Welcome back to the FNDN Series, where we continue our deep dive into startup compensation with industry leaders from across the startup world. In our conversation with Rowan Savage, Former CTO & Co-Founder at Runn, we explore how unconventional compensation practices can drive zero turnover and 100% employee net promoter scores. Rowan shares how Runn implemented automatic pay rises, pay transparency with exact salaries (no bands), location-agnostic compensation, and the radical practice of paying every role the same at each level—from engineers to marketers. We dive deep into their four-day work week, recruiting philosophy that attracted top 1% talent, and performance management approach that separated pay from performance discussions. Keep watching to discover how these practices resulted in annual pay reviews taking less than five minutes instead of weeks or months.’

Rowan is a serial entrepreneur and tech founder with a strong belief that the way you win is by attracting the best talent, putting the right team together, retaining them over the long term, aligning them on the mission and then unleashing them to do their thing. Rowan was recently the chief technology officer, and one of 4 co-founders at Runn. A fast-growing startup that’s embedded many of these ideas at the core including transparent pay, aysnc remote, worldwide hiring, flexible working hours and let’s not forget a 4 day work week.

Chapters:

00:44 Guest Introduction: Rowan Savage

01:48 Philosophy: Building High-Performing Teams

03:13 Consulting Top Talent Before Starting

05:37 People Operations Without HR Experts

08:20 Creating an Employee-Centric Culture

10:04 Redesigning Employment Contracts

13:05 Beyond Compensation: Building Your EVP

16:47 The ESOP Reality in New Zealand

19:42 The Contract as a First Impression

22:15 Hiring Process: Identifying Top Performers

24:05 Recruiting Through Community, Not Job Boards

24:48 Writing Job Ads That Attract Attention

27:09 Long Interview Processes Done Right

30:01 Investing Equal Time as Candidates

31:17 Scaling the Hiring Process

32:56 Attraction Strategy: Making a Great Workplace

34:30 Achieving 100% Employee Net Promoter Score

41:25 Automatic Pay Rises Based on Experience

44:24 Location-Agnostic Global Compensation

46:07 Five-Minute Pay Reviews vs Months-Long Cycles

47:27 Why Performance Comparisons Never Came Up

50:57 Eight-Week Cycles and Performance Tracking

52:34 Sandbagging vs High Performance Culture

54:12 Lessons Learned: Leadership Alignment Challenges

57:46 100% Retention in Engineering Team

59:35 Advice: Focus on People from Day One

Connect with Rowan

https://www.linkedin.com/in/savagerowan/ 

Resources Mentioned

Runn - Resource management platform for B2B SaaS companies

Buffer - Known for pioneering pay transparency practices

Atlassian - Australian software company referenced for compensation benchmarks

Culture Amp - People and culture platform

GitHub - Platform for software development

Canva - Australian design platform

Company Mentioned:

Runn - Resource management platform for B2B SaaS companies

Buffer - Company known for pay transparency practices

Culture Amp - People and culture platform

Atlassian - Australian software company

Canva - Australian design platform

GitHub - Software development platform

Tools Mentioned:

DISC Assessment - Personality and behavior assessment tool used by leadership team

More FNDN Episodes:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4GeBIeZOKrFxG1oiiPxmiM

Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fndn-series/id1794263484

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StartupCompensation, PayTransparency, CompensationStrategy, AutomaticPayRises, LocationAgnosticPay, FourDayWorkWeek, HighPerformanceTeams, ZeroTurnover, EmployeeNetPromoterScore, PayEquity, TalentRetention, StartupCulture, RecruitingStrategy, PerformanceManagement, EmployeeEngagement, CompensationFrameworks, StartupBestPractices, PeopleOperations, RemoteWork, GlobalCompensation