- Kieran Snyder is the founder and CEO of Textio, a company that analyzes job postings to determine their success rate.
- Textio has been around for 3 years and has raised $29.5 million in funding.
- Around 50% of Textio's team is female, including over half of their board members.
- Kieran previously held product leadership roles at Microsoft and Amazon.
- Kieran discusses 5 important decisions that have accelerated Textio's growth.
- Textio's founding mission is to use data to determine which aspects of language engage certain groups and achieve desired results in writing.
- The company initially built a Kickstarter predictor and achieved 97% predictive success in determining whether a project would be successful.

- Textio raised a seed round of funding after 9 weeks, proving their expertise
- The company started with a small office and a team that worked without monitors
- The founders, who are also married, have complementary skills and trust each other
- Textio decided to focus on job posts as their initial product to deliver value and prove their platform works
- Rebranding and changing their messaging helped Textio accelerate their growth
- The company learned that packaging and selling the product is as important as building it

- The company initially offered individual seats of Textio for a low price, but this was not scalable for enterprise sales.
- They changed their pricing model to a flat fee based on the number of jobs open, allowing unlimited users.
- The change in licensing resulted in a significant increase in revenue and happier customers.
- Customers who shared data with the company received lower pricing and became partners.
- The company initially received press coverage focused on bias, but worked to change the narrative to focus on augmented writing and culture.
- The company is creating a new category called augmented writing.
- Key lessons include picking a co-founder carefully, starting small, being mindful of product licensing, and aiming big.

- Kieran Snyder is the founder and CEO of Textio, a company that analyzes job postings.
- Textio has raised $29.5 million in funding and has a diverse team.
- Kieran discusses 5 important decisions that have accelerated Textio's growth.
- Textio's mission is to use data to improve writing and engagement.
- They initially built a Kickstarter predictor and had success in predicting project success.
- Textio raised funding quickly and started with a small team and office.
- The founders have complementary skills and trust each other.
- Textio focused on job posts as their initial product and rebranded to accelerate growth.
- Packaging and selling the product is important, and they changed their pricing model for better results.
- They created a new category called augmented writing.
- Key lessons include picking a co-founder carefully, starting small, and aiming big.

Kieran Snyder - https://twitter.com/kieransnyder - is cofounder and CEO of Textio - https://textio.com/

Here's her talk from the Seattle Female Founders Conference.

If you'd like to attend a future Female Founders Conference, you can learn more here: http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/

To our next speaker, Kieran Snyder, who is the founder and CEO of Textio.

So I actually started hearing about Textio last year from a number of YC alumni who use and love Textio.

So they use Textio to analyze their job postings.

So, Textio is used not only by startups, but also by large companies like Johnson & Johnson and CVS.

And basically, they analyze data from job postings from around the world, and they can tell you which are going to be more successful.

So Textio has been around for about 3 years and they have raised 29500000.0 dollars.

And what I thought was really cool, a really cool detail about them is that about 50% of their team is female.

And female or non-binary and their board is over half female as well.

I think that does deserve a round of applause.

And so before Textio, Kieran held product leadership roles at Microsoft and Amazon.

So I'm really excited to have you meet her today.

How many of you had heard of Textio before today?

I am the co-founder and 1 of the founders and the CEO of Textio.

We're gonna go back a little bit through my journey, getting to Textio and a little bit of our journey as a company.

I'm gonna walk you through today, 5 really important decisions we made that have massively accelerated us.

As Kat just mentioned, we're a Series B stage company.

And 3 years and 3 months ago, we didn't exist.

When you leave today, you'll be like, yes, I'm ready.

So I've literally seen the entire journey of his small engineering company.

And I grew up to be an engineer and a writer, and very much formative in what we do at Textio.

So when I went to college, I double majored in linguistics and math, which was a really present combination that I didn't know would be present at the time.

And then I continued on and I got a PhD in natural language processing.

And I met someone else here today who is a graduate of the same program that I was in.

But really, my whole life, in 1 way or another, from childhood all the way on up, was about the statistical measurement of language with math.

