Monster in the Making: Jeff Taylor, Big Bets and Next Boom

Before LinkedIn humblebrags. Before AI résumés nobody reads. Before job boards ate recruiting alive… there was Jeff Taylor, a DJ with ADHD, a dream, and a name everyone hated: Monster.

Live on stage with Joel Cheesman, Jeff tells the unfiltered origin story — getting laughed out of boardrooms, selling Monster for $4M that turned into “oops, that should’ve been billions,” running a Super Bowl ad ranked one of the worst ever, and pitching a LinkedIn acquisition his own board killed.

Along the way: dot-com chaos, layoffs he refused to make, getting steamrolled by Zuckerberg, surviving Ray Dalio’s corporate Fight Club, and why resumes and job postings are still hot garbage.

Now in his 60s, Jeff’s back with BoomBand — trying (again) to fix hiring, break habits, and bring a little joy back to an industry that desperately needs it.

Monster energy. Zero nostalgia. Karaoke optional.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

0:00:02.6 Joel Cheesman: So, I do want to give a little bit of my own intro for you, Jeff. Uh, I started the industry in the late '90s.

0:00:09.4 Jeff Taylor: Thank you for staying at the end, uh, to the day, we appreciate... [laughter]

0:00:12.2 Joel Cheesman: There's karaoke. Don't give 'em too much credit, don't give 'em too much credit. There's a lot to look forward to. But I was, uh, a 20 something in the '90s in the industry, and you were, you were a bit of a, a Sasquatch, Yeti, uh, character, uh, almost larger than life and, and mythological. So the fact that I'm on stage with you today doing this interview is, uh, pretty surreal for me. But I, uh, I appreciate you and I want to tell your story. Basically, we're going to the good, the bad, the ugly. Umm, I know you like to talk and I'm gonna give you plenty of chances to do that. A lot of people in the audience here know the monster story a little bit, know about you a little bit. Uh, I as well, I don't know much about your formative years, and I... This isn't a tell me about your mother, uh, situation, but I do want to know what your childhood was like. Uh, were there formative events that made you an entrepreneur? Were you always who you are today? Like, take us back to 1961, Massachusetts. And who is Jeff Taylor?

0:01:17.8 Jeff Taylor: Alright, just, just one second before, umm, I've been out of this industry for 20 years and I decided last summer that I would come back in and the first thing I did was I started listening to Chad and Cheese. And I went back quite a ways and I...

0:01:35.2 Joel Cheesman: And you still decided to come in the industry again.

0:01:37.4 Jeff Taylor: I want you to know that, uh, that you guys taught me in, uh, kind of brought me up to speed, gave me the things I needed to research, and I have equal respect and, uh, really appreciate what you do in our industry. And we couldn't do what we do without you guys being out there and telling us what it's really like. Would I go on the firing squad? I don't know. But, uh, it's great. So, alright, uh, step back. Umm, I'm a son of a preacher, uh, who couldn't keep a church. Uh, my first memory, uh, I'm in a peace march in Washington. I'm on my dad's shoulders and I'm sitting on his hair and he's telling me that I have to stop moving. That's my first, like, real memory. And so you have a little sense of, I had hippies for parents. Uh, they were well-educated and, uh, let me, set me free. I'm a ADHD kid. I was in trouble, not in a bad way, I just could, didn't learn the way traditional people learn. And I think that's probably still true today. Umm, I moved to a town that was pretty affluent. My dad got a job, umm, as a professor at UMass Boston. My mom had gone back to school and had got a guidance counselor job. So I moved into sort of middle class. I moved into a, a town called Needham, Mass, no friends, seventh grade. And I spent my junior high and high school years in the laws of the jungle, blending in to avoid being eaten. Uh, did not have a lot of friends, had a nice little friendship group what didn't really play sports. And then I went to UMass and I decided I was gonna be different. And, uh, got very involved in the campus and very involved in a fraternity. And I ran the tour guide service, ran the school paper. I did all the things that when you're trying to identify who's gonna stand out in college, uh, I did those things. Umm, and I forgot to go to class. And, uh, so, uh, after five and a half years at UMass, uh, and DJing full-time, uh, at the local hot night spot at UMass, I got a job at a big nightclub in Boston. And I faded away from my first UMass experience. I went back when I was 39 after going to Harvard Business School and got, umm, my degree. Uh, so that's my kind of early childhood. And umm, uh, I just didn't learn in the traditional way. And I think it's, uh, probably was defining for me because I had a lot of leadership roles when I was in college and that really helped me kick things off.

