Category: Entrepreneur Journey

The most successful marketing campaigns do a great job of telling a story. That’s why brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nike, and Apple are so revered in the marketplace. Each of these companies has figured out the link between advertising and storytelling.

But how do you measure what a good ad campaign is? That was the question Jonah Goodhart asked himself back in 2010. Along with his brother, Noah, and Michael Walrath, Goodhart began thinking of ways to make brand advertising (and storytelling) by marketers more effective, especially in the new digital landscape. The result was Moat.

2010: Building a Creative Marketplace

“Our initial thought was: How can we make digital creative better?” says Goodhart. And that was the very beginning of Moat. The three co-founders had successfully created Right Media, which they sold to Yahoo, so they self-financed their first round of capital, along with a small contribution from prominent Silicon Valley angel investors like Ron Conway.

The process began in 2010 by building a creative marketplace, he says. “As part of the process we learned a lot about what was happening around us. For example, what already existed and what didn’t exist.”

Continues Goodhart: “One of the first questions we asked was how do you actually know what ‘creative’ looks like for a brand?” If you consider well-known companies like Pepsi or Nike, what do their ads look like? What story were they telling?

As it turned out, there was no easy way to figure that out at the time.
“The advertising industry desperately needs a currency that makes sense. And we feel the company that measures that currency shouldn’t be the same company selling ads.It needs to be defined by an independent company with no investment by the media owner.”
— Jonah Goodhart

2011: Building a Search Engine

“Our idea was to build a search engine to help us discover what ads brands were running,” says Goodhart.

“We thought that in order to build better ads, we had to know what was out there already,” he says. “We wanted to have a search engine that would allow clients to instantly see what ads any brand was running in real-time.”

Mayfield came on board to lead the Series B round at the beginning of 2012. “They liked what we had built,” says Goodhart, “and having guided successful SaaS companies, they were interested in having a conversation with us about how they could be involved in the future.”

Sitting down with Mayfield, Goodhart and his initial team were prepared for pointed “challenge questions.” This process of evaluation would help fortify Moat’s eventual role in the marketplace. Goodhart was surprised that these weren’t questions for the sake of asking questions, which he says can be the case with many VCs. “Mayfield helped us realize that we didn’t have to know all the answers right away,” he says, “which frankly was a relief.”

And after that, the partnership with Mayfield came together swiftly. “In the span of 24 hours we had three meetings with them,” says Goodhart. “We literally hammered out a deal during one whiteboard session. It was that quick.” A few weeks later, Mayfield and Moat had officially teamed up.
“The proven team of Jonah and Noah Goodhart, along with amazing repeat founder Aniq Rahman, recognized how shifts in media consumption necessitated a next-gen platform for publishers and brands to measure the performance of their content and advertising. We partnered with them in 2012 and today Moat is the new Nielsen/comScore of attention and engagement analytics.”
— Tim Chang, Mayfield

2012: Building an Analytics Platform

Despite his venture’s early success, Goodhart says people were still having trouble wrapping their heads around how the creative marketplace worked. One question he continued to hear was: How do you measure what a good ad is?

Those questions led to the beginning of Moat’s analytics product. “It was a journey,” says Goodhart. “We started in 2010 by defining the creative marketplace. Then in 2011 we built a search engine that still operates today. And in 2012 we launched an enterprise analytics platform that grew to become our main business.”

Today: Building a Digital Currency

“Over the years we’ve become an enterprise analytics and measurement company,” says Goodhart. “We employ a couple of hundred people and have eight offices throughout the world, including the US, Australia, and the United Kingdom.”

With hundreds of clients and significant revenue, Moat now had established clear success metrics. And because of this, Goodhart raised a Series C funding of $50 million from leading New York growth stage investor Insight Venture Partners that they announced in early 2016.

“The advertising industry desperately needs a currency that makes sense,” says Goodhart. “And we feel the company that measures that currency shouldn’t be the same company selling ads.” He’s referring to Google’s substantial presence. “It needs to be defined by an independent company with no investment by the media owner.”

