SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
York hits $1.5m Revenue Helping Founders Scale
07 Nov 2020
Chapter 1: What revenue milestones has York IE achieved in its first year?
Yeah, we have about 25 outside clients, you know, average tickets paying around seven grand a month for the services. So, you know, we've got ourselves upwards of, you know, with our with some of our other project work and things we've done, we've got ourselves right around a million and a half ARR in the first year.
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And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bien before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
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Chapter 2: How does York IE support entrepreneurs and investors?
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On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Kyle York. He's the co-founder, CEO, and managing partner at York IE, where he sets the company's vision of building a hybrid strategic advisory investment and operational growth firm.
He works closely with entrepreneurs and investors to help them realize their shared ambition to build great communities, new jobs, grow general wealth, and impact the world. Investing in over 75 startups over the past decade, Kyle is also a co-founder and board member
of a fourth-third-generation family business called York Athletics MFG, an e-commerce footwear brand based in Boston, and is also a board member of CAMS, Ascent Compliance, CloudApp, and Forcivity. Kyle, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. All right, so how should people think about this?
Chapter 3: What is the vision behind York IE and its services?
Is this a fund and York is a platform you just invest through, or what is York?
Yeah, so sure. So thanks for having me, Nathan. It's really exciting to be here and talk to you. Yeah, so I've had a long career operating SaaS businesses, SaaS startups. Claim to fame helped build a company called Dyn that we built to 100 million ARR and sold to Oracle back in 2016. And in parallel- What was the price?
Jeremy wouldn't tell me the price. I had him on my show and I go, Jeremy, what was the price? The press says 500. I'm like, it's enough removed now. It's enough years in the past where you could just slip up and there'd be no lawsuit.
I mean, I just say it's a rumored 600 million. So yeah, I mean, but we had a great success. Jeremy and the team we had around us, you know, we all built just a really fun company.
Chapter 4: What SaaS platform is York IE launching and what does it offer?
We did it in our hometown of Manchester, New Hampshire. And in parallel to that, I had been angel investing, like many of the other dying early executives and doing advising and boards and By the time I ended up staying at Oracle, I spent three years as the general manager of the business unit, ran cloud strategy for Oracle.
And I kept feeling like the traditional venture capital industry or the conventional sort of way of operating businesses were binary decisions. So I thought, I wonder if York IE could enable me to invest, but also advise, consult, build our own SaaS platform, sort of build this kind of vertically integrated next generation company. So that's really what York IE is.
It's a SaaS business, it's an advising consulting business, and it's an investment business focused on early stage technology startups.
So let's talk about the SaaS component first. What is the customer paying you for on the SaaS side?
So we actually haven't even launched it publicly yet. The SaaS platform is called Fuel. We've publicly announced it because it's actually, it's a market and competitive intelligence platform. So it's how we build our investments practice, how we do market tracking, proactive discovery, market theses. And it's also, we've today launched its SaaS subscription model
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Chapter 5: How does York IE's investment model differ from traditional venture capital?
We've launched three services modules that are almost managed services on top of the SaaS platform, market product strategy, business growth strategy, and Marcom services. And so those services start at 3K a month. and they scale up from there. And we basically productize and modularize these services using our technology capabilities. So they can be hyper scalable, really margin friendly.
And then over time, the idea is that we'll then open up the SaaS platform to the market once we build up a bunch of captive demanding customers on top of the managed services practice in the investments business.
So what is the native services practice? You mentioned there's technology there, right?
Yeah, so the services practice, think of it like a private company database. Think of it, you know, almost an operator version of like Traxin or PitchBook that are more based or built for venture funds or private equity funds. What we're trying to do is basically have the most accurate and connected data sets on companies and markets.
And then we're building a capability called Smart Notebooks, which is really like smart automated templates for things like market research or data strength or share of voice, collaboration or marketing competitive, sizing and things like that. Company pitch decks are really like operator tools on top of the data sets to scale businesses and we think disrupt markets.
How many companies do you have listed in your private company database currently?