I chose linguistics because I didn't want to pick between math and language.

I was really lucky to have a dad who was an engineer.

So at my age, it was pretty unusual to have computers in your house when you were 3 because I'm in my 40s but we did.

I won my first science fair project in fourth grade by writing an early dating application that in basic, for those of you who are old enough, where if you put in your name and answered some questions about you, it would say the name of the person in the class that you were gonna marry.

However, the people didn't know about if, then, and go to, so it was a really great coincidence.

Whenever the boy I had a crush on put in his information.

It said he was gonna marry me Teacher was a little suspicious, I think The other thing I did a lot as a kid was I played sports.

I played sports forever I still coach my 3 daughters in basketball today.

But sports and teamwork were a huge part of my upbringing, and it really gave me a major appreciation for teamwork and tenacity.

So if you have daughters, get them into sports.

That's me on the upper right in middle school.

I've always had a flair for performance, with a mullet, by the way.

And that's me in grad school with, I don't know how much we had to drink at that party.

But as I came out of graduate school, I didn't know what I wanted to do.

I spent a year just writing and ran out of money.

And I had a friend at Microsoft at the time who said, I really think you'd like working in technology.

I went to grad school with all those people.

He's like, okay, but you said you needed a job.

I am absolutely a technology and software person.

So I was at Microsoft for about 8 and a half years and it was a really good experience for me.

I was hired as a computational linguist building spell checkers and grammar checkers.

By the time I left the company, my culminating project was leading Bing's native integration into Windows across thousands of people.

So I really learned how to build software.

Always with a product and engineering focus.

So when it came to Textio, I understood product, I understood natural language processing and I didn't understand that much about starting a business.

My co-founder and I, who I will talk about in a minute, were both technical co-founders.

So everything to do with sales and marketing and business operations and fundraising was all really, really new to me.

I started writing a lot when I decided to leave big companies.

Didn't know I wanted to start a company of my own.

And I started writing a lot about statistical measurement of bias.

I don't know if I was a very good employee at Amazon because I mostly sat in meetings logging how many times men and women interrupted each other and then I published it in Slate.

I don't know whether they were that happy.

I published a piece right as we were getting started that in Fortune on bias in performance reviews and technology that was really fortuitous because it went hyper viral and it ended up formative in Textio's history.

I blogged, I had little comic strips of me and my daughters that I drew on the blog.

That blog is still there, but now most of my blogging is at Textio.

So again, always an engineer, always a writer.

When Jensen and I decided to start Textio, we had a really clear vision, okay?

And I'll talk a little bit about his background in a bit.

From everything we had both done, we had this idea.

But if any time you wrote anything at all, just think about this for a minute.

You're writing a pitch to an investor, you're writing a sales email, you're writing a job description, which is probably how you know of us if you know of us.

If you knew ahead of time who was going to respond, that would be super powerful.

If any time you were writing, you knew exactly which aspects of your language were getting 1 group to engage while another walked away, then you could change your approach.

You could get a different result before you published it, not after you published it.

And so this thing we've come to call augmented writing, we didn't have that language 3 years ago, really means writing supported by masses and masses of data where your engine can find the patterns.

Which words, which formats, which constructions get 1 group to engage while another walks away.

The very first thing we built before we had ever had funding was a Kickstarter predictor.

And Kickstarter was a fantastic place to prototype our technology, because all the projects are public domain, and all the outcomes are known.

So you can look at the successful projects and the unsuccessful projects, and you have a really good data set.

And so that on the left is the first text to UI.

Jensen, our CTO, drew that on a napkin when we were in San Francisco.

And you can see the first prototype we built looks actually a lot like that.

And About 8 weeks into the company, we had this prototype working.

We got to 97% predictive in minute 1 of a project as to whether it was going to make money.

The quality of your idea has no bearing on whether you make money on Kickstarter.

As a longtime product person, that was actually a little demoralizing.

But the fonts you use, how long it is, where you place your video content, how you caption your video content, Many of these things are highly predictive of success.

So that was really interesting, and it felt like we were onto something really big, which is the way you communicate can sometimes even be more important than what you communicate in getting to a certain outcome.

