Nick Dray

Founder, PerfCopilot

I built PerfCopilot because I'd written too many performance reviews from memory and watched the calibration meetings that followed. The work people actually shipped — pull requests, tickets, design docs, customer threads — sat in twelve different systems, none of them open at 11 pm on a Sunday. The review that landed on the employee's desk reflected the manager's recall, not the period. That's not a review. That's a vibe.

Before PerfCopilot, I spent fifteen years as CEO of HPCHOST.com, a managed-hosting business serving customers across North America and Europe. Twenty-plus years building enterprise software in total. The lesson that carried over: when the source data lives in one place and the writing lives in another, the writing drifts. Performance reviews are the most expensive instance of that drift in any company.

Topics I write about

Performance review software — what the category is actually for, where the tools cluster, how engineering teams should evaluate them.
Engineering-manager workflows — the operational tactics for writing reviews that survive calibration, in a Sunday-evening time window.
The shift from forms to evidence — why the next-decade buying decision is sourcing, not form design.
Honest competitive analysis — when Lattice, 15Five, Culture Amp are the right fit, and when an evidence-grounded layer is the missing piece.

Posts on PerfCopilot

Get in touch

Reach me at hello@perfcopilot.com — for product feedback, comparison questions, or to push back on anything you read here.