The following interview is a conversation we had with Ben Zweig, CEO of Revelio Labs, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $19 Million Raised to Build the Future of Workforce Intelligence
Ben Zweig
Thanks for having me. Sad to be here.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before begin talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Ben Zweig
Yeah, for sure. Let’s see. So I did a PhD in economics. So kind of come at this space with a little bit more of like the statistics background and a little bit of experience in labor economics. So had done research, was in academy for a while, and then I worked as a data scientist at a hedge fund for a few years. So that was kind of interesting being in this very sophisticated field where people allocate money in pretty efficient ways and kind of getting a sense for how all that worked. And then went to work at IBM, which was really my first foray into the corporate world. And eventually there started leading a group in workforce analytics. So I was a data scientist there, working with a lot of data scientists in what is now called their chief analytics office. But that was really interesting, I think, because started seeing how workforce analytics happened at big companies and started seeing some of the challenges that IBM had that really lots of companies had.
Ben Zweig
So then started getting the idea for REBELLIO Labs and that was sort of the impetus for some of those ideas.
Brett
Nice, super interesting. And we’re going to dive deeper into the company in a second here, but a few questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder and entrepreneur. First one is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Ben Zweig
It’s a good question. So I’ve never really idolized CEOs in the same way as other people. I think when I think of the people that I really looked up to is mostly economists and so looked up to them. But if I think about CEOs, I think probably Rich Barton is a really interesting one. He founded Expedia and Zillow and Glassdork and all these data companies where he’s exposing data to people that would use it really to anyone and revealing something about the world that people didn’t know before. And I think that’s something that we try to do at Revelo. Revellio’s reveal. We’re trying to reveal something and put this data out there in a clear way, in an organized way, in a way that’s easy to access so that people can understand labor markets. And I really just admire the mission there. And I think there’s just a lot to do.
Ben Zweig
We’re getting more and more data literate as a society, and I think someone needs to organize this and facilitate access in a way. I think he’s been a tremendous force for good in that way, and I hope we can kind of continue on that path.
Brett
I feel like there haven’t been any big books about him yet because I feel like I would have read that. It seems like a lot of people don’t talk about him much, but I’ll have to dig into him a bit more.
Ben Zweig
Yeah, he’s underrated.
Brett
I didn’t realize that he also founded Glassdoor. That’s super interesting.
Ben Zweig
Yeah, he’s co founder of Glassdoor. I think all these companies have co founders except for Expedia. I think he did by himself.
Brett
Interesting. All right, what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a founder? And this can be one of the classic business books or just a book that really influenced how you personally view the world and think about the world.
Ben Zweig
So I would say two, if I’m allowed to say two. So the one that directly affected the vision for Rebellion Labs, I think, is Capital Ideas by Peter Bernstein. So that’s basically the story. It’s the history of how finance became sophisticated. It goes through this time when it was all just, like, phone calls and relationships to an environment where people were typing away at computers and using math and statistics and all that to make decisions around how to allocate capital. And it was so cool. I mean, just the stories of the people who kind of pushed this idea forward and going through the resistance at the time. And I thought this is, like, really a tremendous turning point in history when there’s this whole sector of the economy that just is being born. And I thought, let’s compare this to labor markets, which are bigger than capital markets, but way less sophisticated.
Ben Zweig
And I thought, someday someone’s going to tell the history of how labor markets became sophisticated. And I really want to be I want to be, like, a part of that history. I want to be, like, mentioned in that future book. So I think the idea for Valley Lives was really to kind of do for labor markets what visionaries like Myron Scholes or Harry Markowitz or whatever did for finance and also what companies like Bloomberg and others have done for finance and create this ubiquitous source of shared information. And that was the idea. And I thought that was just, like, very inspiring. So I’d say that book that was, like, inspiring from a business perspective. Personally, I really, like Exit Voice and Loyalty by Albert Hershman. Just like a model of how people behave in scenarios that are just like, not good. So it kind of makes me think about attrition at companies, when you’re in a bad environment, do you leave or do you exercise some voice or try to change things?
Ben Zweig
And I just think about that a lot. Like every time I watch a movie, there’s always some dynamic between whether someone’s going to move or fight for something, and it’s always a struggle in lots of different situations. So I always come back to that and think about that a lot with various business problems or just as we think about the employee employer dynamic. So I just kind of love that one as well.
Brett
Nice. Two books I haven’t read yet, but I’ll add them to my Amazon list.
Ben Zweig
Yeah, go for it.
Brett
Nice. Let’s dive deeper now into the company. So I think you’ve touched on the origin story quite a bit there. So let’s maybe talk about the product specifically. So what does that product look like and what are people paying you to do and solve for them?
