Built In: H Ελληνίδα που βοήθησε το Σικάγο να γίνει tech hub

This Outliers podcast episode is in English.

In the 1970's there was all work for a paycheck right, in the 2000's, it was everyone wanted work life balance. Now work and life is so tightly integrated, it's all about finding your identity at work.

Welcome to Outliers by Endeavor Greece. The podcast is all about the entrepreneur's work transforming entire markets and changing the narrative of entrepreneurship. Each week we speak to the minds behind some of the most successful startups in Greece and beyond, and discover how they make decisions and assess risks. Through their journey and the opportunities they see on the horizon, we uncover what it takes to be an outlier. I am Panagiotis Karampinis, managing director of Endeavor Greece. In this episode we are speaking with Chicago based entrepreneur, Maria Katris. Co-founder and CEO of Built In. Raised in a Greek American family, who had a business of their own, Maria grew up surrounded by entrepreneurial spirit. After starting and running her own successful nanny placement agency, the Nanny boutique, she decided to turn her attention to a new vision, helping Chicago become a tech hub in its own right. What started in 2011 as a social networking site for Chicago startup community, quickly turned into a leading US platform for tech recruitment, Built In.com. Today Built In connects more than two million visitors with over 1800 tech companies, helping potential candidates tap into their local tech communities and discover new career opportunities. The company has raised 22 million dollars in their CRC round, which is amongst the largest deals in history, struck by a female led tech startup in Chicago. Maria talks about how her parents aspired her work ethics, the importance of smart content in built-in's business model and when it comes to recruitment, why we’ve come a long way from the 2:14 job post. She joins us remotely from Chicago.

Hi, Maria.

Good morning.

Thank you. So nice to be with you. Could you give our listeners a quick overview of what built-in is and what you guys do?

Built-in is a tech recruitment platform that harnesses the power of content, to make work meaningful for people. We connect over 2 million monthly visitors to our site with over 1800 companies nationwide. And we really connect them through authentic stories about company’s purpose, mission, values in a way no job host ever could, and for our customers, this makes us their top source of qualified inbound applicants, specifically around data IT engineering talent.

Going a little bit back. I know you have Greek origins. I know you are originally from Kalamata, which I am also from, I know your parents, they run their own business. I would love to learn a little bit more about your childhood, how connected you are with Greece and where you grew up.

So yes, my father is from a very small village at the top of a mountain near Kalamata and my mother is from Olympia. They both immigrated to the US when they were 17 and 21 respectively, so they ended up going to college in the States and then they both ended up going to pharmacy school, so both my parents are pharmacists, but, when I was very young, my father started his own pharmacy with my mom and so they owned their own pharmacy and then we joked that by the time I was in high school my dad wanted to be like a lot of the other Greek entrepreneurs and he opened up a restaurant and a fruit market all at once and so he had three businesses going, so what that meant for me and my sister were a couple of different things. I have a sister who is two years older, we spoke Greek before we spoke English, so my mom tells me how she dropped me off at preschool and I didn’t speak a word of English and she didn’t know what the teacher was going to do with me, but clearly I survived, grew up going to Greek school, every Saturday kicking and screaming at the time, now I’m so grateful. We are going to Greece in the summers with “yaya” and “pappou”, so that was a big part of, you know, staying in Greece for a month at a time. We now have taken our children back, we have three kids ages 12, 11 and 6 and each has been back about three times already, our youngest was baptized there. So, it’s definitely a big part of our world and our life here.

I also know that when you went to the university you also founded your first company, which you actually sold. It was the Nanny boutique, I think? Tell us a little about that.

Yeah, so it’s a good story. It was when I was in graduate school. Basically, when I went to university, I graduated as a finance major and I remember calling my dad and saying I wanted to start my own business as soon as I finished college and he said no, go work for someone else first and learn and then you can go do something on your own. And, frankly, it was the best advice anyone had given me, right? Because it gave me my foundation and so I spent four years in consulting. Sys wanted to sell her agency first, before she did something online and I said OK, I’ll start a nanny agency because I had used a nanny agency when I was in college, to be a nanny, and I felt like NORM was really doing it the way our generation would want it done. Frankly because it was a services business, and I wanted something bigger, I wanted something that could scale and just didn’t feel like that business had… it would be a great life style business and If I had been smart, I would have continued down that path. Instead, I wanted to have a crazy life so I chose something different.

