How Kadence grew to $15M revenue and 600 customers in 2026.

Kadence Revenue Breaks $15m, 130% Net Dollar Retention - YouTube

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(00:00) What was the highest valuation you raised at at Chargefy? >> 40 million US at the time. >> And was that 2021 time frame or? >> No, it's 2019. >> How diluted were you at that point? Were you under 20%? >> down to about 15% of the business at that point. >> You were around a million of revenue. Can I ask when you broke your first maybe four or five million of revenue what year that was? Yeah, we broke that early last year. (00:19) >> Are you comfortable sharing where you're at today in terms of run rate? >> We've grown like triple percentage digits since then. Well, okay. So like that would put you at like 15 million ARR today somewhere in that range. We don't talk too publicly about it, but yeah. Hey folks, my guest today is Dan Bladen and he's the co-founder and CEO of Cadence with a K, a workplace management operations system that coordinates people, places, and projects to improve hybrid work. (00:40) He previously founded Chargefy, a wireless charging company. Dan, ready to take us to the top? >> Let's go. All right. So talk to us real quick about Cadence. When I hear that quick bio, what I think is okay, when I go to WeWork and I need to book a room, they're powering that that transaction with your software. (00:54) Is that right? >> Kind of, but imagine instead of WeWork it was a company's own offices. We work with about 600 WeWork, 600 companies around the world, think Boeing, Bombardier, Rolls-Royce, Porsche, Revolut, helping them manage their own workplaces. You're absolutely right, many of those companies want to have a similar WeWork experience with their own corporate real estate, but inside of their own offices. (01:16) Okay, so I'm a I'm here on your website. I'm a I'm a sales rep at Cargill or GWI at their main office wherever they're located. I need to get on a call, I need a quick side room quickly. I log into the app that's powered by Cadence. I find an open room, I book it for an hour. That's right. Yeah, so you can be company like Willis Towers Watson that works with us, right? They've gone from 10.1 to 4. (01:34) 7 million square feet. So now that everybody's not in the office every single day, though that's obviously a very various difference across lots of different companies how they deploy hybrid, but they've gone from 10.1 4.7 million square feet, roughly saving about half a billion dollars a year in annual leasing costs, and they use Cadence to coordinate the people and how they meet inside of those offices. (01:55) >> Makes a ton of sense. Just for clarity, again, I'm on the on the screen here. This little orange desk right here. In the old days it might have been like this is Joe's desk. Joe's the only one that works at this desk. But now Joe might only come in two days a week, so it's open. (02:08) That real estate's open the other five days a week. You might put Sam or or Sylvia at the desk on Thursday and Friday, something like that. That's correct. Yeah, so lots of companies have what we call structured hybrid work. So they might be in one, two, three days a week. Other people might be in every single day. (02:23) Cadence works with all of the above. Got it. Okay, this makes sense. Before we get your backstory here, I don't want to bury the lead in terms of how you price today. These customers that are paying you today, how do you charge? I see it looks like it's a high touch model. I don't see a checkout with credit card here on the website, so you must be higher ACV. (02:36) How do you bill? Yeah, so it's 48 bucks a user a year is what we start at. Um, that goes all the way up to about 80 bucks a user a year, depending on what modules you use from us. When we started the business, we pivoted from this wireless charging company called Chargefy, we looked at this space like, "Hey, there's going to be a ton of corporate real estate adjustments over the next few years. (02:58) Nathan, it's crazy, there's 22 trillion dollars of corporate real estate in the US alone." And so what we wanted to do was fix our pricing not to square foot, but to the people that use that space, which was a very new model at the time. >> That's interesting. You're seeing the age of AI today, a lot of people saying the seat-based model is dead. (03:14) You would say, "No, we are literally a seat-based model, literally sitting a butt in a seat. You're fine." >> Yeah, to be honest, we're figuring all that stuff out right now. We're not seeing any retention problems in our in our cohorts right now. Um, but we obviously got a lot of identical opportunities in front of us, particularly around a product that we call Space Ops, which is doing a lot of the work and lot of the grudge work that our facilities leaders are having to do day in day out. (03:37) >> Let's talk more about your new AI tool towards the later of the episode, I'll come back to that, but just to confirm, you said on average it's about 50 per user