How Censia CEO Joanna Riley grew to $10M revenue and 40 customers in 2024.

hello everyone joanna riley is an entrepreneur advocate and mentor in technology and is currently the ceo and co-founder of sensia she has a highly experienced background in building and scaling companies which she attributes to her deep passion of people and building technologies that allow people to live and be their best selves she brings her wide knowledge of the industry to better transform the way enterprise companies hire talent at her current company sensia all right joanna are you ready to take us to the top i am very you bet tell us about the company what do you do and what's your revenue model is it pure play sas yeah it's a sas business um so we started sencio to really change the way that companies hire talent really for for companies to start breaking the bias that has really kind of killed off talent in the end of the day and empower hiring people based on merit and we do that all through using predictive ai um and so delivering the best fit people to companies in a predictive fashion versus having humans to perform hours upon hours of searching on platforms like linkedin or filtering through resumes and so um what i love is when you put math and science to the problem of hiring it tells you that diverse people do jobs that are way different than you might think as as a human doing search with all of our unconscious and conscious bias ai machine learning that's a big statement today and you know people go well is it really or is it just a marketing thing like is it a glorified like database what is it really so give me a real example how do you use marketing intelligence and ai in your software yeah it's a great question um i'm one of those people by the way so the skeptics right here in silicon valley so we i hear a lot of a lot of the buzzwords um we looked at this and were inspired very much our back end is a data platform so we aggregate data from thousands of different sources and create golden records on candidates so that we can look at people as dynamic as multi-dimensional every single technology in the world today when you're finding people when you're looking for people you can only look at them one-dimensionally you can only say i want people that have gone to stanford have worked at google have done this and that but you can't say i want someone who's yes gone to stanford or schools like stanford but they were an athlete at stanford athletes more important than stanford you can't do that and so we were really inspired by trulia um trulia aggregates data from thousands of sources for being able to allow people to search in a vertical fashion in a multi-dimensional fashion for buying homes so being able to look at things like crime rates in school districts we do the same thing where all of a sudden we can look at everybody's hard data but we can also use that hard data where you've gone to school what you do you know what skills you've acquired we can use that to build derived data about you things like career trajectory performance against your peers diversity loyalty competitiveness these are really what allows to determine is somebody able to where do they fit in in the world of of you know where they fit as a career but also the we're able to look at things like do you belong in a startup or do you belong in a large enterprise are you somebody who is a rising star so you're going to start out early but you're showing the patterns that others have shown prior that mean that you're going to end up most likely as a high performer in the future that pattern recognition though is only as strong as the inputs you give it so when a new company signs up for you what access to their internal data are they giving you that allows you to then become predictive for them so we actually don't need them to give us any data we sit today on 500 over 500 million people globally that we've created golden records on we aggregate data from over 2 000 almost 2 500 different sources now and all of that is built to aggregate the information that we need to do we need to use to figure out how you map against the global talent pool um when a company however signs up they are absolutely able to say hey we want to plug in our applicant tracking system you can look at all those records but we as sensia will also update all those records instantly for them and give them the intelligence on top of those records so they can search them in a more dynamic fashion basically say joanna we're using you listen susie she joined us three years ago she's a freaking rock star we need more people right now like with the makeup of susie you're saying you have the ability to do that that's right and our our platform that's the interface actually it says tell us three rock stars it builds a short list of people you were hired no yeah it told a short list of people that are exactly like susie but susie stripped of her gender ethnicity race sexual orientation disability status veteran status so it is literally looking at susie as a number as mathematical equation it feels kind of bad saying that doesn't it but i understand why you have to just say you have to kind of uh de-emotionalize the human right to look at the numbers okay what give me i don't want to go down every customer cohort but on average kind of what's a company pay you and other companies are interested in the space they do all kinds of things like number of matches per year and there's a sas pricing i mean how do you price yeah we have two models both sauce one sas based on seats so anyone can have unlimited search 3 500 bucks a year seat model um typically our clients are going to have over 10 recruiters they're going to can sometimes rise all the way to 50 recruiters they're going to have sourcers as well so we focus on companies that are enterprise size or hyper growth so post series c abc um the the other option or we have our second product which is our premium solution is a sas model based on number of roles and that not only automates the sourcing it automates sourcing the engagement and outreach to candidates and then the coordination of the