It was a big exit or…?

For the size of the business, it was a great exit but it was very much a small business, it was very much a small business.

You went on to join a nonprofit, right? Which struck me because it’s very similar to what we do in Endeavor, I mean building communities and helping entrepreneurs be more successful.

Yeah, so it was interesting how I got to the nonprofit but when my second daughter was born unexpectedly, about 15 months after our oldest, and so I stayed out of work for a year and a half; and one day my husband came home and he just looked at me and said, “you got to go back to work”. Because I was trying to do his job for him, I was asking him, like, what e-mails he was sending and trying to help-advise him because I just wasn’t meant to be at home full time, and as I started networking, one of the partners I worked for in my first job out of college in then consulting world at R3and 6:54 , he was becoming board president of this nonprofit for entrepreneurs globally, and he said: “Maria, I know you’re trying to figure out what you want to do next, this could be a great stepping stone, you’ll get to meet all these tech entrepreneurs in Chicago and then venture capitalists, like, it will be a great stepping stone for you”, and I said “sure”. That truly Is what brought me to Built In. About a year into my time at TIE, it was around the time that, it was 2009-2010, and there was a rhetoric In Chicago around how, oh it's so hard to build the technology company in Chicago and we don’t have the talent and we don’t have the capital, and we're not Silicon Valley and right, it was a lot of that conversation and I just felt very different, and I approached one of my board members at the time, who ended up being an investor in Built In, and was the first investor actually to say yes to Built In, and was on my board for four years at Built In. And I said: “Helen, this is what Chicago needs”, and I mapped out, almost what looked like a PR engine for the city. And she said we should go talk to, and she named a number of people in the community. A month later, 7:58 McMow, who is a serial entrepreneur in Chicago, launched Built In Chicago, after pizza and beer in his office one night with the founder of Groupon and the founder of GrubHub, and a number of other tech CEOs in town, because they wanted a community for people in at the time we called it, digital technology, cause it was still an industry, it was the way of life. And to make a very long story short, I got invited to join this site, at the time it was a social networking platform and I was like, this is it, this is what I’ve been talking about. You know, now we’re now nine and a half years in.

Would you like to tell us a little bit more on how the team was involved and how the business model looks like now?

Yeah, absolutely. So, when we first started it was early 2011, late 2010, and it was a social blogging platform. It was user generated content, people came on to the site to connect with other people in their community who were building technology companies, and they basically were just announcing themselves to the world. At the time, we had 100.000 dollars from funding sponsorship from four individuals in Chicago, and they each wrote personal checks to just do something with built-in, because it was so good for the community. So, for the first couple of years, our main revenue stream ended up being sponsorships. We had created and brought all the eyeballs of people in technology together, and so all of these service providers wanted access to these technologies. So, accounting firms, law firms, you name it, they would sponsor Built In to get in front of this audience because it became the most competent audience. And so, we knew there was an opportunity there and I always wanted to solve a very big problem and felt like talent was a very big problem to solve. And so, in late 2012, we launched in Colorado, in early 2013 we launched an outlay. And around that time in just before that we moved off the original platform to a platform where we could have job hostings, and that would give us some revenue and then some job ward, and that started the talent, you know, revenue side of the business, but wanted to fund the business because we were bootstrapped, we didn’t have outside capital, and so I basically created an annual package which represents the very first version of what we sell to companies today and I joke, I sold the first 25 to friends and family, I like to call it, you know, very early supporters the 10

Since then, you’ve moved beyond to many more cities in US. Tell us a little bit more about your expansion strategy and what you are learning from every new station that Built in is putting in.

Yeah, absolutely. So, what we learned with the first two markets was, it was pretty much suicide. We were two people in three markets, and we thought we could take this user generated content model that worked really well in Chicago and transfer it to these new markets. What we didn’t realize at the time just how hard that would be to get people in markets who had never heard of Built In or had heard of us, to actually proactively come and blog down the site, and so, we learned very quickly that wasn’t going to translate, which led us to create a freelance content model, to basically see this sites, and see the sites for content, and fast forward to today, our content teams represent about a third of our employees, and then Austin was market number four. That was the first time we decided to deploy some user acquisitions banned against, you know, acquiring users a little bit faster than we had in the past. And that was when we really went to market as more of a recruitment platform versus where this community site is, and that was a big pivot for us as well. New York was a really critical market for us because it not only was when Instagram opened up its ad feed, and you know, and CBC was so low and we could have acquired users so inexpensively, but it was also that at that time when I looked at my co-founder Adam and I said

This is where at the point that you also raise, I'm assuming that 22 million round, which was a record-breaking fundraising achievement for I think it was second largest round led by a female CEO in the Chicago area. So, what exactly is the bet that the investors are taking?

