Ripple Recruiting

Andrew Myers left Yale before his senior year to run Ripple Recruiting full-time. The idea was to flip the traditional campus recruiting model. Instead of sending a team to campus, employers would use Ripple to filter a database of students by what they wanted to do with their lives and where they wanted to work, then build relationships with those students over email at a fraction of the cost. Students would pay nothing. Employers would buy one of three annual subscription packages.

Andrew and co-founder Eric Ho started working on the SaaS platform in October 2015 and launched at Yale in April 2016. In the first year they did not focus on revenue at all. The priority was free trials and user engagement. To fund that period, the founders put every expense on credit cards and linked the cards to Venmo to pay early marketing reps. By the end they were close to $45,000 in debt. They also raised a $700,000 seed round led by Kevin Ryan, who founded MongoDB, with a syndicate that included hedge fund and HR-space investors.

Growth came mostly from students. Ripple reached about 8,000 Ivy League sign-ups, with over 10% of Ivy League undergraduates having resumes on the platform. Andrew compared this to LinkedIn, which had only about 3 to 5% of Ivy League resumes. On the employer side, pricing ran from $95 per month for the light package to $795 for premium, and the premium tier included the Ripple Scout service, which sends employers a biweekly email with five to 10 recommended students. The average contract was about $300 per month. The company had about 15 paying clients, and Andrew estimated recurring revenue at about $7,000 per month.

The strongest signal was student engagement and the Ivy League sign-up numbers, which Andrew used as the core of the Series A pitch. Early revenue was modest, and the company had not yet focused on monetizing. Andrew said they had only just scaled the sales team from one person to four. Nathan Latka pushed on the founders' refusal to consider a $10 million acquisition offer, which he compared to his own early mistake of turning down a sale. Andrew argued that the team was building for a $25 billion college recruiting market, and that clients such as Teach for America, Venture for America, MassMutual, and Cardinal Health were already getting value.

At the time of the interview, Ripple had 12 employees, most of them between 22 and 25 and based in New York City. It was preparing a Series A to raise $2 million to $3 million and planned national expansion to Stanford, Duke, Berkeley, and MIT. Its 2021 projection was 20,000 students hired through the platform each year.