Scaling Europe
00:02:48 · Sebastian Johnson, Matt Wilson
[00:02:48] S0: Amazing. Can you touch a bit a bit more on the round maybe? Who... Who's backing you this time around and kind of maybe what unlocks it? Because it wasn't hasn't been a particularly long time since you were 20,000,000 round led by Creandum, I think, the end of last year. So, yeah, we'd love to hear bit more. [00:03:00] S1: Yeah. That's right. So the round's led by Air Street Capital and in participation with Creandum who led the previous round, Madrona, and a whole bunch of other fantastic funds and angels. And, you know, I think fundamentally, when we we started the business just in March last year, so we're less than eighteen months old as a company. And and and since then, as you say, we we raised a a $20,000,000 seed round late last year. Since that seed round, the growth has been... We've grown about 40 x in terms of revenue. And since the seed round, we've landed in San Francisco. We've landed in New York. And and just broadly, the the the thesis is kinda coming coming true and playing out as we thought it would. The... Both the consumer user base and the business user base for Jack and Jill respectively is is... Are both growing very, very quickly, and we... Yeah. We continue to be really optimistic about the, you know, midterm future, but also the possibility of building something truly game changing over the long run.
00:03:00 · Matt Wilson, Sebastian Johnson
[00:03:00] S1: Yeah. That's right. So the round's led by Air Street Capital and in participation with Creandum who led the previous round, Madrona, and a whole bunch of other fantastic funds and angels. And, you know, I think fundamentally, when we we started the business just in March last year, so we're less than eighteen months old as a company. And and and since then, as you say, we we raised a a $20,000,000 seed round late last year. Since that seed round, the growth has been... We've grown about 40 x in terms of revenue. And since the seed round, we've landed in San Francisco. We've landed in New York. And and just broadly, the the the thesis is kinda coming coming true and playing out as we thought it would. The... Both the consumer user base and the business user base for Jack and Jill respectively is is... Are both growing very, very quickly, and we... Yeah. We continue to be really optimistic about the, you know, midterm future, but also the possibility of building something truly game changing over the long run. [00:04:04] S0: It's amazing. And so the the expansions into New York and San Francisco must have gone well. Can you touch a bit about that? Because especially here in Europe, everybody's always thinking about landing and expanding across The US in a in a successful manner. How did that process go for you and the team?
00:04:04 · Sebastian Johnson, Matt Wilson
[00:04:04] S0: It's amazing. And so the the expansions into New York and San Francisco must have gone well. Can you touch a bit about that? Because especially here in Europe, everybody's always thinking about landing and expanding across The US in a in a successful manner. How did that process go for you and the team? [00:04:16] S1: Yeah. So we we we launched in San Francisco at this... At the start of twenty twenty six, and San Francisco is now... Is is is... Has been growing faster than London was at the same time Amazing. Index by index by launch dates, and New York is following the same trajectory, although it's it's only a couple months in. And I think, you know, with with going international, I think you either want to do it early in your life as a company where it just becomes the default operating model of the company from day one almost that you are multi market, that you are operating with teams in different time zones and teams in different offices, and that it's just part of your DNA in terms of how you operate. And for us, it was really important. You know, we think winning in... We see as kind of key taste making markets, winning in The US as being fundamental to our long term success as a business and our ability to win globally. So we thought it was really important to get out there and and and put our stake in the ground and and and push on those markets. And that's been a combination of of of of action done from London, from our London HQ, as well as building out the office on the ground there in San Francisco and spending a whole bunch of time out there.
00:05:29 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:05:29] S0: And what was your thinking or strategy in getting those users? Right? Because you need to be... You need to get people on the platform. You now got 250,000. When you're going to a new system or ecosystem, what is the marketing or, I don't know, overall strategy of getting those first thousand, 10,000 people on the platform?
00:05:45 · Matt Wilson
[00:05:45] S1: Yeah. So I think, you know, first of comes it comes... Marketing's built on a foundational product. So where you've got some... We've got a kind of a marketplace product, where we've got companies on one side with Jill and and professionals on one side with Jack. How do you build some density into that marketplace so that you can get over this cold start problem? You know, if you think... We we we have a marketplace. We also have stand alone products. So Jack works brilliantly well regardless of Jill at understanding who you are, and we've added a whole bunch of functionality to Jack since we last spoke. So Jack is scouring every public job listing in the world and identifying them regardless of whether we've got a direct relationship with that cost... That company or not. So Jack is kinda continuously monitoring every day. Is there something interesting that's coming to the market for for you so you don't have to be browsing job boards? And, you know, you're you're you're identified exactly when that dream job appears. Jack is supporting with career coaching, with salary benchmarking, with interview preparation and mock interviews, and kind of a full cycle service that you get from this agent for free throughout whatever stage of your job search that you're at. So we thought about how do we build this product so it works well in isolation of the marketplace, market that, get a user base for that, get that growing through lots of word-of-mouth as well as layering on very targeted advertising channels to build density into the candidate pool, and then bringing in the the company side and scaling that up once we've got the the density of of candidates. So the consumer side kinda led the b two b side by maybe six weeks.
00:07:20 · Sebastian Johnson, Matt Wilson
[00:07:20] S0: Got it. Okay. Can you touch on maybe some success stories? Can you share something like real use cases of people that have either yeah, found or all through Jack or Jill, the company side? [00:07:30] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's there's thousands of people, so it's it's it's hard to pick pick a couple. But maybe one that I think is is incredibly cool and interesting. It's a bit different than our typical use case of placing somebody in a full time job, but we work with a number of accelerators and incubators helping them find potential founders for their programs. So we work with Entrepreneurs First and Antler to to and and they work with Jill in order to identify people in Jack's network that they think could be amazing founders to join their program. [00:08:00] S0: That is so interesting. [00:08:02] S1: And we had... That there was two two guys that spoke to Jack. They did a, you know, online phone call with an AI agent. And in those phone calls, told Jack that they were interested in getting a job, but also interested in maybe founding something. And if you fast forward a couple of months, they've been... Jill... The the... Jill working for one of the accelerators identified these these people, put them in touch with the accelerator. They've been accepted onto the accelerator. They then cofounded a company together, which is now funded, and that company is actually now using Jill to hire its first employees. So No way. So it's a crazy story of of this matchmaking done by these agents that, yeah, definitely feels like we are living in the future.