Kent Plunkett

Co-Founder and Board Director Salary.com

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Kent Plunkett co-founded Salary.com in 1999 and ran it as chief executive for the better part of a quarter-century, across two separate ownerships and with a detour in between. The original insight was simple and, at the time, genuinely subversive: that pay data should be visible to the people being paid. The company launched with a free public salary tool and built a business underneath it selling the structured benchmarking data that employers needed once employees could look things up. He took it public in 2007, sold it to Kenexa in 2010, left for two years to turn around a cloud-backup company, bought Salary.com back with H.I.G. Capital and Prudential Capital in 2015, and ran it for another decade. In December 2025 he handed the chief executive’s role to his co-founder and long-time partner Yong Zhang and took a seat on the board, which is where he sits now.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Salary.com in 1999 and served as Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer from founding to 2010 and again from the 2015 buy-back to December 2025.
• Grew the company from inception to a 2007 initial public offering that raised $59 million, on roughly $40 million of annual revenue.
• Led it through the 2010 acquisition by Kenexa, which IBM in turn acquired in 2012.
• Reacquired the business in late 2015 with a management group backed by H.I.G. Capital and The Prudential Capital Group, and returned as chief executive.
• Built it to more than 30,000 survey participant organizations across 22 countries, over 10 billion data points and coverage of more than 1.4 million roles, with six appearances on the Inc. 5000.
• Chief executive of Intronis from 2010 to 2012, more than doubling revenues in a turnaround; Barracuda Networks acquired the company in 2015.
• Earlier, chief executive of Bumblebee Technologies, a leadership role at InfoSpace, and Director of Business Development at Pro CD.
• Certified Compensation Professional (WorldatWork); frequent speaker and writer on compensation strategy for Chief Executive magazine and SHRM conferences.
• Stepped down as chief executive on 2 December 2025 and became a Board Director, succeeded by co-founder Yong Zhang as Chairman and CEO.

Professional Journey

Plunkett came up through the first internet era’s information businesses. He was Director of Business Development at Pro CD, which published electronic directories on CD-ROM, in 1995 and 1996; he held a leadership role at InfoSpace, the online content syndication company, in 1996; and from 1996 to 1999 he was chief executive of Bumblebee Technologies, a career software publisher. The through-line is proprietary data sold to people who need to look something up - which is exactly the business he then built for himself.

Salary.com was founded in 1999 by Plunkett with Cal Brown, Kevin Plunkett and Yong Zhang. The product was, from the start, two-sided: a free salary tool for the public and a paid data and software business for employers who had lost their monopoly on that information. Plunkett served as Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, took the company to a NASDAQ listing in 2007 that raised $59 million against roughly $40 million of revenue, and sold it to the talent-management company Kenexa in 2010. Kenexa itself was bought by IBM two years later.

He did not stay. In 2010 he took over as chief executive of Intronis, a Boston-area cloud backup company selling through managed service providers, succeeding co-founder Sam Gutmann. Over roughly two years he more than doubled revenues and put the company on the list of America’s fastest-growing private businesses. He left at the end of 2012, and Intronis was acquired by Barracuda Networks in October 2015 - nearly three years later, and not on his watch.

The second Salary.com chapter began in late 2015, when a management group backed by H.I.G. Capital and The Prudential Capital Group bought the business back out of IBM and Plunkett returned as chief executive. The decade that followed was the company’s most commercially successful: it grew through acquisition, including CompXL in enterprise compensation planning, took growth investment from Accel-KKR in 2025, and reached more than 30,000 participating organizations in 22 countries, with over ten billion data points spanning more than 1.4 million roles. It made the Inc. 5000 six times. Through it he remained the industry’s most visible advocate for pay transparency, writing for Chief Executive magazine and speaking at SHRM’s annual conferences.

On 2 December 2025, with the company moving into AI-native compensation tooling, Salary.com announced a leadership transition. Yong Zhang - the co-founder who had returned years earlier and had been serving as President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Revenue Officer - became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Plunkett became a Board Director. The two had, by the company’s own description, co-led the business for more than twenty-five years, which makes the handover less a succession than a change of seats between the same two people.

Education

Harvard Business School

MBA

Georgetown University

AB, Economics and Government