Kent Plunkett and the price of a straight answer

Kent Plunkett wanted to hire a secretary. What should he pay? It was a modest question, the sort a business owner might reasonably hope to settle before lunch. He could not get a straight answer. The information existed, but getting at it was another matter. Years before pay transparency became a familiar workplace phrase, Plunkett had encountered its absence in the most practical way: he needed to make somebody an offer.

That frustration helped produce Salary.com, which he co-founded in 1999. The career that followed included a public offering, his departure as chief executive, two changes of corporate ownership and a return with the original team. There are founders who go looking for the next thing. Plunkett went back for the previous one.

By December 2025, he was moving into a board director role while his longtime business partner Yong Zhang became chairman and CEO. The handover gave a new shape to a relationship stretching back more than a quarter century. The question that started the business had proved rather more durable than the usual dot-com business plan.

A career recommendation with the price missing

Before Salary.com, Plunkett worked on software based on What Color Is Your Parachute?, the career guide. The software helped people identify suitable work through their interests, abilities and attitudes. It could point toward a career. Finding accessible information about what that career paid was harder.

His own hiring difficulty made the missing piece personal. Compensation consultants possessed useful data, but their services were directed toward organizations able to afford substantial engagements. Small employers and individuals were poorly served. Plunkett and his colleagues saw an opening, then put the idea aside because they had not worked out how to market it.

The name arrived through a domain auction in 1999. Salary.com was available; they bought it. Few business names require less explanation. The previous venture, founded with Cal Brown, had licensed the career guide’s software rights and reached $4 million in sales. Its CD-ROM market was weakening. A small team needed worthwhile work to do next. Plunkett started a separate company for the compensation idea, bringing some of the earlier investors along.

The apprentice who left the investor’s chair

Plunkett grew up around Boston and admired Ted Turner. Georgetown came before Wall Street, consulting and Harvard Business School. He earned an A.B. in economics and government and an MBA. The more revealing qualification, however, was a decision he made after joining St. Paul Venture Capital.

At 27, he decided he ought to learn how to run a company before advising people who did. He moved into operating businesses backed by the firm and learned beside two CEOs. Eventually he committed to operations. The appeal included developing people as well as building products. By 2008, he counted seven startups since 1991.

At ProCD, where he arrived as employee number 55, telephone directories became CD-ROM products and then internet content. He later worked with InfoSpace’s founding team on distributing directory information online. A telephone directory sounds like an unlikely rehearsal for compensation software. Both businesses, though, required collecting information, keeping it useful and finding many buyers for the same underlying resource.

“The cost of maintaining content datasets should be spread out across multiple customers.”Kent Plunkett, 2008

Five hundred jobs, then a second customer

The consumer service launched in June 2000. Distribution through AOL and Yahoo helped Salary.com reach people beyond its own website. Behind that straightforward address was less glamorous work: purchasing compensation surveys, hiring analysts and calculating pay information for a little over 500 jobs. The early launch was financed with less than $500,000 in angel funding.

A corporate product followed in 2001. Employers needed more than a broad estimate. Industry, company size and geography could change the comparison. Building the underlying tables and calculations took a year. The initial corporate offering carried a list price of $10,000 to $15,000 for companies with 3,000 to 50,000 employees.

Plunkett’s earlier directory work had supplied a commercial lesson: a useful consumer service could introduce people to information they would later buy professionally. Salary.com had two audiences with related questions. An employee wanted to understand an offer. A compensation manager needed to price jobs across a business. Serving both made the database work harder.

A test drive, without the airfare

Distribution was only half the problem. Selling enterprise software could require expensive visits and lengthy demonstrations. Salary.com used telephone and internet demonstrations instead. Prospective customers received a working password and were guided through the product. They could try the machinery while somebody explained it, without arranging a conference room and a flight.

Plunkett also made a deliberate distinction about the information inside. In 2008, he explained that the company studied user submissions for research but did not put them into its products. Its compensation information relied on corporate survey submissions or payroll records. Matching comparable work mattered as much as collecting numbers.

The approach connected two forms of comparison: whether employees were paid consistently within an organization, and whether that organization’s pay matched the outside market. Those questions would remain central to his work. A clean interface could make a result easy to retrieve; deciding what belonged in the comparison was the demanding part.

A public company, then a way back

Salary.com completed its IPO in February 2007. Plunkett later put the total capital used to reach that point at roughly $8 million. He described reinvesting available cash into the business and reaching positive free cash flow in fiscal 2004. For the fiscal year ending shortly after the IPO, revenue was about $23 million.

Customer support belonged in the economics, too. In 2008 he described providing roughly ten hours of assistance per client each year, helping customers price jobs without an hourly help-desk bill. Software could accelerate the calculation; a person still sometimes needed help deciding what to calculate.

His first stint as CEO ended in February 2010, when he resigned and initially remained chairman and a director. Kenexa acquired Salary.com later that year. IBM acquired Kenexa in 2012. Plunkett, meanwhile, led Intronis, a cloud backup software company. His career had moved on, while the compensation business sat inside a much larger organization.

In January 2016, Salary.com announced that its founding team had acquired the compensation portfolio from IBM with H.I.G. Capital and Prudential Capital Group. Plunkett was back as CEO. The returning organization had 120 compensation and technology professionals across the United States and China, and was hiring back more than 20 former employees. The reunion involved payroll as well as sentiment.

When the number needs an explanation

The second chapter brought fresh capital. Salary.com announced $67 million in financing in April 2021, followed by a significant equity investment from Accel-KKR in October 2022. The latter announcement also highlighted the Plunkett Pay Equity Framework. His name was now attached to a method for considering the problem that had originally sent him looking for better data.

In 2024, he and employment attorney Heather Bussing published Get Pay Right: How to Achieve Pay Equity That Works. Its impetus was practical: customers needed somewhere to begin. The book joined his compensation experience with Bussing’s legal perspective. The question had expanded from finding a market number to building a pay system an employer could explain.

His definition has three parts: fairness inside the organization, competitiveness outside it and clear communication with employees. A business could satisfy one and still disappoint on another. A consistent internal pay structure might lag the market. A successful recruitment offer might leave an experienced colleague earning less than the new arrival.

Plunkett discussed that latter problem as salary compression. Fixing it could require adjusting existing employees’ pay and revisiting ranges. His recommended starting work was concrete: describe the jobs, check market rates, compare similar roles and investigate differences that need an explanation.

The conversation after the calculation

Communication is where his argument becomes particularly human. Transparency, in his account, means being willing to explain someone’s pay and preparing managers to have that conversation. A published range alone cannot answer every employee’s question. Somebody has to connect the calculation to the person asking.

In the book’s discussion of communicating compensation, Plunkett and Bussing argue for giving both managers and employees the means to understand pay decisions. Welcoming questions has to be sincere. There is a recognizable progression from the entrepreneur seeking an answer about one hire to the author asking organizations to explain their answers to everyone else.

The December 2025 transition placed Zhang in charge and kept Plunkett involved in strategic direction through the board. Their long partnership forms the connective tissue across the changes in ownership and scale. By then Salary.com had made the Inc. 5000 list six times, with appearances spread across its first and second chapters.

Plunkett’s story began with an employer trying to make a fair offer. It has lasted through a CD-ROM retreat, an internet launch, public markets and a buyback. The technology and ownership changed repeatedly. The useful test for all that machinery remains disarmingly ordinary: when somebody asks why a job pays what it does, can the person across the table give a straight answer?