Your manager comes to the salary review with data. You come with a feeling. That mismatch settles more raises than anyone likes to admit, and it rarely breaks toward the employee.
Lossdog, a Chicago fintech launched by Tom Sosnoff and Scott Sheridan, is built to close exactly that gap. The two are not first-time founders. They built thinkorswim, the options brokerage TD Ameritrade bought in 2009 for a reported $750 million, and then tastytrade, the trading platform and media network IG Group acquired in 2021 for a reported $1.1 billion. Both companies ran on one idea: give ordinary people the same data the professionals guard, and their decisions improve. Their third company points that idea at your paycheck.
Here is how it works for a U.S. professional. You upload a resume. The platform’s software reads it against real government wage records, current market data and nearly 2 million resumes and then returns a single figure for what someone with your history is worth in your market right now. Not a band. Not “somewhere in the mid-eighties.” One number, with notes on what is holding it down: a title that lags your actual duties, a location discount, a skill you have not put on paper.
A range is a target. A number is a position.
Most salary tools hand you a range. Ranges are comfortable and nearly useless in a live negotiation. Tell a manager you were hoping for “somewhere between $95,000 and $120,000,” and you have just told them $95,000 is acceptable. The person across the table already works from something sharper. Employers buy proprietary pay data from firms such as Mercer and Korn Ferry, surveys built from thousands of real salaries, priced to the role and the zip code. You have been arguing with Glassdoor screenshots against a spreadsheet.
A single figure changes the posture. You are no longer asking what feels fair; you are stating what the market says and asking your employer to explain the difference. That is a harder conversation for a manager to wave off, because the burden shifts. Instead of justifying why you deserve more, you are asking them to justify why you are paid less than the data supports.
Consider a mid-career analyst who has quietly absorbed a manager’s duties without the manager’s title. The platform is built to flag that kind of gap, where the work has moved up, and the label and the pay have not. Walking in with a figure that reflects the job actually being done, rather than the one printed on the org chart, gives the conversation a spine it usually lacks.
The company frames the figure as a modeled estimate, not a hard fact, and a careful reader should treat it that way. It is only as good as the records behind it and the resume you feed it. But an estimate anchored to government wage data and tied to your specific history is a different instrument from a crowdsourced range someone posted eighteen months ago.
What changes when you know
The practical value shows up before the meeting. If the number lands close to your pay, you can stop losing sleep over whether you are being shortchanged. If it lands well above, you have a decision: raise it where you are, or take the figure somewhere that will pay it. Either way, you are working from information instead of nerve.
Sosnoff casts it as the same project he has pursued his whole career.
“I’ve spent my entire career democratizing access to financial markets. Now, I’m going to do the same thing for career compensation and portfolio optimization,” he said.
Lossdog does not stop at salary. The same account grades your investment portfolio, comparing your holdings against an industry baseline and estimating the lifetime dollars an average approach is costing you. He frames pay and portfolio as one question asked from two directions: what you earn, and what you keep and grow. For a U.S. worker trying to get whole, both halves matter, and most people track neither with any precision.
The review comes. Your manager has the spreadsheet. The only variable Lossdog is trying to move is whether you walk in with one too.
Current promotions allow you to visit lossdog.com to try the platform for free.