Ben Zweig
Yeah, so ultimately we’re really trying to create something like a Bloomberg terminal, but instead of for financial data, it’s labor market data. So that’s one way to think about. Another way to think about it is kind of a universal HR database. So every company’s got their own HR data and that’s a locked box. They don’t share that with anyone. And we are trying to collect the universe of public employment records and try to reconstruct or approximate the HR database for every company. So let me give you an example. So let’s say you work at Microsoft. You’re there, you’re in their HR database. You’re a line item in that database. It says your name, your job title, when you started, et cetera, things like that. And that’s information that the Microsoft HR team owns and they don’t really share outside of the company, but a lot of that information is actually mirrored in your resume or your LinkedIn profile or something like that.
Ben Zweig
So there’s a lot of public profile information that can be collected and sort of aggregated. There’s also job postings. Companies post jobs that’s of course public, that’s advertised and they want to see they’re listing out what they’re hiring for, what the requirements are, what skills they want. So that’s really rich information as well. There’s sentiment ratings from sites like Glassdoor and Fishball and things like that. There’s layoff notices, there’s immigration filings, there’s freelance platform data. There’s so much data out there that’s just like in the public domain. And we really want to just collect it and standardize it, enrich it, curate it, and ultimately have this centralized HR database where you can make comparisons across companies. So once we have that, then we could deliver it to companies as a data feed through S Three or Snowflake or something like that. We could deliver it through API integrations.
Ben Zweig
Every once in a while we’ll make custom reports, but the way we really like to deliver it in the most popular way is through a dashboard. So most companies don’t have teams of data scientists or data analysts to analyze terabytes of data. So they want to experience and dig into this data through a front end platform that’s just like easy to use. So that’s ultimately what we deliver. And there’s a lot of processes that we go through to make sure this is clean, unbiased, standardized. So we have like a very big data science team that analyzes the natural language and tries to create taxonomies and disambiguate entities and adjust for sampling bias and lags in reporting and all sorts of problems that come up. And there’s tons and tons of problems. I mean, the raw data is just like messy, as you can imagine, but once you get past that and once you fix these problems, it’s just like so rich and so full of potential.
Ben Zweig
So someone’s got to do it. So that’s what we’re trying to take on.
Brett
And who are the customers? Who are getting the value there? Is it headphones and investors?
Ben Zweig
Yeah. So those were really our earliest adopters. So when we first created this, we thought the original idea was this is bringing benchmarking to people, analytics, this is bringing a view into the external market to HR, which is typically very company centric. So that was the original idea. We were going to sort of advance the way that HR does business. And we kind of got sidetracked a little bit because we found this huge opportunity in selling to hedge funds and private equity firms and sell side research groups and VCs. And really they are in the business of understanding companies without having an affiliation to those companies. So once we’re able to get like a really deep view in the inner workings of companies without any affiliation to them, I mean, that was just like a really easy market for us to kind of get into.
Brett
And where do you think it goes from here then, if those are the early customers, who are going to be the customers two, three, four years from now, do you think?
Ben Zweig
So I’d say we started investment management, then our next big splash was in consulting. So we work with all the major consulting firms because they’re also in the business of understanding companies more deeply and without necessarily needing to get into their systems. So that was great for us. We sell a lot to academic researchers and we sell a lot to HR and recruiting. So the different groups there, that fragmented market. So we’ll sell to the big staffing firms, we’ll sell to talent acquisition groups and there’s now like a subgroup within that called talent intelligence, which is just great market for us. I mean, they are really in the business of understanding the external labor market. So that’s great compensation as well. I mean, they do a lot of benchmarking people. Analytics is another one. They’re really just starting to do benchmarking, which is exciting. And there’s other groups, there’s strategy, there’s procurement, there’s market intelligence.
Ben Zweig
So we’re kind of casting a wide net into the types of users and types of use cases because really, at the end of the day, there’s tons of different players in a company that want to understand people and what’s happening with teams and with talent.
Brett
A couple of months ago I was watching the WeWork, or probably one of the WeWork documentaries and they had a company on there that was an alternative data company that I probably won’t mention their name. I think they had some trouble later on, but they had said they were able to predict that WeWork was going to have issues because of their I think it was their glass door data or some type of HR data. So is it similar to that? In a way? I’m guessing it’s much better than that, but is it similar to that types of decisions and things that you can spot?