0:04:16.7 Joel Cheesman: So, up until Monster, your education upbringing between Monster and sort of getting the... You were DJing, when did you find your way into the recruiting industry?

0:04:28.2 Jeff Taylor: So I met a woman while I was DJing who was a recruiter, and she said, "I think you would be really good as a recruiter." And I was like, "Okay, uh, well, how do I do that?" She said, "Go and interview." And so I went and interviewed with three search firms on 128. I'm from Boston. And, umm, I got three job offers. And, uh, the one I liked, uh, he said, uh, "I know you don't know anything about, uh, computers per se, but, uh, why don't you place programmer analysts?"

0:04:57.8 Joel Cheesman: Mm-hmm.

0:04:58.5 Jeff Taylor: And so my first job was with a phone book and, uh, I was, uh, at a company called Search and I placed programmers and I started out, umm, just mapping 128 and 495, all the mainframes. And I'm da... This is Jurassic Period here right now.

0:05:17.1 Joel Cheesman: That's alright.

0:05:18.0 Jeff Taylor: And, uh, and I had a... I had some sight lines into if I could map all the developers on 128 and 495, and I could start moving them around. And that is a theme that I'm still working on right now. So, uh, that was, uh, I went from, uh, really struggling as a recruiter to being the top biller in my office. I really liked the advertising. We would take 5, 6, 7 job openings, merge 'em all into one job posting sort of not great, I suppose. Uh, we would place that in the Boston Globe, and then I would take all the responses from that and I would, umm, put those out into, uh, potentially making placements. I decided I liked the advertising even more than I liked recruiting. And so I went and started at a company called JWG Associates, anybody from Boston? And I started at a company, uh, called JWG Associates. Uh, I took him from eight employees to 100. And, uh, most of the people reported to me and, uh, he wouldn't share any ownership in the company. So I left and I started my first name, uh, company, which was called Adion. And it was ads is what we did. And an ion was a particle of energy. And so that was my first foray into naming, not calling it tailor advertising 'cause I decided I'd have other salespeople and I didn't want them to say, where's Taylor?

0:06:36.5 Joel Cheesman: Yep.

0:06:37.7 Jeff Taylor: And, uh, so that... I had some successes with that. Umm, a hot recruitment agency in Boston. I had 300 or 400 clients, high tech, biotech, healthcare.

0:06:45.8 Joel Cheesman: So, so around 1993, you have what you called a monster idea.

0:06:49.6 Jeff Taylor: Yeah.

0:06:50.0 Joel Cheesman: Take us back to the Birth of Monster.

0:06:52.0 Jeff Taylor: So in my ad agency, umm, we had a, basically saying what our clients paid us for was a big idea, a monster idea. And everything else was just the support to get that idea done. And I always loved it. And I would pump up my team by saying, we need a monster idea. And, uh, then I... My dad was at UMass Boston, he had an email address in 1992, and he gave me one so we could email, I was on the.edu email address. And, umm, I started researching bulletin boards. One of my biggest clients in the ad agency. I placed help, wanted ads. I did brochures. I did, uh, I don't know, you know, billboards and subway advertising. I did all the human resource communication stuff. One of my biggest clients was placing full page ads in the Boston Globe that were about $35,000. And he said they're not working. And this was in, umm, uh, I guess mid 1993. And so I had read about these bulletin board systems or BBSs, and that fall I had a dream, and my dream was that I built a bulletin board system called the Monster Board. Yep. And, uh, I have a pad next to my bed. I wrote down that idea, uh, on the pad. And then I got nervous that I wouldn't be able to read my writing, which sometimes happens when I'd write things down in the dark. And I get up and went to a coffee shop and I wrote the interface for Monster, that we got three patents. Uh, two of 'em were the buyer, seller marketplace and resumes behind a paywall. And, uh, that was the beginning of a process where I was introducing a brand new idea.