This emphasis on currency is causing a big shift in the marketplace,” says Goodhart. “We’re focusing on providing analytics and measurement for many of the largest advertisers in the world, folks like Nestlé and Unilever to name just two. We’re also providing services to major publishers such as Gannett, The New York Times, Vice, and Vox. Right now we’re hiring talented people, expanding our business internationally — increasing our presence in Europe — adding new products, and continuing to grow.”

Little by little, Moat has developed a better way to measure effective marketing. “Specifically,” says Goodhart, “we’re helping companies tell their stories increasingly understanding how consumers pay attention in a digital world.”

Business-school students can look around and see their future corporate partners and rivals. When Rehan Jalil was in the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School, he looked around and saw a future business. Most MBA students were using cloud tools to do their work. “Then when they go on to their work life,” says Jalil, “it’s going to all be the cloud applications.” In that moment, he saw the future need for cloud security.

Not If but When

“This is back in 2011,” says Jalil. “My conclusion was that the full suite of productivity applications was going to be in the cloud.” He was surprised, then, when CIOs he spoke with didn’t want to use cloud apps widely. Their companies weren’t using the cloud: “The top answer was the cloud just wasn’t secure enough for enterprise.” Jalil knew that as his fellow students went on to do business, they would bring the cloud with them. CIOs wouldn’t have a choice.

“What if you actually solve this issue of data protection, monitoring, and compliance for these applications where the data is in the cloud?” he wondered. “The entire stack of security that existed at that time in the enterprise world,” he says, “had almost no relevance to the cloud.”

He wasn’t looking to add a layer of security to the existing infrastructure. “It was a total new way of doing security,” he says. “This wasn’t going to just be a feature addition.”

Meet the Brand New Security Stack

The conviction led him to raise money to pursue what became Elastica. Jalil already had a relationship at Mayfield. The firm had invested in his prior company, and he was a venture advisor there, serving as a sounding board for Mayfield’s investing partners. “Not everything can be explained with a spreadsheet,” he says. “Being a venture advisor is all about understanding an ecosystem: where are the issues and what are the fundamental new ways of solving those problems.”

One of these problems was cloud security. “When I talked to the professionals who were the guardians of enterprise,” says Jalil, “they understood there was a huge value in going to cloud, but the monitoring control and security didn’t exist. It was kind of like letting go of your data, in the wild, and then not knowing what is going to happen with it. It was a big concern.”

Navin Chaddha of Mayfield immediately understood the opportunity to build a brand new stack of security. “Mayfield led our entire Series A round of $6 million in 2012,” says Jalil.

A Pause Isn’t (Necessarily) a Reset

Elastica wasn’t Jalil’s first entrepreneurial venture. He’d previously founded and run WiChorus, which had been successfully acquired by Tellabs, and some of those same team members signed on to Elastica. Jalil continued to talk with CISOs as the new business started up. “I wanted to validate the feature set we were going to build,” he says. “Literally all the feedback was: we’re not going to be buying any such cloud security for a long time. That was a shock to the system, because we had just raised money.”

He had to make the first of many tough decisions, which was to delay product development for more due diligence. “This happens with many entrepreneurs,” says Jalil, “because you have many options of solving many different problems. We literally put development on hold.”

Mayfield fully supported Jalil’s decision. “Many VCs would have gone, ‘You just convinced me that this was the best thing on the planet to do. Within a month of our investment, how can you turn around and say that you will put this thing on hold?’” says Jalil.

Elastica slowed development and spent the next three months figuring out if they were going about it the right way. “The main issue was timing,” says Jalil. “We knew cloud security was going to be big at some point, but was our timing right?”

What the research showed was a coming groundswell. “Users were choosing to use Google Drive, and Box, and Dropbox, and Salesforce, and Hubspot,” he says, “all of these cloud applications. Those users weren’t asking for permission. They were just using it, and the security teams would be catching up with them. That was our conviction when we came out of this grueling few months of gut check.”

“The entire stack of security that existed at that time in the enterprise world had almost no relevance to the cloud.”

