I Joined Figures as an Advisor
I Joined Figures as an Advisor
Advisory Position - Compensation Benchmark - New Category - Information Business
Hello, I am Nicolas Bustamante. I’m an entrepreneur and I write about long-term company building.
Check out some of my popular posts:
The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Surviving Capitalism with Competitive Moats
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Six months ago, an ex-teammate and friend, Grégoire, introduced me to Virgile to discuss his startup. Figures is a software to benchmark, review, and communicate compensation plans. I happily jumped on a call and did my best to answer Virgile's questions by asking him more questions. I then sent him a follow-up email sharing my experience and adding several articles to challenge his perspective. After this initial contact, a strange thing happened.
Having read all the articles, Virgile replied and asked more thoughtful questions. I answered his questions for what I thought would be the end of the conversation, as it often happens. We continued our discussion, and before I knew it, we were talking about competitive moats, fundraising, OKR methodology, hiring plan, culture, and much more.
That was the beginning of my role as an advisor for Figures. I like working with Virgile, an intelligent, humble, hard-working, and funny person, as well as Bastien, Figures' CTO, who independently created an outstanding product that rivals well-funded US competitors. I am grateful to work with them because I like the team and Figures' product matters.
I have experienced firsthand the pain of crafting and communicating compensation plans. My company suffered from unnecessary tensions because we lacked the data on specific positions. Regrettably, our business plan second-guessed potential salaries and yearly raises, generating countless mistakes. I remember my team struggling to gather sufficient and up-to-date data per job and seniority. The manual process was painful and inaccurate.
With Figures, accessing compensation market data is seamless. I love the dashboard that showcases a compensation index for every department, job, and seniority. Figures also emphasizes a gender-equality index that gave us a fresh perspective on this crucial topic. Today, I use Figures' explorer to browse market compensation data whenever I doubt a specific comp. Even better, Figures has a tool to compare a candidate expected comp to our compensation plan and the whole market. Better information drives better decisions for companies and employees alike.
Figures' product is essential, and it solves an age-old problem for companies. Figures is creating a new market category by adding reviewing and communication features within the traditional benchmarking software. Virgile and Bastien have already built solid competitive moats with a valuable data network effect, a strong channel partnership distribution, and great integrations to payroll software.
Working on Figures has made me a better builder. While I believe founders should focus on nothing but their early-stage business, late-stage founders should probably work with other startups. At some point, analyzing other's people business is essential to step up and broaden one's perspective. Helping Figures gave me great insight on how to improve my own business.
I'm writing this to put my reputation at risk. Because I'm available whenever the founders want to tackle a challenge, it will be my responsibility if Figures doesn't reach its ambitious goals. Nevertheless, any success is due to the Figures' team's hard work and dedication. They are the ones building, selling, and operating the business to create value for their customers, and they are crushing it!
If you're working in Europe on compensation plans, do yourself a favor: schedule a demo with Virgile and buy Figures. If you're an ambitious startup builder, consider joining Figures. They are hiring, remotely or in Paris, an engineering team leader, a senior product designer, a CSM, a head of marketing, and country launchers for the UK, Spain, and Benelux.
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