How my experience at Workday shaped the vision behind building Compa

I left Workday four years ago to found Compa. (This is the story).

Last week we announced Compa’s product partnership with Workday… it was a full circle moment.

How did we get to this milestone?

We built Compa from the beginning focused on three guiding principles, resulting in a shared vision with Workday for the future of compensation.

These are Compa’s guiding principles, told in every comp person’s favorite form of communication: whiteboard sketching.

But first — mental state versus success over time

The founder’s psychological journey looks like seismograph chart during a major earthquake.

Everything is exaggerated. Time is represented linearly on this chart, but it actually feels more like a gravity well, like how Matthew McConaughey is on the water planet for only three hours, but 23 years in Earth time pass by.

But gradually good decisions, hard work, and obsessing over our customers compound, and success begins to grow.

In a startup world of constant change, three guiding principles have stayed the same since the day we founded Compa.

Principle #1: Compa is for enterprise comp

Compa is for enterprise comp. It’s not for small businesses, and it’s not for not comp.

I spent the first ten years of my career in comp, all at larger companies, including at Workday. At big companies, everything is defined by scale — time savings are in the $ millions, comp precision is in the $ billions, and stakeholder pressure from the Board, shareholders, and the public is demanding.

We set out to build Compa with this focus, and avoided the constant suggestions and opportunities to leave this quadrant. In turn, we built software tuned to the needs of comp teams at big companies, resulting in powerful alignment with Workday’s customer base.

Principle #2: Compa is market intelligence

Compa is market intelligence. Workday is a system of record for managing people and money.

At big global companies, compensation planning is a complicated process with a long tail of must-have requirements to get it right. From the beginning, we believed HCMs are best positioned to help enterprise comp teams manage successful merit cycles with tightly-integrated data flows, scaling role-based security, and deep customization.

Similarly, we believe professional comp teams need outstanding market data to efficiently manage billions in annual spend. Focusing our entire company on market intelligence has enabled us to invest aggressively in data quality, methodology, privacy, configuration, and speed, resulting in extraordinary precision like multisource matching, weight-by-company privacy, and skills-based benchmarking.

Our partnership helps comp teams do more with their market data in Workday, keeping Compa focused on making the data even stronger.

Principle #3: Compa is software

Compa is software, not a survey.

That means Compa is fast. Submissions are automated. Data flows in real-time. And insights are at your fingertips instantly — not on the other side of a hundred billable hours from a consultant.

Building market intelligence natively in software enables extraordinary new ways to manage compensation strategy dynamically on a global scale. Compa has only begun to scratch the surface with features like market unvested equity and custom job matching.

Our partnership with Workday unlocks an entire new world of compensation insights and automation, and it’s possible only in software.

Join me in conversation with Emily Walker, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Workday, on Thursday at 11am Pacific to learn how we’re making Compa market data available in Workday.

It’s tomorrow, and it’s live!

Compa is for enterprise comp. Compa is market intelligence. Compa is software.

And now, Compa data is coming to Workday.

Full circle moment. :)

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