Ben Zweig
Yeah, exactly. So we know the team that think down pretty well. We’re both in the alternative data space, which is really providing insights about companies beyond what you find in financial statements. So, yeah, their story is they found some insights about WeWork and published a report and then they got kicked out of WeWork, which was a bit of an aggressive move. So we do similar analyses, we collect a lot of similar data like sentiment, ratings, job postings, workforce dynamics, all that. And yeah, we’ll report on the trends in companies and sometimes that’s very easy to establish, but sometimes we get pushback also. I mean, I’ll give you an example. A few months ago we had a newsletter. We have a weekly newsletter, which is great. We have a team of economists and they write insights that they can see from the data. We had a newsletter that we did in collaboration with Bloomberg that basically showed that Meta basically stopped hiring people in VR AR and all the Metaverse skills.
Ben Zweig
They had been hiring a lot, but they basically shut that down and other companies like Accenture were hiring much faster. And the team at Meta, the communications team, reached out to us and they said, hey, we want to dispute this and this isn’t like we’re seeing slightly different numbers. And so we kind of went back and did a more thorough analysis and we tried to slice and dice it in tons of different ways and at the end of the day, we had the same pattern and we basically said, thanks for alerting us, but we’re not going to retract this, we stand by it. And then a couple of weeks later, then they had their big announcement about how they’re kind of stopping hiring. So we got vindicated eventually, but it was stressful.
Brett
That’s awesome. Do you ever push that data out to the media and use that to create stories, or is that more reserved for the newsletter and the paying customers?
Ben Zweig
We do a lot. So we’re in the media almost every day now. We’ll work a lot with we have a bunch of reporters we have good relationships with at Bloomberg and Business Insider and Wall Street Journal and New York Times and like, a bunch of those just because they’re in the business of looking for data to support their story. So they’re always looking for supporting evidence. And we provide that for free, really, because it helps us with getting our name out also. So we love those relationships and I think they are starting to rely on us also. So, yeah, that’s been awesome for us.
Brett
It reminds me of CB Insights a little bit, just in terms of their approach. I don’t know if you’ve studied them very much, but a few years ago I listened to a podcast with their founder and he said that was their content marketing strategy, was just basically giving their data to journalists. And then journalists would use that in their stories. And that’s where they got all their backlinks and that’s where they built up all the trust and credibility. And that was essentially their marketing strategy. And it worked out great for them.
Ben Zweig
Yeah, they’ve been amazing. I mean, they’ve also been helpful in giving us advice every once in a while, so we know them pretty well. And, yeah, I think they’re really I think of CB Insights as the gold standard on newsletters. I mean, they have such a good newsletter. They really have an excellent voice. And I look up to their founder, Anand also. He’s another founder that I’d put up there as someone who I think has made a lot of right calls and is doing smart things.
Brett
Do you end your newsletters with P-S-I love you like him as well?
Ben Zweig
No, we can’t pull it off. We’re a little nerdier than that.
Brett
Yeah.
Brett
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Brett
Now let’s talk about the companies that you’re working with and we don’t have to dive into them too much, but it’s some big name companies there you have on your homepage. And you mentioned some other big consulting companies as well. What would you say you got right? Because I’m sure it’s hard to break through the noise. I’m sure there are some competitors in this space. So what did you get right? And how did you break through the noise?
Ben Zweig
Yeah, it’s a good question and a tough question. I’d say as an entrepreneur, it’s so hard to disambiguate when things are going well because you sort of deserve it, or when you’re kind of getting lucky. So I think there’s a little bit of both. But if I just think about what we’ve done right, I think first of all, it actually isn’t really that much of a crowded space. I don’t want to say we have no competitors because of course we have competitors that share similar budgets, but I think our approach is quite unique. So I think the idea of creating this universal HR database is not something that others have taken on and I don’t really know why they haven’t. I think LinkedIn could do this, lots of companies workday could do it, lots of companies could do it, but for whatever reason, they haven’t.
Ben Zweig
And I think we’ve been kind of lucky that it’s been not such a tight competitive market. So I think that was were fortunate in having made a bet on something that turned out to be a good bet. I also think it was just a lot of hard work. I think were lucky enough to hire a really excellent team. I think especially in data science and data engineering. I think we really have like a world class team in those categories now. Our dashboard is also really, I think, excellent, like a best in class experience. And I think we’ve just had such a strong team and they’ve all been really passionate about the work and they like each other and they’ve worked really hard and are still working really hard. And I just think there’s just a lot of problems to solve and we just kind of started chipping away at those and doing the hard work.