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Chapter 6: What types of companies does York IE invest in?
Currently, that's a great question. It's a lot of internet scraping. I think the current database is about 800,000. But last I checked, just this past Friday release, we're recording this on a Monday, in mid-October, we added the capability to scrape another 3 million companies through our data sets.
Why so many? Why go so wide instead of deep on a specific sector?
Yeah, I think you need to get a broad enough cross-section of startups in the startup community. Most of the companies, think of it like a private company Bloomberg portal. There are so many small companies. The ability for these companies to get bigger and bigger and bigger is just a long tail to the startup market. To be able to cover all the disruptors, all the innovations, all the
features, capabilities, you need to have a pretty long tail of the market. We think a lot of the big use case of the technology, I mean, a lot of it was built on the backs of dying people that know this. We actually acquired 11 companies and we spun out four different technologies that we sold to other companies. And then at Oracle, my team,
Chapter 7: How does York IE plan to scale its SaaS offerings?
I had hundreds of people who worked for me, but we had a dedicated 35 strategic development team, which was basically marketing competitive intelligence. It was a lot of manual, automated research, market sizing, doing proactive market theses. It took a lot of human bodies to basically scrape the internet without technology.
to do this really well and keep an eye on the ankle biters and also the kind of heavily funded, fast growth, free IPO startups, you just need automation and you need a wide, a widespread database.
But, but how, I mean, so, so, I mean, you look at what sort of what Mattermark did, right? They tried this, they tried selling it to founders and investors and then eventually sales teams. And it just failed miserably in the long run.
And a lot of people, when you talk to X employees, they say the big mistake was Danielle gave essentially a thesis that we need to have, you know, 30 million companies indexed by X,
date and a lot of people say the mistake that was made is the data was so wide it wasn't differentiated you could just go to pitch book crunch so so you either have to have a differentiated data set that and then go wide and have a data point per each company that other people don't currently have or you say super super focused and go really deep on a specific cohort you're going wide what data point are you going to have on all companies that they can't get elsewhere
Yeah, so I think a lot of those companies you just mentioned, Mattermark, Crunchbase, BitBook, they're relying on lots of point solutions and point data sets as partners and integrators, like an OWL or BuiltWith. I was an investor and shareholder and board member of Datanize. I was the founding investor who sold to ZoomInfo.
A lot of these companies are good little companies, but they're never going to be venture-backed big companies. Right. So a lot of the capabilities that are being integrated into the crunch bases and others from these point products, we're actually building ourselves and integrating it.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Kyle York share about his entrepreneurial journey?
The other reason why Mattermark wasn't a successful company is because they fundraise too much. The entire thesis of my investment firm is take less capital. I mean, The best part of the Dyn story is that we didn't raise a dollar of outside capital till we were 30 million ARR. I'm in the fortunate position to self-fund York IE and self-fund our fuel platform.
So I can actually control our destiny, control our fate, control our cap table and not be beholden to investors' definition of success or failure. So I think it's those two things. I mean, it's building a lot of the IP ourselves.
I think it's launching our services and investments practice on top of the platform ourselves so that we can hone the product, the capabilities, the automated levers of the platform. And then over time, decide what parts of it to offer to the market.
I think what you'll see with us is we're building our smart notebooks is really more around automated workflows and doing a lot of education and training on how to do market research, how to do better amplification, how to curate better content.
And I think those types of things that we build in as more workflows will also help us not just be a company, a tool that you think of the user, of the operator, and that's not always the case.
So, Kyle, the revenue model there, again, SaaS, we know what SaaS is. It hasn't launched yet. Your strategy and services practice, which includes the database, it includes smart notebooks, that's 3K a month and higher.
Sorry, it's breaking up a little bit. I don't know if it's, is that on your side too, or is it just mine?
I hear you clearly. So what I was saying was you've got three different product lines. We know what SaaS is. You talked about strategy and services, 3K a month, that includes your private company database and smart notebooks. Is that accurate? And then your third product line is capital. You're investing, correct?
Exactly right.
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