Diversity in Expertise

Another thing that surfaced during the due diligence period was a newfound sense of how many disciplines would be needed to form the Elastica product. Jalil knew from the start that Elastica was approaching the problem of cloud security from the ground up, and the team would need diverse skills — not just security, but cloud expertise, machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science, networking, UX design, scaleout elastic systems. “I am most proud of our super talented Elasticians and we work a like a family together. Its an honor of my life to be working with them,” he says.

“What was shockingly obvious was how terrible the user experience was in security,” he says, likening the existing interfaces to 1990s-era software. To Jalil, this wasn’t just about aesthetics. Design was a security issue because the existing tools were so complex that they led to negligence and errors: “We wanted to have a high-end focus on usability, design, and simplicity to highlight these issues. So we needed a high-end user-experience team.”

Personas First, Customers Later

The company had no real product yet, and no customers. “No customer had given us a check at that point,” says Jalil. Elastica was still sorting out who the user would be — and the answer was plural: users. Elastica was focused less on a single product and more on a suite of applications.

He recognized that the security product would be touched by multiple different professionals inside a client company. How, then, would the network infrastructure team differ from the administrators, from the information protection team, and from the incident response teams?

Each of these user experiences was needed by a different persona: How would they actually want to use this thing. The answer was an operations center, quite literally. Elastica developed CloudSOC, its trademarked term that stands for Cloud Security Operations Center. Says Jalil, “In traditional security, you would buy one appliance for data loss prevention, one appliance for firewall, one appliance for intrusion detection, and one appliance for incident response. In Elastica you would go to our app store turn on or buy different apps without having to do any plumbing that you generally have to do with security.”

When to Open the Door

“There’s always the pressure of when to launch your company,” says Jalil, who kept Elastica in stealth mode (“one single-page website, people speculating on what we’re doing”) for as long as possible. “There is market pressure, too,” he says. “You want to be the first one to be out and talking about it.”

There were two options: launch the company with one security application, or wait until the full multi-app offering was complete. “By that time a competitor had launched with one of the features that we had,” says Jalil. “We decided we’re not going to launch until we have the entire framework of CloudSOC together. I think the decision turned out to be right decision.” Among other things, waiting for the complete product allowed them to present it as a premium offering.

Staying Independent

Even before launch, back in early 2014, there was interest from potential suitors. “We went to talk to one senior exec, and they had us talk to the entire executive team. It turned out that the company was betting on cloud to be the next big wave.” This company wanted to purchase Elastica. “There was a generous offer for our company,” says Jalil, “which was then less than 18 months old.”

“We, along with Mayfield, decided that we could build something much bigger in terms of the product,” he says. “This wasn’t the right time for the company to focus more on a narrower goal and mission.” Jalil opted to keep Elastica independent and pursue solving the security problem comprehensively.

“From an earlier partnership with Rehan Jalil, we knew his laser focus, deep technical expertise and attention to customer delight. We were honored to partner with him again in 2012 as Elastica, now part of Symantec, created the new category of CASB which addresses security vulnerabilities of cloud apps.”
— Navin Chaddha, Mayfield

Going Live and Wide

Elastica launched at the RSA Conference in 2014 as an entire cloud security framework, as Jalil had envisioned it from the beginning. The team was medium-sized, with, as Jalil puts it, “many PhDs from MIT.” Shortly thereafter, the company made headlines by exposing the “Heartbleed” vulnerability, which garnered a lot of press. Gartner, the research firm, listed cloud as the top security priority. “That’s a big deal for such a nascent technology to pop to number one,” says Jalil.

In turn, Elastica announced numerous deals, chief among them Telstra, the major Australian telecommunications company, and Cisco, which became a formidable partner. Elastica became a product sold by Cisco, and its resellers, which vastly expanded its market. “We raised our Series B of about $30 million from Third Point, Telstra and Cisco, to help us grow the company and hire more sales team members,” says Jalil.

Merging to Grow

Cisco remained an essential partner as Elastica matured, so much so that Jalil turned down some potential partnerships rather than risk the relationship with Cisco. The company’s well-respected product attracted several suitors, and by July 2015 Jalil had a new important decision to wrestle with: “Should we get a banker and try to sell the company?”

