Hi there, everyone. Im j. J. Ramberg and welcome to your business, the show dedicated to helping your company. We all know how excruciating it can be to find the right person for an open position. One entrepreneur decided to do something about that. We sat down with ian siegel at the companys headquarters in santa monica, california, to talk about why they company the companys success a big secret for the first four years and how Artificial Intelligence will change how you find and hire talent. Ian segal always hated recruiting new employees. And i was taking the same job and putting knit all these different places and it was so frustrating because it took so much time. In spite of all the job listing companies, he felt like the process wasnt as easy as it should be. I, again, had to do that process where i posted the job. And i actually had printed out a sack stack of resumes this high and i was staring at it and i thought, thats it, im going to do it. By it, he meant start his own company. So he called Three Friends and from his kitchen table, the four founders created ziprecruiter. They launched it with 50 worth of google ads. Post to multiple job site wes one submission. Thats all i wrote. This promise was the thing that set ziprecruiter apart from all the other sites. And people responded. We turned it on and it was literally like the customers had been beating at the gates waiting for this product to exist. The. Company grew quickly, completely bootstrapped and profitable right away, it was an overnight success story, one they took great pains to keep secret. In Technology Businesses in particular, there is this behavior of fast following. So we practiced what we called security through obscurity and we tried to tell as few people in our business as possible. We were shy about doing press. Did you feel like you were holding your growth back, though . Our challenge was never trying to accelerate the growth. It was sort of like ride ago bucking bronco. But ziprecruiter is playing in a crowd and competitive space. At some point, they realized in order to keep up, they needed outside funding. To do that, they had to lift the curtain. Were doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue. And everyone in the industry started scratching their head and looking at us and saying, wait a minute, maybe we should try to kill this company. Suddenly i was facing competition at a scale that i had never experienced. In 2014, reraised 63 mlt, giving them the foot to go play with the big boys. Are you nervous about the competition . Theres nothing i can do about the competition. My philosophy is simple. I solve the problems in front of me, work on the things that i have control over. Ian cant control the competition, but he can control the progress of his own business. And hes learned the only way to do that is to be very clear about what his company does. Every company only sells one thing. And the thing that zip recruiter sells is great candidates. Thats what we sell. Its a lesson he learned the hard way when they veered off track. I think the most difficult and painful product we ever turned off at ziprecruiter was something called ziprecruiter hr. The idea was the help companies after they made the hire by digitizing the onboarding process. They took the best ande brightet of their team and helped build a product. Everyone was excited, except for their customers. After a year, i had to make the difficult decision of turn it off and take all that functionality away from our website. Auto painful process that called ziprecruiter time, resources and some company morale, but showed them they had momentarily lost sight of their true north. When we pursued zip hr, we got away from the one thing that over and over again we told employers was the thing you could expect of ziprecruiter. Working on adjacent products to whatever it is that is your core value proposition, that might be a great way to delight your customers if it works, but its not going to bring more customers to you. Now dp has a policy it lives by. If more than 50 of their customers dont use a new feature, it gets turned off, no exception. Things that work work right away. This notion that you have mvped something and then if you keep it rating, youre going to have your way to success, i havent seen it in my career and i have a running joke with my pr team that i would like to put out a press release once again saying once again, ziprecruiter gets even easier to use and we announce turning features off instead of new features that we have launched. That said, theyre launching new features all the time and trying to stay ahead of the curve. Ian says the challenge the company is tackling today is quality over volume. How do they help match the right candidates to the right jobs . The answer, according to him, lies in machine learning. At this point, we have literally invested tens of millions of dollars. We have an r d center in strais with 47 engineers in it because we couldnt find enough experience in the united states. The competition for this talent is so high. Its been a real coup for us and a real asset for us that we did manage to get so many of these top flight search engineers to work for our company. Ziprecruiter has been a crazy adventure for ian and his partners. Today the company has more than a thousand employees and operates around the world. And he says while he still is as obsessioned as the early days, theres one big thing that has changed. There comes a point when you pick your ed hd up and you say, you know what . Nothing can really kill me. Tomorrow is okay, maybe even next year is okay and thats when you get fun. Thats when you have achieved philosophy and you can start to achieve running your business. Sglerls gregs company is filled with drama, excess, Great Success and great failure and then rebirth. Not to mention family infighting and overcoming a devastating disaster. That crazy guy up there on the forklift is greg whitstock, the founder and ceo of aqua scape. And this enormous place, which embodies everything whitstock is all about, is called aqua land. All right. Lets open up the gates today is the biggest sale of the year for this st. Charles illinois based business