So 9 weeks into Textio, we raised our seed round with this.

It was never going to be like, we're ready to go out the door with a go-to-market plan of helping Kickstarter entrepreneurs.

There aren't enough of them to make that a billion dollar business.

But it proved that we knew what we were doing.

And so imagine you're in a room with a bunch of investors, and they all, by the way, are familiar with Kickstarter.

And they're like, no, no, go find Robot Turtles.

So you have to do this over and over again.

That was our first office in another co-working space that I will not name here.

And on the right up there, those are the monitors we bought for our team when we got our seed round of $1.5 million.

3 years later, we just moved into a 25,000 square foot space downtown.

And we're like, ah, oh, man, this is big.

But that is what we looked like in our beginning, which I'm sure for a lot of you who are just getting started is a lot what you look like, too.

So I'm going to walk through quickly 5 decisions that either I made or we made together that I think have accelerated our growth.

And hopefully, there's something useful in it for you.

The first 1 may or may not be repeatable, but I started the company with Jensen Harris, who is our CTO.

So you may not be able to find that as a repeatable pattern.

Up in the left is our professional headshot, which by the way, took a long time to get.

All of our pictures look a little like family holiday photos.

So we have 3 daughters who are third grade, second grade, first grade.

Jensen's background is in all ways a compliment to mine.

So while I have been deep in language and statistical modeling and building software forever, Jensen was a musician.

He went to music school, but also, like me, had been coding since he was 3.

Made his way through college building Shareware, which again, like 20 years ago, that was a thing.

And really developed an industry-wide reputation around user experience.

He invented the first UI for email ever, right, in the form of Outlook.

Led the design and implementation of Office Ribbon commanding interface and then Windows for the whole world.

So where I had this experience, you know, really understanding which, how do you use NLP machine learning to find patterns in language?

I was really the back end sensibility of the company.

He knew how to build a user experience truly for a billion people.

We didn't have a billion people, we didn't have a million people, we still don't have a billion people, but you've got to aspire there, you've got to build it so it's usable by people who are not linguists, not engineers, not data scientists.

The fact that we've done this together wouldn't work for every family, but for us it is an incredible foundation because there's no 1 I trust more, right?

So if he picks something up, I know it's good.

And if it's not, he's going to tell me and vice versa.

By the way, didn't make it easier to raise money the first time around.

There's certainly some people who didn't want to invest in us because we had the family relationship that we have.

Didn't make a difference in the A or the B.

If you get over the hurdle, people look at what you can do together and you have investors kind of in your camp.

So whether you're co-founding with your spouse or not, I really like what Kristen said in the last panel, co-founding is an amazing choice.

I look at what Amy Nelson is doing here with 3 babies under 4, and she's a solo founder.

And even if they're not your spouse, they're a little bit like your spouse.

So that's kind of the first decision that really, I think, was how we got started that really accelerated us.

The second important decision was the decision to start with job posts.

It has nothing to do with talent or bias.

But remember, I was publishing quite a bit about, really, HR documents and documents about people and bias.

We knew and Still know that in 6, 7 years from now when we IPO, we want you writing everything with Textio.

We want you writing every single thing at work with Textio.

We are going to take down Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

And we can do it, because we've had the opportunity to run those products.

If you're making something that's really, really predictive, right, that actually when you type in a word processor, Kat talked about TXEO's analyzing job posts, it's actually more for writing job posts, you need to give guidance that specifically works for the kind of writing that is at hand.

So we realized early we had a lot of opportunity, because I had a lot of relationships and talent in HR, because of work I was publishing, to do something really good for that audience.

They're spending a lot of time and money recruiting and making recruiting content.

They're not happy with how it performs, both from a time to hire perspective and certainly a diversity and inclusion perspective.

So they have masses of job posts and they keep track of how those job posts actually do with real people.

And so the decision to start with job posts was really essential, so focusing that broad vision in on a place where we could deliver value for companies.

So you could actually prove that the platform works.

We had unique relationships to get us started.

