How Thalamus CEO Julia van Broek grew Thalamus to $3.1M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is jason reminic he's an md mba ms and is the ceo and founder of thalamus the premier cloud-based recruitment platform for hospitals and physicians he began his residency interview season stuck in new york city during hurricane sandy if you guys remember that and after three cancer interviews and spending weeks trying to reschedule he and his co-founder brainstormed a better way to manage medical residency recruitment since then it's what he's been committed to innovating around physician recruitment to ensure the right doctor is recruited to the right hospitals to treat the right patients jason you ready to take us to the top absolutely good to be here thanks for having me you bet so so what's the model here so does this act like a recruiting agency where you take a percent to first year salary or is it like a sas platform it's a sas platform so we manage a very sort of byzantine very complicated frustrating process of students applying from graduating medical school to their residency training positions around the country and previously this is all done manually by email and phone call and our platform works and that hospitals use it either single programs being internal medicine pediatrics obgyn et cetera or entire hospital enterprises it integrates with the common application system central clearinghouse everyone's using to accept applications they pull their data in they invite the candidates to interview applicant gets an email to create a profile and then they're brought to a calendar within seconds to schedule their interviews in real time kind of like open table but instead of booking a restaurant they're booking a residency interview back on the hospital side it's a process-specific appian tracking system it allows them to manage the process score candidates build face sheets and eventually decide what they're going to match the hospital the hospitals pay yeah and so what are what's the average hospital paying you right now per month to use the technology so it's an annual license it ranges uh depending on the size of the program um anywhere from uh a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars hospital system-wise that can be tens of thousands up to hundreds of thousands depending on uh what hospital and how large it is well just simplify that for me right if you take your average hospital what are they paying you per year uh probably around 50 75 000 okay and how many people are they placing for 50 000 bucks a year probably they're interviewing probably depending on the size about 40 or 50 000 people uh and from that they'll place around between thousand and two thousand okay got it so it's almost if they're paying 50k a year it's almost a dollar per interview and then they're placing a thousand to two thousand of those interviews you wanna do the math that way sure yeah well yeah i mean because that's your key value metric right is number of interviews done right or something like that yeah we're actually trying to decrease the number of interviews given that this this kind of niche market but that's an interesting discussion in itself that's a ton of people by the way i mean 40 to 50 000 interviews by one hospital in a year that's the challenge and so hospitals may have 150 programs in various specialties of various sizes and right now over the last five years five to ten years the number of applications a single candidate is sending out has increased by 5x it was around 15 when i applied in 2012. it's now jumped to 70. and so applicants are spending thousands of dollars to have their data sent to different hospitals and then hospitals will interview uh depending on the size of the program anywhere from fifty to a thousand candidates per program uh sometimes to fill as few as one to let's say ten spots and so we've done a lot of research that's showing that about depending on the specialty between 15 and 35 of interviews could be eliminated overnight and everyone could end up in the same place anyway and that's the amount of over-interviewing that's going on right now as well i see when did you launch the business what year uh 2012 uh 2013 uh i was just starting my my medical residency and started it back then very cool so your first customer signed up obviously and then how many customers are you serving out today we're surveying over 2 000 residency and fellowship programs across 200 over 200 hospital systems oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for 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hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview okay so 200 hospital systems got it so i mean can i take 200 hospitals times 50 grand a year you're doing like 10 million a year in revenue uh not not that much we're we're in the in the kind of the four to five range we're talking about this year still yeah that's still nice traction what was your first um which year was your first million dollar year do you remember the first million dollar a year was the first pandemic year um was that 2021 2020 2020 so it was uh the entire process shifted to virtual and we extended our platform to include a virtual interview a platform uh that it that not only builds the schedules for everyone and handles that volume of interview but also then creates all the video links builds the schedules and everyone can you can just interview and not have to move people in and out of breakout rooms we