SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 534: 29yo Radius CEO Raises $100M, Helping Expand B2B Sales Pipelines with Darian Shirazi
09 Jan 2017
Chapter 1: Who is Darian Shirazi and what is his background?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 2: What is Radius and how does it help B2B marketers?
We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Daniel Al-Soudini. He's based overseas. He's an employee at a current company and can't wait to break free. For your chance to win $100, Top Tribe, simply subscribe to the podcast now and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it.
Again, text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it. I give away $100 every Monday. Many people ask me what tool I used to sell my first company, Heyo. The answer is thetopinbox.com.
I used it to send emails, schedule emails to be sent out later, and set reminders inside my inbox so I would know when potential buyers were actually interested, and I easily remembered to follow up with ones that hadn't replied to me. You can try it for free at thetopinbox.com. Nathan Latke here. This is episode 534. And coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Dominic Vassicar.
Chapter 3: How does Radius differentiate itself from competitors like CB Insights?
He's a 24-year-old founder, is now a venture capitalist at Hummingbird VC in Europe. How'd he do it so young? Top Tribe. Good morning. Nathan Latke here. Our guest today is Darian Shirazi. He is the CEO and co-founder of Radius. He was an early employee at Facebook and worked out on the Sell Your Item team at eBay. He's founded, invested in, and advised many successful technology companies.
Prior to starting Radius, Darian studied computer science and philosophy at UC Berkeley.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of Radius's business graph?
He's also a prominent keynote speaker on the topic of technology innovation. Darian, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. Thank you for having me. All right. Hey, thanks for coming on. So you were one of actually the first 10 employees at Facebook. You decided to leave to do undergrad. I sure hope your options vested before you left. Yeah, they treated me very well. Very, very well.
It was an interesting time. I definitely left at the right time. I definitely worked on a lot of really great projects, worked with some great people. Which was your favorite project?
Chapter 5: How has Radius grown since its founding in 2011?
Yeah. Favorite project was definitely something we called Facelift, which was the move from the Facebook to Facebook. We re-architected a lot of the site. We launched high school along with that. There were a lot of projects that we did during that time, which were a ton of fun. In your opinion, is Mark the same guy today as he was back then? You know, I think that he's a genius.
You know, he's he's definitely understands how to build great companies, build great teams. At the time, he was really product focused. He's always been product focused. And that's that's what makes for great entrepreneurs, ones that are product focused and think about how to build the best product for customers.
And that's what he taught me, which was always build the best products first and then the revenue and the users will come after that. So it's it's I think he's definitely doing a lot of the right things. And I think Facebook has, you know, many decades of success and growth out of it. Last question on this before we get more into radius.
Chapter 6: What are the funding details and investor insights for Radius?
Mark disagrees with someone and wants to try really hard to convince them of something. Maybe it's Sherlock or an ad product. What strategy does he use? Maybe if it was to to convince people. I don't know. I mean, I can't really think of a time in which there was anyone that was at odds with each other because the best decision really made sense.
So I think that it's being a CEO is about being a consensus builder. And then when there is conflict, you know, making a really clear cut and strong decision. And he never had trouble doing that. And that's something that I hope I do a good job of as well at Radius. So tell us about Radius. What do you guys do and how do you generate revenue?
So Radiance is all about growing pipeline for B2B marketers. We start with a few key things when we go into a customer and our biggest and best fit customers are typically enterprise and mid-market companies that have a desire to grow pipeline in the B2B space. And so what we do is we usually come in and we first fix the data.
Chapter 7: What is the current customer retention rate at Radius?
We employ a data stewardship project or sort of implementation to allow people to have the best CRM and marketing automation information.
And then after we've built that data stewardship program, we layer on use cases, allowing them to predict who their next best customer is going to be, give them net new leads, have them target existing open opportunities, allow them to direct target businesses and business contacts on Facebook Twitter. Twitter, display advertising networks, or over the phone and email.
But realistically, the whole foundation of the product starts with the radius business graph, which is a data set of 20 million companies and 30 million contacts. And this data set is refreshed every two weeks. But the way we build the data set is that our customers actually contribute and improve our core data set with their CRM data.
So sales activity information that are in our customers' CRMs, we use that to validate phone numbers or email addresses, et cetera. So it's really this virtuous cycle where we get customers to opt in to giving us access to their data in an anonymized and aggregated fashion. And then what we do is we help them improve their CRM data and marketing automation data.
And then we layer on predictive and multi-channel to really drive pipeline and growth for their B2B organization. And in terms of this business graph, Dorian, I mean, how does this compare to something like, you know, a Mattermark or CB Insights? Yeah, it's very different. So those data sources are typically either crawled or they're aggregated from publicly available data sources.
Our data set is actually powered by our customers. There's an inherent network effect that actually drives the quality.
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Chapter 8: What future plans does Radius have for expansion and partnerships?
So we have enterprise customers and mid-market customers with some pretty impressive logos, things like companies like Sam's Club, First Data, American Express, etc., And a good number of the, you know, hundreds of customers that we have connected to the platform are opting in actually 99% are opting into giving us access to their CRM activity data.
And that activity data allows us to improve the quality of our information. Whether it's modeling employee count of businesses or seeing whether a contact has moved from one business to the other, we have primary source data that actually allows us to have the best accuracy.
All these other sources, whether it's Dun & Bradstreet or Mattermark or DataFox or Net Prospects or Zoom Info, these are all really handicapped by the fact that they're relying on publicly available data sources that tend to be very inaccurate. And so our unique differentiator is that network effect.
And that goes back a lot to how Facebook operates is that, you know, Facebook is only valuable because people update their profile information and that network effect enhances the social graph.
At Radius, it's very similar is that companies opt in to giving the refreshes and changes in their CRM information, which is that network effect that makes our business profiles and our business contact profiles of the highest quality.
And then, okay, so I want to get more into kind of the CRM integrations you currently have and what the demand is moving forward there to increase and make your data set even stronger and the value of the customer stronger. But first, give us some high-level history, what you found the business in. So we started working on the business in about 2011.
We were working on something else for a few years before that that we pivoted out of. And then we launched the product in 2013 into private beta and started selling it in early 2014. So it hasn't been that long since we started selling the product and the company hasn't been around for that long.
But now we actually have about more than a petabyte of data that we process on a daily basis of customers that are contributing to our data set and then also that are pulling from us as well. And how, sorry, how many customers are you guys at today? It's in the hundreds now.
So we definitely have many customers, mostly in the mid market and enterprise that are connected to the graph and contributing and getting value out of the predictive technology and multi-channel technology. More or less than 500? Less than 500. And are those logos or seats on the logos? Oh no, those are logos. Those are logos. Yes. Yeah. Many, many seats.
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