Really? The bet here is that the candidate journey has really changed, right? This generation worked for scarce, about purpose, they care about impact. What they looked for in a job is fundamentally different than what they find in a job prescription and so, the supply and demand just continues to get worse and so, tech talent is becoming harder and harder to find and to attract for these companies. So, our total addressable market keeps exploding. So, when we first started in 2014 and I would fundraise, the biggest criticism I got was

Could you share a little bit more about your content generation?

As I mentioned, because we were bootstrapped as a business, we knew we couldn’t just spend money on ads to acquire users early on and we needed a way to do it more sustainably and profitably long term. And so, we ended up going all in on creating a SCO driven content, so to attract users to the platform and then figure out once they were on the platform, how do we convert them to actually to apply to a job. So that strategy is what enabled us to sort of leap frog leap glass door and LinkedIn and salary.com and indeed and a variety of terms, and we do it organically and not through paying for ads. And so, our content engine has become a very big part of the business and that, the SCO content team is one piece of our business. We then have a content team that is dedicated to writing content for customers, that profiles them as an employer of choice and that is actually contented customers paid for as part of their annual contracts. And then we have a content team that writes all non-paid for content.

How do millennials look for job differently, if they do, and what are the trends that you see in that area?

This is a vastly different work force than it was when we all started, right? And so, in the 1970's, it was all work for a paycheck right? In the 2000's, everyone wanted a work life balance. Now work and life is so tightly integrated, it's all about finding your identity at work. And so, what we are seeing with this generation is, when they are looking for jobs, they are focusing on things that matter to them. They want to know if they are going to have impact, they want to know the purpose, they want to know the mission, they want to have mission alignment, they want to know if they can work from home, they want to know if they can bring their dog to the office, right? Things like location, lifestyle, impact, purpose. Those are the things that matter so much more to this generation than the workforce of the past. And that’s why Built In is attracting these eyeballs because we not only write those stories and position companies based on things that are like most to this generational workforce, but it’s also because people finally feel that they can find the company they are passionate about.

And what would be the two or three pieces of advice you would share for Greek employers on their efforts of becoming the employers of choice for millennials in Greece?

You have to appeal to this generational workforce. You have to meet them where they are at if you want to attract the best talent, because they have options. And so, what that means is, if this generation wants more flexibility, if they want to work from home one to two days a week, if they want to have a higher title or more impact right, you are going to have to figure out a way to become that employer, right? And you’re going to figure out a way to communicate that. I’m not as familiar with what is going on with the Greek workforce and haven't yet done that diligence. And I don’t know if it’s any different than what we are seeing in the US. However, I will say that the companies that are really standing now are the companies who show clear commitment to their people, whatever that means. And so, it’s no longer like they’re lucky to have a job, it’s actually the reverse. Candidates at this point have all the power in the world.

Really exciting. And I'm assuming that the covid pandemic is only accelerating the transformation in the workplace. I was wondering, what are your observations, what are you seeing what’s happening out there? What’s changing?

Yeah, it’s interesting. So, there’s a couple of things absolutely changing. You know, on the one hand of our market place we have the users, right? User behavior is absolutely changing and I'll give you a couple of interesting tippets. Last year in 2019, the number one benefit people searched for on our platform was unlimited PTO. This year it’s remote. That is like first and foremost right, and that says it in itself. You know, if you think about, 74% of all companies expect to shift to more remote once covid is over. Not everyone’s moving entirely remote but that movement has started, right, and this is you know just over 3% of the US workers were remote before covid. It is interesting we are seeing many more of our SMV and growth stage companies going 100% remote. We are not seeing the volume at the enterprise local. I think the enterprise is very much shifting to being more remote tolerant and some are shifting to more remote. However, they’re going to keep their offices and I think culturally there are so many challenges there, to being 100% remote that I just don’t anticipate everyone’s going remote. The second biggest shift we’ve seen since covid and not related to covid, but more related to the social unrest in the US, is a focus on diversity-equity inclusion. And so, you’re seeing a lot of companies spending their time right now, to focus on this topic, to focus on their people, to focus on being a better employer, to focus on investing in tools that can drive them diverse candidates, and so it is a conversation we are having across all of our geographies. It’s a conversation we are having internally. Our product has been known to drive more diverse talent and so, we will be going deeper there as well, about 50% of the people on our platform are female and when you think that the number one demographic on our site is tech, it's actually a pretty high statistic.