per year. >> That's correct. Yeah. >> Okay, interesting. And are most if a startup is listening right now with 10 people and they have a very small office space in Austin, Texas, is are they a good fit for you or do you require minimums? >> Yeah, they're not really good fit for us. (03:54) We do have a product called Cadence Flex, which does allow you to get access to about 15,000 co-working locations around the world. So you know, you mentioned the WeWorks, the Reguses, all those kind of industrious places. So yeah, if you're a 10-person company, you don't have an office, but you need to grab space, you can use the Cadence Flex product to get access to about 15,000 workplaces. (04:14) One of our investors is a guy called Frederic Kerrest, co-founder of Octane. He was like, "Dan, my friend, it's going to take a long time for us to get to 100 in ARR if we're just >> What was your What was your ACV back then with the SMB? If you could clarify that. It's about It's about 5K per year. Yeah. (04:29) Okay, so 200 customers 5K per year. Obviously you guys come back to my revenue. Then what year was that? This is 2023. Interesting. Okay, so 2023, that's when you break like a million of revenue, but it's 200 customers paying five grand a year a pop, and you're going, "I don't want to slug this out for the next 10 years." >> Yeah, that's right. (04:42) >> That's right. Yeah. Don't obviously share your customer name, but can you share the largest contract you have today? Do you have any million-dollar customers? No million-dollar customers yet. We've got a couple that are pretty close in our pipe, so appreciate your your prayers and best wishes for that in the coming quarter. (04:56) But no, our biggest customers are our banks, quite honestly, particularly neo banks. So we work with Revolut, we work with Starling out of the UK. We work with folks like Dow Jones here in the US as well. So those are our larger customers. Interesting. Okay, we know where the company is today. (05:13) Take me back to the origin story here. If we go back to your LinkedIn and look at sort of where you've been and how you got here. Start off at at St. Paul's it looks like, technology guide and Techstars. Walk us through this. Yeah, so I started my career at 18-year-old. I always grew up building tech. My grandfather designed the launch mechanism for fighter jets on aircraft carriers for the US and British Navy. (05:31) So I was kind of really interested tinkering with things. As a kid I built my own version of dropbox.com at home in my toy cupboard as a as a young teenager. And then yeah, went and worked for a church for five years straight out of school where I did music there, and then I became head of technology. I did a theology degree as well during that time just to make it even more eclectic. (05:51) >> [snorts] >> And then I founded a business called Chargefy. It was an IoT company back in the IoT boom, which more felt like pilot purgatory at the time. And Chargefy was a wireless charging business. The idea was, "Hey, we could put wireless chargers, you know, those little induction pads, we could put those on coffee shops, tables, restaurants, hotel bedside tables, office office desks, and meeting rooms. (06:16) " The dream was to build Cisco, but to build it for wireless power. We had intellectual property I like to say from phones to drones, so anything that moved that had a battery we wanted to wirelessly charge. And so we did the cloud management platform for wireless charging. We raised about 17 and a half million dollars from Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (06:36) Fast forward eight years, the pandemic struck strikes three months after moving my wife and three kids under five to the Bay Area, and no one cares about our wireless charging business anymore. Wow. Okay, so what happened? It just lost for everybody, shut it down? Yeah, I mean, so we didn't shut it down. We had tens of customers at the time. (06:54) Still wasn't anywhere near like a million in ARR. We were always like the anointed winner of a market that was inevitable, but never actually happened. So it felt like a vitamin, not a painkiller, if I'm honest with you, Nathan, which is very different to Cadence today. I lost a bit of hair during it, but it it was fun. (07:13) But we we had our biggest line of business was with offices. So we're fortunate. Accenture were customers, Okta were customers, Uber were piloting with us. And this was the time of agile working was a phrase. So basically you could pick up your laptop and work anywhere in the office. And so Cadence or Chargefy, rather, we have a swear jar every time I misname it. (07:30) You could wirelessly recharge all around the office, right? And so this is March 2020 when we all get that text message saying shelter in place. Pandemic strikes. Nasdaq come to us, and Nasdaq say, "Hey, we're going to go from three buildings to one building. We're going to reduce in Manhattan, we're going to reduce the number of desks we have by 49%. (07:52) Hey Chargefy, your cloud management platform