success
from company success
separate personal
This week we get Up-Close with Merten Wulfert, founder and co-CEO at Ravio. Ravio is Europe’s leading real-time compensation benchmarking platform, founded last year and backed by leading venture capital fund Northzone. Merten was previously a managing director at Deliveroo responsible for APAC and the Middle East, having first joined the company at series B back in 2015. During this interview, Merten speaks about his earlier career at Deliveroo, and the vision behind Ravio and the company’s progress to date. Merten also offers some advice to other founders building in the current economic climate.
Give us a whistle-stop tour of your career to date?
I started my career in investment, working under serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky. Martin, a man of many talents, has established companies ranging from biotech and real estate to software and fibre optics. I had the opportunity to learn a lot from him. He was my first mentor and his influence ignited my entrepreneurial spirit. However, after some time, I realised that my passion was more aligned with the operational side of businesses. The frustration of being on the sidelines and not directly influencing the trajectory of companies led me to take the entrepreneurial leap and start my own company. But my first venture did not succeed. As a young professional fresh out of university, I underestimated the complexities of business. Despite failure, this venture taught me invaluable lessons about the start-up world, pointing out my shortcomings and gaps in my knowledge. I was eager to learn and improve. With this in mind, I joined HotelTonight, a company that was developing a groundbreaking mobile hotel booking app at the time.
“As a young professional fresh out of university, I underestimated the complexities of business”
Tell us about your subsequent journey with Deliveroo?
When I joined Deliveroo, it was truly a startup. We were thirty employees and active in just three cities! Despite the small scale, there was an incredible energy and vibrancy in the office. It was full of people passionately engaged with their work, from customer interaction to rider management to strategic planning. As the person in charge of international expansion, I spent a great deal of time trying to understand every aspect of the business. Once I crafted a strategic expansion plan, the founder granted me a fair amount of autonomy to bring it to fruition. I was tasked with recruiting talent and expanding the business on a global scale. During that time, especially in Europe, the startup world was perceived as the Wild West! It required substantial effort and persuasive skills to convince potential hires to leave their well-paying, stable jobs to join a relatively unknown start-up.
Reflecting on your time at Deliveroo, what cemented your conviction that you were onto something special?
My conviction was rooted in two key elements. First, the passion and authenticity of Deliveroo’s founder, Will Shu. His drive wasn't about cloning a successful model for quick profit. Instead, he was genuinely committed to solving a real customer problem. That kind of authenticity is irresistible, and it applied to the entire Deliveroo team at the time. Secondly, the impressive performance indicators. With a consistent upward trend, high retention, and positive feedback from riders, restaurants, and customers, I knew we were onto something unique.
“That kind of authenticity is irresistible, and it applied to the entire Deliveroo team at the time.”
Your experiences at Deliveroo must have exposed you to a range of challenges. Could you share what led to the founding of Ravio?
By far one of the most significant issues we faced was compensation management. Scaling rapidly to about 1,000 employees in 12 countries, we didn't build up an internal people team fast enough. It often resulted in discrepancies in compensation, which can unsettle employees. There wasn’t anything on the market to help us understand and navigate the challenge of making the best compensation decisions for our business. This was the initial spark and catalyst for what became Ravio.
At Ravio, we aim to provide companies with a comprehensive solution for compensation management. We equip decision-makers like Chief People Officers or Heads of Rewards with real-time compensation insights and diversity statistics. Alongside this, we offer workflow tools that allow companies to operationalize data and make informed decisions. These tools help companies manage the entire compensation lifecycle.
Tell us about the vision and product Ravio is developing?
“It's essential for founders to maintain a healthy balance between their work and personal life. Such a boundary not only ensures their mental well-being, but also makes them better operators.”
For a start-up to onboard and access Ravio’s platform, you operate on a ‘give to get’ model - in return for accessing compensation data in the aggregate, you ask start-ups to integrate and share their own compensation data and enhance your aggregate data pool. How does the integration process with HR software work? How do you make it as frictionless as possible?
