Stealth startup Glassdoor.com is set to reveal itself tonight as a "career and workplace community" where members review their own jobs, office environments and compensation packages. Glassdoor touts itself as the TripAdvisor of the workplace, and in fact several of its founders come from Expedia Inc. But in practice the company may end up looking more like Yelp.
Glassdoor is free and strictly anonymous, although a user has to provide a valid e-mail address and contribute a review in order to gain access to the site. During its pre-launch phase, the site has collected 3,300 reviews about 250 companies, offering insights on Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc., among others.
For funding, Glassdoor's founders, Benchmark Capital partner Rich Barton, and former Expedia executives Tim Besse and Robert Hohman (now Glassdoor's CEO) all pitched in for a small Series A round, and Benchmark followed with a $3 million Series B investment. Other board members include former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford, current TripAdvisor chief Stephen Kaufer and former Snocap Inc. CEO Rusty Rueff.
A company statement announcing its launch doesn't say whether Glassdoor intends to provide any mechanism for verifying information from community members or policing the community for slander or other misinformation -- say, whether its terms of service will allow a poster to use another employee's real name. In fact, the statement says the reviews will be "unedited." Glassdoor also hasn't disclosed its revenue model, but if it can supply juicy salary data, we suspect it'll get plenty of clicks. -- Paul Bonanos
See May 15 post about Glassdoor from Tech Confidential
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salarybase.com has been doing the same trick for a longer period of time I suspect