00:00:00 · Daniel Chait, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:00:00] S0: We're in the middle of a true disruptive moment right now. Why do we have resumes and job applications? We've cut about percent of our team. Angel investors are terrified of two things. AI's so far made things worse, not better. [00:00:12] S1: Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Daniel Chait, cofounder and CEO of Greenhouse, the hiring platform used by more than 7,000 companies, including Anthropic, HubSpot, the Financial Times, and the NFL. A tech entrepreneur for over twenty seven years, Daniel has helped turn Greenhouse into the leading platform in modern recruiting. Daniel, thanks a lot for being here. [00:00:38] S0: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation. There's a lot going on in hiring and in tech right now, so lots to talk about. [00:00:43] S1: Yeah, definitely. Before we jump into like what has changed with AI and hiring, maybe you can walk us back through the early days of Greenhouse, like how did you come up with the idea and what made you start?
00:00:56 · Daniel Chait
[00:00:56] S0: Yeah. So as you said, I've been an entrepreneur for most of my career. And so prior to Greenhouse, I had built a technology consulting company focused on Wall Street and financial services. So we were building, you know, kind of innovative technology for massive global financial firms. And what we found in that period so this is going back to the early 2000s was there was a huge amount of demand for that kind of service. The problem was the supply. The problem was actually putting a team together that could deliver on that really hard and super competitive. And so I figured out over the course of ten years of running that business that hiring great talent in competitive markets was the most important thing that we needed to do as a company in order to succeed. And so I spent a lot of time and effort figuring out how to compete and win for great talent. And so I had done that myself, and I always, I guess, imagined that I was learning what everyone else already knew. Mean, that's a part of the founder journey is you don't know what you don't know. So I was figuring I was playing catch up. It turns out most companies feel like they're in absolute chaos with hiring. And so after I had done that part of my career, I'd sold the company in 2010, left in 2011, and we started Greenhouse in 2012. I started talking to so many founders and entrepreneurs and executives and leaders, really at every kind of company. And what I heard was this really weird thing that on the one hand, everybody knew that hiring was one of the most important things that they could be doing. That was pretty obvious by then to most people. But the weird part was how frustrating everybody still found it. Most companies were just throwing up hands and saying, Yeah, hiring sucks. There's nothing you can do about it. What are you going do? It's terrible. I was like, Well, hang on a second. Have you tried some of the obvious things that really work, like having an interview plan and talking with your hiring managers about a scorecard so that everybody agrees on what the criteria are for a role and how to do good interviews. And really, no companies have done that. Very few companies are really doing it that way. So that was this kind of light bulb moment like, Oh, wait a second. Hiring is the thing that every company needs to be great at, they know it, and very few are.
00:03:01 · Daniel Chait, Guillaume Moubeche
And yet, when you talk to companies that have done it well, it's always the same story. There's a way to do this. And so I thought, Well, if every company did it that way, that would be valuable, and it would likely work. And so that was kind of the moment was like, I think we hit on something really important here that others are missing. I think a lot of tech and entrepreneurial energy was sort of turning their nose up at it and kinda thinking like, oh, HR, like, that's boring. That's back office administrative paperwork. Like, you know, it's not where it's at. And I just thought differently about that question. I just thought, no. This is super important. Everybody cares about it, and the and the hard part is getting it right. [00:03:40] S1: And how exactly did you turn your company to something pretty sexy? Because if you look, you know, at at ATS and hiring, I think whenever you started, you got rejected initially, like, you tried to raise. I did the same. Like, I got rejected, like, by 40 VCs. So how exactly do you go from being rejected to VCs knocking on your door and wanting to invest?
