SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Board Meeting Software Breaks $24m ARR With Just $5m Raised, New $100m Last Month
10 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: What is the revenue model of the board meeting software?
Our ACV across, if you look at everything, is closer to 10.
I see. So you're doing more than $2 million a month in revenue.
Yes.
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Chapter 2: How does the software automate board deck creation?
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Hey folks, my guest today is Parun Chadha. He's the co-founder of Passageways, now called Onboard, and he leads its business strategy as CEO. He serves on the board of Onboard, a big brother sister of Greater Lafayette, Indiana University from Simon Cancer Center and TechPoint. He was a founding member of YouWeCan.org and is an angel investor in several technology companies.
Today, Onboard powers over 12,000 boards and committees across North America, EMEA, and APAC. Parun, you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 3: What features make the board meeting platform unique?
Absolutely. Pleasure to be here. How does this work? How do you automatically build board decks?
The idea here is to take an analog process of collecting all the different sections that show up on the agenda and automate that in a way that makes assimilating that information easier.
Chapter 4: How does Onboard ensure security and compliance in board meetings?
So we provide a platform that allows more collaborative board information building as well as provide an environment to get the boards to engage in a more meaningful way. We feel board meetings are transitioning from analog to digital. In fact, through COVID, also to virtual.
So all of that provides a great opportunity for us to look at the entire process and streamline everything for the best results for the boards.
And what do companies pay you for this to use this for their boards on average per month?
So, you know, on the lower end, it's about 5K a year. Some larger clients, of course, you know, $50,000 to $100,000 a year, you know, several six-figure clients as well.
What is the customer that pays you the most? Don't name them, but what do they pay you? What's your highest ACV?
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Chapter 5: What is the customer acquisition strategy for Onboard?
170,000. You can imagine big hospital systems, university systems. There are lots of different boards.
And what enables you to drive up that price point? Do you upsell based off number of seats, number of people on the board, or is it feature upgrades or something else?
Yeah, so it's usually the number of entities. So think of a big, large corporation, lots of subsidiaries, lots of acquisitions that they've done, that entire governance structure and providing oversight of that. We have built a platform which allows you multi-board access and that's how we drive up the cost. It's number of users and then there are suites.
So for every board, you may need different set of software packages as well.
Chapter 6: How did Onboard achieve significant growth recently?
And then what is in the software? Do you have to basically rebuild Zoom from scratch, the whole video infrastructure? Are you licensing? Okay, yeah. So what's the software?
I'm glad you asked that question. So the general idea is, you know, board meetings are a legal record. You know, they can always end up in discovery. So the goal here is to give you a chance to build the board information really well. and use as much of the plumbing that the internet provides as possible.
Chapter 7: What are the financial details of Onboard's recent funding round?
So single sign-on using Okta or OneLogin, integration with Zoom, integration with all the different document management systems and video chats and all of that, that's all built in. But our goal is to give you a secure way to You know, provide information distribution to your boards and all the underlying committees as well.
By the way, there's a lot of big committee structure often that comes to the board and then running the board meeting in a way that the platform stays in the background. You're discussing what's important, what's relevant to your board meeting, and then also thinking about how you can get very smart about it. So analyzing the engagement pattern.
If we publish your board book five days in advance, this is how much time people took to study that. What if you change that to seven days, looking at that analytics? And then all the other pieces that come along with board interactions, so board assessments.
uh, DNO questionnaires that have to be filed by, uh, you know, public companies, uh, any action, uh, you know, minutes and, and wording, all of those different pieces, they all stay in one purpose built application, which is not just secure, also limits your liability in case there's ever a lawsuit that's filed. It's all in one contained system.
Okay. The software is clear to me. I understand why people pay for this. Now, how many customers do you have paying?
We have about 2,500 paying customers on the onboard platform. We also just acquired a company by the name of eScribe. They're in the public sector meeting space. So think of counties and cities and government organizations where there are a lot of open meeting laws.
They are focused, they're based out of Toronto, focused on Canada and US for the moment, but they also have customers in Australia and New Zealand as well.
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Chapter 8: What lessons does the founder share about building a successful company?
Was there cash involved in that deal or was it mainly stock? That was a cash deal as well. How did you decide what the price was for that? Was it just a multiple on revenue or something else?
Yeah. So we just took funding, Nathan. So GMI invested in passageways. There was a valuation on the table. We'd done the due diligence on the space. This looked like another company, which is relatively similar to us and high growth. So similar multiples that apply to our deal, I guess.
What was that? Can you arrange yourself like 5X AR, 10X AR or something else?
Oh, 15 to 20 AR, yeah.
15 to 20X multiple. Okay. And you just mentioned you raised capital to help fund this deal. When did you raise capital last?
About two months ago. How much did you raise? We raised $100 million.
$100 million from JMI?
From JMI, yeah.
Interesting. Okay. And we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit because I want to get a bit of the backstory. When did you guys launch?
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