for all these wireless chargers that are going to be on all of our desks, can we ditch the wireless charging part of it and just use your software to manage our move to hybrid?" And Nathan, I had three very quick thoughts. I was like, "Man, that sounds boring. I don't want to build desk booking software. (08:07) " was thought number one. I was like, "I'm a deep tech founder. I don't want to build desk booking software." Number two, I was fascinated by the TAM. This TAM is just absolutely colossal. There's a lot of desks and a lot of expensive offices. And then three, I was fascinated by all the moving parts of hybrid work. Who should be where, when, and and why? So yeah, we pivoted the company and essentially reset it. (08:28) Oh, interesting. So the cap table of Cadence today, you carried that over from the the Chargefy cap table. The 17.5 million bucks you raised, that they're to some degree still in the cap table today at Cadence. Yeah, to some degree. We we went through a lot to change things up, and it's quite a journey for for probably for another longer podcast. (08:44) But it's one of the main things I'm trotted out to for portfolio companies now. "Hey, how do you pivot?" What I think you're getting to, Nathan, is that, you know, we had a lot of hair on the deal at the time. It's probably the way VCs thought about it, right? We Cadence was up-and-coming, it was growing incredibly quickly, but nobody wanted to invest in the cap table of Chargefy. (09:03) On the other hand, I was like, "Hey, these investors have fed my kids for eight years now. I'm not going to just ditch them." And so we had a lot of investors saying, "Hey, new new investors, we want to come into Cadence. Just ditch them, start this afresh on the side." But that didn't feel like winning the right way to me. (09:21) So we I did over 100 investors to get the round done. Had to say no, I'm not going to go that way to a lot of people. And then we got there in the in the end in a way that I can be proud of when I'm a little bit older and look back on. Guys, remember I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. (09:37) We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com, and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. (09:55) Just reply and say, "Nathan, I found you through YouTube," and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. I want to unpack this, Dan. I'm going to beg you to teach us because the majority of founders end up in the exact position you're in. We only read about the big exits, but everyone else, which is the majority, end up in companies maybe they've raised for that they realize it's just not going to grow. (10:15) They see You stuck it out longer than most do. You stuck it out for 9 years. Most quit after three or four. But, the reason they stay stuck is cuz they've raised money. They have money in the bank. They've got investors they don't want to let down, and they just don't know what to do. You figured out a way sort of out of this. So, couple follow-up questions there. (10:28) At Chargefy, what was the And I'm not asking this cuz I care about valuations. I just want to get the context of the switch and change. What was the highest valuation you raised at at Chargefy? >> About 40 US, yeah. 40 million anyway. >> And was that 20 2021 time frame? No, it was 20 2020, yeah. That's uh 2019. >> 2019, okay. 40 million valuation. (10:47) Okay, then Nasdaq reaches out, COVID hits, you and your kids move, you're on the West Coast, you have this new product idea, Cadence comes along, there's investor interest. What do you do? Yeah. Like, how much did you raise for Cadence, and how did you treat the old cap table? >> Yeah, so I went to our board in the summer of 2020. (11:02) I said, "Hey, we've got two two two decisions we can go. We can either go down from 30 to five people and sit in a cave for 3 years and hope that wireless charging comes back, or we can go after this new thing." It wasn't even called hybrid back then, Nathan. It was called like flex work or something. No one had even come up with a name. (11:17) And even the name is slightly odd now to me anyway, hybrid work. But, anyway, um and everyone said, "Let's go for it. Like, let's catch this wave." Um so, the board were all aligned behind it. Um one of our board members at the time was the founder of Aruba Networks, an amazing guy called Keerti Melkote. Uh sold to HPE for 3 billion. (11:34) And then one of my one of my advisors mentors, a guy called Keerti who's the co-founder of of TechCrunch. He's a Brit. He's been here for 30 years in the Valley, too. He's like, "Hey, you're never going to get your next round done for the reasons that you've mentioned." And so, uh I went to my board at the time and said, "Hey, this is going to be really difficult to get this round done because the investors that coming in are going to want to see me north of 30, 40% ownership again. (11:58) They're going to want it to look like a seed stage cap table." How diluted were you at that point? Were you on a cap table >> to about 15% of