A Piece of Paper, Twice a Year
Twice a year at Facebook, Matt Schulman received an envelope. Inside: his rating, his promotion decision, his equity refresh, his new salary. No context. No explanation. No formula. He asked his manager how the numbers were arrived at. His manager said, honestly, that he had no idea - it was a computer algorithm.
For someone who had studied economics at Wharton and computer science at Penn simultaneously, this was not a satisfying answer. It was, however, the seed of a billion-dollar company.
"I would ask my manager how he came up with those numbers, and he would say that he hadn't, and it was all done by computer algorithm."Matt Schulman on the moment Pave became inevitable
Schulman left Facebook in 2019 after two years as a software engineer focused on mobile user experiences. Before Silicon Valley, he had spent a year doing freelance coding and climbing mountains globally - the Andes, mostly, with backcountry ski runs through the Rockies for variety. The man clearly has a relationship with altitude, literal and figurative.
When he came back down, he started building a personal finance assistant. The kind of app that would help employees understand what their compensation actually meant in dollars and cents. During user interviews, a VP of Finance gave him a note that changed his direction entirely: "You're a little bit off the mark, but you're close to something that is truly top-of-mind painful for us." That pain was stock options. Specifically, the fact that no one understood them.
200 Cold Emails. 59 Replies. One Company.
Before writing a line of product code, before raising a dollar, Schulman bought an email list and sent 200 cold messages to CFOs and VPs of People. The subject: stock options are confusing and stressful. He asked if they'd jump on a call.
Fifty-nine said yes within 24 hours. Not 5. Not 15. Fifty-nine. That response rate - nearly 30% - was a market signal so loud it barely needed interpreting.
"Stock options are confusing and stressful." - Matt Schulman's first cold outreach email, 2019. It got 59 replies in 24 hours.
He committed to one rule before building anything: get paid customers first. First revenue landed in March 2020 - the same month the world shut down. The timing was accidental but perfect. COVID-19 had just forced companies to make urgent decisions about remote work pay policies. Board-level conversations about compensation were suddenly unavoidable. Pave arrived exactly when companies needed exactly that.
The PhilosophyBurnt Pizza and Why It Works
Schulman named Pave's early-stage philosophy with an analogy that stuck: burnt pizza. The framework sits alongside oxygen (essential) and aspirin (pain relief) as a third type of product - one that customers will use even when it's rough, because the underlying problem is so acutely real that a flawed solution beats nothing.
"If you're tackling a problem that is very important to solve, an early-stage product can be appetizing - or at least filling - even if it's a bit rough around the edges."Matt Schulman — The Burnt Pizza Framework
This was not accidental modesty. Schulman built Pave knowing it was burnt pizza. He released imperfect software to customers who were desperate enough to use it anyway - and used their feedback to make it less burnt. By the time the Series A closed, the pizza had improved considerably.
The Funding StoryFrom YC to Unicorn in Three Years
The investor list reads like a greatest-hits compilation of Silicon Valley: Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Y Combinator, YC Continuity, and then - at Series C - Index Ventures stepping in as lead. Mark Goldberg from Index took a board seat. Former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner joined as an individual investor. So did Tudor Havriliuc, the former Facebook VP of HR - one of the very executives whose organization had handed Schulman that twice-yearly envelope with no explanation.
The June 2022 Series C announcement came with a surprise attached: the same day Pave disclosed the $100M raise at a $1.6 billion valuation, it also announced the acquisition of Option Impact from Morgan Stanley. The deal instantly made Pave the largest compensation data provider for private companies in the world. Two announcements, one day, one press release - a playbook borrowed from the startup tradition of dropping news in clusters.
The VisionNaming the Category: CompTech
Schulman coined the term "CompTech" - compensation technology - as a deliberate act of category creation. The framing positioned Pave not as a HR software vendor but as the architect of an entirely new industry vertical, pulling compensation out of what he called the "Compensation Dark Ages."
The evidence that he was right: within seven months in 2021, over $100 million in venture capital flowed into compensation tools. The timing wasn't luck. COVID-19 had triggered something. Remote work forced immediate questions about geographic pay. The Great Resignation made compensation the centerpiece of every retention conversation. Boards that had never asked about salary bands were suddenly demanding real-time compensation data.
Why the First 10 Hires Determine Everything
Schulman's approach to hiring is as deliberate as everything else he does. At Y Combinator, he articulated a principle that shaped Pave's culture from the start.
"The first 10 hires would set the tone for the next 100."Matt Schulman — YC Blog on Learnings of a CEO
He personally recruited every early employee. Dinners. Walks. Video calls. He ran a contractor-to-full-time pipeline with what he describes as a 100% conversion rate - partly because he let employed candidates work nights and weekends while keeping their existing jobs. He wasn't looking for credentialed specialists. He was hunting for generalists with rapid career trajectories, what he calls "high-slope" candidates: people whose career arc is steep, not just already high.
His recruitment tools were eccentric and effective. A shared Google Doc with each candidate tracking their progress through interviews and documenting their aspirations. A Slack channel per key role with daily sourcing updates. Personalized Loom video messages when extending offers. Email drip sequences where - he noted empirically - the third email with "Any thoughts?" outperformed everything else.
For executive candidates, he would run roughly ten backchannel conversations, asking each contact a single question: "What specific recommendations would set this person up for success and unleash their full potential?" Then he'd share the answers with the candidate before the offer. Radical transparency at the hire stage - fitting, for someone building a company around pay transparency.
Track RecordWhat He Built
- Grew Pave from a cold-email list to $1.6B valuation in under three years from founding
- Raised $471M+ in total venture capital from a16z, Bessemer, Index Ventures, YC, and Bezos Expeditions
- Scaled to 3,500+ enterprise customers and a team of ~170
- Acquired Option Impact from Morgan Stanley - making Pave the largest compensation data provider for private companies globally
- Coined and defined "CompTech" as an independent industry category
- Y Combinator alumni and On Deck Founders Fellow
- Named speaker at WorldatWork Total Rewards 2025 on "The Equity Renaissance"
The Three-Chapter Plan
Schulman describes Pave's future in three chapters. The first: own the US tech market for compensation management. The second: expand globally and into industries beyond tech - manufacturing, healthcare, financial services. The third, and most ambitious: build a "professional graph" connecting 3.5 billion workers, creating the first truly democratic global database of labor market data.
The comparison point is obvious. Jeff Weiner - who invested in Pave - built LinkedIn, the most complete professional network on earth. Schulman is building the compensation layer that sits beneath it. Not a network of profiles, but a network of pay. What people earn, what the market bears, what a fair wage looks like in Sao Paulo versus San Francisco versus Singapore.
By the Numbers
Traits of the Founder
People who have worked with Schulman use similar language: direct, data-obsessed, willing to move on imperfect information when the signal is strong enough. He introduced himself to the compensation industry not with a warm referral network or a prestigious prior company title - but with a cold email and a 30% reply rate. The approach says something about the person.
He is, by his own account, a "comp nerd" - someone who finds genuine intellectual pleasure in the mechanics of pay. Salary bands, equity schedules, 409A valuations, geographic differentials. Topics that make most executives' eyes glaze over are, for Schulman, the interesting part. That specific enthusiasm - unusual for a founder, invaluable for the product - shows up in how Pave presents compensation data to the people who use it.