first interview roles you're hiring for not roll not seats of roles in your company are giving access to sencia too yeah roles that they're the company's hiring for so let's say that you are anthem who's one of our clients they have thousands and thousands of different roles we're going to start with a segment and those range of contracts typically in the beginning are going to be about you know 50 000 in a in a high case 100 000 contracts and then they're going to rise into multi hundred thousand dollar contracts and hopefully in the future you know over a million dollar contracts it sounds like no matter which of those two options you just gave each one kind of first year acv is kind of that 35 to 50 grand kind of range right yeah it's closer to 50. i would say that you know 50 70 is probably going to be closer we um launched platform in july so we're pretty new oh you just launched the sas platform in july we did oh wow when did the company launch september 2017. oh wow okay so fairly new so okay let me break this down because you didn't say founder in your bio which tells me like something happened like yeah no no it just said ceo so okay are you are the founder i am oh very good because what was going through my head was okay what i was trying to trick you no no attention what was going through my head was okay she was an eir to vc firm the original founders like didn't do something so she must have came in with around you you are the founder you found it a year ago yeah yeah i have a great team um i so i get to just actually they are very much telling me what is what they're what we're gonna do and i get to tell you so that's really exciting but great i have an awesome team and bootstrap today or have you raised um we bootstrapped so i was the original investor in the company and then we've just closed our series seed round which is much larger than a normal seed um however uh we're gonna announce that in the next like two weeks joanna i liked you i liked you so much until you tell me now you're not bootstrapped now you go down two points i know i know but i was bootstrapped i was i launched my product got you know from july to today we have 40 enterprise customers we're super stoked we're growing with insane momentum so um it's a great time i would say to raise when that when you're able to put your investors on calls with tons of customers when you're able to show them an awesome product when you know i've i've done this many times before and uh it's very different when you don't have those things that's right no i hear you um give me a general sense the seed round you say larger than average america when i think seed round especially you're based in san fran i mean i'm thinking i see seed runs like pretty frequently in like the two to three million range so when you say big i'm thinking north of three is that generally fair yeah we're north of five okay in terms of what the raise is and now is it clo it's totally closed you're just waiting to announce yeah that's great congrats how long did it take from kind of finding the lead to getting all the follow on and hitting your target um you know it's not my first audio uh i i would say that i think it's totally normal i i don't think many people tell the truth on how long it takes to raise um i we as i said i launched the plot we launched the platform in july um and so july and august were really kind of my focus of build up which is terrible tip number one never ever raise funding july and august nobody is there ever um but then september we got our lead and then it was closed by the end of september that's great okay so very good now can i take the 40 customers you gave me and that kind of 50 000 average first year acv that would put you at i think like 160 grand a month right now or about a 2 million run rate you know no because we actually brought our our beta customers and our um and some of our revenue generating customers on at the exact same time and so those customers actually converting to that that average contract value in 2019 so that will be just we wanted to have customer advisory board customers we're in the talent space and so integrations into applicant tracking systems are really important um and the way to do that is you either pay a lot of money or you get sponsorship from customers and so we purposely selected exactly who we wanted to smart sponsors and then in 2018 they convert into revenue yeah that's really smart so give me i mean we're doing really well on a revenue yeah no that sounds like a smart strategy you cut out there though so so what are you at today are you like 80 grand a month or 50 grand or smaller it's okay whatever the size is i'm just curious we're right we're we're closer to the first one okay so closer like 50 grand a month oh yeah i mean we're anywhere between 50 to 100 okay fair enough that's good and you expect growth wise once you close this round the next 12 months you expect to grow that to what 3x 2x um you know yeah i think for us it's it's um next year we have a big goal on our head but if we as we accomplish kind of what we project for our december numbers as we project kind of 3x to 5x from from that point yep that's great churn's critical in a sas company obviously you have a very little kind of chunk of cohort data but any insight right now into churn no we have i mean we don't have any yet so i will have that kind of i'll have that knowledge i mean it's just for 70 days so um you know i think that for us we want to in the long run as we look at the future we want to be never above that 10 churn in terms of revenue churn per year uh that's in terms of customer return um i think revenue churn should be even lower yep yep you're talking annual per year and we're sorry per year end gross correct or net gross gross yeah uh team's today what are you at we're about 35 however yeah however um i like 90 of that is all tech and product so probably more than 90 so right now i mean we have so much coming in in our technology we have so much out already in the technology um i'm through december and even the first quarter we will have just unbelievable releases coming out