0:08:36.5 Joel Cheesman: So talk about the first clients that you're pitching this idea to, of putting jobs on this thing called the internet.

0:08:44.3 Jeff Taylor: Okay. So some of these stories are known. Is this interesting just to go all the way back? Uh, so, umm, I had a client, Wellesley Communications. It was a hot company. And, uh, I was very good friends with the VP of HR, and he basically heard my idea and he said, "Your idea's terrible." And he said, "I hate the name." And he said, "No one will look for a job during the day while they're at work." And that was a huge moment for me because my biggest client just said that he didn't like the idea. And I basically said, "I think the idea is good." Now, my wife at the time basically said she wouldn't leave the house with me if I called this company Monster. And, uh, I, my employee said it was like the monster under the bed. And the challenge that I had in that, that early day was, you know, you have an idea, you think you're gonna have all this support. I really had none. Yeah. And that was the thing that when you go back and rewrite history, it's like, oh yeah, yeah. Big success and, uh, you know, change the industry. But at the beginning it was, it was very, very hard.

0:10:04.7 Joel Cheesman: I think there's a lot of pushback with every, uh, new idea.

0:10:07.9 Jeff Taylor: Yeah.

0:10:07.9 Joel Cheesman: Did you own monster.com at this point? Or was it just the Monster Board?

0:10:11.9 Jeff Taylor: I did.

0:10:12.2 Joel Cheesman: Or you own both?

0:10:12.4 Jeff Taylor: No, actually, uh, I own both. Umm, in fact, the Monster Board was our name, monster.com was our address right from the beginning, right from the get. So when I registered... When I started, when I, uh, I was building a bulletin board system and, umm, I realized that it had no graphics and I had drawn these monsters, and I had one of my designers drawing the Trump Asos monster that we know today. And he couldn't put any graphics on the, uh, on a bulletin board system. And so I had an opportunity, uh, Marc Andreessen was at the University of Illinois as a grad student, and he was building this thing called Mozilla. And he kind of said, "I copied your monsters,"[laughter], uh, to create this thing called Mozilla. And, 'cause I already had an article out, uh, on our bullet board system. And, uh, he said, "I have a browser. And it started getting a little bit of tension." Pizza Hut was doing a order, and it was only a one inch wide form. And I said to Mark, I said, "I can't put a resume in a one inch wide form." And he said, "Well, then you write the patch." And so my team wrote the patch to make it so that it was the size so we could put the first resume on the worldwide web. And so, uh, there were 200 websites, 197 websites in the world when I, uh, started the idea. And before I realized I had to go register it at MIT, we were the 454th.com. And just for perspective, there's about 500 million websites today. So I think, I think my timing was pretty fucking good, huh? [laughter]

0:11:45.4 Joel Cheesman: Well, we'll, we'll get to some maybe bad timing here in here in a second. Yeah. Umm, so '95-ish, uh, low company called TMP comes calling.

0:11:56.0 Jeff Taylor: Yeah.

0:11:56.6 Joel Cheesman: And offers to buy the site.

0:11:59.4 Jeff Taylor: Yeah. Actually...

0:12:00.5 Joel Cheesman: Let's talk about that.

