Pavilion Revenue: $11M in 2024, After a $25M Raise and an $8M Burn

Pavilion, the paid membership community for go-to-market executives that Sam Jacobs runs, generates $11 million in annual revenue as of 2024, according to GetLatka's live company profile, which dates the milestone to March 2024. One thing worth saying plainly: on his two 2024 Latka tapes, Jacobs never puts an absolute dollar figure on the record — what he gives is a growth rate. "Our top line has grown 15% this year, and we have half the people that we had a year ago," he told Latka's SaaS Open audience in September 2024. The $11 million does square with the profile's other numbers — 10,000 paying members at an average contract value of about $1,100 multiplies out to $11 million — but that ACV is derived by division from the revenue figure, not something Jacobs has stated himself.

The more interesting story is how Pavilion got here: a bootstrapped community that hit 30% operating margins during COVID, took a $25 million check near the top of the market, burned $8 million of it, and then cut its way back to cash-flow positive. Jacobs told the whole arc, numbers included, on stage at Nathan Latka's SaaS Open in March 2024 and again that September.

Pavilion revenue, year by year

All rows are point-in-time markers from GetLatka's Pavilion profile, most dated mid-year. Pavilion is private and publishes no audited figures.

Two of Jacobs's own on-tape statements rub against this table, and readers should see the friction rather than have it smoothed over. In March 2024 he told Latka's audience that when investor Elephant first emailed him at the beginning of 2021, "we had just gone from 1 to 4 million in ARR" — and joked that he didn't "know of any company that grows 4X in a year and is only worth one times revenue," which is what a friend had just valued the business at. In September 2024 he described the same period as "growing 3x from 2019 to 2020." The June-dated milestones above ($1M, then $3M, then $6M) fit the 3x version; the "1 to 4 million" line implies a year-end 2020 run rate closer to $4 million. Mid-year snapshots and year-end run rates can both be true at once, but the exact 2020 number depends on which of Jacobs's tellings you take.

The $25M check and the $8M burn

Pavilion started in 2016 as Revenue Collective, a dinner group for New York sales leaders — "a support group for chief revenue officers," as Jacobs put it in March 2024. It rebranded to Pavilion in June 2021, and the same announcement disclosed $25 million in growth financing from Elephant (PR Newswire, June 2021). On tape, Jacobs is more specific about the timing and the terms than the press release was: the round was actually raised in February 2021, and Elephant's offer, as he recounted it to Latka in March 2024, was $25 million in at "roughly $105 million" post-money, against their read that the business was then worth about $80 million. GetLatka's profile lists the valuation as undisclosed; the $105 million figure is Jacobs telling the story on stage, not a filed number.

What followed is the part Jacobs now presents as a cautionary tale. He told Latka in September 2024:

"We were a business that during COVID had 30% operating margins and was growing 3x from 2019 to 2020… From 2021 in February when we raised the round through last year, we burned $8 million of capital, which we'd never done before. Now we are generating cash again, we are profitable again, and we're growing."

— Sam Jacobs, told Latka in September 2024

The money went into three simultaneous build-outs he later unwound: a B2B sales organization, a paid-instructor learning arm (Pavilion University), and an in-house product and engineering team. "One of the great lessons that I would share with you," he said in the March 2024 talk, is "to size your bets… so that they're proportional to your balance sheet" — which, he admitted, Pavilion did not do.

Cutting back to profitable

The low point came when Jacobs asked his board what the business was worth. Profitable at its then-growth rate: "effectively like two to three times revenue," he recounted in March 2024 — less than investors had paid. Unprofitable at the same growth rate: "then it's worth zero." His conclusion from the exchange was blunt: "If you're asking your board what the company is worth, it's probably not worth very much."

The fixes, all from the two tapes, dated:

• Headcount: Pavilion entered 2023 with 62 full-time employees and was down to 27 by March 2024, when Jacobs gave the figure on stage.
• Killing the software build: the internal product and engineering team was costing about $2.5 million a year — Jacobs noticed its size "almost exactly matched our monthly burn" — building a member hub he judged far worse than off-the-shelf software. Pavilion scrapped it and launched on Hivebrite in January 2024. "We're actually not very good at building software," he told the March 2024 crowd.
• The result: cash-flow positive in January, February, and March 2024, with LTV-to-CAC back to 4-to-1 on both corporate and individual memberships (March 2024 tape). By September 2024 he said the company was solving backwards from a 5-to-1 target.

The line Jacobs used to frame the whole shift is the one worth keeping:

"The benefits of being a profitable company is that your customers control the company, not your investors."

— Sam Jacobs, told Latka in March 2024

The playbook behind the 15% growth

Both talks are pitches for what Jacobs calls profitable efficient growth, and the concrete mechanics he says Pavilion now runs are more useful than the slogan:

• Fix onboarding before pricing. Pavilion found members who came through its self-signup flow churned at three times the rate of members onboarded by a customer success or enrollment manager (March 2024). His September 2024 diagnosis: most churn problems are "failure to launch," not pricing or product.
• Stop bundling to save retention. Pavilion's earlier instinct was to add more to the membership bundle; on the September 2024 tape Jacobs says that "created a lot of confusion" while onboarding completion stayed low.
• Hire "in ones and twos, not fives and tens" — his March 2024 phrase for sizing bets against the balance sheet.
• The calendar test: before hiring another rep, check whether existing reps hold 15 external meetings a week; if not, route leads to fewer, better reps (September 2024).
• Payback discipline: solve for 12-to-18-month payback periods, not the 24-to-36 months SaaS tolerated at zero interest rates (September 2024).

Or, as he put it that September: "Growth is not a right. It's the privilege of companies with good unit economics."

What comes next, as stated — not achieved

In March 2024 Jacobs framed 2024 as deliberately not a growth year: the company-wide priority was the member journey and onboarding, with growth investment planned "over the course of 2025 and 2026." Those are stated plans from the tape, not results. The 15% top-line growth he reported in September 2024 is the last revenue data point Jacobs has put on the record with Latka, and GetLatka's profile carries no confirmed dollar figure beyond the $11 million March 2024 milestone.