Jon Darbyshire
CEO & Co-Founder, SmartSuite. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Jon Darbyshire co-founded SmartSuite, a collaborative work operating and management platform designed to automate workflows and unify business processes. He previously founded Archer Technologies, a pioneering enterprise governance, risk, and compliance software company that was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2010.
1shows
2appearances
33statements
3resolved
1supported
2contradicted
33%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Jon Darbyshire said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
SmartSuite operates with zero employees and two co-founders using agency contractors
“We have no employees in place. I have two co-founders We hired teams of people inside of companies. I think we have five different main companies that we work with from a development perspective.”
Darbyshire: Bain invested at $70M pre-money nine months before $200M exit
“Bain came in and invested, I think it was a seventy million dollar pre. It allowed me to take some money off the table. They bought about 20% of the company. They allowed the employees to cash out a portion of their stock options at that time, so it was It was…”
Darbyshire: SmartSuite contracted its entire design team exclusively via Upwork
“He is. His team. So he's got a team of three or four people that work with him. Very reasonable rates for that team. And they got rid of everything else about a year and a half ago, so they, that's basically our design team.”
Darbyshire: Personally invested $12.5M to build SmartSuite's MVP
“It's unusual to spend 12 and a half million dollars on a, on an MVP, but for the idea that we had here, it was something that we needed to do. I personally put that money in today.”
Darbyshire: SmartSuite reached 400 paying accounts in first four weeks
“We have about 400 accounts that are on the platform in the last four weeks.”
Darbyshire: People aged 23 to 38 do the actual work in organizations
“The UI that we built is, is built for people ages, 23 to 38 who are Who we feel actually does the work in an organization.”
Darbyshire: Archer Technologies secured 76 Fortune 100 clients within six years
“At the end of the day, I think we had 76 of the fortune 100 were customers after like the first six years of the company.”
Darbyshire: Archer Technologies averaged a 97.6% renewal rate over nine years
“Over nine years, 97.6% renewal rate. So we only lost three customers in nine years.”
Darbyshire: Retaining cash boosted Archer's $187M EMC offer to over $200M
“So this deck, this memorandum that we put together allowed us to get an offer for a hundred and eighty seven million. But what was key when we got to the LOI here is that we also got to keep the cash. That was in the business. So the deal was really north of t…”
Darbyshire: Three-year consulting recruits excel in enterprise software startups
“When somebody would come out of school and go to an Accenture, they would spend two to three months at a bootcamp learning about process automation and how to serve clients and that whole process. They kind of came out of that. It's like a mini MBA type progra…”
Darbyshire: Archer Technologies generates $700M ARR with 90%+ renewal rates
“At the beginning was that we sold that company in 2009, but that company now does seven hundred million a year in recurring revenue, 90 plus percent renewal rates going public this year.”
Darbyshire: Hire inside sales reps in cohorts of three, not two
“What we learned and what they taught me from that
Is that first off always try to hire a full bus if you can, which is seven people, but if you can't hire in threes.
The reason for that is the best salespeople are competitive.
You hire two.
It's okay.
One coul…”
Darbyshire: Ukrainian developers charge $50-$75/hr with comparable quality to US talent
“The Ukrainian folks are typically in the 50 to 75 dollar an hour rate that's their similar quality, but the U.S. Folks have a little more experience working with big data some of the more complex architecture issues that we need to solve.”
Darbyshire: SmartSuite reached $85K to $90K MRR six weeks post-launch
“So we're in the 85 to 90 K per month range. Right.”
Darbyshire: SmartSuite Has More Enterprise Features Than Monday, ClickUp, and Airtable
“We're one level above those organizations. Our goal is to help organizations manage any process or project inside of a single platform, but it has a more enterprise features than you'll find from a Monday, a ClickUp and Airtable type.”
Darbyshire hired 90 contract developers over three years to build SmartSuite
“So we have a little unique company here in that we're in nine different countries around the world. We have about a 110 people that are part of the company. We have a lot of contractor and contractor firms that we've hired for specialty areas, feeling that we …”
John Darbyshire personally invested $12.5 million to self-fund SmartSuite
“I funded it myself. We put in about 12 and a half million to date to kind of get to where we're at.”
Darbyshire: Built one of the first no-code platforms in 2000 with Archer
“I built one of the first no code platforms back in 2000, which was Archer Technologies.”
Darbyshire: SmartSuite is targeting a $100M valuation for Series A
“We're in that hundred range is what we're talking about right now.”
Darbyshire: Review Sites Provide Sales Value Even Without Direct Leads
“It allows us to show potential customers that are coming in that comparisons are Of how we compare against competitors, even if the site's not sending us leads, we can send our clients there to kind of understand that.”
Darbyshire: Archer sent M&A materials to seven companies, EMC closed in four weeks
“I think we sent it out to about seven organizations that we thought would have interest back in, in this space. Three of them responded. Only one of them was super serious and that was EMC and they wanted to do the deal in four weeks in one month, which was un…”
Darbyshire: Archer Technologies sold to 29 of top 30 US financial institutions
“We're only selling into these 10, and people were frustrated with me in the first year and a half, two years, but what happened was we sold 29 of those 30 companies, and that's what launched us to sell to everybody else, right?”
SmartSuite took 2.5 years and ~100 developers to build core platform
“It actually took two and a half years of development time About a hundred developers that were just working night and day to kind of, if we go to the next slide, to kind of build out all these core capabilities in this platform that would make that a reality.”
The other half of the tape: Jon Darbyshire's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jon'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 | CEO & Co-Founder, SmartSuite | 2 | 33 | 33% 1/3 | full record on Top Founders → |