Hi Sheer Dolphin - thanks for your note!

There are a few important things to consider when comparing PDL's employee count to the numbers disclosed in 10-K annual filings:

Parent/Subsidiary Representation

PDL works to tie each employee profile to the single operating entity that best represents their work experience. In the case of companies like Disney, for example, we will tie employees to ESPN, others to ABC, others to Pixar, etc. Whereas the 10-K and other audited SEC disclosure forms summarize to the corporate entity level, we keep these separated to enable more precise targeting and segmentation, but offer tools to roll up if you'd like to (via our parent/subsidiary fields). Our goal here is to avoid double counting and to present the most accurate, actionable headcount information possible.

Online Participation Rates

PDL works to aggregate and represent the online and social media work history of over 700 million person profiles. In some examples you flagged, e.g., Chipotle or Sysco, there may be some discrepancies due to a lower participation rate of service industry workers. With that said, increasing our coverage of "non-LinkedIn" work history information is a priority of our team. While we don't anticipate we'll ever have every single employee of Chipotle represented in our data, we still believe that it can provide actionable signals for you/your users.

Does this help address your concerns?