0:12:02.0 Jeff Taylor: They came in 1994 and they wanted my ad agency, and I was cooking Monster. And I was like, no way. Like, uh, I'm just, I'm not gonna sell. TMP, most of you probably know TMP, uh, TMP started out in the Yellow Pages business, and then had gone into the recruitment business and started buying up the hot recruitment agencies around the country. And they had bought maybe six or eight at that time, and they came and they wanted to buy Adion. And I said, "No." And then, umm, about two months after I said no, my board, I had, uh, seven Angel investors, they were my board. And they said, "You have to shut down this Monster closet thing that you're doing, and, uh, it's distracting you." Because I was writing them a check from my ad agency. And so what was challenging for me was, I have the guys that really are counting on me to build this business, telling me to shut down this idea. My wife doesn't want any part of, you know, it's like just this bad thing. And then Andy came back calling again. Andy McKelvey was the, umm, the guy that ran TMP Worldwide. And he said, umm, "Okay, I'll give you more money." And so he gave me a lot more money from my ad agency, uh, offer. And I said, "I have this monster thing, and the only way I will sell," you just gotta hear this, right? "The only way I will sell Addion to you is if you buy Monster." So he said, "Okay, I'll buy Monster, umm, but we're gonna change the name." And I said, "The whole deal's off." And, uh, so this is this thing where you start digging in and, uh, you have to dig in if you're an entrepreneur like this. And so he came up, he flew up and met with me, and he said, "You gotta explain to me what this is. And, you know, I everything about this monster idea." And so I explained it, we spent a whole day together and I had a server that was like creaking under the pressure with a few thousand people looking for jobs. And I said, "This is what I need. I need to keep the name Monster. I need to run whatever this, this Monster plus whatever you have a TMP and the internet. And I also need another server." So he said, "Okay, well keep the name, buy two servers." And, umm, I said, "Oh, and I forgot, if we go public, I need you to gimme $1 million." Okay. So he agreed to all that.

0:14:34.2 Joel Cheesman: And, uh, what was...

0:14:35.5 Jeff Taylor: A year later, we went public and...

0:14:36.6 Joel Cheesman: What was the price tag again?

0:14:39.2 Jeff Taylor: Uh, which price tag?

0:14:40.3 Joel Cheesman: He bought all the...

0:14:41.4 Jeff Taylor: Uh, they bought all, uh, let's call all in $4 million.

0:14:46.7 Joel Cheesman: Okay, we'll come back to that in a second. Uh, so he buys this, this thing?

0:14:52.4 Jeff Taylor: No, now there's not one internet millionaire right now. Umm, when I started Monster, there was no Yahoo, there was no Amazon. Uh, I could have bought coke.com, nike.com. Like, like you just, you have to like close your eyes and say, okay, you have an idea in your, in your back pocket. You start working on it, you get a few people working on it with you, and then somebody comes and says, "I'll give you $4 million for that." Uh, what would you do? Especially when your investors are saying, "Shut it down."

0:15:19.5 Joel Cheesman: You're in your young, you're in your 30s.

0:15:21.7 Jeff Taylor: I'm, yeah, I'm 30 and I'm 38.

0:15:25.0 Joel Cheesman: 33, 34?

0:15:27.0 Jeff Taylor: I started it at, at 30... I'm 35, 36.

0:15:29.7 Joel Cheesman: Okay.

0:15:30.4 Jeff Taylor: Yeah.

0:15:32.0 Joel Cheesman: Umm, so the internet takes off '95, so let's call it '99, which, did you see that coming, or was that a surprise to you?

0:15:40.3 Jeff Taylor: Oh, no, no. I saw that coming.

0:15:41.3 Joel Cheesman: You totally saw it. So Career Mosaic comes along, OCC.

0:15:43.5 Jeff Taylor: And Career Mosaic started two months two months after me.

0:15:46.7 Joel Cheesman: Yep.

0:15:47.6 Jeff Taylor: OCC started at the same time I did with a bulletin board. They had a threaded discussion out in the Midwest. Uh, you had a, I dunno, headhunter.net, I think later came in about a year, a year and a half later. Uh, let's, Hot Jobs was two and a half years later.

0:16:09.4 Joel Cheesman: Let's jump to '99. And I, you make, I think your first acquisition in OCC.

0:16:08.9 Jeff Taylor: Nope, uh.

0:16:16.4 Joel Cheesman: First major acquisition, I guess at the time.

