How Icims CEO Brian Provost grew Icims to $250M revenue and 3.5K customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is Colin day he's the chairman and CEO of a company called I Sims which he founded in 2000 with a vision to deliver applicant tracking software emphasizing ease of use and an unparalleled customer service I Sims is the largest standalone provider of talent acquisition software in the industry and stands among Forbes top 100 fastest growing private cloud companies in the country Colin are you ready to take us to the top I'm ready I already would I'm excited you're here so the largest standalone provider is a big word you're a measurement guy how do you measure that how do you know you're winning we do it by customer base I mean you can take a look at revenue you can take a look at growth rates for us its customer base so we get pretty good real-time data about who uses what in our industry and so yes we're we're the largest standalone provider we're actually number two to Oracle who bought a company called phileo but we're feeling really good about our odds of hopefully surpassing them as well and where are you today in terms of customers on the platform we're using the platform so we're a little north of about 3,500 companies okay and tell us what that means for folks not familiar with the product what are they using you for your bed so the we we sell something called a talent acquisition suite at EA is honestly just a really fancy word for recruiting so we our enterprise software that you put in place to manage your recruiting operations it usually starts with we sort of have a bedrock product that you put in first and that's our applicant tracking system called recruit and then if you're looking to get a little bit more progressive and not just do what a lot of recruiters can do which is it's sort of post and prey methodology you can put in marketing automations and build up sort of passive candidate talent pools you can put in onboarding components to complete the transaction and should we think of your business model means is this a SAS model or is this you're taking a percentage of first year salary of placed folks how do you make money it is purely a SAS model oh wow so we actually we started in 99 we didn't even know what SAS was it wasn't even called you invented come on Colin just take credit for it I will not take credit for that no I think probably Benioff gets way more credit yeah that but no we we started pure sass kind of one platform one code one version and we've stuck to that you know all the way through and and so what our again give us a sense you said you've had many many products the product that most of them start with is it the tracking so applicant tracking software it really is that's that's the bedrock of recruiting that helps you manage all your position openings that sends it for approvals gets it posted brings in the point of application schedules the interviews and also handles a lot of the compliance around recruiting tracking EEO data etc so what I mean its Equal Employment Opportunity data so race gender veteran status etc and what is the I imagine you have a variable multiple oude of different price points for that but on average what does somebody pay to start using you through that software it really varies so we actually support customers of just about every size we tend to see recruiting to come really really important probably after you hit a hundred employees we have seen some below 100 employees but I think after 100 employees you start getting to scale depending on your growth rates you're you're really thinking about the next level so we have price buckets that makes sense for the the smaller end of the market versus the mid market versus a very high end of the market so it can start as low as you know call it 500 a month and it can go up to six figures a month got it and then talk to me about I want to learn more about the founding story now that we have a little bit of the context of what the business does so you said he founded this in Aysen 99 yeah the hell that's a hell of a year to found a software company yeah tell me about it what was going through your head say I fell into it ass-backwards there was a lot of luck involved but um I graduated from Cornell with a degree in psychology I just wanted to do something entrepreneurial and I got pulled into a recruiting staffing firm as my first job I knew nothing about technology but they said all right you're gonna be hiring you know developers testers DBAs for Bell Labs uh-huh so my first clients were here in New Jersey which is where we are headquartered and yeah worked as a recruiter I was always antsy to try to figure out you know gosh how do i how do i parlay this into starting a business and the reality is and I think this is the case for many entrepreneurs it was just staring me in the face I was logging into this proprietary system that the company I was with at bil they were called comm rise and our system was called comm Rises information management system so they called it Simms and yeah one day just woke up and I said you know what have I been doing it's staring me in the face every single day so I think I was 23 at the time and I went to their CEO and I said you know this is gonna sound crazy but what did we buy the rights to your software we spin it out we'd start our own company and he was totally on board and that's that's what we did we threw a little red eye and a.com and then as I'm sure you can imagine about three years later we couldn't drop the dot-com portion of it that's enough it's not what it was ninety nine the year you start up the company or the year when you were 23 when you negotiated it by the company out yeah so I started as a recruiter 97's as 21 when I graduated so I worked for as a recruiter for a couple of years before I started Ison's at 23 so I didn't have a lot of you know knowledge to go on I think that was probably a good thing I think if I'd uh probably had more experience I would have talked myself out of trying to do it because it's just such a competitive market it's always how did you also call first off amazing story I imagine there's a lot of other 23 year olds listening right now there are frustrated with the company they work in but they see something inside the company they would love to spin out but they're going I've only had a salary of 80k for two years I'm still paying off college debt I have no savings how on earth my not gonna negotiate it's piece of technology to spin out how would you do it oh you know I look back and I wonder I I had someone who trusted in me I would have said believed in me but I didn't I didn't have a lot of history with him to believe in but the individual that ran comrads technology I casino the CEO of comrades the the technical staffing firm I was with I can only imagine what must have been going through his mind when this sort of brash 23 year old walked in the room and said hey I've got an idea for a business is that what you did you just walked in the office and said either fire me or let me buy this part of the company I don't think it was probably saying either fire me I don't think I was ready for that moment but definitely said hey listen I think we've got something here and my god she he was so supportive Wow how do you value it though like like talk to me about the economics of that deal like did you pay him an amount of money for did he just give it to you and keep a chunk for himself I mean oh there's a crazy story behind that portion of it but uh you know all I knew I didn't even know how to hey make me a CEO give me a CEO salary I didn't negotiate for equity early on it really was very much just I see an opportunity I want to run for it I will need to buy the software so we did that at a very you know we created a very low value of the software to do that transaction you use your own money or did you figure out a raise money from other investors we literally did it all through a loan so I not only said hey I need to get the technology out but I need you to give me all the money to buy the technology from you oh he was the way he loaned you the capital you didn't have to sign a personal guarantee with the bank he loaned the capital oh wow great oh when you talk about really having a patron behind you I mean he really was so and then yeah I'm sure you can imagine come 2001 and 2002 well he's turned up in heroing did you have leverage at this point like was the business already feeling the 99 kind of bust and you said before this thing goes bankrupt maybe I can try and pull an asset out of it or were you not was that not the state of mind you were in no it was the opposite that we were in high time so when so when I was working as a recruiter we could not find enough technology people fast enough they even sent me over to India well it's a just recruit out of India and try to bring people back so it was a heyday when we and when we sort of spun out and it was only after that that everything started to sort of gloriously fail and quick before we move and we fast forward to today just so those young folks listening right...