Ryan Holmes
Founder & CEO, Hootsuite. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorauthorengineer@invoker ↗LinkedIn ↗hootsuite.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Ryan Holmes founded the social media management platform Hootsuite in 2008 and co-founded the seed-stage fund LOI Venture alongside the youth charity League of Innovators. He is also the author of social media strategy books, including The $4 Billion Tweet and Saving Social.
2shows
2appearances
31statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
30said about them ↓ Everything Ryan Holmes said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Ryan Holmes Was Extremely Bullish on Snapchat's 10 Billion Daily Views
“Oh man, no, I, I'm hugely bullish on Snapchat. Ten billion views daily. Facebook's at eight billion. Huge audience. Very engaged audience. Recently, this, yesterday, memories coming out. That all of a sudden is, is really interesting seeing your archive of Sna…”
Holmes: Founders sleeping 2 to 3 hours is an unhealthy myth
“I don't believe in the myth of CEOs that don't sleep. I think CEOs that don't sleep die and die early, and so I believe in the power of sleep. I think that sleep is when you heal. I think sleep is when your mind recharges, and I believe in getting, you know, a…”
Rapid Product Shifts Are Irresponsible for Mature Software Companies
“As you grow user base, we have an accountability for dependability, reliability to them. We have an accountability you know, we have effectively Provided our customers with a product and a workflow that they're familiar with, and so rapid shifts in product, tu…”
Holmes: Aspiring founders should do services work to find billion-dollar problems
“Agency is an incredible place. I, when I talk to young entrepreneurs that are, you know, they feel like I want to do a business. I don't know what it is. You know, I often will tell them, you know, go do services work for a while. Somebody is going to bring yo…”
Holmes: Hootsuite generates 30,000 self-serve signups per day
“All of our leads are generated through our freemium signups, our pro signups, our self-serve signups. They come in through those channels. So we get, you know, 30,000 signups a day.”
Hootsuite is cashflow positive with no pressure to IPO
“We've built a company that's cashflow positive, and therefore there aren't any pressing forces for us.”
Operating a Small Business Serves as a Mini MBA
“Working as a restaurateur or a small business owner in general, you know, I talk about small businesses are fantastic because ultimately full accountability rolls up to you, one person. You have to Ultimately develop a skill set. You have to be good at a lot o…”
Alphabet's Cellular Structure Allows Google to Effectively Expand in Multiple Directions
“And so that cellular division, I believe, is a very smart one. I think then it allows the leaders to create a more tightly aligned vision for a smaller group of people, and I think that's a very smart move on behalf of Google. I think it's going to allow them …”
Companies Should Cap Teams at 100 People Due to Cognitive Limits
“The human brain kind of on its own, unaided with Rolodexes and other stuff, on average, kind of starts, stops being effective around, you know, over a hundred relationships, and so, you know, I think that's a way of thinking about how we are maybe naturally wi…”
Hootsuite Policy Allows Employees to Walk Out of Unproductive Meetings
“You know, one of the things we have is a policy of, you know, if you don't feel like you're going to be adding value or the meeting isn't useful for you just excuse yourself. It's not, you know, a mandatory have to sit in and, you know, unless you're contribut…”
Meetings Without Clear Documented Outcomes Are a Waste of Time
“Because if you don't have outcomes out of a meeting, the whole meeting really, I think is very often wasn't worth value.”
Feature Wars Degrade Software Usability When Customers Primarily Prefer Simplicity
“I think that's something that often gets, gets missed as people get into a feature war in terms of adding the next, next, next, next feature. And, you know, ultimately you have something that looks like, do you just stapled on a bunch of brochures and maybe yo…”
Mark Suster Is the Best VC at Social Media Branding
“You know who I always love is Mark Schuster. He's like, so when we first, first started getting going in, in Twitter, 2008, nine, he was crushing it then. He's now crushing it on Snapchat and doing really interesting stuff.”
Holmes: Hootsuite customer contracts range from tens of dollars to millions
“We have teams of tens of thousands using our product on a daily basis to, Help connect with their customers, and so the model matures, so we go from tens of dollars to millions of dollars in terms of the spectrum of our customers.”
Hootsuite self-serve LTV is hundreds; enterprise averages tens of thousands in ARR
“So I'm going to have to, you know, it's in the hundreds of dollars for LTV. And, you know, on the enterprise side you know, it's tens of thousands of dollars in terms of annual recurring and you know, just in, in kind of general numbers.”
Holmes: Hootsuite has raised north of $200 million to date
“Yeah, to date I, you know, it's north of 200.”
Holmes: Much of Hootsuite's funding went toward secondary liquidity for early investors
“A big chunk of the fundraising that we did do was for secondary liquidity for early investors.”
Holmes: Hootsuite has over 200 app directory partners and millions of installs
“We've got over 200, ah, different partners built out in our app directory so far. We have millions of installations of apps in our app directory.”
Holmes: App installations and API integrations directly increase customer retention
“Every time we see an app install or an API integration, we know that that customer is more likely to stay with us because we're more connected, more meshed into their overall marketing and customer support stack.”
Holmes: Hootsuite has customer deployments of up to 10,000 seats
“I mean, the law of large numbers, some of the big enterprises obviously take out, we have 10,000 seat deployments.”
The other half of the tape: Ryan Holmes's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 25 times in 14 episodes across the shows. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 20Cameron Herold 3Harry Stebbings 2
Statements about Ryan Holmes, by other people (5)
Latka: The most successful SaaS companies originated out of agencies
“And the most successful SAS companies I've ever seen all came out of agencies. Qualtrics with Ryan Smith Ryan Holmes at Hootsuite. I mean, the most successful SaaS company started as agencies.”
Latka predicts Hootsuite will sell for $750 million soon
“Probably going to sell Hootsuite for seven hundred fifty million bucks here soon.”
Herold: Pushed Hootsuite aggressively back toward profitability during 2015 leadership meeting
“I led the leadership team meeting for Hootsuite two and a half years ago for Ryan Holmes and his team, and I really, really aggressively pushed them back towards profitability, so they did.”
Ryan Holmes shut down a $5M agency to launch Hootsuite
“He shut down his agency when he's doing five million bucks in revenue to go and force himself to be uncomfortable and go all in on Hootsuite.”
Hootsuite reached $200M revenue after shutting down its $4M agency
“He grew it to about three, four million bucks and just Professional service revenue. Everyone kept asking for them to manage manually their posting. So he said, I'm gonna build software for this. And then he shut down that agency. He totally washed away four o…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 23
20VC 2
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2019 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
2018 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2017 3 mentions in 1 episode
2016 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- EP 433: $19M Raised, 0 to 1M Active Users for Copmetitive Intelligence Platform Owler with CEO Jim Fowler
- Immediately's Branko Cerny on The Rise Of Bottoms Up Sales and The Importance of Branding For Enterprise SaaS Companies
- Look! A Book Author Who Actually Made Money! ($250,000 To Be Exact), EP 305: Ash
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ryan'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, Hootsuite | 1 | 17 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Top Founders → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Hootsuite | 1 | 14 | — | full record on 20VC → |