SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
989 How This CEO Split His Company and Cleaned Cap Table At Same Time
09 Apr 2018
Chapter 1: What is the background of John Younger, the CEO of HireMojo?
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 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.
Chapter 2: How did John's experience at Bank of America influence his entrepreneurial journey?
are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everybody. My guest today is John Younger, and he is the founder of over five startups. He has made more mistakes than most of us could imagine. He's currently the CEO of HireMojo, a SaaS hiring automation platform with a recruiter bot.
Chapter 3: What challenges did John face while launching his first company, Ynet?
He also founded Oklo, an award-winning pro, sorry, RPO, and was VP of HR at Bank of America. He has a BS in math from Notre Dame and was on the US national rowing team. All right, John, are you ready to take us to the top?
Sure.
All right.
Chapter 4: How did John navigate the struggles of Acolo during the market downturn?
Quite a variety of things you've jumped into, which is great. So what years were you VP of HR at Bank of America? Because I remember I'm guessing that's kind of when this idea started festering.
It was. It was from about 87 to 93, 94. Got it. And it was actually when I was managing all the recruiting for two divisions, about 16,000 employees, that I asked the question, is this really the best we can do? And that's really what set me on the course that I'm actually still on today.
And so did you launch the company back in 95?
I didn't. I actually launched a company called Ynet and I launched it actually in November 96 and sold it. Sorry, February 96, sold it in November 96 to a company called Trinet that outsources HR and payroll.
And how much was that sale price?
Um, that sale price, well, it depends on how you, it was mostly in stock, so it's hard to put a dollar value on it.
At the time, how much stock was it?
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Chapter 5: What led to the decision to split Acolo and HireMojo in 2015?
Um, it was probably pushing $4 million, something like that.
Okay. And keep, keep the story going there. What happened after?
So, so I stayed with Trinet and we were on Inc. Magazine's 500 fastest growing companies.
Chapter 6: How does HireMojo's platform simplify the hiring process for companies?
Uh, every year I was there for the next four years. And in fact, we had really hit some milestones that allowed us to ultimately get a major investment from General Atlantic, who ultimately took it public. I left in early 2000 and ultimately started a colo. So what I realized is that all of this knowledge of how to recruit is completely tribal. It's still tribal today for most companies.
And so one of the first recruitment process outsourcing companies, Acolo is like a turnkey internal recruiting department.
And so what happened to that company?
So ended up growing Acolo and it struggled at first. Imagine having a recruiting related company right as the bubble burst in 99, 2000, 2001. So no one wanted to touch anything related to recruiting at that time. Um, ended up getting, uh, through sheer force of will through that period, liquidated my entire retirement.
Which is how much?
Um, well, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand dollars at the time.
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Chapter 7: What unique business model does HireMojo employ to attract clients?
And how old were you? Uh, let's see. That would be, that was so long ago. So like in my mid thirties.
So you're late forties, early fifties now.
Yep. Exactly. Exactly. So I ended up building it version one. I ended up finding a group of nine unemployed developers in Fremont, California, who worked with me to ultimately create it. And we got version one out in 2002. As one of the leading recruitment process outsourcing companies, you can appreciate that we were given the hardest,
Chapter 8: What are the future growth plans for HireMojo and its impact on the hiring industry?
most wacky jobs possible to support because anything that was easy, everyone filled. So we got things like the, let's see, there was, there was a parasitic engineer for Texas instruments and they wanted someone from India who was trained in college here and then wanted to move back to India. So it was,
So I want to spend most of this time on your current company. So fast forward on this company. Did you raise capital on Colo and did you sell it?
We did. We ended up being the 42nd fastest growing company in America in 2006. Raised money in 2007. How much? About $4 million. And we ended up getting to a place where we're hitting about $2 million a quarter and growing quickly right when the bubble burst in 2008, 2009. brutal period, most of the companies that did what we're doing went out of business.
In fact, one of them, Herian, I called the CEO right as they were filing Chapter 7 and took over all their customers because it was going to hurt the industry if we hadn't done that. And then it was really a little later on, we got Colo back on track and started HireMojo around 2015. We realized we had built a platform that had
really grown to learn with every job and ultimately put this recruiter bot concept to work.
Well, so John, what happened to Okolo? I mean, did you sell it? Did you shut it down? Yeah, it's still out there. Oh, is it part of HireMojo? No, no, no, separate company. Okay, yeah, so that's a big gap. I mean, why aren't you still involved there? How did you leave? What happened?
I am still involved. I have someone else running it, but we recognized that there were two totally different businesses. Okolo is a recruitment process outsourcing company that, Like I said, it's a turnkey internal recruiting department.
The technology underneath it, we realized, could support thousands, hundreds of thousands of businesses that didn't want RPO but wanted to make it possible to fill jobs way more easily. So we separated the companies in January 2015.
And what was the size of the combined company right before you split it up? I mean, were you doing 8 million, 10 million, 20 million a year?
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