Confirm is an all-in-one people platform built on the science of organizational network analysis to reveal who is driving impact and who needs help. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Confirm co-founder and CEO David Murray to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
David Murray’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Murray said:
“On the business side, I’m an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and product designer based in Silicon Valley. I cofounded Confirm in 2019 with Joshua Merrill, former CPO at Carta. Previously, I was CTO of Doctor.com (since acquired by Press Ganey, 2020) which I joined through the sale of my company ReferBright in 2014. I was originally a product manager at Google from 2006-2008, and I received the Google Founders Award and EMG Award for my product work on Gmail. I hold a B.S. in Computer Science and HCI from Carnegie Mellon and an M.S. in Computer Science (HCI focus) from Stanford.”
“On the human side, what really shaped me have been my personal experiences – from coming out as gay at 13 and being an engineer that didn’t always look or sound like the folks I worked with, to being diagnosed as autistic at 38 years old. I grew up as a people-pleasing kid who learned how to survive dysfunction. That led to therapy (lots of it), opera training, and even a stint on reality TV. All of it shaped how I lead today, with a focus on empathy, impact, and making sure quiet contributors get the recognition they deserve.”
Formation Of Confirm
What inspired the founding of Confirm? How did the original idea come together and how have you scaled since its founding? Murray shared:
“It started during the pandemic. My cofounder Josh and I were living together in our little startup bubble, riffing on how broken hiring was. That snowballed into building what we thought was a better resume. Then Henry Ward, CEO of Carta and our first investor, asked for help identifying internal talent – and that kicked off the first version of Confirm.”
“We built the first product in six weeks with zero lines of code at the start. I ended up implementing the entire first cycle for a 2,000-person company solo. It was brutal – but it worked. Today, we’ve tripled our revenue, built a real team, and moved from a scrappy prototype to a platform that powers performance reviews for some of the world’s most forward-thinking HR teams.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory leading the company so far? Murray reflected:
“Closing our largest customer. Not because of the ARR – though that helped – but because of what it symbolized. We had just come through a phase where I’d taken over as CEO. Things were rough. We weren’t sure we’d make it. That moment proved to myself and the entire team that all the grit, all the long nights, were worth it.”
“Tell me more about Confirm and your newest product, One-Click Performance Reviews. What are the platform’s key features?”
“Confirm helps companies identify and reward the people making a real impact—not just the ones good at managing up. Our newest product, One-Click Performance Reviews, uses AI to eliminate the blank page problem. It pulls real work data – from tools like Jira, GitHub, and Asana—and drafts reviews for employees and managers. Self-reflections, peer feedback, performance summaries – it all writes itself. All they have to do is click ‘Confirm.’”
“We pair that with Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) to identify hidden talent, reduce bias, and give leaders a full view of who’s making a difference. No more guessing. No more popularity contests.”
Ensuring GenAI Does Not Introduce More Bias Into HR
How do you ensure that the generative AI that powers your platform doesn’t introduce more bias into HR processes, and specifically performance reviews? Murray emphasized:
“Great question – and a critical one.
While we know that bias shows up a great deal in AI as it relates to many HR use cases like recruiting, I invite readers to reflect on all of the biases currently present in performance management and traditional performance reviews. Specifically, there’s the idiosyncratic manager rating bias (google “Maynard Goff” and you’ll see 60% of manager ratings are the manager’s own biases), selection bias from peer 360’s (i.e. people cherry-pick people to say good things about them), recency bias (because the lack of frequency), selection bias from continuous feedback and recognition (some people participate in it and others don’t), the halo/horn biases that often show up when rating, and the “group think” effect that occurs in calibration rooms.
All of these biases are addressed and reduced through our One-Click Performance Reviews and ONA methodologies combined. We reduce recency bias by gathering data from actual projects, we increase subjectivity by referencing work that is actually done, we reduce the gate-keeping effect of selection bias as anyone can be named in ONA, and when the ONA data and recommendations are presented to managers, managers can give more productive, constructive, and subjective feedback.
