The Man Who Made Tech Layoffs Transparent - Then Turned His Attention to Pay
In March 2020, Roger Lee was on paternity leave when the tech industry started shedding jobs at a pace nobody could track. So he built a spreadsheet. Then a website. Then the site became Layoffs.fyi - and the internet's de facto record of who got cut, and where.
That is not a typical origin story. Most founders trace a tidy line from problem to product. Roger Lee's line runs through paternity leave, a domain name he built during a pandemic, a spreadsheet that became a media fixture, and a side project that made him - improbably - one of the most quoted sources in business journalism. His wife, a doctor, grounded it perfectly: "You're just some dude." His data ended up in Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, NPR, and Bloomberg anyway.
By 2023, Layoffs.fyi had tracked approximately 450,000 tech layoffs and drew more than 1 million monthly visitors. The Information called him "Tech's Doom-and-Gloom Guy." The San Francisco Business Times named him to their "40 Under 40." The New York Times ran a full profile. He had never been laid off himself, and had never laid off any of his own employees.
Lee is now the Co-Founder and CEO of Comprehensive, a compensation management platform he launched in 2021 with co-founder Teddy Sherrill. The seed round: $6 million, led by Inspired Capital, with Floodgate, SV Angel, and a roster of founders from Rippling, Wealthfront, and Pilot writing checks. The pitch: compensation management is broken, companies are making pay decisions across "a thousand spreadsheets," and nobody has a holistic view of what they're paying or whether it's fair.
"We were using what felt like 1,000 spreadsheets to track and decide salaries, equity, raises, pay ranges and offers. It was impossible to get a holistic view of employee compensation to ensure that we were paying people fairly and competitively."- Roger Lee, on the problem that inspired Comprehensive
Comprehensive: Pay Without the Chaos
The insight behind Comprehensive came from Human Interest - the 401(k) company Lee co-founded in 2015 that went on to raise more than $700 million from BlackRock, SoftBank, and TPG. As Human Interest scaled, figuring out compensation became its own full-time job. Equity bands, salary ranges, raise cycles, pay transparency compliance, offer benchmarking - all of it scattered across disconnected systems. "When comp data lives in siloed systems," Lee said, "a company can't really make informed decisions on compensation."
Comprehensive solves that by pulling everything into one platform: salary benchmarking against real-time data from 6,000+ U.S. tech companies, pay range management, equity tracking, compensation review cycles, pay gap analysis, and employee total rewards communication. Clients include Clearbit, LaunchDarkly, and Mercury. The platform integrates with Rippling, BambooHR, Culture Amp, and 15Five.
Lee describes Comprehensive as the logical sibling of Layoffs.fyi: "I almost see it as the inverse - where I can start tracking some happier news for a change." One site tells you where people are losing jobs. The other helps companies make sure the jobs people have are being paid fairly.
Lee and Sherrill operate as a distributed team - Sherrill is NYC-based, Lee is in San Francisco - meeting quarterly for strategy and planning. Lee uses the Eisenhower Decision Matrix to prioritize his time, specifically targeting the "Important, But Not Urgent" quadrant that most founders skip in favor of the fires in front of them. Strategy. Culture. Long-term planning. "This category," he says, "will ultimately drive the success of my business."
Five Companies. Two Decades. One Through-Line.
From AIM to Applied Math: How He Got Here
Roger Lee grew up in Congers, New York, and taught himself HTML at age 12 on a site called antistudy.com. At 16, he co-founded SubProfile - an AIM instant messaging service that let users customize their profiles with extended social features. By 2003, three of the ten most-visited teen websites on the internet were his. Thirty million monthly views. His domain name was eventually hacked; he paid a bribe via PayPal to recover access. Even that was a product lesson.
At Harvard, where he studied Applied Mathematics, he and Tyler Bosmeny co-founded PaperG in 2007 with three Yale students. PaperG helped newspapers and publications automate digital advertising. They won the Harvard i3 Innovation Challenge in 2008, raised over $1 million by 2010, and eventually rebranded as Thunder. Forbes listed them among their 100 Most Promising Companies in 2011. Lee turned down a McKinsey offer post-graduation - a clean, well-paying exit ramp - to keep building instead.
Thunder was eventually acquired by Walmart. Lee also built Job Change Notifier during this era: a LinkedIn tool that alerted users when professional contacts changed employers. TechCrunch and Mashable covered it. It was tracking job changes for 20 million connections before LinkedIn's API policy changes shut it down. In retrospect, it was the earliest version of his transparency-through-data thesis.
In 2015, he and Paul Sawaya founded Human Interest, originally called Captain401 - a company built to bring 401(k) plans to small businesses that had historically been locked out of the market. They went through Y Combinator's S15 batch. Lee obtained a Series 65 investment advising certification. The company raised hundreds of millions from institutional investors and now serves over 20,000 small businesses. Lee sits on the board.
"My hope was that by giving more visibility to these tech layoffs, I could help the laid off employees find new jobs more quickly."- Roger Lee, on the purpose behind Layoffs.fyi
Accidentally Building the Internet's Most-Cited Labor Database
Layoffs.fyi started in March 2020, while Lee was on paternity leave. Tech companies were starting to cut workers as COVID-19 scrambled the economy. No single source was tracking it cleanly. Lee built one. It was initially a spreadsheet. Then a website. Then a resource that became indispensable to recruiters, journalists, policymakers, and laid-off workers themselves.
The mechanics are simple: Lee manually researches and catalogs every tech layoff he can verify, publishing the company name, number of cuts, date, and source. "It's kind of a surreal experience every day to be reading and posting layoff news," he said. "I've read, at this point, over 1,000 articles about tech layoffs." The site operates on a loose definition of "tech company": if they sell software, they qualify. If they've raised venture capital, they usually do too.
The cultural shift Layoffs.fyi helped accelerate is real. Layoffs in tech were once handled quietly - announcements delayed, numbers obscured, employees kept in the dark. The existence of a public, real-time record changed the incentive structure. Companies that tried to low-ball their headcount cuts got corrected by Layoffs.fyi's crowdsourced submissions and media citations. The New York Times concluded that the site's popularity was "a symptom and a cause of a cultural shift toward transparency about layoffs in tech."
The site has been cited by the BBC, Reuters, NPR, Bloomberg News, Fox Business, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. Recruiters use it to find talent after mass layoffs. Laid-off workers post their information to be found. CNBC and the San Francisco Chronicle call Lee routinely for comment on employment numbers. He has declined to describe the site as a business - it remains, in his telling, a personal project. The Information has other ideas about what it says about him.
"Employee compensation is now more complex and higher-stakes than ever, given the recent trends of remote work and inflation and the focus on DE&I."
"When comp data lives in siloed systems, a company can't really make informed decisions on compensation."
"If I could make a living off this, why wouldn't I do this for the rest of my life?"
"I almost see [Comprehensive] as the inverse of layoffs.fyi where I can start tracking some happier news for a change."
Twenty-Five Years of Building
Things Worth Knowing
Age when he taught himself HTML and built his first website - antistudy.com
Age when he co-founded SubProfile, which became a top-10 teen destination online
Times he's been laid off - and times he's laid off his own employees
Layoff articles he personally read while maintaining Layoffs.fyi
Companies founded across two decades in tech - all building something workers actually needed
Times he's partnered with SV Angel - they backed both Human Interest and Comprehensive