0:16:13.5 Jeff Taylor: So when Andy bought me, uh, I basically said, okay, "I think we should do some of what you've been doing in buying recruitment agencies. I think we should go buy a couple other recruitment agencies, and I think we should buy a little company out in the Midwest called OCC." Yep. And, umm, what was crazy is Andy went and bought it and didn't tell me, I don't think that's out there.[laughter]. Uh, and so Bill Warren, who was also an amazing innovator in our space, umm, is running OCC and Monster and OCC together, probably have 80% market share. This is a crazy what the market share we had. And then we're going..

0:17:03.7 Joel Cheesman: Can we rewind this for a second? Jassy buys this company from under your nose to, to add it, 'cause OCC became sort of the technology backbone.

0:17:02.9 Jeff Taylor: Uh, yeah.

0:17:04.0 Joel Cheesman: As I remember.

0:17:04.7 Jeff Taylor: Yep.

0:17:05.5 Joel Cheesman: So what, what is that conversation like when he comes in and says, "Oh, by the way, we just bought....

0:17:24.0 Jeff Taylor: Well, I found out in, I don't know, November of '96 when we were going public, Andy came and sat me down and said, "I just need you to know that we actually own OCC," uh, because it was in the, uh, it was in the papers to go public.

0:17:20.4 Joel Cheesman: Okay.

0:17:21.5 Jeff Taylor: And, which was awesome. Uh, it was great because I had been talking to Andy through the year, we need to buy the company. He had very stealth, just had two or three people working on it. This feels, I don't know what this would feel like right now, this would be like, umm, the equivalent of if two of the big AI or early recruiting players got together and nobody knew they were together. That's kind of what it would feel like. And, uh, then, uh, '99, umm, we were starting to grow, uh, and grow fast.

0:18:07.5 Joel Cheesman: As was the internet.

0:17:55.4 Jeff Taylor: Oh yeah.

0:18:11.1 Joel Cheesman: For a lot of the people out there weren't around in '99 to remember it. Talk about the.com, boom of '99, what the world was like, the, just the optimism, and.

0:18:08.7 Jeff Taylor: So what's interesting is the first few years we were having to sell the internet at the same time as we were selling our job board. Now I don't mean selling it, uh, posting jobs. And we needed to go to companies and say, "Look, uh, we want all your jobs." And people say, "Well, we're, we're posting 'em in the newspaper." And I would say, "Okay. And also online.

0:18:29.3 Joel Cheesman: Mm-hmm.

0:18:29.8 Jeff Taylor: And one of the advantages I had early on was, and I don't have any regrets about selling to TMP, by the way, the opportunity that I had, uh, to have those 13 or 15 recruitment agencies all adding Monster. So as, uh, companies would come in, post their jobs in the newspaper, we were adding Monster for $75. That was early distribution that I wouldn't have had otherwise, which gave, uh, a big unfair advantage, I think, just in the US marketplace. And, uh, so 1999 came around, the internet is now growing fast. Companies are recognizing that this is gonna be an important solution. It's funny, my LinkedIn post today, if you go to my LinkedIn is actually a, I think it's I logo, I don't know. Uh, it's a stat from, uh, 1998, 1999, and 2000. And it's talking about the percentage of, umm, uh, job postings that are on the internet versus in the newspaper. And I've often said, it took me five or six years to migrate the habit that all of you have from the newspaper to online. I think it's sort of like right now, if we were to say, looking at AI and a lot of you say, "Oh, I'm not even gonna use AI anywhere in my recruiting." It, it kind of felt like that '96, '97. The other thing is, if you look at the growth of Netscape, and you look at the popularity of the internet, it, the curve is slightly different because the AI curve is just bigger. But the curves look very, very similar. And so people are asking me like, "What do you think about this bubble?" And I would say, "This is a bubble that's going to become a bigger bubble, I think." I think we've got some time here.

0:20:14.9 Joel Cheesman: Yeah. So you said you don't regret selling, but around '99, you know, Mark Cuban selling broadcasts for $1 billion, I mean, like, big money is flowing.

0:20:24.2 Jeff Taylor: Oh, yeah.

