1337biz - Our core claim is that an an advisory/coaching model is a better fit for the tech industry. It's why we brand ourselves as "Advisors", and not "Agents". In addition to compensation advice, we provide meaningful career coaching advice as part of the process - this helps you figure out which place is actually a better fit along non-monetary dimensions.

Also, our fee structure is much more reasonable than an agent's - we're charging 20-30% of the cash increase, or a $2k flat fee, whichever folks feel is more reasonable. Incentive alignment is important, but there are also cases where candidate may get a huge bump in equity they can't can't necessarily pay us out of.

It'd be interesting to consider derivatives-based model in the future to align incentives better by capturing the value of the equity increase, but that's a long ways off, and not terribly important to us at the moment.