He decided against an auction, preferring to talk with interested parties and gauge the opportunity. In November 2015, after less than a month of talks, Blue Coat purchased Elastica for $280 million: “There were a lot of public companies interested. Blue Coat was private and cash rich, because it was private-equity funded, though they were about to go public.”

“We decided that Blue Coat would give us the platform that would enable us to link with their 15,000 security customers,” says Jalil. This wasn’t just about scope. It was about complementary products, and a shared customer base. “The buyer that they had was similar to the buyer of our product,” says Jalil.

Blue Coat differed in numerous ways from previous acquisition offers. Jalil says he sought Mayfield’s counsel, and they agreed with the direction, as did the rest of the board. Jalil reflects on the early decision to delay product development, and the various suitors they’d deflected over the years. “The trust Mayfield put in us,” he says, “was invaluable.”

GE Digital’s acquisition of ServiceMax for nearly $1 billion dollars in 2016 was a match made in heaven. Three quarters of GE’s profits involve service, and field service had been ServiceMax’s focus since day one. As Dave Yarnold, CEO of ServiceMax, describes the deal: “It’s just such a great marriage in terms of what we were focused on and how it applied to their business — and how they could take this externally as a commercial offering where they just have so much credibility.”

But as with many notable tech companies, the success of ServiceMax was defined over time and as a result of deliberate decisions: from its origin as a startup-contest winner through its role in solidifying an underappreciated industry to it becoming a significant part of a $140b company.

The Benefits of a Third-Party Platform

The story of ServiceMax begins a year or so before Yarnold’s arrival as CEO. He singles out the key decision by founders Athani Krishnaprasad and Hari Subramanian to employ Salesforce.com as the company’s platform. “It got us going very quickly,” Yarnold says, contrasting the use of a third-party platform with life at the job he’d come from. “My prior company was SuccessFactors, the human resources software leader, and we spent a lot of time and effort and money on platform.” He estimates that much of SuccessFactors’ early research and development was about building out and maintaining its homegrown platform. “It really slowed down our speed of delivering new capabilities that our end users wanted,” he says. “We had to build out the platform before we even could start to create those features and functions.”

“In the case of using ServiceMax, we didn’t have to worry about enabling the platform. All we did was focus on the end users, and just build the stuff that mattered to them,” he says, ticking off a list of things the then new company didn’t need to concern itself with, including security and the ability to manage scale. The Salesforce platform’s ubiquity didn’t hurt ServiceMax, either: “Because we were building on this platform that companies were already predisposed to want to use, it just made the initial conversation with prospects a whole lot easier. It gave us a leg up in terms of credibility, and obviously we were playing within their ecosystem.”

Eventually ServiceMax became one of top five apps in that Salesforce ecosystem, alongside Veeva and FinancialForce, among others. In fact, ServiceMax began as a Salesforce exemplar, when Krishnaprasad and Subramanian won a 2008 contest cosponsored by Salesforce and Emergence Capital. “They won based on the app itself and customer use cases,” among other characteristics, explains Yarnold. “The prize was that they got funded by Emergence and Salesforce.” This was right around the time Yarnold was looking to leave SuccessFactors, following that company’s IPO. He also knew the field service business from what he calls “an earlier life,” when he ran North American sales for Clarify (later acquired by Nortel). “It was a neglected space that we uniquely chose to focus on,” says Yarnold of his time at Clarify, “and it won us some really big deals. Field service helped us to differentiate among the first generation of CRM providers.”

Hiring to Scale

For the first year or so, ServiceMax had everything its new CEO, Yarnold, needed: “I had fantastic talent in the founders, and great technical, and product, and market awareness — all that good stuff.” But just because Salesforce could support a scaling business didn’t mean the scaling came naturally. “I needed sales, marketing, and services capability,” says Yarnold, thinking ahead to what was necessary for the firm to level up.

“I had this dream when I had my few months off after SuccessFactors: wouldn’t it be great if I could come back, be the CEO of a company, and then somehow manage to convince a handful of people — and I had a few people in mind — to come join me as kind of a dream team?” Not only did he assemble the team, but he consolidated the core of it in one momentous week. “I got incredibly lucky,” he says, of hiring three key individuals from SuccessFactors, two of whom he’d recruited to that previous company in the first place. These were Stacey Epstein, who joined as CMO, Scott Berg, who joined as Head of Sales and eventually became COO, and Karen Pisha, as head of Services.

