The following interview is a conversation we had with Jason Radisson, CEO and Founder of Movo, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $9 Million Raised to Build the Future of HR Automation.
Jason Radisson
Thanks for having me on, Brett.
Brett
No problem. So, as I was preparing for this interview, checking out your LinkedIn, I saw that you were at Uber in 2015, and a lot of amazing things happened after Uber, but I’d love to start there. Take us back to 2015 and what you were doing at Uber.
Jason Radisson
Oh, gosh. So I joined Uber. Kind of an interesting inflection point. It was relatively late in the US expansion, relatively early in the global expansion. And my specific mission was to build the team and get the company ready to launch in Nevada. That was my very first mission at Uber, including Las Vegas.
Brett
That must have been a pretty hostile market to move into, right? Like, I think even to this day, the Uber is not fully functional in Las Vegas. Maybe that’s wrong, but that’s a tough environment, right?
Jason Radisson
Yeah, it was a little bit crazy. There had been some regulatory set, know, police had impounded cars, those kinds of things. And Nevada just being a purple state, a very purple state at the time in particular, was just a really challenging market. And we used to internally talk about regulatory hacking. And that was some of the role was finding a path politically to get the service stood up in a legal way and get rolling in the market.
Brett
And who was the advisor who was leading regulatory affairs? Wasn’t it Daniel Pluth?
Jason Radisson
Plouf.
Brett
David Plouf, something like that, yeah.
Jason Radisson
Pluffle is an interesting role, speaking also on matters of future of work and sort of the gig economy more broadly, very publicly and leading charge on a number of regulatory art. Got it.
Brett
And then let’s leap forward now. Let’s go to 2017. You joined 99 taxis as COo. What was that experience like? And then what was the outcome there of 99 taxis?
Jason Radisson
Yeah, absolutely. So the really interesting thing I found, and I’ll just say this more generally, as an entrepreneur, I always remind myself, and we talk about it on our teams. Product market fit is certainly not a static thing, and it’s a two sided thing, meaning one thing is what you’re doing with the product. The other thing is the markets that you choose. And the interesting thing about the gig economy was that the best product market fit, really, in the world. Ride sharing was in Latin America in particular in secondary cities in Latin America, the kind of city that has 3 million, 5 million, 6 million people is just perfect for a service like Uber or 99 taxis.
Jason Radisson
You’ve got a really ready pool labor, you’ve got a ton of underemployed folks all around the city and in the surroundings, and you’ve got a really sort of snarled infrastructure and lack of infrastructure and terrible traffic and other inconveniences. Then you’ve got an emerging middle class, upper middle class folks with not a lot of time, but plenty of disposable income to spend on services. So if you look at services like 99 taxis, like Rappi, like Uber, these are services that just fit super well in big latin american cities. And that was part of the motivation and it was just a wonderful experience and really a chance already to do a future of work company in a scale up in a way that was more beneficial to both sides, more beneficial to the company, but then also much more beneficial to the workforce.
Jason Radisson
99 Taxis was the local favorite and the preferred brand and sort of the brazilian startup that had grown up and tried to do everything right by all the stakeholders. And that was very unique and very refreshing working there and help scaling up that platform. And as you alluded to, we had a fantastic result. We were able to ten x the business very quickly. I led the charge together with a number of amazing operators in building up the platform and rolling out the platform across a bunch of cities. We had a great technology partnership with Xuxing from China on a number of topics, and were able to sell the company for a billion dollars just a few quarters later, after taking our series C.
Jason Radisson
It was quite an event and quite a success story for the local market in that ecosystem in Brazil that hadn’t had a lot of exits yet at that time.
Brett
And I think I read as well, that was Latin America’s first unicorn, is that correct?
Jason Radisson
It was first unicorn, clean unicorn exit in that ecosystem in particular.
Brett
What did you learn from that entire experience? So we can kind of rope in Uber to that and combine these stories together. But that whole journey there, what did you learn?
Jason Radisson
Well, I think what you learned is, on a very fundamental level, what it means to bring a service to the world in a very impactful way. And all of us who are out there building technology companies, we’re all having impact in our own ways. I think what’s very unique about a lesson like that, and one that was possible, is still possible in some parts of the gig economy, is the transformative nature you can have on a city and on the lives of millions of people, and whether it’s providing work and additional earnings. In the case of 99, well over a million working class people who are working on our platform each day to helping solve transportation problems in big cities. Just the incredible transformative nature of tech done right.
