SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
DevOps Tool Copado Breaks $400m Valuation, as New CEO Ushers in 100% YoY Growth with Founders
10 May 2021
Chapter 1: What experiences shaped Ted Elliott's entrepreneurial journey?
It's just been a series of experiences I never thought I would have, but I've enjoyed every moment of it. And right now, Capado is at $40 million in revenue after two years. We have 340 people in the company. We're going to have 600 by the end of the year. We've raised $111 million, and we're crushing it.
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Hello everyone, my guest today is Ted Elliott. If he sounds familiar, it's because he was on the show a while ago building a company called JobScience. He's since launched into a new DevOps tool that he is building called Copado.com. Ted, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, thanks so much.
Glad to see you again.
What happened to JobScience?
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Chapter 2: How did Ted Elliott transition from Jobscience to Copado?
What do you think we should do? And I'm like, well, is it a good deal? And they're like, it's a great deal. But we didn't listen. This was in 2018. And they said, but we think this is going to be really big. And I'm like, I think it's going to be really big too. And I think you guys are crazy. And they're like, well, yeah.
They said, instead of taking the money, we're going to take a round of investment from Insight, Salesforce Ventures. They're like, if you want to be in it, there are a couple other guys. One was from DocuSign. One was from Velocity. So we all threw in invested in the business. And at that point I had no plans on joining the company. I was just going to be an active board member.
That was a seven and a half million dollar round, something like that. Right.
Yeah. Yeah. And I was just gonna be an active board member and help them hire people in North America so they could go ahead and, and execute their North American plan. And, um, and it sort of just evolved from there. Uh, and, um, you know, about two board meetings later, two founders said, you know, we're really struggling to get a foothold in North America.
We really need someone who can help us. And I said, okay, guys, I'll only do this if I'm in charge. All right. This is our business. I'm like, yeah, well, I said, I need to be in charge. You guys can fire me anytime the two of you can agree. I go, if one of you agrees with insight, you can fire me. If you two agree, you can fire me. But if the three of you can't agree, then I'm in charge.
Um, and, and I said, great, come on board. And so we, we started off and my whole plan was to hire as many people as quickly as possible and spend that seven half million dollars as quickly as possible to show that we could scale. Um, and I think when I walked in the door, we had four and a quarter, uh, in ARR, um, and you know, we took it from four and a quarter to 15 million in the first year.
Um, we went from 30 people in Spain to about a hundred people, um, uh, in the U S in Spain. Um, I got diagnosed with stage three rectal cancer, my third month on the job and was told that I was going to die. Um, and, um, I was like, well, do I want to keep doing this or do I want to just focus on not being here? And I was like, no, I'm going to go for it. Go big. Right. Have you beat it?
Um,
Yeah, I beat it. I did 12 rounds of chemo and radiation and four surgeries. And I just had a follow-up surgery last week that was not related to the cancer, but I had a hernia as a result of them poking a hole in my abdomen for a colostomy bag that I had to wear for four months. And I can tell you, I have probably, well, I shouldn't go there.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Ted face during his time at Copado?
It's part of our secret sauce. We've actually leveraged a ton of ideas from recruitment software in our entire selling methodology. We found out that 80% of the world's DevOps community on Salesforce lives in India in one of three cities. They go to one of three schools. Bangalore is the capital. We, so, uh, my really close friend and colleague, this guy, Sanjay Gurdwani, who is our COO.
I said, you know, Sanjay, I think someone needs to go to India and throw a training and see who shows up. And he calls me from Bangalore and he's like, it's like a dead concert, dude. There are people lined up for blocks trying to get into the training center. And I was like, okay, we're onto something. And that's the fun part of it. It's like,
we've got the money to go run any play we want to run. We can place big bets. It's so different than when it's founder bootstrapped. And I could have never done this without art basically freeing me from job science. And it wasn't that I love job science. I loved what I did, but I'd done it forever. And that six months in the desert thinking about what I want to do next, I was like,
What did art do right?
What did insight do right? Job science was you launched in 99. So, I mean, when you say- Yeah, and we pivoted.
We pivoted like three times. And in fact, a lot of the guys I hired at Capato, I knew from Salesforce. The guy who sold me Salesforce when I was at job science is now running my sales team. That's right. The guy who I went and did the first pitch at Kelly Services with job science at Salesforce is now running my sales ops and sales insurance.
So I've taken all these people that I've collected relationships with over the last 19 years and I call them up and I'm like, hey, this is what we're doing. I'd love to get the band back together. Do you want to get involved? I'm like, here's kind of where my life is.
And we also did this other crazy thing that I would have never done in job science, which is we start off with a very clear mission, which was to make release days obsolete. What does that mean? It means from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., no one should have to be at the office trying to deploy software, right?
So you're talking like continuous integration teams or what?
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Chapter 4: How has Copado achieved significant growth in revenue?
So we were at 15, so a little less than... And after this first quarter, we're growing at 100% plus on new revenue. What's really interesting about this business is the number of customers. And this is really the sign that you're making customers successful. We generated 50% of our new revenue in the fourth quarter of last year on customers who are coming back and buying more.
Got it. Well, can you quantify that? So what is expansion revenue percentage-wise over the past 12 months? 100%, 80%, 50%?
So we're running 140% plus net revenue retention.
What's the gross? Yeah.
Well, I mean, what's we're holding onto about 90% of the labels and we're 95% of the revenue. And then we're upselling another, you know, 55% on that on average, you know, our customers come back on average within eight months. And by, a second set of products from us that are about 40% of the first sale.
Yeah, that's world-class.
I probably shouldn't be throwing those numbers out, but I mean, I don't care because no one who we're competing with can pull this off.
Yeah, no, these are healthy numbers, Ted. 140% even in a public SaaS. I mean, that's world-class. Zoom is up in that world. Zoom info is in that world. So real quick, on your team, 340 total today, how many engineers?
50.
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Chapter 5: What unique strategies does Copado use to target customers?
And that doesn't mean I don't have days when I'm hurting. I haven't had a drink in two and a half years. I can only eat chicken and fish. And I was a steak eating monster. And honestly, I love being here. So Nathan, I know we're out of time, but I just wanted to have a follow-up with you because I was excited the last time I talked to you
Um, hopefully someone doesn't call and make us an offer to buy the company in the next two weeks. And you're like, what the F Ted? I thought this was your opus, man.
But, um, that's what it is. You come on the show, you get multi-billion dollar acquisition offers. Yeah.
Yeah. So, so anyway, um, I had fun talking to you last time when you reached out to me, I was like, Hey, sure. Let's get the band back together.
Well, Ted, the show doesn't work unless you come with these stories. So I want to thank you for being so open and guys, we'll, we'll take it on there. Ted Elliott, 1999 launch job science grew to $25 million run rate, kept 70% of the business. Him and his family ended up selling that for more than a three X multiple to our friends, art pop us at private equity back in Bullhorn.
He did that call it a year and a half to me, sorry, two and a half years ago ish. ultimately ended up getting involved with DevOps tool Capato, making Salesforce deployments finally stress free. He joined in the company was doing 4.2 million in ARR back in 2019. It's now doing over $40 million in terms of run rate. They're serving over 400 customers.
The team is 340 people, 50 engineers last round valuation. It raised 96 million bucks at North of a $350 million valuation. He's growing. We're having fun watching Ted. Thanks for taking us to the top. All right. See you later, man.
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