built our own video platform and uh that really accelerated the growth business so just to confirm if you're doing between four and five million revenue right now let's call it a run rate of 4.5 million you're doing something like 375 000 bucks a month in revenue yes right around there cool yeah and how many across all 2000 programs and all 200 hospitals how many total interviews were done over the past 12 months uh total hospitals that were done over the last 12 interviews interviews uh interviews we sent out about 200 000 invitations to interviews probably completed about 150 000 of those okay 150k interviews interesting um over 20 over 20 million minutes of video interviews as well okay got it i guess the reason i asked you said it earlier that someone paying you 50 000 bucks a year is doing 50 000 interviews but if you have 200 customers times 50 000 interviews right that should be a number of interviews and like 10 million interviews you just told me the last 12 months you did a total of 150 000 interviews it's a big difference no so the hospitals are um not all of the hospitals are necessarily using us for all of their interviews but that's how many people they're interviewing oh i see yeah i see i see so of the 40 to 50 000 that one hospital might do in a year how many might they use you for i'd say the largest hospital is just doing about 10 or 20 000 interviews with us i see i see why don't they use you for all of them it varies depending on size and just the number of people that they're interviewing overall so i mean but if you're if you're providing a lot of value then people are happy why wouldn't they want to get the whole system on you as fast as possible it's it's technology adoption and just changing practices that have existed from prior who are you replacing we are replacing emails and phone calls predominantly and some older software systems that don't integrate with the other other platforms interesting okay so again you get going back in 2013 you're scaling nicely uh it took you i guess what is that seven years to break a million in revenue but now scaling rapidly can this growth keep up even when the pandemic slows down i think so um sort of the longer term play for us is we really think we can help in terms of improving the recruitment process making it more diverse and equitable for hospital systems which has been a major challenge um helping to drive more strategic decision making rather than inviting so many candidates to interview and doing a much more targeted interview also for the candidate allowing them to end up in a hospital that works better for them as well now jason have you bootstrapped the business or did you decide to raise capital we raised capital okay when did you decide to raise and how much we've decided to raise uh we've had a seed round in uh 2019 where we raised a million and a half um we did prior to that about a million and a half and friends and family kind of preceded funding and a little bit of bridge funding and then we're just completing an eight million dollar series a raise and so where do you plan to spend that eight million and what why do you need it why does this company require capital we're looking to scale um in the hospitals that we work with as i mentioned where we're growing in in across the enterprise of many of them uh and we have many other hospitals still to hit uh but we also think that the data piece is is kind of key here and so helping hospitals recruit smarter and then from there as broken as the recruitment cycle is in the residency side when you get to the attending physician space um it's even more broken so hospitals are spending upwards of 250 000 per single uh physician higher usually takes six to twelve months to fill the position and they lose about two and a half million dollars in revenue uh billable revenue for every position they don't feel every six months and so coming out of training as a physician you usually approach with close to 100 different job opportunities they're usually non-targeted i don't practice right now but i still get offers to go practice surgery in rural kansas and i'm not a board-certified surgeon and i have no ties to kansas but someone's paying for our data and so we think there's a way from medical school all the way beyond uh to help doctors and hospitals make that connection better vision's interesting we'll see sort of see what happens how many hospitals are there that you think are in your addressable market uh depending on how you measure a hospital between 600 and a thousand okay so you're at 200 now that's a high amount of penetration so i assume the story to validate a series evaluation is once we get the hospitals we'll sell them more and increase acv uh yeah i think the hospitals but there's a whole recruitment problem we're trying to solve as well and this goes a lot of different directions because to become a physician in the us you have to go down this very particular regulated pipeline and so um we're we're excited about the possibilities for the future now most folks in their series a are selling between 10 and 15 percent of their business are you sort of in that average range or did you do something super unique no we were we were kind of a little bit in that average range a little bit to the higher side of the range but yeah okay but it felt the process felt fair to you absolutely okay i think we have i think we have the right investors who are really aligned with our mission and uh really excited to be