Drew D'Agostino
Founder & CEO, Crystal. On 1 show, 2 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthor@DrewDAgostino ↗LinkedIn ↗drewdagostino.com ↗
Drew D'Agostino is the founder and CEO of Crystal, an adaptive communication and personality data platform. He previously co-founded Attend.com and co-authored the book Predicting Personality.
1shows
2appearances
39statements
2resolved
1supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
Everything Drew D'Agostino said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
D'Agostino: Startup Recruiting Will Become Harder as Talent Avoids Risk
“I think this problem is going to get more acute as top performers also experience risk aversion, and they also are going to look at, all right, what are my options in these safer environments?”
D'Agostino: Founders are the most effective recruiters for their company
“Whether you like it or not, you as a founder are the most effective recruiter for your company.”
D'Agostino: Startup candidates deciding against big tech want the challenge
“The first principle is that I found that the people who, especially the ones who are kind of tossing around between a big offer at a big company that feels safer and your startup, they're actually attracted to the challenge.”
D'Agostino: Hiring bricklayers during a startup's trailblazer phase causes severe frustration
“If you're in a, at a phase that's a startup and you really need the trailblazers, you need to be able to understand that if you bring in bricklayers, they're going to be very frustrated.”
D'Agostino: Fast customer impact motivates top software developers more than money
“The best developers are so attracted to just the idea of them pushing code and then seeing it impact customers quickly. That's, like, It's more valuable than money to most developers that are most of the best developers that I talked to.”
D'Agostino: Founders mistakenly treat employees as static dots instead of moving trajectories
“Oftentimes I feel like as a startup executive or a founder, you can look at someone as a dot instead of a line.
It's like I hired this person for this reason, and that's their job, and I'm paying them to do that job.
Meanwhile, they're viewing their life as a …”
D'Agostino: Neglecting the firing process causes half of talent issues
“I think we focus so much on the hiring
And nobody talks about the firing process, and that's where everything gets messed up, like, half the time.”
Crystal removed self-service paid signups from its pricing page
“As far as new customers go, you can right now, if you go to Crystal's pricing page, there's a free user. You can't sign up for the self-service account.”
D'Agostino: Crystal has personality data on a few hundred million people
“So we offer access to a large set of personality data. For a few hundred million people”
D'Agostino: Crystal predicts DISC personality type with 83% accuracy
“And 83% of the time we can properly guess what the primary personality type is when they take that assessment. So Crystal will get that about four to five times accurately.”
D'Agostino and his co-founder were fired by Attend's investors
“That was a whole big thing where my co-founder and I got fired by our investors.”
D'Agostino: Attend was nearing $1M ARR when investors fired founders
“I think we were about to hit a million ARR.”
D'Agostino rejected an Attend severance package to speak freely
“We actually got, we were offered a severance package in exchange for a release. But because if we signed that, I wouldn't be able to have this conversation with you at that level of specificity. So I prefer being able to speak and not filter myself.”
D'Agostino: Average Startup Employee Tenure Is About 1.8 to 2 Years
“The average startup tenure, which tends to be around, like, 1.82 years, depending on how you measure it.”
D'Agostino: Sharing retention policies during interviews boosts candidate hiring and retention
“Building real policies at our company that had, that I now share in the interview process and actually really helps. And I think it's also helping retain, it's Really helping retain people for the long term.”
Crystal gives employees a one-month sabbatical and $2,500 stipend after 4 years
“After four years there's a one month sabbatical, a paid sabbatical with like two and a half thousand dollar Travel stipend.”
D'Agostino: 30% of Crystal's hires come from former employee referrals
“Now about 30% of our employees came from an alumni referral, and we've actually had some boomerang employees come back, too.”
Manual personalization from data enrichment is impossible at scale
“There's a lot of that data out there. And it makes it makes personalization on one hand possible, but on the other hand, really hard because it's impossible to do all that research and actually put that into action in an efficient way. If you're a sales rep or…”
Crystal's B2B ACV is $8,000 compared to $500 for self-serve
“That is around, around 8000 annual annual contract value versus the self-service, which is historically for us been mostly monthly contracts, but if it's annualized, it's five or 600 dollars.”
B2B grew from 0% to 65% of Crystal's revenue since 2021
“So since like really the beginning of 20, 21, it's gone from almost zero percent B to B to about 60 to 65%.”
Accenture is a major enterprise customer of Crystal
“Some examples of those are like big professional services organizations, like Accenture is one of our big customers.”
Crystal gets 30,000 to 40,000 monthly signups for its free tools
“It's about 30 to 40,000 people, depending on the month, who sign up monthly for our product, and they go through the motion of filling out personality assessments, downloading trials of our tools.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Drew's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Crystal | 2 +1 | 39 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Top Founders → |