$71M ARR: How Cognism’s Founder Rented the Expertise He Didn’t Have
James Isilay knew nothing about B2B sales intelligence when he started Cognism. His answer at every revenue threshold up to $71M ARR was the same one he used on his first two bad hires — find someone who had already done it, and put them in the room.
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“The first two hires I ever made were terrible.” James Isilay was talking about two SDRs, and the fix he eventually landed on was not a better interview process. Isilay is a software engineer by training. He knew how to hire engineers, and that was the end of the list. “I needed to find people that knew how to hire those juniors,” he told a room of roughly a thousand software CEOs in late March 2024, “and I needed them involved in the hiring process and I needed them to do the sign off for those employees.”
By the time he told that story on stage, the company was doing $71M in ARR — his own figure, said twice from the podium. The talk was billed as four scaling crises between zero and $70M, and the answer Isilay gave for all four was the answer he had given for the two bad SDRs: he did not work them out himself. He went and found somebody who already had.
The argument. Isilay treats expertise as something to rent rather than something to accumulate. At each revenue threshold he changed the people he took advice from — angels under $1M, a venture firm’s operating bench next, a CEO coach at $10M, a new chairman and an almost entirely new executive team past $50M — so that the learning curve sat with the mentors rather than with the founder.
The premise is that he was unqualified and knew it. Before Cognism, Isilay traded oil, German power and carbon. He started the company to build a fintech and pivoted into B2B sales intelligence, an industry he says he knew nothing whatsoever about. “I really went out and seek knowledge and I really went out and tried to find the mentors to help me get to the next stage,” he said. He opened the talk by asking for a show of hands: who has a mentor at a company several stages ahead of you? “Oh wow,” he said. “Not that many.”
The 2016 network was two investors who cancelled each other out
Isilay put his support network from 2016 on screen. It was two people, both friends at the time. One was the conservative investor, who would call and WhatsApp him daily, “chasing me about every single penny that was spent” — a bit miserable, Isilay said, and also the reason the money lasted. The other was the optimist, who promised to always be there, wrote the first cheque, “and then I never heard from him ever again.” Combined, he said, they made the perfect investor.
Two friends who had put money in. One chased every penny; the other went quiet after the first cheque. That was the whole board, the whole advisory bench, and the whole safety net.
A CEO coach, a CEO mentor who now chairs the company, a wellness coach, a wealth adviser, a fitness coach he had only just added, and the operating partners of two venture firms. Most of it is paid for, some of it by his investors.
He justified the softer half of that list with numbers off a slide: 72% of founders report that the entrepreneurial journey affected their mental health, 37% report anxiety, 36% burnout, and average loneliness among CEO founders scores 7.6 out of 10. He named four pillars — family, health, career, wealth — and described what happens without them in a metaphor a room of operators recognised: “the chair breaks and it falls down because one of the legs falls down.”
Under $1M: stay out of America
The first rung had three mentors, and Isilay credits each with a specific decision rather than general encouragement.
An angel investor who had already had an exit. His advice was to stay in the home market and not touch the US until Cognism reached $10M.
Had run a B2B outreach agency, so he understood the market Isilay did not. He explained what customers wanted and helped build the first sales plan; he and Tom James both introduced early customers to test the service on.
Arrived after the two failed SDRs. He taught Isilay how to hire salespeople and customer success staff — and, critically, took the sign-off on those hires himself.
The US advice is the one Isilay says was worth the most, because he watched the counterfactual play out in real time.
One of our rivals raised a seed round, went into the US market, and blew the entire money and died.
James Isilay, founder and CEO, Cognism
The other sub-$1M move was structural. Isilay now invests in startups himself, and says the mistake he sees repeatedly is founders avoiding a board out of fear of losing control. “But it’s not really a control thing,” he said. “It’s really a headspace thing.” Cognism ran board meetings and revenue-operations meetings monthly from its first year, and Isilay credits that cadence with keeping the company pointed straight from zero to $50M. Both have since moved to quarterly, because there is now too much data to review monthly without swamping the executive team.
$1M: the expensive mistake is being cheap
At the second rung the spending changed. Isilay bought Salesforce and, as a matter of policy, the best tools and equipment he could give a sales team. The failure mode he describes is the opposite instinct, and he sees it in the companies he invests in.
People are cheap and they don’t invest in their people, they don’t invest in their technology. And I see that as one of the major issues of scaling.
James Isilay, founder and CEO, Cognism
The other arrival at this stage was PeakSpan, Cognism’s first institutional investor, and Isilay is explicit that he took the money for the bench attached to it: an expert network, operating advisers, education resources, monthly sessions with specialists, and mentors for every member of his C-suite that PeakSpan pays for. His advice to first-time founders is to screen VCs for exactly that infrastructure, because plenty do not have it. He also gives the honest range: PeakSpan’s operating partners were the right fit “from that kind of like 5,000,000 ARR up to 50,000,000” — which is a wider and later window than the $1M slide implied. The funding record agrees with the later date: Tech.eu reported PeakSpan leading a $10M Series B in July 2019, at which point GetLatka’s series has Cognism nearer $7M than $1M.