working with them okay cool so maybe call you sell 15 of the business something like that um which would put sort of evaluation maybe around 50 55 million something like that after you're all said and done sure well not sure is is i mean i'm asking a question i i prefer not to disclose our valuation well so i'm just going off the numbers you just gave me right so you i said 10 to 15 you said 15 percent i'm just multiplying what's 8 million 15 right what does 8 million make up that's 15 of it it would be about a 50 million valuation right i understand um we're we're a little bit below that okay okay fair enough fair enough but the reason i ask this is because if you have a big vision you want to get all these hospitals right solve a lot of problems besides just recruitment for them you want to obviously hold on to as much equity as possible so how are you thinking about dilution managing it i think with every deal and every time we raise capital we've looked at where we feel the business is going to be who the partner is what value they provide to the business what accelerant that allows in terms of the capital coming in and how much runway that gives us and how much firepower it gives us to grow and meet sort of our kpis and okrs to grow the business on the trajectory we think it's going to work and so that's that's kind of how we weigh that and i think we've been well aligned with our investors along the way why is the multiple though so low i mean i'm going to give you credit here you've gone from a million dollar run rate right 19 months ago to like a 4.5 million right now that's incredible growth over 400 i mean i interview thousands of founders right most founders of that kind of growth right now are raising at multiples in the 35 to 45 x range you raised at a multiple of 10x right 4.5 million run rate 45 million valuation why why why did investors not like this business more yeah no i am i'm getting caught up in my numbers here so i apologize i didn't get much sleep last night and i'm i i'm i'm i'm not where i should be on this and totally cool if we could redo this like it's just we don't we don't we do we don't redo interviews this is all we take this and we edit out any o's and um's and we get it out there but it totally opened to correct it though right so are you saying revenue's lower or valuation's not high enough no our revenue is about three last year we're expecting six this year oh i see i see okay so yeah so revenue is a little bit lower than four and a half right now yeah yeah i see i see okay cool so your evaluation is a little bit higher but still it's not 40x why didn't they like your story i mean i like your story why didn't they like your story what were they hitting you on i don't i think everyone's just hitting us on market and what the market's gonna be and i think we're building a new kind of business so it's been interesting from that perspective okay okay interesting and are you doing this alone soul founder you've got some co-founders got a co-founder she's uh my mentor from medical school uh named susie karen practicing anesthesiologist and we kind of lived both sides of this problem very cool and how many folks of the time are on the team besides you two 20 20 wow how many engineers uh six did you decide to keep those sort of state side or you went to sort of outsourced options we've been both in in in different times of the business so okay and tell me more about that when did you switch away from outsourced sort of development work we still use some outsource but we have we've been growing the core team internally and so it's uh it's kind of important do you recommend that to others starting out start off with outsourced labor sort of development wise and then move to internal as you build some revenue i think it depends on the the growth of the business and what what kind of product you're building i think it worked well for us early on and and we've kind of supplemented it as well over time and it kind of you know it can accelerate development cycles or or sort of supplement the the internal workforce as well makes total sense to me jason on that now let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book uh favorite business book is um i would say uh let's say lean startup i think it's just a really great philosophy number two is there a ceo you're following or studying not one in particular but different parts of different ceos number three what's your favorite online tool for building thalamus twilio number four how many hours of sleep every night usually uh between six to eight hours last night closer to four okay fair enough and what's your situation married single kids married with one two-year-old oh my gosh you're super busy how old are you yeah i am 37 37 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. how quickly 37 would come guys there you have it launched in 2013 after challenges finding his own residency program uh jason is now building a platform to make residency programs at hospitals more efficient he's working with 200 hospitals that pay on average 50 dollars per year had his first million dollar a year during koba the first year pandemic in 2020 has since scaled up above three million bucks in ar just closed his series a eight million dollar round prior to that had about 2.5 million raised between his seed and pre-seed team at 20 as they look to scale jason thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show 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