Yarnold makes a simple case for bringing in big-league executives early: “Adding those three senior leaders was like we had that dream team that could scale for years. What determines your success is the people that you hire into the company, and in order to hire great people you have to have great people, and we just had a tremendous team across the board.”

Building a Community

Yarnold singles out the efforts of CMO Epstein to research and synthesize the underlying unique aspects of the field service industry. “When we sat down with Stacey, the first thing we said was, ‘All right, field service: I wonder where these people hang out, what do they read, where do they go in terms of marketing events. Online, where do they go for knowledge and data and, you know, sharing things?’”

At the time, Yarnold estimates there were some 20 million people in field service around the globe, and yet they had no organizing principle. “There was nothing,” he says. “There was no community out there for field service.” ServiceMax set out, in turn, to build what was at first called the SmartVan and later evolved to FieldService.com. Yarnold describes it as an “impartial” source of information: “We’ve been feeding this site with content about field service, like taking care of baseball stadiums, and all kinds of crazy equipment.”

“That was our goal, to create this global community of people who were proud field service people who had been neglected by the software industry,” says Yarnold of the “invisible army,” as he puts it, of white vans with people in them who keep things working. SmartVan began as a “brute force, bottoms-up” effort, and became an indispensable tool to give shape to the market with which ServiceMax would become synonymous.

The Wages of Leading

It was during 2011 that ServiceMax didn’t just double but triple its business, not just the size of the company, but its bookings as well. As a result, the pitch became easier, especially to established global companies. “All of a sudden,” says Yarnold, “these big, global brands were looking at us as kind of like, ‘Hmm, you guys have something very unique that is a big part of our business, and we’re going to start doing projects with you.’” He ticks off some of those major deals: Schneider Electric, Tyco, Procter & Gamble, Motorola — and, though the acquisition was more than half a decade away, GE.

ServiceMax had gone from being an unknown in an underappreciated sector to being the leader in a sector seen as a major source of revenue. For a CEO of a rapidly growing company, the sign that things were changing came when clients were signing contracts without any involvement from him. “It’s part of the deal when you’re the CEO. You’re trying to sell to big companies and they want to know that you’re going to be around. You have to go and fly to see the decision makers and reassure them.” Then Coca-Cola Enterprises happened. “I didn’t have any interaction during the sales cycle and I ended up spending a lot of time with them afterward because Coke was, and still is, an important customer. But not having to do that was kind of like, ‘Huh, this thing is starting to scale — very interesting. It’s kind of weird.’” A very good weird.

The Preemptive Investment

When describing the investments that made this period possible, he brings up Mayfield’s Rajeev Batra. The two had met through a former WebEx executive. “I’m really a chemistry and relationship person. I was getting ready to do my B round, and I wasn’t just looking for checkbooks. I was looking for partners.” He mentions stories he’s heard of board relationships and investors “that get sideways” with their CEOs. “It takes me a while to warm up to folks to the point where I feel like ‘All right, I want to have a long relationship here.’”

Thus it was that Batra arrived late enough to the B round that Yarnold went ahead instead with another firm. Batra didn’t let the closing of the Series B dissuade him. “He didn’t give up,” says Yarnold. “He really believed in us and our market, he was one of the few VCs who knew CRM and especially field service really well from working with industry leader Siebel, where he had spent some time, and he just kept after me.”

In time, Batra and Mayfield proposed a pre-emptive round for Series C. “It was very compelling,” recalls Yarnold. “I didn’t have to go through a whole fundraising round, it was a great valuation, and I had a great partner. By then he and I knew each other really well, and we have a great relationship to this day. He’s just been a great board member and supporter and has become a good friend. For a long time he didn’t let me forget about missing out on the B round, but now it’s all good for everybody.”

