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.
00:13:07 · Sean
And I think as you do that, as you spend more and more time immersed technology and in that conversation, you become better and better at understanding how it works and what you can do with it. When you're a CEO, all of those things are done by other people. You're not building your own financial model. You're working with a team of people to build a financial model. Maybe working in salesforce.com, but you're not the one actually working in salesforce.com. You're consuming data. So it's a transition from being a very big doer of tasks to somebody who is trying to motivate, encourage, and direct a company around where they need to go. Number one job of the CEO is make sure the bank account doesn't run out of money. Everything else, strategy and hiring, which are so important, come after fact of making sure you have money in the bank. This is gonna be a challenging time for lots of entrepreneurs over the next eighteen to twenty four months. The world of fundraising and the capital markets and the macroeconomic environment have shifted pretty dramatically over the last two years. And it's made it so that maybe this era of being very easy to raise money and easy to get investors has changed to a world where it might be more difficult to get investors. And so it may take longer, it may take more creative solutions, it may make some companies have to pursue profit over growth or at least some measure of profit in addition to growth instead of kind of what's characterized the last ten years, has been growth, growth, growth no matter what. There's something unique about building software that has people get a job. It's actually a tangible thing for a human being in the world. Of all the companies I've ever been involved in, Fountain has the biggest opportunity to be a global public company. We believe that opening opportunities for the global workforce is a worthy endeavor, a profitable worthy endeavor. That's the future for Fountain. I don't know how many years it will take. Will it take three years, Will it take five years? Will it take ten years? But I know that it's a worthy journey, and it's a journey worth going on.
00:15:16 · S1
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