Friends,

I’m writing this one from my home office on what is only the third day of being at home, out of the past 15 or so.

I’m home next week before living out of a suitcase again for another fortnight. All great training before doing it for 5 weeks solid in Europe.

Sometimes I feel a bit like one of those serialised travelling salesmen from tv and movies. Looking at my flight booking dashboard confirms it: 29 flights so far in 2025.

I’ve always hated working from my laptop (and particularly my phone) for long periods. Probably something to do with my millennial trait of big screen being for big work. It’s most difficult when it comes to spreadsheets. Coming off a 32-inch wide screen monitor onto a 15 inch MacBook is a difficult transition to make. Although I’m now surprisingly comfortable looking at Google sheets zoomed out to 60%. Sorry to any optometrists reading this.

Something I’ve developed an appreciation for is minimalist travel. Getting around with literally the bare minimum needed. I hate being weighed down when traversing places like airports, plus it’s a nice excuse to buy cool looking (and functional) bags, suitcases, laptop gear, tech pouches, or other ‘everyday carry’ for which there is a whole obsession with.

I often think about how much the roles reverse when you’re travelling for business vs pleasure. When travelling for pleasure the outbound flight is the most exciting. When travelling for business it’s the inbound one, and the return to home, that I find the most appealing.

Despite all this, I still really enjoy travel (of all kinds). Sure, sometimes it’s a lot. But I love the variety, and I love being in a new place. I also miss home a lot (my own bed in particular).

If you travel lots (or even a little) and have some amazing travel hacks, let me know. Especially because I’m always open to hearing about a new piece of gear 😄

OK, that’s a little snapshot into the solopreneur life.

Enjoy this weeks edition ✌

Matt

Matt here. I did the classic thing of sending this last week and botching the links — FUN — so here it is again for the dozens of people that clicked this when it didn’t work (soz).

I still remember when I read my first great compensation philosophy and wondered how I could ever write something that brought structure and clarity to such a difficult topic.

Since then, I’ve had a hand in writing over 30+ compensation philosophies, and read plenty more.

This deep guide is built with the best of those philosophies in mind, and in a way that enables you to easily build your company’s needs into your very own compensation philosophy.

You’ll be armed you with everything you need (including a ready-to-use philosophy template) to go from blank page, to exec buy-in, to building trust with your people.

Vaso is the Chief People Officer at Ravio, a compensation and workflow tool helping HR leaders, CFOs, and employees make pay practices clearer and fairer. When you work for a comp tech company, the onus on getting comp right is that much higher.

Having scaled TrueLayer from 40 to 440 employees across 12 countries and previously riding the rocketship at Deliveroo, Vaso brings hard-earned lessons from the frontline of startup hypergrowth.

Her career is marked by the kind of compensation battle scars that only emerge when companies scale faster than their structures. Now, at Ravio, she’s building the tools and frameworks she wishes she had back then, and it starts with how to operationalise compensation philosophies so they aren’t just well-written PDFs but company-wide practices.

Vaso argues that waiting until post-hypergrowth to formalise compensation creates unnecessary pain. "Fixing retrospectively is way harder," she warns. Even with 10-15 employees, founders should draft a simple comp philosophy that evolves incrementally over time. It’s about preventing entropy before complexity sets in.

In the absence of a documented philosophy, people invent their own. "Silence leads to noise," Vaso says. Simply writing down what you’re already doing—how often pay is reviewed, your pay positioning, and promotion logic—can massively reduce internal friction and align expectations.

A beautifully crafted comp philosophy is worthless if your CEO hasn't read it. Vaso recalls hard lessons where founders disagreed after the fact, despite early sharing. Her advice: "It's not a democracy, but the people who can pull it back must be aligned."

When policies inevitably meet edge cases (e.g. hard-to-hire roles), you need a plan. Vaso advises stress-testing: "If we've had a cloud security role open for nine months, what happens?" Decide the triggers and governance for breaking your own rules before you're forced to.

Vaso encourages teams to tell employees: this is our best current thinking, but it will evolve. Being transparent about iteration reduces internal resistance and fosters buy-in. Build in review cycles and communicate them clearly.

Vaso recommends a major annual cycle (e.g. Q4) for fairness and budget discipline, alongside a minor off-cycle (e.g. April) to handle outliers like promotions or hiring mistakes. "Twelve months is a really long time in our world," she notes.

Any new comp system must include a plan to resolve existing salary misalignments. If budget limits prevent immediate correction, map a timeline: "In October we do this, April we do that..." Transparency about the fix builds credibility.

Something I loved. At a previous role, Vaso set up a shared spreadsheet where employees could anonymously input job offers they received. This peer-generated signal offered a real-time market sense check. "It gave us breathing room and surfaced market shifts early”. Requires high trust, but also builds it!

To help new hires internalise the comp philosophy, Ravio runs a live onboarding session where employees must simulate rolling out a philosophy using legacy data. The takeaway: it's hard, messy, and what Ravio solves. It's also an internal culture-builder.

"Your line managers are your best friends," Vaso says. HRDs must arm them with the rationale, scripts, and confidence to hold the line. If they default to "talk to HR," the system falls apart.

Data accuracy is non-negotiable. From job levels to taxonomies to benchmarks, the credibility of your philosophy relies on foundational HRIS hygiene. As Vaso says, "It's impossible without the scaffolding of the organisation in place”.

Listen, watch or read the full interview here.

Got a specific topic you want me to cover or a guest you’d love to nominate? Hit reply to this email and let me know.

That’s all for this week.

Sure, this is technically the end of the newsletter, but we don’t have to end here! I’d love this to be a two-way chat, so let me know what you found helpful, any successes you’re seeing, or any questions you have for me.

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