Facebook’s Professional Twin: Identified Co-Founder Adeyemi Ajao (Part 7)

Sramana: Where is Identified at in terms of business?

Adeyemi Ajao: We allow employers to search through the database and their primary tool is the career score. We wanted to stay away from a job board concept. We hired a VP of Sales from CareerBuilder and he showed us how long-term careers are not just about jobs. We ended up selling the ability to reach people in an entirely new way. The current monetization model is the recruiting tool. I am personally more interested in helping companies become part of the career ecosystem.

Google and FaceBook have scores as a company. We can tell people that it is better to work at one company over another based on the company scores relative to their desired career path. My impression when I talk to people is that they are very interested in recruiting young people on FaceBook. They get even more interested when I start talking about how we tell people about the companies and what types of employees they have. We are helping employers engage in a more meaningful way.

We are doing over 5 million dollars in revenue but that is based only on our basic recruiting tool. We have already started seeing some really significant traction from per-bookings of our advanced recruiting tool and that tool does not even go out until July.

Sramana: What is your business model?

Adeyemi Ajao: It is a subscription model. Companies pay for seats and access to the database.

Sramana: What is your current membership?

Adeyemi Ajao: We are around 10 million, most of them are under 30.

Sramana: What is the geographic footprint?

Adeyemi Ajao: It is global but we have the most engagement in the US. We are covering almost every school now.

Sramana: Obviously you are skewed to North America, and there is a significant youth unemployment problem here as well as the rest of the world. Do you see that in your database?

Adeyemi Ajao: Most people in our user base have a job title in a company. Most of them take actions that express desires to move to a different career or company.

Sramana: What about internships? Those are becoming more and more interesting.

Adeyemi Ajao: A lot of our users are still in college. Internships make a lot of sense and we are exploring how to handle those right now. Internships can be a great way to get positive comments for companies and brands as well. They can be mutually beneficial for students and brands.

Sramana: Where do you go from here?

Adeyemi Ajao: We have just announced our Series B funding. We raised 22 million dollars from VantagePoint Capital Partners and Capricorn Investment Group. We also had some of our original investors such as Tim Draper, Bill Draper and Innovation Endeavors participate again. We are going to use this funding to expand our team. We have work to do everywhere from engineering to business intelligence, sales and marketing.

Sramana: This is an excellent story and I think you have a bright future. I look forward to following your success.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Facebook's Professional Twin: Identified Co-Founder Adeyemi Ajao
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