0:00 Introduction

Welcome to the show. What a guest we have. She has recently arrived in Australia as they’re launching into the market here. Amit, so good to have you on the show. So great to be here, seriously. This is my second time in Australia. The first time I arrived I was back-to-back and didn’t see the opera house. This trip I’m hoping to see it. We’re a great business with great traction in a beautiful country.

3:00 Who is Amit and what is Compete

I’m Amit, married to Johnny, from Israel. Mother of three crazy boys. Co-founder and CEO of Compete together with my husband Diony, who is CTO. I started my career at Palo Alto Networks, led recruitment in their Israel entity, then moved to SentinelOne. I experienced two things: not knowing how much to pay my candidates, and not being able to give data-driven recommendations to my executive team because the benchmarks I had were outdated and too high-level.

7:00 The compensation data problem

If you think about backend engineer versus full-stack versus mobile, they’re all different profiles under the wide umbrella of software engineering. But surveys aggregate them all into one super high-level single column on a page. That’s not arming me with the in-depth data I need to maintain internal fairness. The disparity between a frontend, full-stack, and mobile engineer can be enormous. We see that clearly in Compete’s data today.

10:00 How Compete works: data integration and six-hour refresh

We integrate to their HR systems, pull the data every six hours. It’s literally real time. The algorithm takes the high-level job titles in their HRIS and breaks them down into specific role profiles to ensure apples-to-apples comparison. The give-a-little, get-a-lot model: you contribute your data, you gain access to the full benchmark. It covers salary, commission, equity, bonus, and every benefit category: maternity, paternity, wellness, and everything that’s evolved since COVID.

13:00 Filtering and the stock market analogy

You can compare yourself to the total benchmark, all tech companies in Sydney, or narrow to sub-50-employee seed companies in Sydney in cybersecurity. That granularity is what makes it valuable. You can see product managers trending up, frontend developers trending down. Steve called it watching the stock market for jobs, which is exactly right. Comp structure has evolved massively since COVID, and our data captures those real-time shifts.

16:00 From Israel to the US to Australia

We started bootstrapped in Israel. When we reached 100 customers we closed our seed. Eight to nine months later we closed our Series A. By then we were in Israel and the US. Australian customers were already using the platform before the official local launch, because our existing customers had Australian entities and replicated their use here. We see Australia as a strategic APAC launch pad. We pulled the data and could see exactly where the demand was.

20:00 Gender pay gap: the data from the platform

Across all levels the gender ratio is 70-30, male to female. At the C-suite level it drops to 13 percent female. Within that 13 percent, the pay gap increases. We see a lot of companies using Compete specifically to address their internal fairness policies, driven by new pay transparency laws globally. It’s not enough to talk about it: you need data to actually walk the walk and make sure your policies are implemented. That’s what the platform provides.

25:00 Product roadmap and employee-facing version

We provide company-level compensation benchmarking but it’s one component of a full picture. The roadmap includes connecting compensation data with tenure, performance, engagement, and satisfaction to give HR teams a smarter machine for promotion and hiring decisions. An employee-facing version where individuals can check their own market value is also on the roadmap. In Israel, employees already ask their HR teams: do you use Compete? That signal is becoming a recruitment tool in itself.