0:20:24.9 Joel Cheesman: Was there a point where you said, "Damn, I left a lot of money on the table?" Or did you come to peace with that?

0:20:31.0 Jeff Taylor: So, you know what's funny, I would not be sitting here right now. Uh, I would've, uh, I'd be on Shark Tank or something, probably[laughter], uh, but I have had this joy in this industry, uh, for this entire 30 year period. And a lot of it's had to do with like, creating something from nothing and driving this idea and being the Pied Piper to go all around the world and open the Monster offices in 36 countries and to go, and each country, I would go by the company that copied Monster, and then I would go in and meet with their employees and tell 'em they were gonna change the name. And then I'd go back and meet their clients. And then I'd go to their one year anniversary and I'd go meet with the clients. I traveled for five years straight. And it was all about being a Pied Piper for this brand. And even today I'm meeting some of you. I went and visited all the booths today. I just love this business and I love the work that all of you're doing, and I just couldn't wait to meet all of you. And, uh, I have a passion for this industry that is, it's second to none.

0:21:37.7 Joel Cheesman: Uh, I've never met your dad, but I'm guessing as a old hippie, he would love that answer. That, uh, you found peace in that decision.

0:21:44.7 Jeff Taylor: Yeah.

0:21:45.4 Joel Cheesman: So '99 comes around a lot more competition is popping up. Uh, the internet's a big deal. Umm, I can speak for my period at the time, uh, building a brand was huge, and there was a real sentiment around, we need to be the monolithic brand around searching for jobs. So you make a decision to advertise in the Super Bowl.

0:22:06.8 Jeff Taylor: So I made a decision to merge OCC and the Monster board and to rename the company monster.com, which was our web address.

0:22:16.4 Joel Cheesman: Mm-hmm.

0:22:17.2 Jeff Taylor: And to go on the Super Bowl. And, uh, that was, umm, a very popular from my side, from the indie side of OCC that was not popular. Uh, but what was important is that we had, you mentioned this, the tech team at OCC, uh, had a, a couple of crackerjack, umm, developers. And so I said, "Let's build a new version of Monster that doesn't exist, and let's run it." And we did what few companies can do. We ran it with 10% of the traffic, then 20% of the traffic, all the way to 100% of the traffic. And then we advertise on the Super Bowl. Do you guys remember our Super Bowl spot?

0:23:02.7 Joel Cheesman: Remind them if they don't.

0:23:04.0 Jeff Taylor: When I grow up, I wanna file all day. I wanna have a brown nose. Uh, yes, sir. No, sir. Anything for a raise, sir?

0:23:12.6 Joel Cheesman: Who gives credit for that idea? Was it an agency? Was it...

0:23:14.0 Jeff Taylor: Yes. Uh, so the agency was Mullen. Uh, I'm in this story though, because the three big, umm, ideas they had, I didn't think were very good. Yeah. But they, uh, six, idea, six or seven that they started pulling out of the bag I liked, and it was about nurses and doctors, and it was saying maybe we could mix this up. So the expectation is when you grow up, you become a nurse or a doctor. And I was like, "Okay, there's something in that, but let's not make it nurses and doctors." And, uh, so the team went around and we basically just interviewed everybody and said, "When I grow up, you know, what would your answer be if you were being ironic."

0:23:52.3 Joel Cheesman: Yep.

0:23:53.0 Jeff Taylor: And, uh, so we did that. We shot that commercial, they ran in the Super Bowl. Umm, I had spent $2.5 million or $3 million in 1998, uh, on marketing. Uh, and in 1999, I spent $2.3 million or $2.6 million in 90 seconds, uh, at the beginning of February, first day of February. And so there was another big risk moment, and that was the brand moment. I think that goes to what you just described, is kind of saying, "Okay, we got a great idea, it's working, and now we're gonna press the accelerator. And how are we gonna do that? I need more distribution, I need more people to know what monster.com is. And that's when we went on the Super Bowl."

0:24:33.0 Joel Cheesman: How did that Super Bowl ad change the business?

