#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Greg Gasperin, Co-Founder & CEO, Merify
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Equitable Talent Management Through Skill Data
Based on past experiences in the workplace, Greg Gasperin created Merify to enable talent managers to equitably identify and reward top performers for valuable work. The platform also serves as a tool for employees to quantify and track their performance data. We spoke with him about the need for trust and accuracy in the workplace, Merify’s extensive use of independent contractors, and a much needed social safety net for startup founders.
Tell us about your background. What led you to create Merify?
I am a software engineer by trade and have been for my entire career. At a previous job, I was working with a quality assurance engineer who had also learned how to code, and he was easily one of the best developers I've ever worked with. I went to our management team and asked them to either promote or compensate him for the extra work he was doing, and they declined, saying that things were fine the way they were, and nothing changed. I realized that no skill level data source follows people throughout their careers, even though our co-workers observe our skill level performance every day on the job. How great would it be if we could harness that first-hand data?
This also applies to the hiring process. I experience anxiety, so when I’d go into a job interview, even if I was a great fit, I struggled to point to a data source that could speak to my skills—I’d have to prove my abilities from scratch because no data carried over from interview to interview. And that’s for those who make it to the interview stage—most people are filtered out earlier in the hiring process because there is no trustworthy source for candidate skills, so proxies for talent are used (degrees, titles, and tenure for example).
What does Merify do?
We are a democratized skill validation platform. We give talent managers community-vetted and real-time performance data for their employees with very little overhead. It's all on the flow of work, so it gets done as projects are completed or as you notice positive skill demonstrations in your coworkers. It's a very quick, text- and tax-free process, and our data is backed by proprietary statistical analysis. We do a lot of vetting to ensure honesty and to make sure that the most relevant voices have the highest impact on the data. This is so that we can bake trust, accuracy, and equity into our understanding of any workforce.
What’s been the importance of ecosystem support organizations like Start Out to your entrepreneurial journey?
This week, we joined the 13th cohort of Start Out’s Growth Lab. I founded Merify with my husband, but we're not independently wealthy, and he's been working a full-time job to support us financially. Even though we have a good team of contractors and advisors, it's essentially been a solo effort on my part. Having a network of people who are mostly ahead of where we are, who have gone through the same experiences in building their businesses helps to limit the loneliness of the process. Having that network has been great.
They also have an excellent track record of building relevant and effective sales pipelines. I'm a software engineer, so that’s not exactly my strength, but they're providing a lot of support there.
We’ve also built our advisory board, which is comprised of a lot of people who have extensive backgrounds in HR tech, and that's helping us source partnerships and investor groups. The network from both sides has been invaluable already, and we’ve only just gotten started.
You mentioned your use of independent contractors. Can you dive into how they support your company?
Independent contractors are an extremely necessary part of my business. We would definitely not have the funds to hire a full-time position for pretty much any role at this stage. I'm a developer and I built the API for our company, but we have two contractors who are front-end developers. We also have one UX designer, a DEI team, a fractional CFO, and a graphic designer—all hired as contractors. We have great relationships with all of them, but simply because we’re so early, we cannot yet bring on full-time talent.
There is quite a movement towards freelancing for a lot of people, and I love that idea. Being able to have multiple jobs and projects is great. It does feel a little ridiculous that we're still in a place where health insurance is heavily tied to employment. It’s such an innovation-crushing thing that people like independent contractors—and even startup founders—have to worry about. It’s something that’s on everyone’s mind and should be on policymakers’ minds as well.
We often hear about the importance of a social safety net for founders, especially for first-timers. What’s been your experience there?
For a while, my husband worked full-time on Merify and we got health insurance through the exchange, and it was a fairly decent process. But it was our personal financial situation that made it necessary for him to return to a full-time job, and we then got health insurance through his company. For founders, anything that effectively de-risks the process of starting a company is extremely helpful.
We're privileged to have a great network of people who were able to participate in a friends and family fundraising round. Most people don't have that. We also wouldn't have been able to do this if my husband didn't get a severance package from his old job or if we didn’t have savings that we were willing to drain completely. Basically, everything had to line up perfectly for us to even attempt entrepreneurship.
I think some other governments around the world provide for exploring an idea in someone’s lifetime through a built-in safety net. Having something like that in the U.S. would have a huge impact on entrepreneurship and innovation overall—I can't even imagine what a tiny fraction of a percent of people get the opportunity to explore their ideas.
What are your goals for Merify moving forward?
We're still an early stage startup, but we have a great network through Start Out and our advisory board. Our main goal at the moment is to define our ideal customer profile so that we can build an appropriate sales funnel. Since I'm new to the whole entrepreneurship thing, I initially thought that anyone who shows any interest can be a customer. The reality is that you have to focus your energy on your ideal customer, especially at the beginning. So getting that knowledge and also building the customer pipeline is going to be our top priority for the next few months.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email advocacy@engine.is.