“Dave Yarnold, Athani Krishna, and Hari Subramanian had a vision for how to transform the services industry, which makes up 80% of the overall U.S. economy, using a cloud and mobile platform. Now part of GE Digital, ServiceMax is elevating field service as a core differentiator for the world’s biggest brands.”
— Rajeev Batra, Mayfield

When Your Message Precedes You

All that work with SmartVan combined with the tripling of the business changed the marketplace, and how ServiceMax was perceived. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, which had once positioned ServiceMax in the lower left corner, was steadily moving it up and to the right. People were repeating Yarnold’s own messaging back to him. “People would come to me and say, ‘Do you know there’s 20 million field service technicians around the world?’ And, yeah, I do know that. I think I’m the one that kind of raised that for everybody.”

And then Jim Cramer called. “Out of the blue I get this invite to go on Mad Money on CNBC,” says Yarnold. “I’d never been on TV before and we had never really gotten any kind of national press, so that was cool. It was important enough for Cramer to put us on because he liked what we were doing. He liked what kind of customers we were dealing with. Most of the interview had to do with, not our valuation or anything like that, but it had to do with who our customers were and how they were using us.”

He cites the Mad Money appearance as a big moment that resonated within the company. “But what was really interesting is how many emails I got from CIOs and COOs from big companies congratulating me on it,” he says. The show aired in the early evening on the East Coast, and he immediately started getting feedback. “It kind of had the feel of ‘Huh, we have entered into another realm now.’ We’re no longer an unknown startup. We’re becoming a serious player in our space.” He distinguishes the value of such experiences from paid media, in which he places little value.

Partner as Competitor; Client as Owner

In 2016, ServiceMax’s origin as a Salesforce competition winner came full circle — when Salesforce announced it would become a ServiceMax competitor.

“We had kind of known that this was going to happen for a couple of years,” says Yarnold of Salesforce’s field service offering. “We could see that they were coveting this massive market.” But aware doesn’t mean inured. “Even though we anticipated it, it was still a shock for everybody, because we are great partners with Salesforce. They support us, they support our customers, but like a lot of these big enterprise players, they saw a big market and they said, ‘We can support you and we can also be in this market directly.’”

The Salesforce announcement set Yarnold’s phone ringing. “I started to get really interesting partnership calls from every major player in the enterprise world.” All the suitors recognized the potential for field service, and they wanted to provide a home and resources to ServiceMax. “It kicked off a process of six months or so of increasingly interesting conversations, which culminated in GE getting very aggressive and making a really compelling offer from a number of perspectives. Financially it was great, but also where their business is and how they’re building out their digital industrial strategy, and the role that we could play within that.”

The GE deal marked a strong finish to what Yarnold calls “a crazy year” — and to ServiceMax’s nearly decade-long rise to lead the field of field service.

A company is only as good as its employees. But many organizations are still recruiting prospective employees using an inefficient and outdated manner, according to Jerome Ternynck, founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters. To compete in the war for talent, it’s the tool of choice for such modern enterprises as VISA, Skechers, Equinox, Alcoa, and CERN.

Recruiting isn’t an administrative function, he says: “It’s much more of a sales and marketing function, where you’re really looking to invest in people and get the best talent available.”

Moving Past the Past

Ternynck had been working with recruiting software for over a decade and realized that these applicant tracking systems were not solving the issues that companies needed to solve. Tracking was a bureaucratic process that had little to anything to do with actually acquiring top-level talent.

Moving from Paris to San Francisco in 2010, Ternynck gathered $1m in seed investments for his startup, SmartRecruiters. That money went toward building a beta version of his platform.

Platform Before Monetization

In 2011, Ternynck sought the counsel of Mayfield. In concert with Partner Rajeev Batra, he started putting together a game plan for a new way to approach recruitment.

“Hiring quality personnel is considered to be a top priority for many CEOs,” Ternynck says. “But we could see immediately that the process wasn’t being solved properly with the technology currently being used.”

With that in mind, Ternynck and his team launched SmartRecruiters in the summer of 2011 as a free app for people to create jobs, to find candidates, and to hire them.

Within six to nine months Ternynck had solid evidence that there was interest in his platform and people were using it regularly. By early 2012 SmartRecruiters started to pick up steam and display good traction.