To streamline our service, we've developed two tiers: a free tier and a paid Pro tier. Both tiers necessitate a streamlined integration through API for two main reasons. Firstly, our ethos is built on reciprocity – sharing data to access our valuable dataset, which inherently improves our community product. The more people contribute, the more value everyone derives from the service. Secondly, the integration process provides immense value to our customers. Once integrated, companies can compare their employees' internal job title and level against the market, offering insights into their compensation positioning.
By integrating with HR systems, we can track compensation changes in real-time. Each time our customers adjust an existing employee's compensation or add a new employee, our aggregated and anonymized data set is updated. This real-time visibility helps our customers better understand market trends, aiding them in making more informed decisions.
Absolutely, data security is of paramount importance. We've taken multiple steps to ensure that all data is secure and protected. To start, we built Ravio with an enterprise mindset from the very beginning. Our internal data storage is highly segregated to prevent comprehensive data leakage. Additionally, we have implemented numerous security layers for enhanced protection. To further instil confidence in our customers, we hired a compliance lead early on. This allowed us to establish robust internal processes to safeguard data in compliance with local regulations. We also secured SOC-2 compliance from an auditor early in the process. Our need for data is justified by the fact that it drives a lot of Ravio's functionality and value. But we understand different companies' comfort levels, so we also offer the option of anonymous integration with fewer features.
I’m sure data privacy and security has been paramount for a product of this sensitivity. How has Ravio approached that?
It seems a key challenge is not just collecting a critical mass of data, but operationalising it effectively. How does Ravio handle variations in job titles and levelling?
We've implemented a framework with specific levels and career tracks in our standardised Ravio job catalogue. We utilise a combination of algorithms and automation, coupled with human refinement, to map new companies against our framework. Our in-house approach helps maintain a high level of consistency in our database. Despite the complexity of the process, we believe it's integral to maintain a dynamic job catalogue to keep pace with evolving job titles.
In 2021, hiring was booming. But the current climate is more relaxed. How does Ravio think about delivering value across all phases of the economic cycle?
We don't tailor our product development according to different cycles. We focus on the persistent needs of our customers, regardless of market highs or lows. Initially, client discussions were all about competitive compensation to attract top talent. But now, the focus has shifted towards retaining talent and managing salary adjustments. Our product has remained consistent, catering to these changing needs effectively. We have only tweaked our messaging to align with market evolutions.
It's been 18 months since we shook hands as founders, but we launched our product in September last year. Since then, we have expanded our services to 16 countries and built a team of 40 talented individuals. We have established ourselves as the market leader for real-time benchmarking data for tech companies in Europe. Our goal remains to enrich our data set and deliver more valuable insights. We also recently released a module called 'Workforce Metrics' that allows companies to compare their workforce functional composition against market trends.
You are 18 months into your journey. What’s Ravio’s progress been like in that time?
What surprised us was the strong correlation between our data and anecdotal feedback. Net new hires are down across the board, even though commercial roles are still being hired at a surprisingly high rate. But that can be explained by the systemically high attrition rate within commercial roles compared to other job families. We also noted a generous rate of salary increases, reflecting companies' attempts to retain their key employees. But in recent months, salary adjustments have been trending towards pre-COVID patterns, even in markets with persistently high inflation like the UK.
What has been the most surprising feedback or data insights so far?
“We also noted a generous rate of salary increases, reflecting companies' attempts to retain their key employees.”
Any final words and advice for first-time founders trying to succeed in the current climate?
This may be contrarian, but the key insight I'd like to share is the need to separate personal success from company success. Equating the two can lead to real anxiety and stress, especially during challenging times, and that can harm your start-up’s mission and execution. It's essential for founders to maintain a healthy balance between their work and personal life. Such a boundary not only ensures their mental well-being, but also makes them better operators.
Clients of The Up Group can access Ravio's core benchmarking tool for free, and receive an exclusive discount on first year membership of Ravio Pro. For more information, contact us and follow the link!
