00:00:00 · S0, S1, Sean, Keith
Ad[00:00:00] S0: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:00:30] S1: The Vuori core short moves with you. With everyday versatility and classic athletic fit. It's the one short for everything your day brings. Invest in your happiness and get 20% off your first purchase at viore.com/coretwenty. That's vuori.com/kore2zero. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. [00:00:59] S2: $225,000,000 later. We've helped three and a half million people last year get a job. 225 great Fountain years around the world. How do you build three successful startups? You need to be always taking action even when maybe the last 10 didn't work. Taking that eleventh might be the thing that breaks through. [00:01:17] S3: This is never gonna work, and I don't believe what you're saying. You're lying. You need to be okay with getting rejected all the time. You need resilience and grit. In order to get to that one yes, it takes 99 nos.
00:01:17 · Keith, Sean
[00:01:17] S3: This is never gonna work, and I don't believe what you're saying. You're lying. You need to be okay with getting rejected all the time. You need resilience and grit. In order to get to that one yes, it takes 99 nos. [00:01:27] S2: I'm Sean Bear. I'm the CEO here at Fountain, Internet executive and entrepreneur. There's no shortage of HR technologies available for customers, but most HR technology is focused on knowledge workers. Fountain is the exact opposite. Fountain is focused on the hourly worker, the blue collar worker, the people who have generally been underserved by technology. And we help large organizations hire those workers more effectively and more efficiently with a frictionless experience. Number of customers we have continues to grow. Last year, customers hired almost three and a half million people around the world. In terms of our venture capital fundraising, just the last eighteen months, we've raised a $185,000,000. We really believe in investing in technology that can make a difference in this frontline worker's life and the business of our customers.
00:02:17 · Keith
[00:02:17] S3: Hi. My name is Keith, and I'm the cofounder and former CEO of Fountain before handing the reins over to Sean. Growing up, I always had a lot of frustrations with just generally technology and the way that the world kind of worked. I'd always think, why, you know, does this work this way? Freshman year of college, there was a movie called The Social Network that came out. And after watching that movie, it became clear that, you know, just college kids with just a laptop and an Internet connection could really make a big difference. I think that's what really motivated me and gave me that confidence to work on my own business even as a college kid. And so I was working on a project at a time called OnBard, which is a self learning educational platform where the idea was that I like to learn things online by myself, whether that's online investing or computer programming. But as a beginner, my biggest problem was that I didn't really know what I didn't know. And the feedback that I got at the time was a lot of small business owners came up to me and said, we're small, so we don't have the time or the resources to develop our own content. So we rely on existing materials, but it's a very haphazard process. I don't know if my employees have completed this training process, and each time, it's very hard for me to keep that updated. So can you guys build some features where I can assign these tasks and these curriculums to my employees? At the time, we said, yeah. Sure. Like, that sounds like a pretty easy change. And that's what I was working on for the last two years of college. And in 2014, when I graduated, I moved out to San Francisco to sell that product. We had one paying customer that was paying us $50 a month, but I didn't really have any sort of cash saved up. And so I called my parents. They said, here's $5,000. Take this. Go out there and make sure that you have no regrets. $5,000, while that is a lot of money, it doesn't really last you that long in San Francisco. First year and a half, I was living with a random 80 year old lady in a one bedroom apartment that I found online, and she was living in the living room. I had my small kind of attic room, and that's basically the first year and a half. I was very happy that I was in Silicon Valley meeting like minded individuals.
00:04:06 · Keith
We were close to our potential customers and customers, and it was just a very fun experience for me at the time. I was looking through TechCrunch, seeing which companies got funding, reaching out to them. You guys are probably gonna hire a lot of new employees soon. Can we help out with your employee training? And a lot of them said no at the time, but we have this other pain point around having to hire and manage this large hourly workforce. What they told us basically was, first of all, it's hard to find a lot of these hourly workers, and we're competing against all these other companies. Even after we convinced them to show up, only half of the people that said they'll show up to these interviews actually show up. So no show rates were a very big issue. And this is around the time that Uber and Airbnb and DoorDash and all these on demand companies were coming into the market, and this created a completely new set of challenges around having to hire a large volume of hourly workers. And so at that point, we basically pivoted the company from an employee training platform to applicant tracking system that was designed for this high vol
00:05:00 · S0, S4, Keith
Ad[00:05:00] S0: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:05:30] S4: It's officially the holiday season, and Abercrombie's new collection has outfits for everything on your calendar. It's the busiest time of year, and between shopping and party invites, I don't have time to plan every look. But Abercrombie's always got me covered. Their sweaters are the perfect easy layer for low key plans, and on a nice night out, I'm reaching for their classic trousers. Fill your closet with the pieces you'll need all season long. Have a very Abercrombie holiday. Shop in the app, online, and in stores. [00:05:59] S3: High velocity type of recruiting. We had a really hard time fundraising. I was 22 years old, and my cofounder Jeremy was 19. And we both didn't come from an Ivy League background. We both weren't engineers. It really took us a long time to actually get that first yes. But we were lucky enough that a lot of our initial customers were on demand gig startups, which meant that they also raised capital from VCs. Once we got the customers on board, we would get their CEOs and the other cofounders, invest in us as an angel, and then they would introduce us to their VCs.
00:05:59 · Keith, Sean
[00:05:59] S3: High velocity type of recruiting. We had a really hard time fundraising. I was 22 years old, and my cofounder Jeremy was 19. And we both didn't come from an Ivy League background. We both weren't engineers. It really took us a long time to actually get that first yes. But we were lucky enough that a lot of our initial customers were on demand gig startups, which meant that they also raised capital from VCs. Once we got the customers on board, we would get their CEOs and the other cofounders, invest in us as an angel, and then they would introduce us to their VCs. [00:06:27] S2: I was the first angel investor in Fountain. As proud as I am right now of Fountain, there was a day when it was a two or three people with an idea and a product that barely worked that was being developed in real time with almost no customers, and I decided to invest in that company. What was it about that day? Something about what the founders at Fountain were doing made me super interested in being an early, early, early investor in the company.