So if we had started out in sales and marketing, which by the way, every investor that we first talked to asked us why we weren't starting there, because there's a lot of money in sales and marketing, we would have been choked out.

As the head of an HR tech product, I get to go meet with CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, because they care about that problem.

And it's a very underserved population technologically.

If we had built something in sales and marketing to start, I would have been just another sales enablement CEO.

So find the place that is uniquely you that You can win.

We started here because we thought we could win.

And at the same time, it's had this stealth benefit, which is, by the way, in all of our companies, so you think about a company like Apple or Cisco or Johnson & Johnson, because we're mostly an enterprise product, everybody in that company is using Textio because every job function hires.

And so when we're ready with products for those other domains, they know us.

In fact, 1 of our challenges is people try to give us data for other domains ahead of our desire to be in those domains.

You've got to do something you can do uniquely well and win.

So for us, this was a really good place to begin.

The series B we raised last year is the recognition that the platform works, and we're ready to start attaching it to other kinds of writing.

And then, of course, there's the wonderful benefit that actually you can solve some really significant bias problems for companies, too, which is really important to us, as Kat mentioned.

Our company's half women, our exec team's half women, our board is more than half women.

The third really big decision we made is around rebranding.

So in 2000, whoops, this is a skittish clicker.

In 2014, that's what our logo looked like.

And it really is a very stark contrast before and after.

The 1 on the right looks like an enterprise product.

It wasn't just about the look and feel though, it's also how we talked about the product.

So our director of brand experience, when he arrived at the company, observed that our team, when we were selling the product, was talking too much about how easy it was to use.

But no 1 buys something because it's easy to use.

No 1 gives you a quarter million dollars for something because it's easy to use.

You buy it because of the value it provides to you.

So he really made the observation that we were pitching the company and the product wrong.

We were pitching about ease of use, which is a strength of ours.

But actually, we should pitch the fact that when companies use the product, they fill their jobs 2 weeks faster.

Or they get 23% more women into the pipeline for engineering and technology roles.

And so all of the rebranding and the way we talk about the product have contributed to an acceleration for us, because people read it differently.

The other thing I learned as somebody with a product background is that the product isn't only what you build.

So when we started out, The very first thing we did was we had an invite-only beta.

Once we got 5 months into the company, we had built this beta for job descriptions.

We had early prospective customers who were sharing data with us.

The beta went well, and so we decided to commercialize.

We didn't know anything about how to commercialize.

So we did what a SaaS company might do is we're like, here go on our website you can buy a seat of Textio for $59 a month or something for yourself, which is really cheap for the value.

People loved it because it was really cheap.

And they went and they bought the product.

And that seemed really exciting until we tried to get back into those bigger mid-marketer enterprise sales where they're like, well, we could just buy like 3 or 4 seats and we're good.

That's not good for building a scalable business.

And today, the way we sell the product is with a flat fee according to the number of jobs you have open at the time you subscribe.

So if you have 1,000 jobs open, you pay a flat fee for 12 or 24 months and you add as many people as you want.

In fact, you should add everybody because the product will work better for you.

As a machine learning company, that's super important to us because we're learning from more writers in the platform.

And of course, in terms of our sustainable revenue, that's more important to us because we shift the value away from the individual writer to the value of the platform.

I can't even tell you, Again, I had no sales background at all.

Our first 6 people were all technical at the company.

I wrote a lot of the original back end of the product.

But I was the only 1 who wanted to talk to people, which is how I ended up being the CEO.

And that's certainly how I ended up being the first salesperson.

So I ran sales, customer engagement, basically for a year before we hired our next person.

And you can't imagine my shock the first day we received a paper check in the mail for $35,000 from my first enterprise sale.

I was like, what do I even do with a paper check?

I didn't even know how to get it into our bank account because it never occurred to me people would pay that way.

It was like sitting around the office like a hot potato for a few days.

We were all like, oh my god, someone's gonna lose it.

Although that customer on their third year of renewal still pays with paper checks.

Luckily is no longer my job to take care of the paper check.

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Kieran Snyder of Textio at the Seattle Female Founders Conference