in the product so we built our whole company around intelligence right so being able to just know immediately when you put in a rockstar everything else is solved it analyzes your competitors and analyzes the stage of the company it analyzes every company they've worked at why they've been successful who they're surrounded by and it delivers that predictive slate and engages them automatically it's kind of very magical for no it sounds magical i'm trying to figure out though i mean it sounds like you potentially put in a big chunk of your own money to start this if you've got 35 people in san fran and you assume a conservative five grand a month salary just your head count there is 175 grand per month and if you're doing between 50 and 100 you got to make up that cash somewhere i mean you put in a big chunk of money then at the beginning yeah but um you don't have all of those 35 here in san francisco too we have two um other locations one florida and one romania oh interesting why the romania connection how'd you set that up um incredible data science um my cto has built high frequency trading platforms for his the last 20 years which are truly i mean they analyze so much big data they have to make predictive decisions that cannot have error um there's a lot more pressure on high frequency traders or high frequency trading platforms than than anything in talent ever but um the uh but he has worked with this team both in florida and romania for years and so he brought them all when he when he became our cto and he's also one of the co-founders really smart very smart all right joanna let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um right now well so hard things about hard things ben horowitz um i think that's a a great book i'm reading prince principles by ray dalio right now who's the ceo of bridgewater and it's both talent and how do you build a team um [Music] kamal ravikant wrote a book called live your truth which i love it's something you could read in like an hour but it is amazing when it comes down to finding a career um and just being passionate about that career and i love it not that i've ever needed you know not that i've ever looked for my career but rather as i'm in one that i'm passionate about continuing that journey and finding what's important so yeah number two is there an under the radar ceo or founder that you like getting lunch with there in san fran that many people don't know or talk about oh um i'm super lucky uh i'm part of ypo and so i get an opportunity to be around ceos that i am inspired by every day um you know what someone i think is fantastic is jess ma the ceo of indiro she's incredible i think jess scorpio is also fantastic she's a ceo uh she i'm sorry she was ceo and is uh the founder of get around um they've just raised 300 million dollars unbelievable um nicole farb founder of darby smart such and just amazing person with such an incredible vision and creativity about her and she's able to take that creativity and apply it to success on a scale that is much larger than i think many people can kind of vision so um there i mean i could go on forever that's great number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business i love a company it's called a company uh it was just sold cisco uh amy chang also amazing ceo to follow uh they just sold for almost 300 million dollars and a company is just super helpful when it comes down to scheduling meetings and um i'm fully prepared on who i'm gonna meet and what i'm gonna talk about uh do you pay for it by the way do you pay for their i mean i believe off my memory they basically have great in like detailed profiles on executives do you pay for their data stream to help fuel your ai no we don't you don't okay and so and mostly that's just because a lot of that data what we don't do is analyze like media what is happening on your twitter feed or stuff like that whereas a lot of that's kind of just like one spot all of it you know it's great for executive meeting having a face-to-face it's different when um if i'm in the end of the day when we're trying to build profiles or trying to build the knowledge base around somebody's career trajectory yeah number four uh how many hours i'll see people are getting every night um i don't know why i'm i don't necessarily need a ton of sleep i love love love when i get six to eight hours of sleep i feel completely refreshed um but i can survive on very few all right so what do you get like five six today um yeah right around there okay and what's your situation married single kiddos i am single but i'm in a i've been with my boyfriend now for three years and he has a son who is four um i am jojo in his life so that's great he turned four last week and uh such a fun age that's so that's so cool at this age and joanna uh do you let me ask you about how old you are yeah i'm 36 36. okay last question take us back 16 years what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um you know it's funny i uh i was watching this this show called glow was on tv and it summarized that the director summarized to one of the actresses so perfectly what i wish i could tell myself 20 which was try not giving a um i'm not sure i'm allowed to say that but of course there's something really powerful about not giving a is kind of the message that he gave her and i think that's really true we get caught up a lot of the time in you know caring so much about what people think and in the end of the day yeah you're you are you yeah guys don't give a you heard it from joanna 2017 launched her company sensia today they're about 40 enterprise customers doing between 50 and 100 grand per month so healthy growth in the first 70 days about to close around today which will be north of 5 million bucks so pretty healthy seed around there they've got about 35 folks based in san fran florida and romania again really adding ai and machine learning to recruiters toolboxes inside of companies so they can figure out how do we hire more stars like company or like employee x maybe a susie who's a rock star joanna thank you so much for taking us to the top thank you thanks david