the business at that point. And so, yeah, I went to them and proposed, "Hey, we're going to have The way to keep protect everybody's ownership, keep you guys all in is to do an options increase. (12:15) " Um so, that's that's what we did. In the end, 220 DocuSigns, we did a Delaware We did a Delaware flip from the UK to the US. We had a UK government COVID bounce-back loan note as well that we pivoted that we flipped over to the US entity. It was a whole deal. Um this was now August '22 by the time we got it done. (12:38) Um but, you know what, Nathan? It served me really well in the end. We ended up having three people wanting to lead that kind of quote unquote new seed round. >> Okay. And so, guys, a lesson for you guys listening right now, right? In case you didn't follow what Dan did, he basically brought in the new investors, but he said, "Look, I'm so diluted. (12:51) " And his employees, he's probably looking out for his employees at Chargefy, too. They're also diluted. Anyone sticking. He needed a reset that the ESOP pool of option pool. I don't know if I can get Dan comfortable to share what he reset it at, but hopefully Dan said something like, "Guys, look, I'll take on the 10 million, but I need to establish a 30% ESOP pool post close and immediately reissue 50% of that, so maybe 15 out to, you know, current go-forward management. (13:12) " Dan, am I sort of Is this sort of the right Yeah, roughly. We had The most aggressive we had was And by the way, this wasn't me pushing that. This was like the market saying, "You need to look like a seed stage cap table for optics, for future investors, for making sure that it all looks like you guys are still in this." Interesting. (13:28) I want to end on the last four or five minutes here talking about your product, AI, your go-to-market motion. But, since we're on the cap table question, just finish up. Have you raised any more at Cadence today? Just fill out the rest of rounds? >> Yeah, so we did a Series A last year in the summer of 20 million in August last year. (13:45) >> Okay. And where where are companies There's a lot of people wondering we're not trading at 2021 valuation multiples anymore. You just did one last year in 2025. Without sharing your actual valuation, can you give a general sense of AR multiples you saw out there? Uh mid-teens. >> Okay. Yeah, where we were at the time. (14:00) Uh cuz year-over-year growth is really strong. I think what's super interesting right now and what I'm focused on is quality of revenue. Obviously, everybody wants growth rate, but I think, you know, whatever the phrase is, the cows are going to come home on growth rates versus the quality of revenue later this year. (14:15) I think quality of revenue is going to go back into vogue uh back in vogue. Uh so, we've got absolutely stellar net dollar retentions. Um you talked about land and expand. Many of our customers land with Cadence in one geo or one location and then grow from there. And so, not only have we got the natural quote unquote seat expansion, but we also now got the multi-product expansion, too. (14:36) We're recording this here in March of 2026. To get a good sort of answer on net dollar retention, if you go back and look at the cohort you signed up in March of last year, 2025, what is their net dollar retention as of today? Are we talking like 120, 130%? >> Yeah, north of 130%, yeah. That's really impressive. (14:52) Yeah, I'd say world class is like 140, 150. So, that Wow, that's that's congratula sticky software. I mean, you're signing a 7 to 10 corporate you know, lease for your office. Um this this product becomes a system of record for what's happening and who's happening in your office. And so, yeah, it's incredibly incredibly sticky. And you pivoted from the SMB motion back in 2023. (15:13) You were around a million of revenue. Can I ask when you broke your first maybe four or five million of revenue, what year that was? Yeah, we broke that early last year. Okay, early 2025. And are you comfortable sharing where you're at today in terms of run rate? digits since then. >> Wow, okay. So, like, that would put you at like 15 million AR today, somewhere in that range. (15:30) We don't talk too publicly about it, but yeah, we're in and around that range. You've been super transparent, so I want you to have the option you know, the option to talk more about your product here going to go forward basis. So, tell us I told you I'd come back to I think you called it your space ops AI tool. Tell us how you're thinking about AI and growth going forward. (15:44) Yeah, so as you know, the way the world works has changed forever. Nine out of 10 companies are now in some sort of hybrid modality. That might mean one day in the office a month all the way through to four and a half, five days a week in the office. What we've discovered as we've gone out market, Nathan, is just how much more product we need to ship to secure repeatably six-figure deals, right? And so, many of our customers not don't just want desk booking, room booking, space booking, visitor