Finally, we ask people to substantiate their claims in ONA, so instead of it being a popularity contest, managers can identify unusual outliers based on the comments provided and skills/behaviors tagged. In addition, while some folks may wonder if the ONA methodology biases towards extroverts, we’ve done the research and published a blog post about how it actually identifies a large number of quiet contributors, i.e. people who create a lot of value for people around them, but may not manage up..
This was a very long-winded way of saying that we reduce the biases that exist by increasing data sources and perspectives, significantly beyond what you’ll find in a traditional performance review process.”
Organizational Network Analysis
What is Organizational Network Analysis and how do you use it in your products? Murray pointed out:
“ONA is the practice of understanding influence, collaboration, and performance through relationships — not just reporting lines. We do active ONA, which means we ask every employee questions like:
- Who do you go to for help and advice any why?
- Who motivates or energizes you at work and why?
- Who do you see as outstanding if you could only pick 3 people and why?
- Who are you concerned about that needs additional support or attention and why?
To prevent it from being a popularity contest, we ask people to substantiate their claims with 200 characters, then we surface this information to managers before they give their manager ratings to be informed beyond what they would learn from cherry-picked 360 peer reviews or other gate-kept methodologies.
Some folks as if this methodology biases towards extroverts, but we’ve found the opposite to be true, namely that it identifies a large number of quiet contributors who are creating a lot of value for the people around them but may not necessarily manage up.
We use this data to show managers and HR teams who’s really moving the needle – and who might be struggling. It reveals the hidden contributors and the toxic ones coasting by. That visibility is what makes performance reviews more fair and actionable.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have you faced in growing Confirm recently, and how have you overcome them? Murray acknowledged:
“We started right before the pandemic, and in our early days my cofounder’s husband died by suicide, and I was living with my cofounder at the time, so it was a very, very challenging start to the business. That said, we navigated through and got some solid traction.”
“When I took over as CEO early in 2024, we faced significant challenges – revenue growth was under what we’d projected, and while we were resonating with rebellious CHROs, we were struggling to get the attention of traditional CHROs. What helped us get through was grit and clarity. We leaned into what was working, cut what wasn’t, and rallied the team around the case studies and outcomes from our non-traditional performance review methodology powered by ONA.”
“There’s also just the day-to-day grind of selling into a risk-averse HR market. It’s not easy convincing leaders to rethink how they evaluate talent. But once they see what’s possible, they don’t go back.
What have been some of Confirm’s most significant milestones?
- Building our first Enterprise-ready product in just six weeks.
- Closing our largest customer – over 3x bigger than the next largest at the time.
- Helping companies identify hidden talent that managers completely missed.
- Watching CHROs shift from skepticism to advocacy after one performance review cycle with us.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Murray about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“We had a large retailer with thousands of employees use our methodology, and half of the names at the top and bottom of our list of talent were ones their leadership had never seen before. It was amazing to be able to identify so many hidden quiet contributors and hidden detractors, and it led to significant improvements to the business’ operations, and a 30% increase in their eNPS.”
“Another tech company with a few hundred employees had to make some tough decisions, and we had 2 impressive outcomes:
- They retained 100% of their top employees during the great resignation
- They were able to strategically identify specific members of the sales team to part ways with such that when reducing headcount by 50%, sales went up quarter-over-quarter by 26%.
On a personal level, here’s one that stuck with me: a company did a performance review cycle with us and found that a top-rated engineer – Michael – was coasting, while Tracy, an engineer who got downgraded in calibration, was actually a massive internal leader. Our ONA surfaced that Tracy was nominated by over ten peers as outstanding and a source of help – while Michael had almost no endorsements and even warnings from peers. That data gave the company the courage to course-correct and retain the right person. Without ONA, Tracy would’ve been another quiet star who got overlooked.
What differentiates Confirm from its competition?
Most platforms are just digitized versions of what companies already do: manager ratings, 360s, goal tracking. We don’t believe in digitizing broken processes.
Confirm is built from the ground up around two principles:
- Performance happens in networks. We surface insights from across the org—not just top-down.
- AI should reduce admin, not amplify bias. We use AI to draft reviews from real work, not gut feel.
That’s what makes us different. We’re not just speeding up performance reviews, we’re reinventing performance management to make teams smarter, fairer, and more efficient.”