Jason Radisson
And I think one of the secondary learnings is really our sort of job as the stewards of capital and our functioning as entrepreneurs to deploy that capital really efficiently. And 99 was, we pride ourselves, were able to get to our first billion dollars of GMV having spent $50 million. So that’s a 20 x ratio, which is to this day, one of the most efficient scale ups that’s ever been in the technology industry. And I think a big part of that we talked about product market fit, but it’s just being very thoughtful and planful in terms of how you’re sort of rolling the service out and these growth activities and essentially just not doing careless things. Still experimenting a lot, but being very planful in the way you build up the company. Lots and lots of lessons in there at some point.
Jason Radisson
There’s a book in there. We had a ton of amazing learnings from that scale up.
Brett
Now, let’s switch gears and let’s talk about everything that you’re building today and what the company does.
Brett
So just at a very high level.
Brett
Can you paint a picture for us of what the product does?
Jason Radisson
Yeah, sure. So Movo is our company, and we started mobile, essentially, to take that technology, to take the gig economy platform per se, and to refine it and to use it as a vessel for change for a lot of industries that employ millions and millions of frontline workers, but are kind of stuck with some combination of pen and paper and old erps and these really antiquated processes. We built a platform and began sort of our presence in the market and ramping up in the market, really right in the days and weeks before the pandemic hit.
Jason Radisson
And throughout the pandemic, really our main value out there and the impact were able to have was in providing access to jobs and making sure that food manufacturing, a number of logistics, and last mile logistics companies and companies like that, some medical device manufacturing and others, were all able to kind of keep the trains on time and keep running. And so were running around the countries that we operate in, sort of plugging those labor gaps. And as the platform has evolved and as sort of the economy has evolved and the pandemic is now in our rear view mirror, the value to the platform and that we’re having out there in the world is more just in terms of like it’s evolved into, yes, having a very frictionless onboarding and hiring experience, but more importantly, having a very modern, real time experience in the workplace.
Jason Radisson
In other words, mobile is a workforce platform that’s on your device, it’s on your supervisor’s device, it’s in head office, and the whole company is using it to make sure that everybody’s deployed in the right way, in the right role at the right time, managing tasks, managing schedules, doing all of these things automatically, and with a lot of smart systems to make sure that the workforce is deployed correctly. So it’s really kind of become that Uber platform for anybody who’s running a really large retail or logistics or healthcare company.
Brett
And just to recap some of the numbers I read on the website, you decrease time to hire by up to 80%, eliminate time fraud by 50%, increase HR operations productivity by four to five x. This just seems like a no brainer. What’s in the way right now from you having 100 times more customers than you do today?
Jason Radisson
Well, we’re early stage. That’s part of it is you seem small when you’re early and you only have so many clients that you can work with and so many workers that you can get on the platform. Part of it too is not every company is set up for the change management that running your workforce in a real time way involves. And so I would characterize us more as we work with large companies who are early adopters or earlier on the technology curve, who may also just be in that moment in time when they’re looking at workforce management tools and sort of thinking about how do we want to manage nurse scheduling across multiple sites and multiple dimensions, or whatever the use case might be. What are we doing in developing markets about the informal labor problem?
Jason Radisson
How are we going to assure that we can continually upskill and cross train our people? We’re looking for clients that have those kinds of use cases, those kinds of challenges and pain points, and that are in a situation to really affect change. It isn’t the kind of thing that you can kind of do from. It’s got to be somewhere very high in the organization and a strategic priority for the company. And those are the only clients that we’re looking to work with and the ones that we have sort of already large deployments with.
Brett
And can you share any numbers or metrics that highlight the growth that you’re seeing today? Our audience always loves to hear metrics, so anything that you can share would be awesome.
Jason Radisson
Yeah, we’re early, but our paid user counts on the software deployment. Our software rollout are increasing about 100% a month at the moment, but we’re about six months into commercially rolling out our platform per se to our client base.
Brett
And what do you think you’ve gotten right so far? What do you attribute to that growth and that success?
Jason Radisson
I think we’re solving a frontline workforce problem in a unique and I think, straightforward way. In the sense that at the end of the day, if you want to come up with win situations for workers and employers, the bottom line is you got to help people be more productive. There’s no sort know silver bullet. If you look at the US, we’re in a situation of a declining workforce. We’ve got more people retiring than ever before. We’ve got fewer people entering the workforce. We’ve got a lot of people checking out. We’re in a difficult time. There’s no way that you can help the economy move forward without sort of going through productivity and helping, as I said, helping the economy to be more productive.
