StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Nikos Moraitakis

Co-founder & CEO, Workable · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@moraitakis ↗LinkedIn ↗workable.com ↗

In 2012, Moraitakis co-founded Workable, a cloud-based hiring and HR platform that scaled globally to serve tens of thousands of businesses. Before launching Workable, he worked in IT consulting at Ernst & Young and served as Vice President of Business Development at Upstream.

12statements → 1claims → 0claims resolved → 3.83/5average certainty → 2.17/5average debate potential → 4.6/5argument clarity · the sources →

1 not checkable as stated how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 3 opinions · 4 insights · 3 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Nikos argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.6 / 5 directness 5 · coherence 5 · precision 4.4 · compression 4

answered every one of 12 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

249 words/min while actually speaking · 48.1 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,932 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 4/10
setup questions received 55%

Everything Nikos Moraitakis said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Pitch decks are bullshit compared to long-term investor relationships
“People talk about pitches and decks, that's bullshit. You know. The whole thing, it's about the relationship. You know, people, nobody's going to write you a twenty million dollar check if they haven't known you for a while, observed the way you execute, seein…”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 18:29 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Opinion
Greece is not the place to build consumer tech hits
“Also we were starting in Greece, so, you know, this is not the place to start the new consumer big hit that is going to become fashionable in San Francisco.”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 3:23 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Insight
Enterprise software companies selling to Fortune 500 become sales organizations
“We didn't want a company that is going to sell to the fortune 500 companies because these companies tend to be sales organizations in the end.”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 3:36 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Insight
Peripheral markets give tech founders a massive hiring advantage
“And the huge advantage when you are in a peripheral market like Greece is that if you have a network there and some reputation you probably have a huge advantage in in hiring. You know, hiring engineers in Greece, there's plenty of them. They're really good. T…”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 8:54 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
What-if
Workable could not have hired its first 20 engineers in SF
“It, it's more the fact that the kind of people that came to join Workable in the beginning, you know, our first 20 engineers, We're the kind of engineers that would probably be working at Facebook or Google if we were in in San Francisco. We wouldn't be able t…”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 9:48 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Disclosure
Growth and churn metrics alone justify investing in any legal company
“I think with two metrics, you'd probably invest In a company. In fact, given the right numbers, I invest in anything that isn't illegal and has good numbers on those two.”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 14:55 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Opinion
Legacy applicant tracking systems are built for HR, not managers
“And the name reveals the mentality. It's business process software to keep track of an arcane process that it's going to be done behind closed doors by the HR department. People don't want to touch this thing.”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 5:40 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Opinion
The US is unmatched globally for online sales and marketing talent
“When it comes to things like online, online marketing and sales the United States, I think, is no comparison to any other place in the world.”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 10:59 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Insight
20% MoM growth past $2M ARR signals strong SaaS health
“If you see a business growing at 20% month-on-month beyond beyond, beyond two million annual revenue, Then, you know, something must be going on right in there. There's, it's really difficult to achieve that if other things don't work well.”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 14:17 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Disclosure
Workable had 50% of its customers in the US before hiring there
“Essentially we had 50% of our customers in the United States, even before we had a single person there.”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 10:24 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Disclosure
Every Workable investor knew the founders for over a year
“Anyone who has ever invested at WorkUp, we knew us for more than a year, or anyone who has made an offer, who has actually taken seriously.”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 19:14 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Moraitakis targets 100,000 US small businesses using Workable within five years
“I'm hoping we get a 100,000 small businesses in the United States use our recruiting software, but I don't know how we're going to get to that.”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 21:45 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable Nov 27, 2015 15m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more