YouSaid · the spoken record

Nikos Moraitakis

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24
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2015-11-27
most recent
2015-11-27
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1
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  1. “I have no clue what you saw. I'm hoping we get 100,000 small business in the United States use our recruiting software, but I don't know how we're going to get to that.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That's the one thing to work on. And the other thing is to be, or at least that worked for us. We have been transparent, honest ourselves. We didn't try to make this look as something bigger than it really is, or to sell a grand vision or whatever. We have been quietly and consistently working on our business, making it a little bit better all the time and being honest about this. And some investors may want to whet their appetite with a big vision, but some other investors appreciate that. And I'm not saying that this is the right way. This is who we were. Me and my co-founder, this is the kind of people we are. And I think at the end of the day, it's a filter. This way you're going to attract the industry of investors who like that type of person”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's an attractive company. I don't think that anybody whom we met last week would invest in this company, any serious investor, no matter how good we are, no matter how good diametrics are, whatever. So for me, it's an investment in relationship building. The people you pitch today, they're not going to invest on you today. But if they watch you for two years and they figure out that you did more or less what you were suggesting and you're staying true to your vision and you're delivering the results, that is going to make them very interested.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The whole thing, it's about the relationship. Nobody's going to write you a $20 million check if they haven't known you for a while, observe the way you execute, seeing consistent results. It's what Mark Suster says very often, that they do not invest in a point, they invest in a curve. And the curve isn't just numbers. It also has to do, do the investors believe that you have integrity, that you will make the right choices at critical points. And that takes time for someone, that kind of relationship to build. Anyone who has ever invested a worker knew us for more than a year, or anyone who has made an offer, who has actually taken serious. I've never had, we definitely did have the metrics to support a very good investment.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The things I've seen in our case, because I have very little experience, I've just done it two or three times, first of all, it is a relationship. People should not treat it as a pitch. People talk about pitches and decks. That's bullshit.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I guess that obviously Baldon had a fairly good picture of how well the company was doing and how much the company was delivering on its promise. I don't know to what extent Mark was involved. But I believe if we were a company that wasn't doing very well in Europe, they wouldn't have invested”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Like many things in life, it works in pretty random and unexpected ways. I mean, yeah, it's pretty formula-like, it's easy to meet investors because it's their job to want to meet companies like that, and they want to see as many as possible. There is a formulaic process of how you meet them. You see the associates and look at your business and they keep track of what you're doing until they become interested. But at the end of the day, what I discovered is that the investors who do get to back you are usually investors who with whom you clicked in a special manner, that people that have definitely have known you for a while, definitely have seen the business progress for a while, and for some reason ended up believing in you personally, the company. I really don't know actually there are mysterious people.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Thank you. Although we do not celebrate fundraising, we do not celebrate in the sense that when you raise money, the point is to do something with it. So it's like standing in the starting line of a marathon with your new pair of shoes and somebody telling you, congratulations, that's a really good pair of shoes that you bought. You know, you haven't used them yet.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So they will ask you for a number of other things and us operators obviously we look at a lot of small things here and there to see patterns and to micromanage and improve the business, but this is really what it comes down to. How fast you're growing and how much drug factor do you have on it.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “If I were to invest on a company purely on one metric, that would be month-on-month growth. And, of course, it's not adequate to judge an entire business, but if you see a business growing at 20% month on month beyond 2 million annual revenue, then something must be going on right in there. It's really difficult to achieve that if other things don't work well. If I could ask for a second metric, I would also want to see the ratio between new business and upgrading the new revenue coming in every month and lost revenue every month to see how much DAG do they have behind them. I think with two metrics, you could probably invest in a company. In fact, given the right numbers, they invest in anything that isn't illegal and has good numbers on those two. Now, obviously, investors need to convince themselves that they've done a lot more soul searching about this.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “More small and medium sized businesses realize that, realize that it's making their performance better. They're starting to try to adopt one for every job. For this, we owe to some pioneers in the accounting software or the email marketing software that penetrated all of those small businesses and taught them that the tools like that can really worth their money.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Any other business models. And at the same time, there's a huge growing market for it. One on the high enterprise market, there's a replacement of traditional on-premise software, which is happening on mass, and there's still a lot of it to be replaced. So it's very clear to see how many more billions are going to be thrown into cloud solutions over the next few years. And the other thing which looks a little less inevitable, but it is in fact happening, is that with cloud solutions that cost $20 and $50 a month, a lot of the medium-sized businesses start figuring out that whatever they need to do for the business, somebody's made the software that they can go, they can, you know, in a self-service manner adopt within a few days, pay $50 a month and get the job done.