Sturges: AskHR turned down investors to avoid 'dumb money'
James Sturges · 1617 How He Closed 50,000 Seat Deals on Day 1 · Dec 28, 2019 · at 6:26
AskHR co-founder James Sturges explains the startup's fundraising philosophy and why they were selective with incoming investor capital.
0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 15.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In this most recent raise, we actually said no to a few investors because we didn't want to take what's, you know, what I'm calling dumb money. So we really wanted money that would get us into you know, partners equity partners that would basically help us sort of grow the business, talk to different people and that, you know, that sort of thing.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from James Sturges
Sturges: AskHR launched with about a dozen major customers, including Fortune 500
“So officially we're pre-revenue, but we have we've launched with probably about a dozen major customers and then a couple of other smaller customers. And we're lucky that some of those customers are in the fortune 500 space.”
Sturges: All AskHR customers are paid, revenue-generating accounts
“The product, so all of our customers are paid. So we're actually generating revenue from our existing customers.”
Sturges: AskHR customer revenue covers salaries, servers, and R&D
“It's covering salaries for our employees. It's covering our server costs and fees, and it's covering our R and D costs.”
Sturges: AskHR closes five-to-six-figure deals and has two 50,000-seat customers
“From a revenue standpoint, we typically do probably five to six figure deals with those customers. And some of that will be our current product. And some of that will be sort of service based customer software that we're integrating on top of that. So integrat…”