Friends,

Conference FOMO should be a diagnosable condition that impacts your productivity.

These past few weeks I’ve been watching (through the one way glass of LinkedIn) as many in my network attended various conferences. First was Transform in Vegas, then just this past week it dawned on me how many reward people have become a part of my network, because that’s all I saw — Total Rewards Texas — wall to wall across my LinkedIn.

I’m more than a little bit excited to be heading to one of my own next week. Sunrise is run by a VC and is a great place for exploring concepts of creativity and entrepreneurialism of all flavours. (If you’re in Sydney and heading there, make sure to hit me up)

It’s also got me thinking about how to create the same FOMO sentiment for my own event, Startup People Summit. You’re now one of the first to know that it’s back in 2026 (🎉).

SPS is something that’s become a major focus of mine this year, as we turn it from ‘scrappy thing we pulled together’ in 2025, to ‘best startup People conference in APAC’ in 2026. It’s happening on the 3rd of September this year, and I’m internally giddy at the lineup we’re pulling together. Not only that, but the intention with which we’re designing this to be something that people truly gain from, both in their capability and their connections (capabilitymaxx and connectionmaxx for the kids reading this).

Ok, let’s get to this weeks edition, all about how you need to delete the word ‘competitive’ from your vocabulary and replace it with something more meaningful.

Enjoy ✌

Matt

In case you’re new here (or just missed it) here’s the past three editions of the FNDN Series:

Your CFO wants headcount cost by tenure, retention by manager, where comp gaps are widening, and hiring ROI.

Shapes' AI sits across your engagement, performance, compensation, and time off data, and answers questions like a senior people analyst would. Without the salary, or the delay.

Ask it in plain English, get a live answer backed by your own data, then walk into the exec meeting with the dashboard already built.

Know a startup Head of People looking for answers 🙋 why not forward this to them for some instant karma? ✨

Early in my career, an employee came to me worried.

"We're seeing a lot of colleagues with real expertise leave the business, and they're telling me it's because of pay. I don't think we pay competitively enough anymore."

I still remember how atrocious my response was.

I talked around the topic, tried to give her some kind of answer, and watched her walk out less confident in me than she came in.

That moment stuck with me. It was the day I realised "we pay competitively" was just a phrase I'd been using to duck the question.

Back then, I could get away with it. Today, the same phrase creates real risk with your people, your recruiters, your CFO and the board (usually all at once).

I ran a survey last year asking Heads of People what "we pay competitively" meant to their business.

As you can see, the answers were all over the place.

Same two words, wildly different definitions. That's the first clue the phrase has no meaning.

Four things have shifted underneath us:

They talk about it on TikTok and Instagram. They talk about it on the street: channels like Salary Transparent Street have built audiences of millions asking strangers how much they earn. When they ask your recruiters what the number is and how it was set, responding only with "competitive" reads as "you haven't thought about it."

A growing number of US states now mandate salary disclosure on job ads, the EU Pay Transparency Directive lands in member-state law this year, and Australia is catching up through WGEA's public employer reporting. 

You don't need a specific law to feel the pressure; the person on the other side of the conversation almost certainly does.

Five years ago, a salary benchmark was a spreadsheet updated once a year. Today it's a live feed (I keep a current list of startup comp benchmarks here). The early-stage competitor across the road has the same data and tools that mature companies have. 

The moat is gone.

Salaries are the biggest line on your P&L. If you can't explain why the company pays what it pays, and what would change if you paid more or less, you've effectively opted out of the commercial conversation.

The most common mistake I see is starting with "what percentile should we target?"

That's the wrong question. You can't decide how competitive to be until you know who you're competing for and against.

A pay position worth its salt answers three questions. Leave any of them ambiguous and "we pay competitively" starts to creep back in.

Pick the two or three talent segments your strategy actually depends on. A SaaS company doing product-led growth probably lands on engineering and customer support.

Run this with your exec team: which skill sets would stop the company dead if they left tomorrow?

Those roles are the focus of your comp strategy.

"The market" isn't a single number; it's a dataset filtered by geography, industry, company stage and size.

Your peer group narrows it further. Start broad (Australian SaaS companies, for example), then narrow (Series B to D, under 500 employees). Your peer group's median often sits away from the broader market's. Targeting "the market" when your peer group pays differently is how you over-hire talent you can't keep, or lose offers you should have won.

Pick the percentile you think is right, then stress-test it. Model your current workforce and your hiring plan against three scenarios: the position you want, one below, and one above. What does each do to your runway? What does the ambitious version force you to change? What kind of talent can you hire with a lower or higher percentile, and what impact does that have on your strategy/runway?

This is a conversation you have with your finance partner. The version you land on has to be one your CFO will still defend, because it will get questioned.

A pay position only works if the people around you defend it.

Get four sign-offs before publishing to the company: your CEO, who owns strategy; your CFO, who owns the numbers; your Head of Talent, who'll operate against it daily; and one exec running a critical talent segment (usually engineering or product) for the manager's voice.

Once they've agreed, the internal shift happens quickly:

A rollout lesson from experience: separate the strategy conversation from the ranges conversation.

The first time I tried both in one meeting, managers spent it comparing their own salaries to the new ranges instead of processing the bigger picture. Brief the strategy first, let it land, then share the ranges later.

The order matters. Approve internally, brief your recruiters, circulate to managers, then tell the company. You're building a position the company can repeat back to you. Surprise rollouts don't survive the first tough question.

If that employee walked into my office today, I'd have a real answer.

I'd tell her which percentile we target, why we chose it, which peer group we benchmark against, and what we'd do if the market moved, and how that shows up in who we lose or keep.

The whole conversation would have taken a minute, and they would have left with confidence.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe.

This piece is based on a session that ran at Startup People Summit.

There are 40+ more sessions (just as practical as this one) in the On Demand library.

Everything from: Compensation frameworks, culture operating systems, high-signal engagement programs, change management that sticks, AI-powered people ops, and unusually honest conversations about what CEOs aren't telling their Head of People.

A roundup of the most interesting stuff from the week:

When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help you:

1. Tools & resources
Resources and tools that give you what you need to build your own startup compensation practices.

2. Comp consulting
Building startup compensation practices that are clear, fair and competitive.

3. Startup People Summit
A one day annual event for People professionals in scaling companies. Creating the playbook for startup people practices. Grab recordings from past events, or subscribe to join the next summit.