$10M: two days and one word
Above $10M ARR a CEO coach joined. Cognism had values already and Isilay is blunt that “they weren’t very good”; the coach ran a two-day offsite at which the executive team rebuilt them. The one he singles out is the first: we are nice. He built the sales culture around it deliberately, alongside fairness, and says the result is visible in the company’s Glassdoor reviews and in unsolicited inbound from people who want to work there. Culture, in his telling, is a hiring discount rather than a poster: get it right and candidates knock on the door, which lowers what you spend to acquire employees. “It does pay back in spades.”
The same coach set the communication cadence — monthly town halls where every department’s wins get read out, since moved to quarterly on the same too-much-data logic as the board meetings.
What that $10M rung actually looked like from the inside is on a separate tape. Speaking to Nathan Latka in August 2020, Isilay said Cognism had just crossed a $10M run rate and expected to finish the year at $11.5M, on 179 people, with 12 quota-carrying reps each carrying a target of $8,000 in new monthly recurring revenue. There were a bit over a thousand customers at an average contract value of about $14,000, up from $11,000. Net revenue retention was around 85%, which Latka told him to his face was “a very poor net retention metric”; Isilay argued it was normal for prospecting data sold to SMBs, where churned customers frequently come back.
One line from that 2020 conversation explains the whole mentorship habit better than the 2024 talk does. Asked why his team was willing to sell shares in a secondary rather than hold them, Isilay said: “Everybody in the team is pretty much a first time in startups, like none of us are experienced entrepreneurs.” The support network was not a personal-development project. It was the entire supply of operating experience the company had.
Past $50M: he replaced five of his own executives
“We’ve now scaled past 50,000,000 ARR,” Isilay said, and the bench changed again — to Balderton, whose operating partners have run companies at that size and beyond. His CEO mentor, a PeakSpan operating partner with NetSuite and Crystal Decisions behind him, is now Cognism’s chairman; Isilay admits he recruited him too early the first time, when “the advice that he gave me wasn’t really resonating and didn’t really have impact because I’d taken him a bit early.” The same mentor, at $50M-plus, he calls invaluable.
Then the logic turned on his own team.
5C-suite roles — CTO, CFO, CHRO, CLO and CPO — Isilay hired into over the twelve months before the talk, which was where he says essentially all of his time went
- Hire for the stage, not the seat — the executives he brought in had already scaled to the hundreds of millions in ARR, and “it’s a very expensive mistake to hire the wrong people.” Part of the skill is simply knowing which executive search firms to use.
- The good ones arrive with a bench — the sign of a strong executive, Isilay says, is that they find the real talent already in the department, then bring in people they have worked with before to fill the gaps.
- Governance gets formal — board governance grows more complex, legal issues surface, and investors expect more of you as the company moves towards IPO. That is the body of knowledge he says he is seeking mentors for now.
- Communication slows down — town halls and RevOps reviews moved from monthly to quarterly, because at this data volume monthly is “just overwhelming our C Suite executives.”
The revenue ladder
What the database says about $71M
The $71M Isilay stated in March 2024 sits cleanly inside GetLatka’s recorded series for Cognism: $2M in September 2018, $7M in September 2019, $16.11M in August 2020, $19.2M in October 2021, $38M in November 2022, $64M in October 2023, and $83M recorded in December 2024. Disclosed funding across five rounds comes to about $116M, from a $2.7M seed reported by Tech.eu in April 2018 to the $87.5M Series C it reported in January 2022. Headcount was 481 in September 2023 and 559 by October 2024.
Two rows disagree with the tapes, and both are worth stating plainly. The August 2020 row carries $16.11M for the same date on which Isilay told Latka the company had “just gone over 10 million” and would finish the year at $11.5M — a gap the database has never reconciled. And a 1 January 2024 row, flagged in the data as an estimate, puts revenue at $83M: roughly $12M above what the founder himself said three months later, and the identical figure the database went on to record as an actual number in December 2024. The estimate was not wrong so much as eleven months early.
The last question
Someone in the room asked what you tell the company when you let a C-suite executive go — not the other executives, who Isilay says can usually see it coming, but the individual contributors watching from outside the room.
Ideally you’re like, this person’s leaving and here’s the new better person that’s gonna take over. Which is what I just did with the CPO. And then everybody got very, very excited about the change. … If you could convey some good news immediately after the bad news, it softens the blow … it also can pump up the organization. So you can use it as a good thing to pump up the energy of the organization.
Sources — James Isilay’s talk on scaling Cognism from zero to $70M ARR, recorded 28–29 March 2024 at SaaSOpen and published on Nathan Latka’s YouTube channel on 7 May 2024; Isilay’s Latka interview of 26 August 2020; revenue, headcount and funding rows from the GetLatka Cognism profile; round reporting from Tech.eu (April 2018, July 2019, January 2022).