00:04:04 · Daniel Chait
[00:04:04] S0: Yeah. Look. I mean, I think it's important not to get a little caught up in that too. I think part of my formula is, like, I kind of think really hard about what I'm trying to do and focus on that, and don't worry so much about if everyone else thinks the same way. Remember... So picking up on the point I was just making, very much the perspective was, number one, HR and recruiting aren't really important or valuable. Number two, like, I had never been to Silicon Valley before I started Greenhouse. Like, I didn't really get that whole world. And so people looked at what I had done, and they were like, oh, he's not an exited founder. He's never raised money. Like, yeah. And I was like, wait. What? Like, who... Like, why is that? Who cares? And I remember going to a car. I think it was at one of the early SaaStr conferences that Jason Lemkin had put on. This is, like, probably 2012 or 2013, and being on stage on a panel and and telling the story. And someone... A question came in from the audience, like, do you think you can build a big successful company in New York City? That was an actual question that came in in San Francisco. I know you're laughing, but received wisdom was, well, there's never been a big venture exit in New York. It's all these media companies in Wall Street. It can't be done there. And I just was super puzzled by that. I was like, what do you... There's big buildings. There's millions of people that live here. There's lots of economic activity. Why would I not be able to build a company here? I don't understand. I genuinely was... So I think there's a risk in sort of thinking too much about what other people think and and their perspectives. And be... You know? So I try to be really careful about, okay. Like, we thought really hard. We tested our assumptions that this was gonna be a big idea. I mean, I just, you know, make it up. We talked to lots of people. I did a lot of customer discovery. And then once we had conviction, it was like, okay, this is what we're gonna do. And I knew, I've said this for many years now, there's gonna be a moment when everybody's gonna decide enterprise software and hiring is the greatest thing in the world. And I remember when they said it wasn't. And then they're gonna say it wasn't again. And then they're gonna say it was another day. And it's like, you know what?
00:05:59 · Daniel Chait, Guillaume Moubeche
I don't control any of that. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. And there was a moment, to your point, where people all of a sudden figured out that this is... You know, it's all... You know, B2C is dead. It's all about enterprise. Okay. Here I am doing the same thing, and everyone thinks differently about it. And then one day they decided, actually, it's not about that at all. It's all about the blockchain. I'm like, yeah. That's not gonna matter. Like, okay. I'm gonna keep doing my thing. And so you gotta be a little bit leery of these trends that come and go, and and a lot more focused on, like, what's your long term north star that you're trying to build towards? [00:06:33] S1: And how exactly do you, like, navigate it as a founder and also leverage it to your advantage? Because as you're saying, you know, there there are, like, cycles, and when you raise, like, should you raise? Like, when it's possible and everyone gets excited? Like, what's your vision about it?
00:06:47 · Daniel Chait
[00:06:47] S0: Well, just because you don't have to get caught up in it, doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. Because to your point, when everybody's saying it's a bad idea, like, things get harder. And when everybody's saying it's great idea, things get easier. So that's like the weather. Like, you can't control it. It doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. So it's kinda like that. I think when we first started, partly due to some of the dynamics I mentioned, like, I didn't have any venture capital introductions. I didn't know anyone. And so it was, like, definitely, like, a little bit fake it till you make it. I found my way into some investment circles and sat sort of on that side of the table for a little bit and sort of did a little bit of learning how those people think, and I was like, oh, light bulb went on. Angel investors are terrified of two things. They don't wanna bet on a company that nobody else is gonna bet on, and they don't wanna miss on a company that everybody else bet on. So it's like, oh, wait a second. Nobody wants to be the first angel investor into a company, and everybody wants to get in when someone's in. And so I started seeing that because I was listening to how they discussed investment opportunities. And so I just figured, okay, we gotta hack that mentality. And so we just retold our story in a different way that Greenhouse was inevitable. We basically went on to the cover page of our angel invest... Now keep on. This is... We we had nothing. It was me and my cofounder, John. We were trying to raise our first few $100 to hire two programmers and build the product. And we went from saying, you know, hey. Like, we're raising this amount of money to saying, we only need this amount of money out of the total raise, and the rest is committed. Now it was committed by me and John. Nobody... You Smart. It's like, yeah. We're committed. I'm pretty committed. Are you committed? Yeah. Alright. So we're committed. And we're always like, well, there's no law about what committed means. It's not like a defined term in the dictionary. It's just like Mhmm. It's all kinda like... So it's not exactly, like, clear when a startup is positioning, like, what's going on in their deal, like, what's actually happening under the hood. And so we were able to use some of that to our advantage and say, look.