Announcing TransparentCareer: A journey from class project to company
Today, we are incredibly proud to announce the launch of TransparentCareer, the most personalized compensation and career planning platform on the market. For us, this marks a major milestone for our company, and it is humbling for us to reflect back on the journey that has enabled us to get to this point.
Just over a year ago, as Booth MBA students, what started out as a project in a Ruby on Rails class led us on a journey to solve a small, but annoying problem: we couldn’t find compensation and culture data on companies we were interested in, based on people similar to us in both experience and education.
To get a good sense of this data, we’d have to either:
- Painfully gather anecdotes, engaging in potentially awkward conversations with peers who have worked at various companies, or
- Scrape together generic data from online sources and pray it was relevant to us. According to Glassdoor, a Product Manager at Amazon makes anywhere between $65,000 and $183,000 in salary. What a range. Where do I belong based on my experience and qualifications?
As a result, we created TransparentMBA, a way for our peers to anonymously report their offers and visualize compensation, satisfaction, and work-life balance metrics personalized to them. Instead of high-level averages, the platform provides data across industries, roles, and companies in a more granular and intuitive way than offered by either their school’s career services or sites like Glassdoor.
Within weeks of launching at our school, over 60% of the student body had signed up and we realized might be onto something. Over the next few months, we expanded to 25 more schools, grew from 500 users to over 5,000 (representing 25% of all current U.S. MBA students), developed partnerships with dozens of programs, and refined our pitch through countless hours of coaching sessions and practice with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs around Chicago (thanks guys!).
We ended up winning Booth’s New Venture Challenge competition, the top university accelerator program in the country, and decided to forego our job offers and degrees in order to pursue the company full-time. Remarkably, through the relationships we built during the accelerator, we were able to rapidly raise a seed round from leading investors including Hyde Park Angels, Pritzker Group, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Origin Ventures, OCA Ventures, and Rough Draft Ventures, which closed just weeks after the competition finished.
As we built our company, we talked with hundreds of our users, undergraduates, and alumni and realized that we had stumbled upon a problem that extended well beyond MBAs. The tools on the market for students and early-career professionals to understand their fair pay and explore their career options are significantly lacking. For people making decisions worth potentially millions of dollars and affecting thousands of waking hours, the data available is surprisingly sparse, overly general, and poor quality.
Thats why we built TransparentCareer, a platform to empower students and professionals to maximize their careers through access to better data. We designed TransparentCareer to be the most personalized, granular, and detailed compensation and career planning tool on the market. We’ve already helped our users negotiate a staggering $6.8M in increased pay and we can’t wait to help even more make the most of their careers.
For the MBAs who have been with us from the beginning — thank you, and we know you’ll find TransparentCareer to be even better than TransparentMBA. For people just hearing about us for the first time, we hope you’ll find value in what we’ve built.
Below are just a few examples of ways in which you can use power of TransparentCareer. Thank you, and as always, let us know if you have questions, comments, or feedback.
Personalize every single data point
“Show me compensation for only full-time jobs in Chicago for people who obtained an MBA, are in their first job, and compare by job function”
The most granular company and position data
“Let me see compensation and average hours worked per week for full-time Product Managers at Amazon, working in Seattle, in the first job after their degree”
Automatically benchmark your pay
“Show me how my Google offer stacks up against other Business Development positions at Technology companies in San Francisco”
