My company Jobvite was recently awarded the 2009 TiE50 Winner, Top 10 “Hottest” Software Startups award. Check out the winners.
Dan Finnigan (Jobvite's CEO) and I attended the two day event on May 15th and 16th. The event was very successful. It was very heartwarming to see so many entrepreneurs following their dreams despite the venture funding drought.
As one of the 10 award winners in our category (software), we were requested to present our entrepreneurial success story to the conference attendees. Dan presented on May 15th and I presented next day. As usual Dan did a great job. Next day, I had to fill Dan's shoes. I did my best. After my speech many people came up to me and thanked me for the inspiring and motivating speech. Here is a transcript of my speech.
Good afternoon!
First of all I would like to thank the audience - all of you, who are sitting here on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Your presence here shows that you are committed to your passion. And let me tell you, passion, and, commitment are the two most important ingredients for entrepreneurship. So congratulations, you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
Now, I would like to thank the TiE organization, our customers and friends for their vote of confidence. I am honored and privileged to be here.
What do we do? We (Jobvite) are a SaaS based hiring platform. Companies like LinkedIn, Mozilla, Zappos, Digg and many others use our software services to acquire talent and manage their hiring process. We think “hiring is everyone’s business” and employee referral hiring is perhaps one the most effective ways of hiring top talent. Through employee referral, companies hire better, faster, and cheaper. Better, because employees tend to recommend their friends who they have worked with in the past and who are good at what they do; faster because the discovery cycle and getting to know each other is short circuited; and cheaper because you are really paying a bonus to your employee and encouraging a behavior rather than paying a fee to outside recruiters or job boards.
Prior to joining Jobvite, I ran engineering for Yahoo HotJobs. My CEO at Jobvite, Dan Finnigan, was the GM for HotJobs and prior to HotJobs, Dan was CEO of Knight Ridder Digital and a board member for CareerBuilder.com. While working at HotJobs, Dan and I saw the Open Web movement, so we built the first Open job board that crawled all jobs from few hundred thousand corporate career sites. We soon saw the emergence of social networks FaceBook, MySpace and professional networking site LinkedIn. And it occurred to us that the future of hiring is about to change – hiring will be increasingly done from the Open Web and the era of the Walled gardens is over. Jobseekers will create their living profiles and Companies, Recruiters and Hiring Managers will be looking at these live profiles for the candidates on the open web and therefore the future of recruiting is an open platform in the cloud that connects with social networks, has the algorithms and matching at the heart with analytics, intelligence and web 2.0 consumer like experience. And so we set out on our mission to transform the hiring SaaS world. At Jobvite, we got the opportunity to convert our thoughts and ideas into action and viola! Pretty soon we heard analysts talk about us.
Even in these turbulent times, we have doubled the number of customers, our revenue is up, Gartner group has put us in “Cool Vendors” category and ERE called us “Game Changer”. It is nice to have analysts and blogs praise your work. These things help us tremendously in marketing. But you know you got an A grade, when your customers love your product and they say great things about it. Recently a customer of Jobvite tweeted about us “If Jobvite was a man, I would marry it”.
But really as an entrepreneur you give yourself an “A+” when your competitors, the Goliaths of your industry notice you and get worried about you. That is when you know you are onto something big. The best thing we heard a competitor, a Goliath of the industry describing us as “ankle bitters”. I think this is a big compliment. This mean we are now getting somewhere.
Key take-aways that I would like to mention here are:
- You got to have ideas to begin with. But it is the execution that makes a difference
- Don’t wait for the big ultimate idea. Often big ideas are evolutionary
- In this economy while the Goliaths of your industry will be focusing on bottom line, you as an entrepreneur need to focus on innovation that will disrupt the market when the economy returns
- Look at the macro trends of the tech industry:
- Open Web, APIS, Platforms, Cloud computing
- Algorithm, matching and recommendation technologies
- Bringing the Consumer Web innovation to enterprises and
- Social Networks
I am sure many of you sitting in this room are already looking at these trends and thinking creatively or already working on applications or services that will disrupt the market and I am absolutely sure that many of you will be the winners of the TiE50 award and I will see you standing here on this podium in coming years.
Thank you and good luck!