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “There's a couple of things going on there. One thing is that it's a fantastic, measurable, graspable, predictable business model. I mean, after a few years, the SaaS model has matured. We all speak the same language in the same metrics. I could look at the five or ten metrics in another business and tell you if it's doing well or what kind of potential it has. It's much easier even for investors to understand those businesses to put them in a set of framework analysis and see how far they can go and the way the model works is that after a company gets a certain level of traction and the metrics work well, the probability that the company will have at least a moderate level of success is much higher than with”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “online marketing and sales, the United States, I think, is no comparison to any other place in the world. And they're close to the customers.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “To be honest with you, it's not for the VCs. I mean, I mean no disrespect, but if you do a good business VCs, we'll pay attention. You don't need to move next door. But what happened at Workable is that essentially we had 50% of our customers in the United States even before we had the single person there. And at some point a company follows the customer. So when we were having a few hundred customers and starting to grow really fast and we wanted to set up a marketing, an insight sales and account customer support infrastructure, it made sense to build this close to a bigger customer base. And also while you can find great engineering and operational talent in Greece, and it doesn't matter where they are, when it comes to things like”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Have a huge advantage in hiring. Hiring engineers in Greece, there's plenty of them. They're really good. They're equally good to the kind of engineers that you will find anywhere else in the world. It also comes with a territory and the engineers in general have access to similar information and training wherever they are in the world. And there are plentiful and you probably have a lot less competition. It's not so much the factor of costs. Many people assume it's because it's less expensive. It's more the fact that the kind of people that came to join workable in the beginning in our first 20 engineers were the kind of engineers that would probably be working at Facebook or Google if we were in South America. Francisco. We won't be able to hire them”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Actually, it is. Actually, it is. I mean, 10 years ago when you would need five or ten million just to get started, you wouldn't be able to find that kind of money if you weren't in one of the big technology hubs of the world with lots of VCs. But right now you can get started with 50 or 100K or with 200K. And right now to find your first half a million in Greece, there are funds that do it, open fund is one of them and better known that gave us the first money and you can definitely get started and move the company to the stage where it can attract the interest of major VCs in Europe or the state. So that's a solved problem. And the huge advantage when you are in a peripheral market like Greece is that if you have a network there and some reputation, you probably”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “No, no, it wasn't. Or to put it differently, I think that the hard problems that you need to deal with when you create a startup are not so much location-based. They are conceptual, figuring out a product market fit, designing a good product. These problems, no location is going to make them better for you. True, when you start in a small country with probably not as good support for starting a new business, etc., maybe you'll have to deal with a little bit of extra hassle here and there. But in reality, what? These are not the kind of things that are going to stop you.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “With a few less features, but better collaboration model. And I think that appeals in the end to the small company. That's what we found. Initially, we made it for companies like the ones we have worked with before, but we realized that the guy who runs a car dealership in Kansas or a small hotel in Antakyet actually wants that type of tool to get a job done. And that's why it's growing faster.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And the name reveals the mentality, its business process software to keep track of an arcane process that's going to be done behind closed doors by the HR department. People don't want to touch this thing. Sometimes they don't even allow to touch it. It's not a collaborative software that the managers and the people inside the company are going to want to go in and actually get the job done there. It's to track the job, not to do it. So workable takes a completely different approach and says, you know, you don't need to track anything. Just go there and do it in a simple interface that you would like. It makes some discounts on functionality. So it says that some of the stuff that's typically done around this process, it's just there because that's the way we did recruiting 50 years ago. And you can live.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “How is it better? I think the main element of Workable that makes a difference is that it focuses on a workflow that fits with the way line managers work inside the company. It's not designed the traditional space of recruiting software. It has a hideous name, by the way. They're called applicant tracking systems. Oh, wow, that's nice.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “The SV space for our B2B software. And then of all the things that we ourselves had used because we had been doing growing a company from 10 to 200 people as executives, we have been doing a lot of hiring. Recruiting seemed to be like the stepchild that was left behind from the revolution in enterprise software. It still had very clanky old archaic software made for big companies 20 years ago. And it hadn't been affected yet by this renaissance of tools we see on spaces like CRM, like marketing automation, etc. And we knew the problem. We cared about it. We understand that recruiting is... Is something that managers, executives and founders care a lot about and they would like to be a lot more involved in. So we said, hi Goramet, we could do something better here. And that's how it started. There wasn't some grand vision in the beginning.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “To be honest with you, there wasn't an aha moment or a big burning problem we wanted to solve. In our case, it worked a little bit the other way around. We wanted to start a company. We had a fairly clear idea of the type of company we wanted. We wanted a software company with an engineering culture centered around the product. Also, we were starting in Greece, so this is not the place to start the new consumer big hit that is going to become fashionable in San Francisco, but we understood enterprise needs and enterprise tech. We didn't want a company that is going to sell to the Fortune 500 companies because these companies tend to be sales organizations in the end. We wanted a company with a strong engineering culture where the product is first and dominates the business model. So we picked”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I used to work at the startup before. I worked at the company called Upstream, which was doing marketing automation technology for telcos. It was a startup in all the ways that we understand the term right now. One of the early employees spent seven years there all the way to the exit of the company. And then my father and I who were both working over there decided to start our own company.”

    2015-11-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source