Jason Radisson
And we’ve chosen to go after the biggest target, which is the productivity of the vast majority of the workforce in a country like ours. So I think that’s all correct. It’s a little bit more of a challenging approach and a challenging mission than if were picking off a niche compliance topic in HR tech or something like that. And we had a widget that did x. We’re really going after that bigger change. That’s what I would say. Fundamentally, what we’ve gotten right is the mission is right. And I think if you look at sort of the use cases that matter and the applications in particular of AI and in some of the smart systems that we build, we’re hitting on the right things.
Jason Radisson
We’re hitting on the things that really rig the cash register at our clients and the things that will really increase the wages and the productivity of their workforce and the workers that are out there at some point in their career looking to level up with a system like ours, they’re going to get there quick.
Brett
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Brett
When it comes to market category, what is the market category? Is it frontline workforce management? Is it HR automation? Like what’s the market category?
Jason Radisson
I think the market category, if you use sort of terminology, it would be workforce management or all in one HR systems or HR platform. I think really most everything pays into workforce management. And the approach that we have is fundamentally this gig approach that, let’s face it, the generation coming up really needs and has kind of grown up with where you’re on a platform in real time, all day long with your whole team. That approach is the workforce management of the future. And that’s right where our product is. And I think the other HR applications and features, they all pay into that.
Jason Radisson
In other words, if we’re deploying, scheduling and deploying and automatically dispatching workers to different locations, or trimming schedules, or assigning them to different shifts, or giving them incremental time off when the forecast is such that we’re not going to have enough work tomorrow afternoon or whatever that is, all of that automation all means 10%, 20% greater productivity in a large employer. And all of that stuff requires seamless hiring, requires upskilling and training and cross training. It requires the other areas of HR to support it or HR technology to support it. So I’d say it’s both. We’re both an intend platform approaching this set of problems. But the main place that we usually begin and where clients, their pain points are usually pretty much in that HR sort of workforce management space.
Jason Radisson
And then from there, everything else really lives to support workforce management and support the frontline. I would say even you look at, there’s a lot of talk about recruiting automation and hiring technology and everything. That’s all really important. But from a technology footprint perspective, that’s what you do in the minutes and hours and days before you have an employee. Then you’ve got an employee, and hopefully you’ve got that employee for five years or ten years. And what you do every day that they’re on the floor or that they’re out in the field working with you for those five or ten years, that’s where the workforce management piece comes in and where the training modules and other things that support it are so important. That’s what affects productivity over that longer haul with that lifecycle of that employee.
Jason Radisson
It’s a long answer, but I think the big lever for HR technology and for AI and HR out there in the economy, in the world is better and better workforce management and that kind of core functionality that we’re aiming our teams at and the things that we’re trying to solve with our clients.
Brett
And I think HR leaders right now are probably just bombarded with different tools, different vendors trying to capture their attention. Are there any specific tactics and strategies that you’re using that are really helping you rise above that noise and to connect with those HR folks?
Jason Radisson
Oh, yeah, 100%. So that’s a great question and one we do a lot of thinking about, because I think the US also with mobile, we’re active in a number of middle income countries as well as in the US. And the US is very unique in that the HR tech space is completely dominated by big companies with huge budgets. And literally they spend billions of dollars around sort of this HR platform space. And I don’t need any names, we all know who these kind of cloud and ERP folks are. And then underneath it, you’ve got a lot of startups that just really struggle to see the light of day. And so I think it’s led to a really kind of incremental and safe approach in the HR startup space where people are looking at very small slivers that they can sort of sneak through.
Jason Radisson
We’ve had a very different approach in that we’re working within the HR community and we’re really working with early adopters on big problems. We’re not sort of out there just trying to do everything with Internet advertising or relying on cold calling or these kinds of things, but more kind of in the trenches deep with big blue chip companies working on big problems. I think the other thing too is in having gone abroad as early as we did, that allowed us to get hundreds of thousands of additional workers on our platform, which was just so helpful in terms of rounding out the tech, training our models, getting a very robust system across a number of dimensions.
Jason Radisson
And I think that’s really been a strategic advantage versus kind of other entrants in the HR tech space and where some of the things we talked about, like we have a hiring automation system that works quite well with our employee scheduling system, that works quite well with our training and upskilling system, and being able to cover a number of those things and pay workers, all of those things are just, that’s less integration points, that’s less headaches for a company that’s going to adopt a platform like ours.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 9 million so far. What have you learned about fundraising?
Jason Radisson
That’s a great one, fundraising. Every entrepreneur has a slightly different take on it. I think we’re very blessed, and I think it’s just sort of being multiple exit, multiple scale up Founder is just like, it gives you the ability to sort of get a lot of meetings and sort of be maybe a little bit more strategic and structured in terms of how you think about your cap table and the folks that you have around that table when it comes to sort of your inner circle and the various stakeholders that you have in the fundraising process and the advisors and such that you put together.