“Yes, there was interest in our platform and people were using it,” Ternynck says, “but we didn’t know how to monetize our efforts. We were not sure whether the economics would work.”

Series A = 200 Years of Development

In February of 2012, Ternynck and his group raised their first round of venture capital financing.

“The Series A, led by Mayfield, was really a true partnership to try and build the software and the model to address the opportunity in the market,” Ternynck says.

Ternynck knew the stakes were high. The team at SmartRecruiters was working hard to replace an existing software platform being used by major players such as SAP, Oracle, and Workday.

“We were approaching companies and saying, ‘Hey, you’re currently using Oracle globally. Why not give us a chance to give you everything they offer and more,’” Ternynck says.

It was an ambitious plan. “We understood that if you were going to build an alternative to an established industry, you weren’t building a small tool for a small market,” he says. “You were actually building a talent acquisition platform of the future. And that undertaking was going to take some time and investment.”

The goal, says Ternynck, was to carve out an attractable market and produce a service that was bigger and better than anything currently being used.

“I was very fortunate, as an entrepreneur, to find investors who had faith in this particular market, and faith in us to build the right platform. Keep in mind that our success was built in four years with 50 developers,” Ternynck says. “That’s the equivalent of 200 years of development. Mayfield really invested in a vision — a vision that there was a better way to hire. A vision that we could make hiring easier.”

“Jerome Ternynck was a product-obsessed entrepreneur with deep domain expertise when we met in 2012. His dual focus on making hiring easy and helping people find the right job was unique. We embraced his audacious vision for ‘ending unemployment’ and today SmartRecruiters has grown into the leading hiring success platform.”
– Rajeev Batra, Mayfield

Time to Charge

SmartRecruiters continued to upgrade its software into the beginning of 2014. That’s when the second round of financing began. Series B financing embraces all kinds of investments, public and private.

“We raised our Series B round on the basis of our extended traction and our confidence that the platform was ready to start monetizing,” Ternynck says. “We went out and sold it to as many companies as we could.”

These Series B investors came on board during a time when SmartRecruiters already had a few thousand companies using its software. Says Ternynck: “We were seeing a lot of volume on the platform and we thought it was time to start charging for the software.”

SmartRecruiters launched its first paid product in May of 2014. The company picked up 700 new customers in the next two years. Says Ternynck, “It really went high in the enterprise market.”

“We understood that if you were going to build an alternative to an established industry, you weren’t building a small tool for a small market.”
– Jerome Ternynck

The Transformative Effect of Series C

“By July of 2016 we had heavy growth, good revenue, good repeatability, and good successes with our first customers,” Ternynck says. That’s when they raised their Series C financing.

“Series C investors are people who want you to scale,” Ternynck explains. “They were not taking a market risk; they already knew there was a market. They weren’t taking a technology risk either because they knew there was proven technology being used. They were only taking an execution risk. In other words, they were interested in how we were going to build our machine and scale our company across all segments of the marketplace.”

There’s a transformative effect when you reach Series C financing, says Ternynck. “It means that you have a proven repeatability in your sales process and in your integration process.”

SmartRecruiters Today

“From the very beginning, I wanted to make hiring a quality business, and I wanted to give people a job they loved,” says Ternynck. “That hasn’t changed.”

What’s changed, however, is how to effectively reach that goal. In tandem with Mayfield (and in particular Batra), SmartRecruiters was able to change the landscape of the recruitment industry. Its Talent Acquisition Suite has full end-to-end functionality for finding, engaging, and hiring. It provides experiences for all three groups that are critical for hiring success: candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters. And, built on a modern enterprise-grade platform, it has integrations to more than 250 partners and HR systems.

Recruiting talent is a sophisticated undertaking. Ternynck knew that the recruitment industry needed a paradigm nudge. “Things are different today,” he says, “Not only do businesses want to acquire the best talent available, but they want to become industry leaders as well.”

In order to achieve that goal, companies need three things: ideas, money, and people. “Nowadays there are ideas and money everywhere,” Ternynck says. “But talent is hard to find.” Thankfully, SmartRecruiters has made that process a little bit easier.