Founder Interview Video
How Collective[i] Reached $500K Revenue Per Employee With 140-Person Team in 2023 (Interview with Co-Founder Stephen Messer)
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and LinkShare exit overview
- 0:57Life at Rakuten after the LinkShare acquisition
- 2:28Reflecting on the $425M sale and what came next
- 3:20Launching Collective[i] and the neural net thesis
- 10:37Who buys Collective[i] and what it does
- 12:29Unique dataset and how the data network works
- 13:45Pricing model: free for contributors, paid for leaders
- 14:18ACV and contract size
- 15:01Bootstrapped funding and no outside investors
- 17:11Getting the first paying customer in 2011 to 2012
- 19:57Revenue milestones and revenue per employee
- 20:45Famous Five rapid-fire questions
- 22:30Advice: work hard when you are young