Jason Radisson
In our particular case, what I learned was that I think the board composition and the cap table composition, were able to put together companies that just went very well together and in other words, firms, institutional investors, a number of angels that are just super helpful and have that all fit and have it feel like just a super thoughtful, supportive, and also just super overly helpful network for our company. And it’s something that you can read about it and you can experience it, but it’s one of those things, I think each time I go through the fundraising process, it just gets, you’re really benefiting from that previous experience and sort of what you’ve learned in terms of where you’re going to find the most help and the best fit for your company.
Jason Radisson
And I think in this particular case, we’ve got an amazing syndicate and captain able. And I’m just super blessed we are, as a company to have all the folks that we have. That’s what I would say about that. I think we’ve been through some things that are a little bit episodic in the sense, like we raised late, we bootstrapped, we’re a profitable company. Bootstrapping in the first part of the pandemic, in our growth. Then we raised, in 2021, we raised a fairly large seed at peak market that had its own dynamics. We raised a little bit since that had its own dynamics. There’s a little bit of that environmental that you can’t control a ton. The startup is growing and your capital needs are where they are and the product market fit is where it is.
Jason Radisson
And you’re going to have to raise money along the lines of sort of how the company is progressing. And you don’t always get to choose. I’m going to do this at peak and I’m going to do this at trough. Some of that stuff is forced on you by the market, but to the extent you can, getting that right set of folks around the table is really key and it’s really been, in this case, a blessing.
Brett
Now, let’s just imagine that you were starting the company again today from scratch. What would be the number one piece of advice you’d give yourself?
Jason Radisson
The number one piece of advice would probably have been to probably have raised money earlier, because I think we had the bootstrapping phase and a lot of founders would say exactly the opposite. Bootstrap as long as you can, or God, I wish I had bootstrapped. I think in our particular case, the fundraising process and just we could have run a lot faster in the early part of the pandemic if we had been well funded and not bootstrapping and not sort of having to fund our growth out of profits, out of the ongoing business. That would have been the main thing. And I think other than that’s always hindsight is 2020, right?
Brett
And final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s that big picture vision that you’re building? What do you want the world to look like and the company to look like?
Jason Radisson
I want the company first and by extension, of world. But our goal is to make a win and an improvement in, like I said, the productivity for companies, but also the standard of living for tens of millions of frontline workers. This is the technology. There aren’t a lot of silver bullets when you talk about the frontline worker problem, and it’s slightly different in different parts of the world, but fundamentally, this problem of sort of stagnating productivity, stagnating wages, being overworked, I think if you look at that problem, our platform is at least, it’s one of the few answers that technology in a really scalable way has come up with for that problem.
Jason Radisson
And I think having a platform like ours out there, I think finding other broad technology solutions that allow big workforces to be more productive and earn a respectable wage that you can raise a family on, I think being able to do that at scale is really what we’re about. And that’s the main thing that I would like to see changed in the world, is more technology for good at scale. I think the flip side of that is it really does call upon corporate leaders, and there are a lot of early adopters, there are a lot of corporate leaders who are leaning in and work to help solve the frontline worker problem, and there could always be more. I think my challenge to corporate leadership is always the technology exists and it’s hard. Change is hard.
Jason Radisson
But the other side of a change initiative like this is it is 10%, 20% more productivity in your company that drops to the bottom line. That means higher wages. That means you’re able to be out there as a high road employer, having a big impact on the communities that you’re operating in. It’s always easy to not do that and to just go through your kind of daily job and be change averse and risk averse and conservative in your decisions. But to the extent that you can lean in on the implementation of productivity inducing technology, you are just doing good in the world. And I think that’s the other side of it.
Jason Radisson
And one of my personal passions is definitely one that a discussion that we have all the time in our day to day, whether it’s arguing and advocating on behalf of workers and classes of workers for better pay or better working conditions or better time, or advocating on behalf of putting better technology into a workplace or improving safety standards, these are all things that we do on a very regular basis with our clients and with our potential clients out there in the market.
Brett
Amazing. I love it, and I love the vision and love everything that you’re doing. Jason, we are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here before we do, if any founders listening in want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Jason Radisson
Thanks, Brett. The easiest way to get in touch with us is at movo.co. And you can also find us on LinkedIn under my name or under Movo for our company.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you again for taking the time to chat, talk about what you’re building, and share some of those lessons that you learned early on in your career at Uber and 99. This is a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it, and I think our audience is going to as well. So thanks so much for taking the time.
Jason Radisson
Thanks again for having me, Andre.
Brett
All right, cheers. Take care.
Brett
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