Not just building comp — transforming it.

I've spent fifteen years inside compensation. Long enough to see how the sausage gets made — and long enough to know most of what goes wrong isn't anyone's fault.

Somewhere right now, two people are doing the same job, with the same skill, for different pay. Neither of them knows. The company doesn't either. This is the quiet reality of comp: not villains underpaying people on purpose, just systems that grew faster than the thinking behind them. Bands set by gut. Offers shaped by who negotiated hardest. Gaps that widen one reasonable-seeming decision at a time.

I've seen the cost up close. The talented person who quietly leaves after finding out what a peer makes. The team whose pay drifted out of line because no one had time to look. The founder who genuinely wanted to be fair but had no way to know if they were.

I started Equitas Strata because this is fixable. Compensation can be fair and rigorous, defensible and humane — the same discipline that protects a company from risk is the discipline that pays people what they deserve. These were never opposing goals.

I work with startups because that's where it matters most. The structure you build at 150 people becomes the inheritance of everyone who joins after. Fix it early and fairness compounds. Ignore it and so does the inequity.

And I don't believe in comp as a black box. I build tools you can see into, question, and run yourself — because a fairer comp world isn't one where you depend on me. It's one where you don't have to.

I believe the comp world can be better than it is. That's not a tagline. It's why I do this.