Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Utah: HireVue CEO Mark Newman (Part 1)

True to our 1M/1M mantra, Mark bootstrapped HireVue to $1M in revenue before raising the first funding. Today, the company has raised a total of $92 million, and is going $30 million in revenue. Excellent case study to study!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances.

Mark Newman: I was born in Northern Canada, about 400 miles north of Toronto, in a small town called Timmons. I was a mining industry brat. My dad designed and built the copper smelters. He was a chemistry and metallurgy nut whose favorite thing was taking rocks and turning them into solid bars of something. Living up there, you were able to be blissfully unaware. You live in a small little town. You had chances to go to lakes and kick through trees.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you do your college?

Mark Newman: I moved to Utah when I was about 10 and went to school here. I went to Westminster College and the University of Utah here in Salt Lake City. About 11 years ago when I was 20, I started HireVue while still in school. The university was a great help.

Sramana Mitra: So you started HireVue while you were still a student?

Mark Newman: Yes. Both my co-founder and I needed internships to graduate from college. Rather than going and working for a company, we convinced a professor that we should be able to start our own company. I could sign off on Ryan’s and he could sign off on mine. That was the birth of HireVue.

Sramana Mitra: What was the premise of HireVue and how did you get if off the ground?

Mark Newman: There were two premises. One was what in your life would you TiVo. More importantly and more relevant to us at that time was just the fact that we were going through the hiring process. Ryan was a manager at a company. He was hiring and it was so inefficient and broken.

The spark behind it was that we went to a small school called Westminster College. This small school had a giant Goldman Sachs office right by it, yet Goldman Sachs wouldn’t hire from Westminster. It wasn’t on their radar. That formed one of our core values. People aren’t resumes, profiles, or forms. You should be able to differentiate people. We wanted to do that with video.

Sramana Mitra: We’re talking 2004?

Mark Newman: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You and Ryan were both still in school?

Mark Newman: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: I imagine you bootstrapped HireVue?

Mark Newman: Yes. The first five years was totally bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that Goldman Sachs became a client of yours?

Mark Newman: No, not yet. We were fortunate that other clients came on board. Oracle used us in Romania. Our first year in 2005, we sold two interviews and won $1,000 in a business plan competition, so we had $1,300 in revenue. In 2006, we went up further. I think we had 20 times growth and $30,000 in revenue. It just kept growing. At that point in time, we said, “The world is going to take job interviews through webcams.” People’s first response was, “What are webcams?” For at least seven years, we’ve shipped thousands of webcams. We actually did interviews in 100 countries before we did them in all 50 states in the US.

We found the niche that we can serve and that was oil companies, development banks, mining companies, and groups like that doing global hiring. In 2005 to 2006, we figured out how to get HireVue built with help from developer friends. We borrowed money and had credit cards.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Utah: HireVue CEO Mark Newman
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