The Story of Revelio Labs: Building the Bloomberg Terminal for Labor Markets

Sometimes the most transformative business ideas come from spotting parallels between industries. For Ben Zweig, the founder of Revelio Labs, that insight came from reading about how financial markets evolved from relationship-driven phone calls to sophisticated data analytics.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ben shared how reading “Capital Ideas” by Peter Bernstein sparked his vision: “It’s the history of how finance became sophisticated… 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.”

The genesis of Revelio Labs emerged from Ben’s unique background straddling academia and industry. With a PhD in economics and experience in both hedge fund analytics and IBM’s workforce analytics division, he witnessed firsthand how sophisticated financial markets had become while labor markets lagged behind.

“I really want to be part of that history,” Ben explains, describing his ambition to do for labor markets what pioneers like Myron Scholes and Harry Markowitz did for finance. “The idea for Valley Lives was really to kind of do for labor markets what visionaries… did for finance and also what companies like Bloomberg and others have done for finance and create this ubiquitous source of shared information.”

The company’s core innovation lies in creating what Ben calls a “universal HR database” by aggregating public employment data. “Every company’s got their own HR data and that’s a locked box. They don’t share that with anyone,” he explains. “And we are trying to collect the universe of public employment records and try to reconstruct or approximate the HR database for every company.”

This approach struck a chord, but not initially with their intended market. Instead of HR departments, their first customers were hedge funds and private equity firms seeking deeper insights into companies. Ben notes: “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.”

This unexpected direction proved valuable, leading to expansion into consulting and eventually corporate markets. The company maintained a steadfast focus on product development, with Ben noting: “Right now there’s, I think, 55 people in the company and only four people don’t write code. Everyone’s really hands on.”

Their commitment to data quality has earned them significant credibility. The company’s insights are now regularly featured in major media outlets, and they’ve even gone toe-to-toe with tech giants over their analysis. Ben shares a recent example: “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… the communications team reached out to us… 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.”

Looking ahead, Revelio Labs has ambitious plans to revolutionize how companies understand and manage their workforce. “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,” Ben shares.

The next frontier involves combining their external data insights with companies’ internal HR data. As Ben explains: “We have a lot of data that companies themselves don’t have… 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.”

Their journey illustrates how transformative business ideas often require rethinking entire industries, and sometimes the path to realizing that vision comes from unexpected directions. By starting with sophisticated users in finance, Revelio Labs built the foundation to potentially transform how every company understands and manages their workforce.