Ben Zweig
I’d say another thing that’s sort of distinct about our approach is that we really had a very big product focus. So right now there’s, I think, 55 people in the company and only four people don’t write code. Everyone’s really hands on. I mean, it’s a very hands on environment. We have a pretty flat culture and I think we just know there’s a lot to do and we’re just doing it. So I don’t know. I mean, none of this is like, particularly novel, but I do think we’ve been working hard and we’re sort of harvesting the fruits of our labor.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Now let’s talk about market categories. So I had introduced you as a workforce intelligence platform. Is that the right category or how do you think about your market category?
Ben Zweig
Yeah, so I don’t know if there’s others using the term workforce intelligence. I think that something that we sometimes say to make ourselves sound a little more distinct. There is a category called labor market intelligence, and that I think, probably is the category that we’re in. There are companies there like Cast and Talent Neuron and Drop and maybe eightfold. And I think when I think about some of those companies, I think they are really labor market intelligence companies with an emphasis on the market. I think they’re doing a lot of like market level analysis, so doing analyses on cities or roles or skills or something that’s kind of economy wide. And I think for us we’re trying to go much more granular. So rather than just know the trends for a role, we really want to know, let’s say, the attrition rate of senior salespeople with skills in oncology at these four pharma companies, something like really specific.
Ben Zweig
I think we want to get these granular analyses that companies would be able to get from their own HR databases. So that’s why I think we call it workforce intelligence rather than labor market intelligence, because I think calling it labor market really makes it sound more macro and I think we want to get.
Brett
A little deeper and it just sounds cooler, right?
Ben Zweig
Yeah, I think so too.
Brett
Labor market intelligence just sounds like very boring workforce intelligence. I’d want to learn more. So I like the framing there.
Ben Zweig
Cool.
Brett
Now if you look at the labor market intelligence field, is there like one giant in this space or is it super fragmented? Is there a sales force here? Are you the equivalent of a sales force or what’s that look like?
Ben Zweig
So I’d say there were two really medium sized companies that just merged about a year ago. So one was called MC and the other was called Burning Glass, and they both got bought by KKR and just they merged and now they’re called Litecast. And they, I think, are the biggest in the space, but they’re not enormous. I mean, they’re not the size of salesforce. So I’d say it’s still a pretty new space. I think there’s kind of widespread recognition that we’re kind of early days in this market and I think any and all of the companies could be as big as salesforce or something like that someday. But right now HR is really just starting to use data and there’s still a lot of decisions to get made. Some companies are really in the early innings of this journey and so I think these companies are smaller than they will inevitably be, and I certainly think we are smaller than we’ll inevitably be.
Ben Zweig
So we’ve got big ambitions as well, but I don’t think there’s really any big behemoth in the market.
Brett
Got it. Makes sense. And let’s talk about challenges. So I’m sure along the journey so far that you’ve experienced a couple of challenges along the way. If we had to pick one go to market challenge that you faced and overcame, what would that be?
Ben Zweig
There’s tons of them, I’d say, like breaking into the corporate market. So going from selling to investment management and consulting firms and academic researchers to selling to companies, corporations, it’s been hard just because it is a fragmented market and you don’t really know who the buyers are necessarily. Like, in contrast, when I think about investment management, there are industry conferences where there are data buyers and data sellers, and these commerce organizers facilitate introductions and meetings, and it’s very clear who you’re selling to. But in a company, the user is not always the buyer, and maybe the decision maker is two levels above. So I think just kind of navigating that sort of big, messy corporate structure is always a challenge, and it creates, like, longer sales cycles. I also think it’s a new type of data set. It’s not like we can say, oh, you have a line item on your budget for this and we can do this.
Ben Zweig
It’s really not like that. They don’t necessarily know that they need something like our offering. So I think a lot of our job is educating people on what’s possible ways to save money, ways this could help provide value and level up your understanding of your own company and be able to differentiate against competitors. So I think we’re trying to make that case and do a lot of education. So, yeah, all of these are challenges that we have to just start tackling.
Brett
Yeah, I can imagine on the investment management side, the benefits that you were talking about there, it was all about being able to make smarter investment decisions, I would guess. Corporate side, what are you doing to articulate and describe the ROI and the value there on the corporate side?
Ben Zweig
Yeah, I think in a very broad sense, I think let’s use the analogy of if you’re going to a doctor, they have to diagnose the issue and then treat the issue. But within investors, they just have to diagnose things. They just have to understand where the problems are and then just, See you later. They make a trade and they’re speculating. They’re speculating, but within a company, they’re much more similar to the doctor. So they have to really get the diagnosis, which is basically the same thing that a hedge fund would do, but then they have to actually act on that. And I think these companies really have a better handle on the treatments than the diagnoses. So I think coming into a company, we can say, like, we can help you better understand where things are going well and where things are not going well, and then drill in a few levels deeper until you really get a sense for what’s really going on.
