the 401(k) startup he co-founded - figuring out compensation was a top source of pain. Then, in May 2020, he built Layoffs.fyi, the grimly authoritative tracker that has catalogued hundreds of thousands of tech job cuts. He calls Comprehensive the inverse of that project: it focuses on opportunities, not cuts. One site counts who lost their job. The other helps companies pay the people who still have theirs.

In October 2021 he teamed up with his former Harvard roommate, Teddy Sherrill, who serves as CTO. Earlier that year the company had quietly raised a $6 million seed round led by Inspired Capital, with Floodgate and SV Angel along for the ride. The bet: that remote work, inflation, and a sharpening focus on pay equity had made compensation too complex and too high-stakes for a grid of cells held together by hope.

Return to that People lead and the dreaded spreadsheet. In the Comprehensive version, the open tabs collapse into one screen. The pay ranges are configured, not improvised. The outliers are flagged before anyone has to apologize for them. The manager opens a conversation already holding the right talking points, and the number that comes out the other side is one finance can sign off on without a wince.

The spreadsheet does not vanish out of spite. It vanishes because it was never the right tool for the most expensive decision a company makes. Comprehensive's quiet ambition is to make that obvious - to turn pay from an annual fire drill into something closer to a system of record. The man who built a museum of layoffs is, fittingly, building the place where the paychecks finally make sense.