management. (16:08) They want move management. I've got 40 people starting in Sydney on Monday next week. Where do they all sit? Um when do their desk get moved? Who are they in adjacency to? I've got to shut down an office in Lehi, Utah next month. How do I reallocate all those people and these resources? How do I scenario plan to who's going to be where and when? What's my cost savings? So, scenario planning, move management, and so what the industry calls stack planning, so who's on what floor. (16:36) These are all huge pieces of work. Uh and so, what we've done is we basically built agents around this work uh that enables our VP workplace that we typically work with to go from a three-month window for getting this kind of stuff done to about quote unquote a three-day period to get this stuff done. (16:56) Um We joined our first customer with space ops was the HR company BambooHR. Um quote unquote, "I can't believe the power of Cadence." So, we've really really enabled that team to have a ton of leverage in their workflows um to look after thousands and thousands of people. And we're seeing your product arise you're giving me over you here, but it sounds like this scenario planning here that we're currently on is what you're referring to. (17:19) Yeah, that's right. Um one of the things that we're excited about as well is looking at um peer indexing as well. So, we've got So, we've got about 10,000 teams that use Cadence. So, we can say, "Hey, for finance in London at this company size, what does your cost per square foot look like in comparison? What does your hybrid Cadence look like in comparison?" And then, yeah, here we were the first to market with what we call a concierge Cadence AI inside of the workplace in the summer of '23. (17:49) Uh and so, basically you can use this for anything you might use an EA or assistant for inside of the workplace. Hey, who's going to be in? Grab me a desk. Register a visitor. What meeting rooms are available today on the fifth floor? All through uh our AI here. As we wrap up, there's a lot of people saying that pricing models for tools that are built on sort of agents or agent swarms, especially legacy models. (18:10) So, I would say Cadence was a legacy model. You're now really aggressively investing in AI and these underlying agents to help your folks be more productive. People are saying we're going to shift to more of a jobs to be done pricing. So, a jobs to be done example for Cadence might be number of booked desks per day instead of how many heads do you have using the platform. (18:27) Is that an internal debate right now or no? Yeah, I don't think anybody knows in our industry right now, Nathan. What I do know for sure is that um CFOs like to know what they're going to be spending each year, and they don't like to have an uncapped limit. >> Wrap us up here in the last 60 seconds. Go-to-market motion, how do you scale from 600 customers to 1,000 customers? It doesn't look like SEO is a big focus looking at your Ahrefs account. (18:50) How are you finding new customers today? Lots of events, Nathan. So, yeah, most of our customers aren't Googling us anymore. Back at the start of the pandemic, it was desk booking, Microsoft Teams. Like, that was like the keyword that we defended to the hill. >> [laughter and gasps] >> That's not the case so much anymore. (19:06) It's much more events, dinners, social content. Um that's where we're seeing larger ACVs coming in. All right. Well, hey, people want to follow your story. Where's the best place for me to follow you online, Dan? LinkedIn and well Dan Bladen. Uh that's the best place to follow what we're doing in the future work. (19:23) Guys, he launched After working on a truck for a while out of college, he founded Chargefy back in call it before 2019. Ultimately raised it to a 40 million valuation, 30 FTEs. But, he was diluted down to a call under 15% at that point and realized, you know what, man? We got to pivot this business. Moved his three kids and wife to the Bay Area around 2022. (19:41) Still at about a million bucks of AR with a bunch of sort of small customers customers and eventually said, "You know what? We got to pivot." He worked with his current cap table, raised a $10 million new round, reset the ESOP pool, so it really looked like a true seed round, and pivoted to a brand new business model at Cadence. Cadence is what enables you to help uh plan your workspace in this age of hybrid work than world's number one workplace operations platform today serving over 600 customers average new ACVs call it uh in the $50,000 range uh (20:07) a 10x increase over 5K from 2023 doing north of 10 night what is it say north of 10 million bucks of revenue broke 4 5 million in early 2025 and what he says which I love is quality of revenue is really high 130% net dollar retention as he continues to invest in products to help folks like Nasdaq plan their hybrid workspaces. (20:25) Dan, thanks for taking us to the top. Lovely to meet you, Nathan. You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.