Former Glassdoor Execs Launch Salary Platform for Doctors

A team of former Glassdoor leaders have partnered with physicians to create Marit Health, a new salary transparency platform for doctors and advanced practice providers.

More than 12,000 clinicians registered for Marit Health and contributed over 7,000 verified salaries ahead of today's official launch. The platform is free to those who submit information, propped by an initial $3.2 million seed funding round led by Define Ventures—and including investments from Rich Barton, co-founder of Glassdoor, Zillow and Expedia, and Tim Besse, co-founder of Glassdoor.

Glassdoor's influence extends beyond financial support; the popular company review and compensation platform also served as inspiration for Marit Health. When Tim Anderson, Glassdoor's first chief product officer, was leaving the company in 2017, his brother Dr. Rob Anderson—a practicing anesthesiologist—urged him to build a "Glassdoor for medicine."

They revived the idea in 2023 and were joined by Vikas Sabnani, Glassdoor's former vice president of product.

"The long-term vision is to build the community and platform for clinicians to find and do the best work of their lives," Sabnani, now CEO of Marit Health, told Newsweek. "We want to give them the tools so that they can thrive in their careers."

Glassdoor's "Give-to-Get" Model (With a Few Twists)

Marit Health uses a similar "give-to-get" model as Glassdoor, meaning clinicians can access the database if they contribute to it themselves. The platform collects information related to pay, like compensation structure, bonuses and loan forgiveness. It also offers insight into work-life balance, including practice structures and schedules, call-rates, PTO and clinician satisfaction with their circumstances.

Clinicians can share data on any and all employer types: private practice, digital health companies, major health systems. The only caveat is that they must be actively practicing to contribute.

Verification is an important part of Marit Health's process, so it checks each clinician's national provider identifier, or NPI, before publishing their information. But privacy and security are also top of mind, according to Sabnani—once the verification process is complete, physicians' NPIs are stored in a different server, detached from the rest of their information, to ensure that individuals can't be linked to their data.

Anonymity is vital to Marit Health's success, Sabnani said. Pay packages vary significantly by specialty, so the intricacies of a doctor's title are important to include. But that same highly specialized title could link a physician to their health care organization.

For example, there are dozens of reporters at Newsweek, so we can review our company on Glassdoor and maintain plausible deniability. On the contrary, one neurosurgeon might serve an entire hospital or an entire region. If she published a scathing review of her organization on Marit Health, her identity would be clear.

That's why Marit Health does not ask for employee or employer names like Glassdoor does, Sabnani said. Instead, it collects information about the type of organization (academic medical center, government institution, etc.) and location. An algorithm automatically rolls up each person's location to a broader level depending on how popular their specialty is—for example, if a primary care physician says they work in Eureka, California, they might be classified as "rural California," while a neurosurgeon working in Durango, Colorado, might be classified under the broader "Rocky Mountain region."

Clinicians always have the ability to take it one step further to protect their anonymity, Sabnani said; a concerned doctor could opt for "California" over "San Francisco," regardless of their specialty's popularity.

"This community has just been dealt terrible software, between EHRs and fax machines and all the documentation," Sabnani said. "There isn't a great consumer-grade set of products that they have been given, and there is generally this lack of trust that when they share the data, it is going to be sold to advertisers or whatnot."

"You have to slowly earn that trust," he continued. So far, that has proved somewhat challenging for the startup—at least, it hasn't been easy on Reddit.

Transparency in Question (and Context)

In January 2024, Rob Anderson (the doctor) created a spreadsheet with the help of Tim Anderson (the ex-Glassdoor exec). Physicians could fill out an anonymous survey with their salary data, and in return, they would get access to a Google Sheet where other responses were aggregated.

Originally, the sheet was only intended for anesthesiologists. But within 36 hours of Anderson sharing it on Reddit, more than 450 anesthesiologists, CRNAs and anesthesiologist assistants had contributed.

"It was clear from the positive feedback in the comments and the viral sharing that they had tapped into something bigger," Sabnani said.

As the effort gained steam, it began to evolve into Marit Health. The founders say they adjusted for user feedback to extend the spreadsheet to all specialties, and launched a new version of the survey "powered by Marit." Between October and December 2024, they approved about 4,700 salaries, processing, anonymizing and cleaning up the raw data for display in the Google Sheet.

Then, on January 7, they rolled out the Marit Health website and began emailing everyone who had contributed to the Google Sheet.

"We saw so much enthusiasm for our project (over 10,000 clinicians signed up to view the data) that we turned our Google Sheet into a secure, mobile-friendly website to make it easier to filter and navigate the data," Dr. Anderson wrote in the email, obtained by Newsweek.

"Rest assured—it's still free (and always will be), anonymous, and 100 [percent] community-powered by fellow clinicians."

However, not all clinicians found this reassuring.

Data from the spreadsheet was automatically transferred to Marit Health's new platform. "The spreadsheet was essentially our v0, and the software launch on Jan. 7 was our v1," Sabnani said via email.

As the emails rolled out, some contributors took to Reddit, saying they felt slighted. A few commenters called it a "bait and switch," claiming that they contributed to the spreadsheet because it appeared to be a grassroots, peer-to-peer effort—not the start of a company.

"Color me cynical, but this really seems like a prelude to monetization," the original poster on Reddit wrote. "Am I reasonable to feel disappointed? It just seems like another way for [a] middle man to make money off our expertise and knowledge."

The email told clinicians to reply if they wanted their data removed from the website, and according to Sabnani, only four did so. He holds that the website was necessary to improve security, verification, anonymization and data sorting capabilities.

Still, the startup clearly pressed a pain point. In recent years, physicians have watched private equity firms scoop up thousands of medical practices as health care venture capital investments have surged—meanwhile, many work at understaffed hospitals that struggle to break even amid declining reimbursement rates. The health care profit pie is getting bigger, but as more companies take slices, patients and clinicians are often left with crumbs.

How Will Marit Health Make Money?

Despite concerns about the salary transparency platform's own transparency, Marit Health vows that the service will remain free for clinicians.

"A question that we get all the time is, why is this free? Like, what is the catch?" Sabnani said, comparing the site to Glassdoor, LinkedIn and ChatGPT. "There is no catch. It is free because it should be free."

Scale is vital for a platform like this, according to Sabnani; the richer its dataset, the more valuable it can be. Requiring clinicians to pay would stunt participation and "defeat the purpose," he said.

Instead, Marit Health will monetize its services by facilitating connections for people who want individual advice—for example, contract attorneys could offer their services via Marit to help physicians evaluate job offers. Employers can also pay to post job listings on the platform, or view aggregate data that could inform their hiring strategies.

More than 12,000 users have signed up for Marit since its January 2025 launch, giving the platform a wealth of real-time salary data. They've already been gathering some trends. Here's one that Sabnani shared with Newsweek: Every $30,000 in compensation appears to increase physician satisfaction scores by one point.

"We can start seeing the differential between a satisfied and a dissatisfied employee," he said, "and that's data that employees can start using to inform the compensation structure."

A growing number of physician groups are unionizing as burnout grows and compensation fails to keep pace with inflation. Marit Health believes that more accurate, accessible pay information could help their cause.

"We are really bringing this community together and empowering them with the tools they need to be able to advocate for themselves and ensure that they are able to make the best career choices," Sabnani said. "I'm very, very encouraged by the engagement and participation we've seen so far and hopefully, it will keep growing."

Updated 4/1/2025, 1:38 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to name Define Ventures as Marit Health's lead investor, and better clarify the intention behind Marit Health's policy on anonymity.