How York IE CEO Kyle York grew York IE to $12.9M revenue and 25 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is kyle york he's the co-founder ceo and managing partner at york ie where he sets the company's vision of building a hybrid strategic advisory investment and operational growth firm he works closely with entrepreneurs and investors to help them realize their shared ambition to build great communities new jobs grow general wealth and impact the world investing in over 75 startups over the past decade kyle is also a co-founder and board member of a for third generation family business called york athletics mfg an e-commerce footwear brand based in boston and is also a board member of cams ascent compliance cloud up and forcivity kyle you ready to take it to the top absolutely all right so how should people think about this is this a fund and and york is a platform you just invest through or what is york yeah so sure so thanks for having me david it's really exciting to be here and talk to you yes so i've had a long career operating uh sas businesses startups um you know claim to fame help build a company called dine uh that we built to 100 million ar and sold the oracle uh back in 2016. and in parallel what was the problem jeremy wouldn't tell me the price i had him on my show and i go jeremy what was the price the press says 500 i'm like it's it's enough remove now it's enough years in the past where you could just slip up and there'd be no lawsuit i mean i just say it's a rumored 600 million that's what i like you know so yeah i mean but we had a great success um jeremy and the team we had around us you know we all built just a really fun company and we did it in our hometown in manchester new hampshire and in parallel to that i had been angel investing uh like many of the other dying early executives and doing advising and boards and by the time i ended up staying at oracle spent three years as the general manager of the business unit ran cloud strategy for oracle and you know i kept feeling like the traditional venture capital industry or the conventional sort of way of operating businesses were were binary decisions so i thought i wonder if york ie could enable me to invest but also advise consult build our own sas platform sort of build this kind of vertically integrated uh next generation companies that's really what york ie is a sas business it's a advising consulting business and it's an investment business focused on uh early stage technology setups so let's talk about the sas component first what is the customer paying you for on the sas side so we actually haven't even launched it publicly yet um the uh sas platform is called fuel um we've publicly announced it because it's actually it's a market competitive intelligence platform so it's how we build our investments practice how we do market track day uh tracking uh proactive discovery market thesis um it's also we've today launched um it's sas uh subscription model we've launched three services modules that are almost managed services on top of the sas platform market product strategy business growth strategy and marcom services and so those services start at 3k a month and they scale up from there we basically productize and modularize uh these services using our technology capabilities so they can be hyper scalable uh really uh margin friendly uh and and then over time the idea is it will then open up the sas platform to the market once we build up a bunch of captive uh demanding customers on top of the managed services practice in the investments business so what is the native services practice you mentioned there's there's technology there right yeah so the services practice uh think of it like a private company database um think of it uh you know almost an operator uh version of like traxxan or pitchbook uh that are more based or built for venture funds or private equity funds what we're trying to do um is basically have the most accurate and connected data sets on companies and markets and then we're building a capability called smart notebooks which is really like smart automated templates for things like market research or strength or share of voice collaboration or marketing competitive um sizing and things like that uh company pitch decks they're really like operator tools on top of the data sets to uh scale businesses and we think disrupt markets how many companies you have listed in your private company database currently uh currently um gee that's a great question it's a lot of internet scraping i think the current database is about 800 000 but last i checked uh just this past friday release it's uh we're recording this on a monday uh in mid-october they um we we added the capability to script another three million um companies through our data sets why so many why go so wide instead of deep on a specific specific sector yeah i think it's um you need to get a broad enough cross section of startups in the sort of uh startup community i mean most of the companies think of it like a private company bloomberg portal um there's so many small companies the ability for these companies to get bigger and bigger and bigger um you know it's just a long tail to the startup market right so to be able to cover all the disruptors all the innovations all the features capabilities you need to have a pretty long tail on the market uh we think a lot of the big use case of the technology i mean a lot of it was built on the backs at dying people don't know this we actually acquired 11 companies and and we spun out four different technologies that we sold to other companies and then at oracle my team we had i had hundreds of people who work for me but we had a dedicated 35 strategic development team which is basically marketing competitive intelligence and it was a lot of manual automated research market sizing uh doing proactive market theses um took a lot of human bodies to basically scrape the internet without technology so to do this really well and keep an eye on the ankle biters and also the kind of heavily funded fast growth pre-ipo startups you just need automation and you need a wide a widespread database but but i mean so so i mean you look at what sort of what mattermark did right they tried this they tried selling it to founders and investors and then eventually sales teams and it just failed miserably in the long run and a lot of people when you talk to ex-employees they say the big mistake was danielle gave essentially a thesis that we need to have you know 30 million companies indexed by x date and a lot of people say the mistake that was made is the data was so wide it wasn't differentiated you could just go to pitch book or crunch so so you either have to have a differentiated data set and then go wide and have a data point per each company that other people don't currently have or you say super super focused and go really deep on a specific cohort you're going wide what data point are you going to have on all companies that they can't get elsewhere yeah so i think a lot of those companies just mentioned matamar crunchbase pitchbook they're relying on lots of uh point solutions and point data sets as partners and integrators like an hour built with or and a lot of these i was an investor and shareholder and board member of data knives i was a founding investor who sold the zoom info a lot of these companies are good little companies but they're never going to be venture backed big companies right so a lot of the capabilities that are being integrated into the crunch basis and others from these point products we're actually building ourselves and integrating in the other reason why matter mark wasn't a successful company because they fundraised too much um the entire thesis of my investment firm is take less capital i mean the best part of the dine story is that we didn't raise a dollar of outside capital until we were 30 million ar i'm in the fortunate position to sell self-fund york ie and self-fund our fuel platform so i can actually uh control our destiny control our fate control our cap table and not be beholden uh to investors definition of success or failure so i think it's those two things i mean it's building a lot of the ip ourselves um i think it's launching our services and investments practice on top of the platform ourselves so that we can hone the product the capabilities the automated levers of the cab of the of the platform and then over time decide what parts of it uh to offer to the market i think what you'll see with us is we're building our smart notebooks is really more around automated workflows and uh doing a lot of education and training on how to do market research how to do better amplification how to curate better content um and i think those types of things that we build in as more workflows will also help us not just be a company a tool that you think flow of the user of the operator and that's not always the case so so crowd the revenue model there again sas we know what sas is it hasn't launched yet your strategy and services practice which includes the database it includes smart notebooks that's 3k a month and higher sorry it's breaking up a little bit i don't know if it's is that on your side too or is it just i hear you clearly so what i was saying was you've got three different product lines we know what sas is you talked about strategy and services 3k a month that includes your private company database and smart notebooks is that accurate yeah and then your third pro you know product line is capital you're you're investing correct exactly right walk us through that and so now we focus on how many investments have you made and what's the fun size yeah so we don't run a traditional uh venture fund um we operate an evergreen syndicate so back in...