Building a High-Growth Startup From Brazil: Revelo CEO Lachlan de Crespigny (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How long does a developer stay in one company before they go out and look again?

Lachlan de Crespigny: Developers that find jobs with American companies stay for much longer. As per the current model, the average time is over three years. A normal developer stays 12 to 18 months. I don’t think it’s particularly healthy. Latin American remote workers tend to stay longer because US companies, in general, have very interesting work. They pay good salaries and it’s cool for people to work for a New York or Silicon Valley-backed VC company.

Sramana Mitra: There is also the stock option issue right? Are your developers getting the stock option? If they do, they have the vesting schedule. They have to stay longer to fully take advantage of the vesting schedule.

Lachlan de Crespigny: American companies, for sure, have that built into their culture. It’s something that a lot of our clients directly do with our candidates.

Sramana Mitra: What is the trend of remote work? Are people working from home? Are they working from co-working spaces?

Lachlan de Crespigny: It’s a great mix. It depends on the age. People with kids tend to work from home. We see groups of younger people traveling.

Sramana Mitra: Digital nomads.

Lachlan de Crespigny: Exactly. Less co-working than you would imagine. I like co-working spaces, but I’m surprised by where our candidates are working from.

Sramana Mitra: What level of revenue have you reached with this marketplace now working?

Lachlan de Crespigny: The marketplace has been scaling aggressively. I prefer not to talk about revenue numbers openly. What I can say is that, each day, there are hundreds of interviews happening through the platform.

Sramana Mitra: The story was pitched to us as having over $5 million in revenue, so we’ll just go with that number.

Lachlan de Crespigny: It’s significantly higher than that now. We grew five times over the past 12 months. The remote wave has turbocharged the industry.

Sramana Mitra: One of the constraints you have in your business model is the pool of Latin American developers. Is that number improving?

Lachlan de Crespigny: This is probably the most common question I get. I think it’s a misunderstanding of the scale of Latin America. We have 400,000 software developers in our network at the moment. We’re nowhere near exhausting the supply. If you then just do some quick math. Let’s imagine that you place a hundred thousand in companies.

Each software developer, on average, gets $100,000 to $200,000 and we take a percentage. You’re talking about a company making hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. The scale of software developers available across Latin America is very high and we can’t see that as becoming the cap for growth.

Sramana Mitra: Your business model is recurring revenue or a one-time fee?

Lachlan de Crespigny: It’s recurring. We decided to align our incentives with the candidate and the company. The traditional model would be, they pay a one-off fee. If something goes wrong, you’ve lost your money. Instead of that, we charge a monthly fee for as long as the candidate stays at the company.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a big business model change from what you described at the beginning.

Lachlan de Crespigny: Absolutely. It’s much better for us.

Sramana Mitra: One of the ways they keep everybody on the marketplace is through reviews and ratings. Is that on your platform as well?

Lachlan de Crespigny: That’s not for our platform. Our companies are looking for long-term relationships with candidates that want to build their careers at their companies. We have never had much of a problem with bypass. We never had to work that hard.

Sramana Mitra: Not only that. It’s a bit strange to have public reviews and ratings of employees.

Lachlan de Crespigny: It feels strange.

Sramana Mitra: I love your story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a High-Growth Startup From Brazil: Revelo CEO Lachlan de Crespigny
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