0:24:36.1 Jeff Taylor: Well, first of all, it was the fourth worst rated commercial in the Super Bowl[laughter]. Uh, it's...

0:24:44.7 Joel Cheesman: By what, USA Today, or?

0:24:45.2 Jeff Taylor: Yeah. USA Today had these atmometer people, uh, I tell you, life is so different. And so they had, they hired 200 people to rate each Super Bowl commercial. And, uh, our commercial is not funny. Uh, it is ironic and maybe thoughtful and thought provoking. And, uh, so I, umm, went and bought a USA Today, uh, in the morning after the Super Bowl, I sat in my car and looked at it, and I'm looking, looking, looking like all the way at the bottom as monster.com. And I'm like, "Shit, here we go again." And, uh, the reality was we believed in it. Umm, uh, the Today Show and, uh, a couple of morning shows said, "There's something to this commercial, it's good." And then over the next three months, it got more popular and more popular. It's still considered like a top 25 Super Bowl commercial now, today.

0:25:36.6 Joel Cheesman: So as a competitor at the time, I can say that it catapulted the brand into the leader, uh, in a big way.

0:25:43.9 Jeff Taylor: Yeah. Yep.

0:25:45.0 Joel Cheesman: And things I, I guess, really took off between 2000 and then up until your time when you left in '05. Talk about some of your memories in that five year period, what you took away. I know there was a, a big potential acquisition that I'm sure you wanna, uh, talk about as well, 2000, 2005.

0:26:06.1 Jeff Taylor: So, umm, let's see. Uh, there was some things that happened in there, like, so Amazon Dot Bomb, was it about, uh, April or May of, uh, 2000 and, umm, the.com bubble? That's funny. All this stuff. Just remember these moments, right? The bubble burst, and most of the.coms like blew out. They just didn't have any revenue. They didn't have any plan, uh, but monsters was profitable and growing like crazy. And so this was a really important moment for us, but for 90 days, there were no job openings at all. So that's just like the pandemic basically, right? So in that 90 days, uh, there was a lot of pressure on me to lay off half of the employees, and I wouldn't do it. I basically said, "Look, we're profitable." It's funny, this is very true today too. Uh, and I said, uh, "We're profitable." Our culture... How many of you worked at Monster?

0:27:03.0 Joel Cheesman: Any Monster alum? A couple.

0:27:04.9 Jeff Taylor: A couple. It's crazy. Uh, so I can go in almost any room and, uh, there's a lot of Monster employees. I, I think many would say it was the best job they ever had. Our culture was so good. And so the board came to me and said that we're going to hire a president of Monster, and you're gonna become the chairman and chief monster. Uh, and I was like, "Okay, you do, you do you, you do what you have to do." And so we laid off 800 people, and I wouldn't have laid off. I would maybe 100 people. This is the way I thought about it. I had a deep care for our group. We probably had 4,000 employees, so you should get a little sense of the levity of this situation. So, umm, you know, if we laid off 18% of our workforce or something like that, and I didn't wanna do that. And so I, I have no regrets for that. I, I feel like that to this day is the relationship I have with a lot of Monster employees. And so I was all... I was traveling the world opening offices, so, uh, I started to remove myself from it. And then you reference something in 1993, umm, job postings were about 65% of our revenue. And the resume product resume database was about 30% of our revenue. And no matter what I did, I couldn't grow any other piece of revenue more than 5% or 6%. So I had this idea, I launched Monster Networking. It didn't really get traction. I had some ideas about doing an auction for employees. Uh, and, so I went to Reid and said, uh, "What do you think about putting LinkedIn and Monsters together?" And we got an agreement, umm.

0:28:54.0 Joel Cheesman: Reid Hoffman.

