Helping Moms Juggle: Juggling Mother Sara Sutton Fell, CEO of Flexjobs (Part 2)

SM: I think straight out of college is a great time to do entrepreneurship. You don’t have families to support or any big liabilities. If it doesn’t work you can always go do something else!

SS: Exactly. There was a freedom because we knew that if it did not work we would go back to school. As we started building it we started hiring our friends and we had internships on college campuses all over. The average age in our company was 23. We were all living in cheap apartments. We had a really fun experience there and that company was a huge college education in and of itself; I suppose it was an MBA.

SM: How did you fund the company?

SS: Angels initially. We had some family in the first round and then we did a lot of networking. We tapped into a passion in a lot of our investors. Some were big financial industry guys in New York. I don’t know why we decided to start the company in Connecticut because we really should have done it in California. A lot of investors had never invested in anything related to the Internet and certainly not with two 23-year-old women who looked like they were 16. They read our business plan and tapped into our enthusiasm. It was fun. We had 10 investors from a municipal bond firm who we ended up sharing office space with. They loved the entrepreneurial spirit.

SM: How much did you raise?

SS: Ultimately about $7 million total. We grew it from the two of us to 125 people when we sold to Korn/Ferry. It was a crazy ride. We had some fun with marketing. We won an Inc award for our advertising campaign wherein we had an RV which we had painted by a graffiti crew. It highlighted our website, and we would take it to college campuses with laptop computers and have them sign up for our service. That is how we dealt with the chicken and egg problem that any service has. That generated a lot of press and excitement. We ended up with three RVs and did a nation-wide campaign.

SM: How many users did you get to?

SS: We had 750,000 when we sold. The first semester we had about 5,000 resumes. We did the job drive with a single RV and by the end of the semester we had 30,000. We knew right then we had to do more of it.

Simultaneously we were working on selling to employers. We had some big sponsorships with Dell, Yahoo! and Microsoft. We really had some excellent sponsors.

SM: The companies were paying for job listings or for advertisements?

SS: We went through a few iterations of price points but we ended up doing annual contracts with them. Online job boards were so new and HR departments were fairly slow to adapt, so we had to give them full support and training on how to recruit entry-level people using the Internet. At the time they did not know how to get through the firewalls, and some recruiters did not even have emails. We did some fairly large annual contracts with many of the clients.

I chose to leave about five years later. The company had evolved enough that we hired a CEO, which changed the vibe a little bit. It was a natural transformation that needed to happen. I felt I had worn all hats and I was ready for a challenge and something a little bit different. I left and went to work for a company in San Francisco called MyFamily, which is a part of Ancestry.com. It was a really wonderful concept to connect families.

SM: What role were you playing there?

SS: I was hired by the founder without a role around 2000. We just connected and when it all settled I was a director of email communications. They sent upwards of 20 million emails a month but never had anyone cohesively look at them. They did not have multi-part emails yet and were not in line with all the spam rules. They needed one person to get their arms around all of that. I helped them build revenue streams around it with newsletters and integrated advertising efforts.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Helping Moms Juggle: Juggling Mother Sara Sutton Fell, CEO of Flexjobs
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