And how about specific technologies in verticals? Are you seeing specific verticals growing faster and what are the trends that you are observing in your community?

It’s interesting. We bucketed a lot of our prospects and customers into the hiring and thriving bucket and the struggling bucket, you know, and there is definitely been impact everywhere. However, the ones that we see that are hired and thrive through 23:53 are thin tech. Thin tech is exploding. Health care tech, a virtual doctor’s visit, tele medicine, tele health, right? Those are probably the three buttons that stand out the most. And then, if you start to think about the crop of companies that will emerge as a result of this environment, that’s what excites me the most, like I tend to not to focus on the now and focus more on the exciting future and I'm really eager to see what the next unicorn will look like, that was built because of covid and you know, when you think about work from home and what that means from perks and benefits, right, we spent so much time focusing on fixing our offices to track the best employees, it doesn’t matter anymore. Those perks and benefits don’t matter anymore and so, who is going to come off with the next leave of at home and remote and work from home perks. And, you know, we were even talking about our connectivity issues, right, when you think about just the opportunity for startups to start today, to address some of these problems and the shifts in how we work, it will be fascinating to watch.

Do you think that this evolution in the workplaces is in any way an opportunity for Greece? This remote work hype, um. Perhaps this is something that we can capitalize.

The biggest opportunity is that, historically and I’m just assuming this, is you guys have engineers who are leaving Greece because they just can’t find enough tech companies in Greece to work for, that excite them or interest them, right? But no one wants to choose to leave Greece. Like it’s an amazing lifestyle, right? You don’t make that choice to leave, but you leave for work, and you leave for opportunity if you feel like you have to. And so, I think if anything, there is a massive opportunity to profile and highlight the tech talent that Greece has, as these companies are looking to find the best of the best and know where they can find them. And so, Built In,1 needs to be able to attract eyeballs from Greece to work for tech companies in the US, and, you know, in Europe you just won’t have as many companies demanding that people relocate. And so, I think there is a massive opportunity for the workforce in Greece to stay in Greece and then simultaneously, it allows Greek technology companies to start to percolate and get bigger till they can recruit, you know, the talent in their own hometown.

We always ask our guests at the end of every interview. What do you think makes an Entrepreneur an Outlier? We would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Oh, that’s tough. I have so many thoughts on this. I think it’s vision. I do believe, at the end of the day you need to be able to see things before other people see them. It gives you an inherent advantage and if you can’t see things before anyone else sees it, you are right behind the wall, right? So, to me it starts there and then I think there is a lot of underlying factors. It’s work ethic, you have to be so competitive. You have to want to win, you have to care. And then last but not least, and this is something that I'm seeing, I never appreciated, but I’m seeing it more and more post covid is, you need to be a good leader. You know, I think, can you build a unicorn business and not be a good leader? Yeah, if you do it in a couple of years before anyone really realizes it. However, to navigate a company through ups and downs, through a long journey, you have to care about your people, you have to have a high level of EQ, you have to be empathetic and I think we are going to start to see this more and more now, especially in this remote environment, post covid environment, social unrest. And so, I do think it’s a combination of those things that ultimately makes someone an outlier.

Amazing. Maria, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with that. It was a really inspiring conversation. Thank you so much and all the best of luck to you and Built In.

Thank you and thank you for having me.

That was Maria Katris, co-founder and CEO at Built In. Thank you for listening to this episode of outliers. It was produced by the Greek podcast project. You can subscribe to outliers on our website outliers.gr or wherever you listen to your podcasts, and please leave a review. I am Panagiotis Karabinis. See you in the next episode.