SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
946 He Changed Ideas 7 Times at Y Combinator, Now 500,000 Employees More Engaged Because of Him
25 Feb 2018
Chapter 1: What insights does Taro Fukuyama share about his background and journey?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Taro Fukuyama.
He's the co-founder and CEO of a company called Fond.co, which he founded back in 2012 and, again, now serves as the CEO. He was born and raised in Tokyo and is a Y Combinator graduate and part of the first Japanese team ever to be admitted to the program. He studied law at Keio University in Tokyo and was named one of Business Insider's Silicon Valley 100, the coolest people in tech right now.
Taro, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yep, super excited to be here.
What the hell does coolest people in tech mean?
I have no idea. My face was next to Elon Musk and Marissa Mayer. And then the only thing I know is my parents were excited to see that.
What did they think when you said, I'm going to this thing called Y Combinator in the U.S. ?
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Chapter 2: How did Taro's experience at Y Combinator shape his entrepreneurial journey?
And we call on behalf of them. Hey, we represent Salesforce. Here's how we work. Please give us this gun so we can send you more customers from Salesforce.
I see. That's really smart. Okay, that's the one model. What's the other one?
The other one is called employee recognition program. Recently, especially a lot of millennial are so used to post on Snapchat, Instagram, and once you do it, five seconds later, they get likes or comments. So that type of instant recognition is getting so important, but that's what they require in the workforce today.
So if they work really hard, they want to get recognized by the manager or company immediately right after they do that. So how the program works is as a company, you can give budget to each manager and manager can give recognition to the employee with the points attached. And they can use those points to exchange with gift cards, you know, skydiving experience, one day PTO, those type of stuff.
It's a good way to bring more recognition within the company.
That's great. And how many companies are using the platform today across how many employees?
Roughly over 1,000 company-ish right now. And then average sweet spot is few hundred size of employee companies to few thousand employee size of companies. That's roughly the customer base we have.
Okay. So, I mean, is it fair to say that you said 1,000 companies? Can we try and pin down an average? Can we say 200 employees per company on average?
Yeah, mostly like 500 employee size of companies is the average that we see.
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Chapter 3: What is Fond.co and how does it enhance employee engagement?
So there's a little bit, you know, that discount based on the, you know, size of company, those kinds of stuff, but that's how you do the math.
Okay. Uh, can we, so maybe a little less, but can we say you're definitely over 2 million a month? Is that fair?
Uh, yeah, that's fine.
Okay.
You have this revenue.
So now I get that, but we'll, we'll keep it vague and say between two and 2.5 million per month. That's fair.
Uh, Is it okay to no comment?
Of course you can no comment. I'll just ask the question differently.
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Chapter 4: How does Fond.co generate revenue and what is its business model?
Will you be happy this year if you pass $2 million a month in revenue? You think you'll hit that by the end of December?
No comment.
No comment. All right, fair enough.
We're a little sensitive right now for the funding, so if you could not touch about the revenue, that would be helpful. Is this recorded right now, or how is it working right now?
Yeah, yeah, of course we're recording. Okay, okay, cool. Why is that? I'm curious why you say that though. So you say that it's a weakness. Basically you just said that don't talk about how much revenue because you're currently raising. Why do you see that as a negative?
I don't think it's a negative. I think it's much better and easier for us to control the story. You know, the other ways like numbers going walking down the street and they can read in different way. There are a lot of context that I have inside. So that would be helpful.
That makes a lot of sense. Now you've gone through YC. So I assume you've already raised capital. How much have you raised?
We have raised around 24 million so far.
Do you regret it?
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