that got it started 25 years ago. Its pond building. Just a few years ago, the fate of aqua scape was in question. Adversity can pull a Team Together or apart. Without them, i wouldnt have been able to do it. Gregs adventures in pond building started at just 12 years old when he built his first pond in the backer yard with his dad. That first pond leaked, turned green and even my prize turtles migrated away. That was the beginning of my odyssey with water features. Every summer, i would spend my summers ripping it out, rebuilding it and mcgyvering up my filtration smgs. Over the next seven years, whitstock innovated along the way and figuring out how to make the maintenance of the pond relatively simple. I thought, there has to be a business here. Greg, then a student at Ohio State University went into business that summer. As a 21 yooeyearold kid, i 11,000 in profit. The business took off from there. The Second Season that i was in business, i had done 12 years. And august 2nd of 1992, my life changed when the Chicago Tribune ran a front page story on me calling yon golden ponds. And my business went through the roof. So my fun summertime gig became my career. Before i even graduated college. In those early, crazy days when the company had had just gotten started, gregs dad, gary, an engineer was a big supporter and helped his son with the business. My dad is a conservative 50 something yooerlear old ted anda wild 20 something yearold entrepreneur. I was the gas pedal and he was the brake. The strife between father and son escalated. Ive lost a lot of people in my life running this business. I wanted to go for the mountain and he wanted a schematic plan. Any Business Needs both skill sets. When its family and youre that close to somebody, it gets tough. It was a conflict that couldnt be resolved and the two parted ways leading to years of estrangement. We worked together for the first three years and he became my first competitor. The challenge from his father drove greg to work harder than ever. That was a big motivation for me because i wanted to prove not just to him, but to myself that the i could do it. And we did. Acqua scape was enormously successful, especially during the housing boom when building a pond was the type of thing people built with easy access to home equity loans. That built the companys 250,000 square foot headquarters. Then, 2008 came along and changed everything. The company lost 12 million in just one year. And they were forced to layoff nearly half of the employees. When everything went to hell in a hand basket, so did aqua scape. Colleen witnessed the tail end of aqua scapes incredible growth, including whitstocks reconciliation with his dad and the friendly acquisition of garys business, pond sweep. But colleen also witnessed the decline that hit the company like a ton of bricks. 2006 was our first year in this building. 2007, we saw the wheels shaking and 2008, you know, we just banded together and held on and made some really, really hard decisions. Then in february of 2011, as aqua scape was limping along trying to survive another day, the unthinkable happened. When the economy was at itser worst, down game 24 inches of snowfall and down my building fell. When i saw the entire 700 foot span on the ground, i fell to my knees. The timing of the roof collapse could not have been worse. With the ramp up to the busy spring and Summer Season just a few weeks ago, greg went from having a business that was through the roof to a business that was collapsing under the weight of the recession and then to a business with a collapsed roof. The building was condemned. We were basically out of business. And just like the conflict with his father, the challenge of rebuilding aqua scape became a rallying cry for whitstock and his remaining employees. This picture says it all. Now, several years later, aqua scape is a leaner, meaner business ready are for anything. Not only do we rebuild this building, but we rebuilt this company. Even though our sales werent where they were post 2008, coming out of 2011, we rebuilt this building. This was a stronger company. I dont know if we would have been able to do that if we didnt face the adversity that we faced. Im here in nowhere else at the collision conference which has brought 25,000 people together to talk about technology. Whats new, what should we be paying attention to . What is inknnovative . Now were going to talk about invest, david segall. So good to see you. Great to see you. So you guys created something called the anxiety index. So it predicts how investors will behave. The anxiety index predicts what . The anxiety index can help people to understand how anxious the general market is at a particular time. So investpedia has 30 Million People that go to the our website every single month and theyre looking up all these terms like bankruptcy or correction or shortselling. If hundreds of thousands of people are suddenly looking up these negative and anxietyprovoking terms like bankruptcy or correction with, then chances are theres something thats bad thats happening in the larger market. Interesting. So that is how youve created the index . Correct, correct. When did you start it . So the background is august 24th, 2015, was a day known as a big flash crash. The market was down a thousand points prior to opening. Suddenly, our head of marketing runs into my office and he says, david, youre not going to believe it, but our short selling tutorial is going through the roof right now and tons of people want to learn how to short sell. So i said thats interesting that all these people want to learn how to short sell. Wouldnt it be more interesting if we could predict whats happening in the market and whats lagging in the market. If youre able to predict things. So we created this anxiety index which looks at these 13 terms that millions of people are looking up and if tons of people are scared and looking up bankruptcy and potentially planning on declaring it, then theyre going to do research and theyre going to educate themselves before taking action. Interesting. Okay. Now lets take that and you talk about public markets. Now lets talk about getting people to invest in my business, right . Any business. Im a small business, a medium sized business. What do i take from your anxiety and i mean, it might be a good time to start pitching people, right, because they want to get out of the markets or a bad ditime because theyre so nervous about their money. So i teacher entrepreneurship at colombia. I talk about when is the right time to look at ac money and visa money. There is little doubt that the best time to look for is when theres a lot of receptivity in the market. If theres high levels of anxiety out there, thats not the best time to getting funding and get new investors. By looking at the anxiety index, you have a better understanding of should i go out there or not go out there and be trying to raise funds. One could argue, do the opposite. Right. Thats what i was going to say, it might be the time to say, hey i mean, if you understand the psyche, the psychology of whats out there, then you can pitch against that, right . Hey, here is a safe place to put your money. Thats a great point. If you can look at a time when people are really scared and you can then use that to your advantage and you can change your pitch to make sure that the pitch is then focused on how do you minimize risk, how do you make sure that what youre doing is going to be a much safer investment, that it could really help you to cater your pitch around what the risk is and how to mitigate those risks and a big growth story. So it makes sense, as well. And does this anxiety index change every day . How often do you look at it . Every day. Its reached a high of 185 in the Lehman Brothers collapse about, ten, ten years ago. As one would expect. We all remember that time. Yep. And the low point was around 90, 95 when the market was really humming over the last couple of years. But its extremely important as a entrepreneur and as someone who is founding a startup to really get an understanding of the larger macro environment and to make sure your pitch is consistent with that. The blinders are often pretty high. Its easy to think your startup is the center of the world. Understanding the larger world around you you will help to make your startup a bigger startup. Great meeting you. Take care. Thank you. Im here with this weeks elevator pitcher ed roth who is here to tell us about your company, stencil one. I want to hold one of these up so people can see it. These are so cool. Thank you. You are the designer. I am. And you run the company. Yes. So youve done a lot of talking to customers, but how much have you done pitching to investors . Not much. Ready for that step now. Do you feel prepared for it . I think so. Did you get some advice about how to pitch to them . Yes. Lets see how you do. Youre pitching to two people. What is so neat about your pictures today is one of them, becca brown of soulmates was a pitcher on this show and her company has done so well that now shes flipped sides and shes one of our panelists. And then the second one is ditcha bray who is the cofounder and ceo of money line. He staerted his company and wen for the same thing youre going for. Lets see how you do. Thanks. Hi. My name is ed roth. My company is stencil one, a Decor Company i founded in 2004. I saw a need in the marketplace for more refreshing designs. Im going to give you these. Stencil1 has been praised by martha stewart, the new york times, as well as Good Housekeeping television. All of our sense ills are laser cut mylar. They range in price from 5. 99 to 99. A little bit about my background, i had a crafty mom, a diy dad and i have a design in art design in art background and i turned it into a fulltime business. Im seeking 1 million investment. With that money i will invest that in technology, product development, as well as ordering morin venue tore to improve our margins. This is a 44 billion industry. So who is ready to join the movement and take a piece of the pie . You got so much in there. Im going to give you two these. I can take your stencils from you if you would like. I need two numbers, 1 through 10. What do you think of the product and what do you think of the pitch . I think you seem like you had some coaching in there. Practice, practice. And watching your past ones. I hope you have learned something from it. You got stuff like how big the market is, what your background is, what you will do with the money. As i always say, it is totally irrelevant what i think. Lets see. What do you think, becca . I gave the product a 9, the pitch an 8. The product is mazing. It is cool to see the samples. I love all the designs, customizability. The pitch i gave you an 8. I would have wanted to know what your sales were and what you are looking for in Exchange Just for a tighter pitch. Rl f, nice to meet you as well. Great job. Thank you. I gave a 9 to the product as well. I think you can clearly see there is a demand for the product. You can also see a path to getting the products to market fit where your customers become your biggest advocates and your sales force. It is good to visualize that. The one point is maybe if you articulated that exactly how you would do that in the next 6 to 9 months, that would get it to 10. On the pitch, 8 as well. I would have loved to hear a little bit more on the Gross Margins, financials, how you would expand that. As you scale, does that impact your Gross Margins because you have to go to different factories, different production channels and does that impact your gross margin. Just understanding that would have given me even more confidence to put that Million Dollars behind the product. Nice job. Very good job. Stencil one, you didnt say where you can buy them. Stencil 1. Com, target. Com. Thats impressive. Congratulations. You did a great job. Thank you all for your advice. When we come back, how to manage a Millennial Workforce. And personalizing the customer experience. The line between work and life hasnt just blurred. Its gone. Thats why you need someone behind you. Not just a card. An entire support system. Whether visiting the airport lounge to catch up on whats really important. Or even using those hardearned points to squeeze in a Little Family time. No one has your back like American Express. So no matter where youre goin