Why Roger Lee Began Layoffs.fyi

“I feared if I talked to them, they might understand I used to be a 13-year-old,” he mentioned.

By 2002, Mr. Lee and his childhood pal ran a few of the hottest websites for teenagers, in response to Nielsen information printed on the time.

One of the businesses he co-founded was SubProfile, a social media service constructed on AOL’s instantaneous messenger platform. By his junior 12 months of highschool, he mentioned the location was producing “six figures in income” and getting no less than seven million distinctive guests per thirty days. (Nothing he has carried out since has exceeded that visitors, he mentioned.)

He acquired his first paycheck from an advertiser at his dad and mom’ house within the suburbs of New York.

“It was undoubtedly a surreal expertise,” Mr. Lee mentioned of his time as a teen entrepreneur. “That’s after I first fell in love with the web.”

Mr. Lee bought one other firm, a examine information website, whereas he was an undergraduate at Harvard.

After commencement, he co-founded an web advert gross sales start-up referred to as PaperG in New Haven, Conn. Mr. Lee was on the firm, which has since modified its identify to Thunder and was bought to Walmart, for about seven years.

Krystal Benitez was employed onto Mr. Lee’s operations staff at PaperG in 2012. By that time the corporate, and Mr. Lee, had moved to San Francisco. Ms. Benitez mentioned that Mr. Lee usually gave casual monetary recommendation to the employees, together with a number of lunchtime lectures about investing and retirement planning. Personal finance is “a really close to and expensive matter to his coronary heart,” she mentioned. Indeed, Mr. Lee quickly based a 401(ok) start-up referred to as Human Interest, which was valued at a billion dollars in 2021.

“There’s possibly no higher strategy to have influence on folks’s monetary lives than by way of employment and the way they’re paid,” Mr. Lee mentioned. He added that his curiosity in private finance has animated his profession, from Human Interest to Layoffs.fyi to his work now on Comprehensive.io.

Mr. Lee’s early enchantment — and early success — with the online continues to energy his optimism concerning the business, and his view that lives may be improved by way of expertise.