Paul English holds on to a lot of domain names.
Several years ago, he snagged greatcompany.com — no specific purpose in mind, but it could be good for some future project, he thought. Flash forward to this year, when Paul Schwenk, his longtime collaborator at KAYAK, Lola.com and Blade, approached him with a new idea. Schwenk, an engineer at heart who recently returned to his coding roots, had built a tech stack that relied on email verification.
What if they could take that base technology and use it to create a better version of Glassdoor or LinkedIn, one that cut through the noise of both platforms and ultimately built a filterable database of companies?
"I was talking to some ex-KAYAK people. We were talking about how much we hate LinkedIn," Schwenk said. "It would be kind of cool if I could just use email as a way to verify where I used to work."
Thus, Great Company was born. It's in very early stages, but right now, here's how it works: New users have to either register using their company email or ask someone at the company to verify them. If, for example, Schwenk wanted to indicate that he'd worked at Lola.com, he would have to enter the information of a former colleague with an active Lola.com email address. That colleague would receive a link to verify Schwenk, which expires within seven days.
Once registered on the platform, users can provide information about their company, very similar to how Glassdoor works right now. They can indicate whether a workplace is LGBTQ-friendly, has a motivated team or takes initiative on racial equality, for example. They can rank the company out of five stars. At the moment, they cannot write posts about the company — a key difference from other company review platforms.
Schwenk has also built a tool that enables users to create surveys, ideally making information about companies more thorough and better-vetted.
"If I'm a member of KAYAK, I could create a survey that anyone else who's been verified at KAYAK could use," Schwenk said. "It could be anything at all. A technology thing or anything."
And, if a Great Company user comes across a user who is falsely purporting to have worked at a company, they can report that user.
Great Company is only just getting off the ground, with its future yet to be determined. It could become a recruiting tool, an online forum or something else entirely. Right now, Schwenk, English and the team are looking for feedback: What do they want the platform to become?
"I would love people to just get in there, verify themselves with their current company, and I would love to hear the feedback, positive and negative," Schwenk said. "I don't need a flood of people. I just need some good, tech-savvy people who know the industry and know the problems in the industry as well."
