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.
00:08:49 · Keith, Sean
[00:08:49] S3: So when I look back at Fountain, we always had this question about market size. That would be the number one reason why investors would say no to us. You know, we did a great job finding customers in the on demand gig space, but we always knew that we would run out of customers eventually. And so we needed to make the shift from this startup cohort into something else. After a while, it became clear that we had to go through this enterprise phase. At that time, I felt that the skill sets involved in going after enterprise customers is a very different skill set than building your product from zero to one and selling it to start up companies. I think this was around the time that we realized a leader with an enterprise motion help us take us to the next level, and that's how the CEO search kind of started. When we're doing our CEO search, there was only one person that really understood the mission and the company from day one, and that was Sean. And luckily for us, he embodies the culture and the values that Fountain had just because he was so close to the business from day one. [00:09:41] S2: Keith and I wrote the values together. I knew the vision. I knew the mission. I knew the team. I knew the challenges. I knew the opportunities that made the transition to being the CEO easier for me and I think easier for the team. I became the CEO at Fountain right in the middle of COVID. It was a challenging period in the
00:09:41 · Sean, S0, S4
[00:09:41] S2: Keith and I wrote the values together. I knew the vision. I knew the mission. I knew the team. I knew the challenges. I knew the opportunities that made the transition to being the CEO easier for me and I think easier for the team. I became the CEO at Fountain right in the middle of COVID. It was a challenging period in the Ad[00:10:00] 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[00:10:30] 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.
00:10:59 · Sean
[00:10:59] S2: Overall macroeconomic picture. We definitely saw big changes. There were areas that experienced incredible growth. Prior to COVID, warehousing transportation logistics business was relatively small. During COVID, because everyone was ordering packages online, that part of the business exploded. We got more customers, people who needed delivery drivers and warehouse workers and shift loaders and and package loaders. Those parts of our business exploded in COVID. So this period of time has been a growth period for us. We brought on Softbank as our series c lead. That was an $85,000,000 investment. We brought on B Capital as our series c one investor and an additional $100,000,000 in capital. And we entered a period of what I would call kind of rapid growth. We've really expanded the company. Half our business is outside The United States now. Because the vast majority of blue collar and hourly workers exist outside The United States, the population around the world is in the billions. The thing we've been fortunate about is many of our customers are large organizations who have operations both in North America and in Europe or in Asia. See the benefits of using Fountain in Europe and they want to expand. And so it's actually been our customers that have been the ones to encourage us, hold our hand and bring us to new markets, to have our companies hiring people in 77 countries around the world and in 35 different languages. We continue to believe, given the scale of workers outside The US, that the opportunity outside The US is as big, if not bigger, than the opportunity inside The US. Being a CEO is... It's an incredible job. I hope to get better at it every day. A couple of things that I did that I think were helpful. One, I really spent time with engineers, product managers, and designers. With an engineer, trying to understand how our technology worked, how it interacted with our partners and our vendors, with our customers, and trying to become an expert in that world. The only way I knew how to do it was to go really deep, going almost to the bottom, the basic levels of the technology and what it does. And then only from there, up to understand more and more about how it works, how it interacts.