The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Patel: Celebrating VC funding is like celebrating getting a mortgage
“We didn't want to do the typical fundraise announcement where, you know, everyone gets high fives because they raised X dollars at a Y valuation you know, which always seems like an odd thing to celebrate. It's a very Silicon Valley thing to do. It's sort of a…”
Patel: Next wave of marketplaces combines marketplace dynamics with SaaS
“I'd posit there's a next wave coming in marketplaces, and that is really gonna be the combination of a marketplace company and a SaaS model.”
Patel: Lower marginal transaction costs in SaaS marketplaces drive better data flywheels
“The power for the marketplace in that is as marginal cost goes down, usage goes up, they get more data, they understand preferences better. Once you understand preferences better, you can match and make recommendations better.”
Patel: Hired's subscription revenue surpassed four years of transactional scale in two
“We've actually, in the two years we've been running the subscription business we've got to a scale that is now greater than we've got to after four years of running the transaction after running the transactional business.”
Patel: Relying on policies instead of values kills early-stage innovative culture
“When you don't have alignment around values, you have to find that alignment in different ways, and the way you do that often is policies and procedures. Policies and procedures kill an organization at this stage, right? If you're going to lose the most innova…”
Patel: Early-Stage Transformations Need Scrappy Builders Over Big-Company Executives
“We made a mistake of going too senior in certain instances. We needed people who knew how to be scrappy and how to build, not people who had done this at a very, very large company at least in the early stages.”
Patel: Hire leaders two steps ahead, not seven, to avoid cultural rejection
“The way we thought about it is we wanted someone two steps forward for what the future looked like, but not seven. So they could pull the org with them.”
Patel: First Executive Hired in Hired's Pivot Was Head of People
“The first executive I hired when we went through this transformation was a head of people.”
Patel: Category-creating companies should hire pricing competence in-house
“So there's a learning there for all of you to think about actually hiring that competence in-house so then folks who understand the nuances of your business and how to set Pricing when you're creating a category.”
Patel: Delivering incremental feature requests builds trust for long-term product vision
“What we found, the nuance on that was because we hadn't done SAS before our customers didn't really believe we could develop the car and deliver it to them. The car for us is the end-to-end talent platform. So we needed to deliver some faster horse features, i…”
Hired's transactional business reached tens of millions in revenue before pivoting
“We launched in 2012 for our first four years of our history. We're a transactional marketplace like that. We curated, meaning we selected the best candidates. We grew triple digit percentages year over year hit tens of millions of dollars of revenue.”
Patel: Hired shifted from transactional to SaaS while sustaining 100% YoY growth
“That's a massive, massive change to go from a transactional business in the tens of millions growing a hundred percent year over year to a subscription business that's delivering value now over the long term that's also growing a hundred percent year over year…”
Patel: Hired grew recurring revenue from 10% to 80% in two years
“By the way I said that we, our goal was in two years to get to 50% recurring from 10, we got to 80% recurring in the business.”
Patel: Cost per hire is Hired's leading indicator for renewal
“Cost per hire is a metric that, that really, for us, was a leading indicator of clients going to renew again with us. If their cost per hire was low, they, they'd renew, and if it was high, they were at risk of churning.”
Patel: Seat expansion model raised Hired's ASP by 30% to 40%
“She really drove a seat expansion model that has actually had a double win for us. We've got we've got our reps able to sell more deals, and we've got the ASP has gone up now significantly, 30 or 40% from where it was after the consultants had talked to us.”
Patel: Customers prompted Hired's shift to subscription pricing
“It was our customers who told us to move to subscription, right? They came to us and said, it doesn't make sense for us to pay a high cost each time. That, that chills my users from using you more. Let's set up a longer term relationship. Pay you a fixed price…”