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.
00:08:35 · Daniel Chait
You know, I'm committed to doing this business whether I raise a nickel or not for a couple of years. And I've got rent and I've got, you know, food and I eat and so you add all that, but, like, that's an amount of money that I'm committed to spending on this business and so was he. And so between the two of us, that added up to, like, you know, some money. And the rest of it was what we were looking for. And so immediately, we positioned it from, yeah, we've got, you know, a few $100 committed out of a $500 that we're trying to raise. Everybody's like, I'm in. And so you do a little bit of that when you're getting started. There's ethical lines, obviously, you can't cross and that we didn't and wouldn't, but there's also a little bit of hustle and a little bit of grind. And I think the art and science, the art of getting it right at that stage is knowing what those lines are and being a little bit clever about coming up to them. I'll give you another example, if I could have another minute. Just to illustrate the kind of hustle and grind you do as a startup, it's like, it's not you're doing bad stuff, but you're doing stuff that you maybe wouldn't get away with, like, a little bit later. So, again, I said we're trying to do a lot of customer discovery. I wanted to understand the customer. So there was a job fair here in New York, and all the New York tech companies at the time were there with a booth hiring engineers. And so I signed up as a candidate. I went to this job fair with my resume and stood in line at these booths. I remember waiting in line behind, you know, a bunch of people with a lot of jobs. You get up to the front of the booth, and there's a recruiter from, you know, a tech company in New York. And I'm like, hey. What are you hiring for? And of course, they're a recruiter. They're very... They're happy to talk. So they told me all the jobs they're hiring for. I go, how's it going? And, oh, this one's hard, and that one's hard. Oh, what are the challenging parts about it? Where are you looking? What have you already tried? And I'm, like, having this whole conversation with the person. And after about five minutes, they're like, this doesn't sound like... Like, what's happening here?
00:10:19 · Guillaume Moubeche, Daniel Chait
[00:10:19] S1: Is he selling something me? [00:10:21] S0: And that would just be like, hey. Can I get your card? Of course. They... Like, any recruiter would love to hand out their card to, you know, someone at a job fair. So they give me their card. Say, thanks a lot. Would walk away. So I left that day with a bunch of business cards of tech recruiters in New York and a ton of information about their their mindset and their problems and what they needed. And so they made a rule at that job fair that you couldn't do that because of us. But but those are the kind of things that you just sort of hustle when you're getting started, you know, to, like, give yourself an edge because you can't do the things that big companies do, but they also can't do the stuff that you do. [00:10:53] S1: You know, you mentioned earlier, Jason Lemkin and SaaStr. [00:10:56] S0: Sure. [00:10:56] S1: So when you organized, like, the first SaaStr in Paris, it was just at the moment I was, like, launching my company. So I volunteered to get like free tickets. And when I had the free tickets, I just went in and and did like similar things and went hustling. So, yeah, 100% agree. [00:11:13] S0: I respect I respect the hustle. You know, I mean, again, I've been an entrepreneur my whole career. There's things that you can't do, but, you know, when I see a startup person, you know, trying to think creatively about how many they wanna try to go, like, I respect that. And so, you you gotta do a little bit of that.