Opinion
Traditional job search platforms provide an inadequate, dehumanizing experience for candidates
“I mean, even today, in most cases, you are confronted when you go to those sites by a giant blank search box. You have to type something in and you'll get 3724 results, and they all look the same. What sort of, I mean, I'll get off my soapbox, but I am offende…”
Insight
Venture capital should accelerate customer-funded growth, not support basic operations
“Our Customers pay for a fair point of our growth and we can use venture capital really to accelerate and not to sort of, yeah, exactly to support.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Minshew: Over 50 million people use The Muse annually
“We have over fifty million people who use the site every year to find a job, get to that next step, talk to a career coach, get advice, learn a skill, anything that's related to taking charge of your career and sort of living the life that you want.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
The Muse serves over 600 companies including Facebook, Slack, and HBO
“And then on the other side, we have over 600 companies From Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, to HBO, Goldman Sachs, Marriott businesses large and small, and we help them with hiring and employer branding.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Minshew: The Muse's average contract value is $20k to $30k
“So right now the average is between 20 and 30 K. But the enterprise number of enterprise deals is rising quite a bit more quickly than our mid-market business.”
Opinion
Minshew: Banner advertising has no place on The Muse
“We've never had advertising on the site. I think banner advertising has no place on the muse.”
Assertion Supported
The Muse Reached 100,000 Monthly Users Within Six Months of Launch
“So we actually had a 100,000 users a month in about six months. So it was not all that much time.”
Assertion Partly supported
The Muse tested its first job listing with a 50-employee Uber
“And we launched our first job listing about a month later. It was a test. We did it with a little known Silicon Valley startup called Uber that had about 50 employees at the time, and, ah, we decided to see if we could get them some hires from our platform.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Two early Muse candidates rejected job offers from a 50-employee Uber
“Unfortunately Uber made two offers from the Muse, and both people turned down those jobs, so we didn't get the success money, but the caliber of people who came through was so high that we felt like we had proved We were onto something.”
Assertion Supported
Minshew: The Muse raised roughly $270K in initial seed funding including YC
“We raised about a hundred K in January of plus we got into Y Combinator. So that came with about a 170,000 dollars. That was our first seed funding.”
Insight
Sudden Muse profile takedown requests reliably precede M&A by 4-12 weeks
“We will regularly have companies, especially, again, tech companies, up-and-coming companies, that will suddenly email out of the blue. We think that they're very happy, and they'll email out of the blue and say I need my profile to come down. And we used to j…”
Disclosure
The Muse charges enterprise employers an annual subscription for candidate marketplaces
“Essentially we have these businesses of various sizes that subscribe to the Muse. It's an annual subscription. And through that, they get a range of different tools. They have the ability to literally have a profile on the new site and hire from our community,…”
Disclosure
The Muse's candidate user base skews heavily toward women and millennials
“We've got a great population, a lot of women, a lot of millennials, a lot of digital natives”
