An open market for work.

The problem

Compensation is hidden behind NDAs. Skills are self-attested with no verification. Matching is dominated by middlemen whose incentives don't align with workers or with companies. The result is an enormous, structural mispricing of human capital. Talented people are systematically underpaid because there is no public price discovery for what they do.

We think that's fixable.

Why this matters

Peter Thiel makes a point in Zero to One that we keep coming back to: when a hundred near-identical candidates compete for one slot, the gains people fight over (one more internship, one more certificate, one more line on the resume) are tiny relative to the energy spent earning them. The differences between candidates collapse to almost nothing, and yet some get the offer and some don't. The selection ends up being made by committees, recruiters, and pattern-matching on signals that may have little to do with what actually matters.

That isn't price discovery. That's noise.

Wages exist, so in a narrow sense work is already priced. But the price is set one offer at a time, behind NDAs, with the employer holding far more information than the candidate. That isn't a market in the way other markets are. A real market has many buyers competing visibly for the same supply, with prices other buyers and sellers can see and respond to. That's what's missing for labor. It's how we price everything else that matters at scale. There's no good reason work should be the exception.

One concrete consequence: most talented people are underpaid, often by a lot, because their current employer is the only buyer who can see them clearly. Once that's public, a small raise is enough to win them. The candidate gets paid closer to what they're worth. A smarter employer gets a hire who was hidden from them. Only the firm that was relying on opacity to keep wages down loses.

We need critical mass for that mechanism to work. Until then, we're building the layer that gets us there: the ranking, the profiles, the data. When enough of the market is here, the prices will follow.

What we believe

• One open ranking, not silos. Students, individual contributors, executives, freelancers, founders: everyone on the same board, scored on the same axes. Cohorts emerge from the data instead of being hardcoded.
• Real bids set real prices. A score on its own is opinion. A score plus a history of actual offers made to actual people is a market price. We want to be the place where that price gets discovered.
• Transparency is the product. You should be able to see where you stand, what people like you are being paid, and where the gap between rank and price is widest. Workers benefit. Honest employers benefit. Only middlemen lose.
• Data, not opinions. Career advice should cite cohort evidence, not generic platitudes. “People at your rank who climbed the fastest did X” is worth something. “Network more” isn't.

What we're building

Three things, in order.

1. A ranking anyone can take. A few minutes, fourteen dimensions, one score that tells you where you stand against the rest of the market, and lets the rest of the market see you back.
2. A market where companies bid on people. Workers opt in. Companies make real, structured offers. Closed deals become public, time-stamped price data. Hidden offers, hidden salaries, and hidden rankings stop being the default.
3. A picture of the labor market nobody else has. Real bid data, real acceptance rates, real talent flows. Available to workers deciding what to ask for, and to anyone serious about understanding where work is going.

Who this is for

Anyone who works. If you've ever wondered whether you're paid what you're worth, this is for you. If you've ever hired someone and suspected the market was lying to you about what they cost, this is for you. If you think the way people find work is broken, this is for you.

What this is not

• Not a social network. We don't care about your follower count.
• Not a job board. We're not selling listings.
• Not a recruiter. We're not taking a cut to walk a resume across a room.
• Not opinion-driven. Self-reports are a starting point. Real transactions are the truth.

Where we are

Early. The ranking is live. The market is being built. If the thesis is right, the work that follows is the most important thing we'll ever do.