How Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait grew Greenhouse to $266.3M revenue and 4K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is daniel chaney is the ceo and co-founder of greenhouse which builds software tools to help companies make recruiting a competitive advantage before greenhouse he co-founded lab 49 a global firm providing technology consulting solutions to the world's leading investment banks daniel are you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right man you are in a extremely competitive space give us an update you're on about a year and a half ago where's greenhouse today and is it pure still are you guys still pure place ass yeah still doing sass um still uh still you know having a great time growing um we had our biggest uh conference ever this summer greenhouse open with uh 1300 or so attendees it was a huge part of our year and we where was it uh here in new york city we did the javits center which was a big step up for us that's a big space that's a big space to fill you got to be a celebrity daniel those of you that don't you know that haven't been in new york or don't know the space like it's where they do the auto show and the boat show and so you know you come into like a big cavern like that you really got to bring it so we upped our game we did a big roll out for business executives and business leaders called talent makers which is kind of moving the idea about outside of hr and into the broader business conversation around when you're a business leader you need talent and and you can't upload that to your hr team you got to take responsibility yep very good now for those people that didn't catch your first episode on the program put this on a timeline for us when did you launch greenhouse we started greenhouse in 2012 january yep 2012. and then again last time you came on was in 2017 you said you were serving i mean your price point then was around kind of 18 000 acvs have you held steady there have you generally increased or decreased you know prices move up a little bit but the thing for us that's really happened is that we've been serving increasingly larger customers so you take an average number like that you know that's represents a certain customer size but we serve customers nathan from 25 or 30 employees all the way up to you know 10 20 000 employees or more so obviously like the the involvement and the investment on both sides for a bigger engagement like that is pretty significant of course as we've grown and built the company you know we're just engaging with a more global business uh you know customer base and and larger larger organizations so i totally understand you have all these different cohorts which is great you're able to span that spectrum but when you look at kind of all your customers paying today relative to obviously revenues the is the average moved up from 18 have you driven meaningful expansion revenue across the same base it has a bit and and part of that is also driven by we've we've rolled out new products so last year we launched greenhouse inclusion which is our newest product which is really around combating implicit bias and helping you measure the effect of your recruiting process on different groups so customers are now buying crm from us they're buying employee onboarding they're buying inclusion and doing other things with us beyond what they traditionally have so all that stuff in conjunction is really leading to larger deal sizes and kind of just more stickiness and more impact that's good i will dive more into those products here in a second uh but first i want to try and get an accurate number here so was 18 grand kind of average do you think it's supposed to like 25 26 now today or more uh i don't know that i would be prepared to say okay but generally it's increased for sure okay absolutely the one way to obviously measure these increases is to look at how these new product launches have changed how your customer success reps drive retention on historical accounts which then reflects itself in net revenue retention help me understand how you've you know who's in charge of getting your historical accounts active on new products or is it the aes or the csms or what so we have an account management team which is a sort of combo between customer success and our aes are really focused on new logos team for us is really in the intersection of the two where they work with existing customers on not only renewals but you know any new product sales that they want um that they want to talk about and so we'll have conversations that start with a csm a customer success manager or a customer success director around a problem the customer is having an opportunity to see and then we'll pull in the account management team to do like to run the sort of process and do paperwork and show product demo and have sort of new product expertise there as well so it's a joint effort for a lot of these ceos that i've talked to recently called on the 50 to 100 million range a lot of them are experimenting with adding quota to csms who are only driving expansion revenue have you taken that plunge or how are you are you doing any extra incentives for your csms we're sort of doing we're sort of going a different direction with it so for the account management the ones that are focused on really these expansion sales absolutely they're you know it's a very sales-minded team for our customer success we're actually moving them further uh towards mission-aligned metrics and less around financial aligned metrics so if you think about greenhouse our mission is to help every company become great at hiring if you're an rcs team your job is to help your customers firstly become great at hiring ultimately they should be renewing and buying new things and all that stuff as well but your job is primarily make sure we're having that kind of impact so we're aligning them much more closely around you know our as a customer is on greenhouse longer are your customers you know sally csm are your customers doing a better job of pinpointing the right talent doing a better job of making hiring decisions doing better job with delivering good candidate experience as measured through our products wait yeah daniel's gonna say what are you're basically uh you're basically quantifying kind of your activation metrics there but you gave kind of high level number actually quantify those for me is it sound like hey sally the csm of greenhouse um does your average account you know place at least 300 jobs per month where there's a you know minority of at least thirty percent women and twenty percent for with a new inclusion product like how do you actually quantify these things yeah so we think so basically our value is in kind of four quadrants and so each quadrant has a little bank of of metrics aligned to them so there's a quadrant around candidate experience and it's literally like there's a candidate experience survey that our product will automate yeah so the csms are now looking at number one are the customers using that product or is actual data they're turning on the survey they're collecting the data are they looking at the data and then are the trends going up and so measured by number remember measured by number of candidates that use that per month measured by the candidate response basically we send a survey to the candidate we say hey you just interviewed for a job at airbnb you know rate us on basically give us a net promoter score um and then the customers use that data to identify opportunities to improve they might see a certain team within their company where managers aren't getting back fast enough or i was asked questions that were off-putting they need that information improved so it's really about is the number going up are candidates saying better things about you as a company and so look at like operational rigor using data to make decisions every area of their hiring funnel is measured in greenhouse and our csms are just aligning to to putting that up we haven't yet though nathan aligned like confident incentive to that yet yep that's later on we've got that road mapped out so once we have enough confidence the numbers are right and that we know the place to move them all correctly then we can like comp to it real quick name name the other three so canada experience what are the other three quadrants so the first is pinpointing the best basically like how quickly when i open a job can i get a list of really good candidates okay uh to interview for so whether you're sourcing them or finding them internally or finding them through other channels um uh candidate experience decision making so are you actually making smart decisions are you doing it quickly okay and then operational rigor are you actually able to use data to adapt to changing conditions okay very good so those are your four quadrants now how many people total are on the team today and then we'll go into how many csms at greenhouse the total company yeah about 380 380 that's up significant it's almost double from 200 back in 2017 so that's good huh i said we've been busy well that either means you just increased your expenses significantly uh or hopefully you also increase revenues at the same time so it's a good hiring spree yes that's a good heart did you still have about 60 in the company 60 million raised or did you do another round we raised our series d last summer so i don't know if it was uh just after we talked uh or you know or when it was in relation to but yeah we raised a 50 million series d in the middle of uh last year so about 110 in total you got it when you what are the metrics say on the series d so most ceos you and that you talk to i mean are you seeing ceos raise for 18 months burn or 24 or 36 months burn what'd you kind of plan for you know it's kind...