Ben Zweig
So I think that’s part of the value proposition. I think also, these end users, they are very often familiar with their sets of problems. Sometimes they’ll just come to us and they’ll say, oh, here are five challenges I have in my role. And we’ll say, okay, we can basically solve one, two, three, and four. And that’s it. Like, out of the box, snap of the fingers, and you don’t have to go down this six month project to kind of get a handle on these issues. So I think very often they’ll come to us with the problems that they want to solve and ask, can you solve this? And very often, the answer is yes. So sometimes we have the luxury of being kind of agnostic for the problems in a way, but they often follow the same patterns. They want to find pools of talent.
Ben Zweig
They want to understand how they’re differentiated. They want to see the companies that are doing well in their space. How can they emulate their talent strategy and understand where they’re sourcing people from how they’re retaining people? Get a handle on what are the drivers of attrition and attraction? So all these sort of questions come up kind of again and again.
Brett
Yeah, you can imagine that. Now, last couple of questions here before we wrap. What motivates you day to day? I know you’re what, five years into this journey. So what excites you most, and what motivates you to keep working so hard?
Ben Zweig
Wow, five years. That didn’t really hit me until you said it, but yeah, what motivates me, I love what we’re trying to do. I think there are some entrepreneurs who are really drawn to starting things and startup life, and I think for me, it’s less about that, more about this is the problem. This is the mark I want to make on the world. I want to make labor markets more efficient. So I really think this is, like, a problem that affects every other problem. So I think the mission is kind of still very salient. And then I think as I’ve sort of gone through this, I feel myself just feeling more accountable to the team. I think people in the company are really putting their heart and soul into this, and they’re doing so well and really, I mean, thriving, and they have great ideas for how to change things.
Ben Zweig
And I just feel like I want to work hard because I don’t want to let down the team. And everyone is also working hard. It feels like we’re the 1996 Bulls. We feel like we’re at the top of our game, and we want to keep pushing ourselves because we’re doing things that are kind of impressing ourselves and impressing each other, and it’s kind of invigorating.
Brett
Nice. I love that. All right, last question now. Let’s zoom out three years from today. What’s the company look like? What’s that high level vision that you’re working towards?
Ben Zweig
I would say let me zoom out even further. Let me say even, like, ten years. In ten years, I really would like to see a Revellia Labs terminal on the computer of every person who works in HR, just like a Bloomberg terminal is used by everyone in finance. I think that’s the future that we want to build too. I’m not. So optimistic we can get there in three years just because there’s a lot of change, a lot of behavior that needs to change. And they sometimes say science progresses one funeral at a time. So that’s a little bit of a dark perspective. But I do think we got to get some early adopters into a lot of these organizations. So I think that’s a long term vision. I think in the intermediate term, like in three years, I think we really want to be very dashboard driven.
Ben Zweig
We want to be self service. We’d like to have basically infinite flexibility on our dashboard and still kind of maintain a easy to use curated experience, which sounds somewhat contradictory, but we want to strike that balance. I think we’d like to do a lot more in the pay benchmarking space. Here’s a big one. I think we also want to start embedding first party HR data. So right now everything we’re providing is in the public domain. So we’re providing insights about a company based on what we can see externally and approximate what they are seeing internally. But they have some data that we don’t have that we’ll never have. Like, for example, we’ll never see performance reviews. Companies have that and sometimes it’s very useful and we just won’t ever have that. And we probably won’t see reporting structure in a way that companies have that internally, but we have a lot of data that companies themselves don’t have.
Ben Zweig
We have a better sense of the skills that people have and where they go, when they leave and where they come from and the activities people do and so much of that. So I think we’d like to come into a company and say, we can incorporate your own data and the external data and give you the best of both worlds and still be able to enable benchmarking across companies. And that’s a big to do because taking in actually, like, first party HR data, there’s a lot to do with privacy, there’s a lot of integrations to do. Every company is a little different, so we need to build abstractions and integrations. So there’s a lot of work to do, but I think we’d like to have that within three years.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Ben, I’d love to keep you on and keep asking you questions here, but unfortunately we are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go?
Ben Zweig
LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my platform. You can follow me there. Always happy to connect and that’s where we publish our newsletters. So yeah, definitely feel free to do that. And thanks again for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Thanks for coming on, sharing your story, and talking about everything that you’re building. This is super exciting and look forward to having you back on in three years or ten years to talk about everything that’s happened.
Ben Zweig
Yeah, hold me to those targets.
Brett
Sounds good. Cheers, Ben. See ya.
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