Kadence

Dan Bladen started his career managing technology for a church before founding his first IoT business—a wireless charging startup. The venture seemed promising initially, but Dan eventually realized his product was a "vitamin, not a painkiller." It was a nice-to-have, not a must-have. When the pandemic hit and Dan had moved his family to the Bay Area just before lockdowns began, he faced an existential question: how could he keep his company alive?

The pandemic created an urgent, undeniable pain point for enterprises: managing hybrid workplaces. Companies suddenly needed to coordinate people, assign seats, and optimize office space in ways they'd never had to before. This wasn't a vitamin—it was critical infrastructure for the new world of work. Dan saw the opportunity and pivoted Kadence into a workplace operations system. The shift required not just product development but a complete restructuring of his company's cap table and board dynamics, as he had to reset investor expectations and bring in new capital aligned with the SaaS vision.

Instead of chasing small and medium-sized businesses, Dan made a strategic decision to focus exclusively on enterprise customers. This shift was transformational. Enterprise customers had real budgets, longer contract lifespans, and more complex operational needs—exactly what Kadence solved. The company introduced seat-based pricing, which resonated with how enterprises thought about workspace management. Word spread to major players: Nasdaq, Revolut, and Boeing became marquee customers. Today, Kadence serves over 600 enterprise customers.

High-ticket dinners replaced SEO as the primary customer acquisition channel. Rather than trying to rank for generic SaaS keywords, Dan's team invested in relationship-building with enterprise decision-makers, hosting dinners and engaging in consultative sales. The metric that proved they'd nailed it: over 130 percent net dollar retention, meaning existing customers expanded their spending year-over-year faster than they could acquire new ones. The financial impact was staggering—Kadence's solutions helped customers save half a billion dollars in leasing costs, making the ROI conversation simple and compelling.

With $15M ARR and dominance in enterprise workplace operations, Kadence launched SpaceOps AI to expand into adjacent product lines. This multi-product strategy, paired with a restructured cap table that now attracts growth capital, positions Kadence as the operating system for hybrid work. Dan transformed a dying hardware startup into a category leader by recognizing when to pivot, choosing the right market to pursue, and building a product that solved a billion-dollar problem.