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
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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.
00:06:27 · Sean, Keith
[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. [00:06:55] S3: Sean at the time was the CEO of a company called Zurks, which is an on demand valet service. Because he was a customer early on, he understood the pain points exactly. He saw the pain points firsthand, and he worked with our team as a customer first. He got to see the insidings. The product wasn't perfect. I think Sean saw that, and so he gave us feedback. You know, we borrowed a conference room two to three hours. We built some of the features that he had requested, and then we called them back and said, hey. You had asked for these features. We delivered on it. Is there anything else?
00:07:24 · Sean
[00:07:24] S2: They showed me the idea that I had talked to them about in the product, And I was like, wow. We talked about this thing, this new page, and in the last two hours, you guys built it. I think this is a team I wanna be more involved with. I said to them at the end of that session, I said, if you ever decide to raise money, consider me interested. It was a week later or a day later or something like that, they called and I wrote a very small check to help fund the company. And a number of years later and $225,000,000 later, we've helped three and a half million people last year get a job, two twenty five great Fountain years around the world. Pretty amazing to see from initial moment of this is a team I want to be involved with to here we are today. In every startup, you hit moments where you have to completely rethink where you are. And if you're not willing to do that, it's gonna be really tough. And how you react to the moment is as important as the moment itself. Like all startups, it goes through periods of credible growth, incredible product progress, and then periods of slower growth and slower product progress. And Fountain's no exception to that. Neither is any other startup of the 20 that I've invested in. They've all had similar trajectories over time. A 100,000 to a million is incredibly difficult. 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 is incredibly difficult. 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 is incredibly difficult. They require different skill sets. They require different areas of focus.