0:28:55.1 Jeff Taylor: Uh, Reid Hoffman, uh, LinkedIn. And, uh, we had an agreement, uh, and I said, "What do you think about 300?" And he said, "Too low." And I said, "How about 305?" Because I had a 300 number in my head. And he said, "Too high." Uh, and we agreed at 304, uh, kind of back of the envelope, an agreement between the two of us. And I went back to Monster pumped because I felt like we could have the third leg of the stool, and my board turned it down. So my board at Monster had become a more professional board after 9-11, had much more operators and more traditional business people on it, and they said, "Look, we're profitable. We're gonna press the accelerator." But we had 800 million in cash, and so it would not have hurt us. You understand, accretive and dilutive, uh, if we had bought LinkedIn, it was losing a lot of money. It would've been dilutive to our stock, which maybe would've meant it, it would go down. But in my view, I thought that it would, uh, that it would've driven it up. And so, umm, I resigned, uh, that after that weekend. And, umm, I gave 18 months notice. I didn't have a temper tantrum, but I signed a bunch of papers and basically said that wouldn't be a going away party or anything, I would just end at 18 months. Now.

0:30:16.8 Joel Cheesman: You did, you did buy a network called Tickle.

0:30:19.5 Jeff Taylor: Uh, yeah.

0:30:20.7 Joel Cheesman: Were you part of that was, was that yours or?

0:30:23.2 Jeff Taylor: Uh, I was actually, Andy McKelvey bought, uh, military.com and Tickle. Uh, coming out after 9-11, we needed traffic, we needed engagement, and, uh, we needed buzz. And it was really, we were profitable, but there were no jobs. We needed to start our engine. We needed to make sure that we could cement our leadership. And Tickle had a, umm, a test, anybody remember Tickle? Uh, it had a test where you could figure out what dog you're like, and, uh, you would put in all your information and it would say, "Oh, you're a German Shepherd, or you're this, or you're that." And, but it had a lot of traffic. It had, uh, I don't know, 14 million monthly unique visitors, something like that. And, umm, James Currier was the, uh, was founder of that. Yeah. And he now, uh, owns a big hedge fund and, uh, is very successful.

0:31:12.0 Joel Cheesman: So '05 you take off, I wanna back up a little bit because you indeed launches around '06, so '05, '06, somewhere around there. So you weren't really around when the Indeed phenomenon happened, but you were around when Google became a thing and from my perspective, you...

0:31:28.1 Jeff Taylor: Yeah. Indeed was there, uh, indeed, uh, I think, uh...

0:31:32.5 Joel Cheesman: '04 maybe.

0:31:33.4 Jeff Taylor: '04, uh, and Indeed was coming around all the job boards saying, "We will, umm, take your jobs for free." And there was a big buzz inside Monster that we can get the distribution from this thing called Indeed.

0:31:45.7 Joel Cheesman: Did you see a threat there at the time, or?

0:31:47.3 Jeff Taylor: I did. And I wouldn't let our company do it.

0:31:50.3 Joel Cheesman: Yeah. What impacts, in talking about threats, to me, Google was as much of a threat to your business as Indeed was. Because before Google, no one could launch a job in Toledo and rank for Toledo job search and get traffic. You had to be a marketing machine like you were. Did you see a threat in Google at the time, or? Nope?

0:32:13.6 Jeff Taylor: Umm, I mean, it might be naive, but, uh, Google really, umm, hadn't started to broaden its horizons. Yeah. Yahoo made a, umm, critical mistake and basically got into a bunch of businesses, and then Google basically took its search and won that category. And so for 10 years or so, Google basically just stayed in that search category without the idea of really thinking about, uh, any other categories. And so even though you could do searching for career stuff, it just wasn't a thing. And, uh, it was probably, I actually don't know when it really started to become a thing. Maybe around 2010, 2012. It started to become a, uh, a recruiting tool, but not an important recruiting tool. I don't know when they announced maybe 2015 or something, they announced that they were gonna have a job board.

0:33:06.7 Joel Cheesman: We'll, we'll save the Google conversation for another time. Maybe, uh, you couldn't let go of the network thing because the '05, you wasted no time and founded Eons. Yeah. Talk about that.

0:33:18.6 Jeff Taylor: So, umm, average age on Monster, when I started Monster was around 37. And so I watched a millions of job seekers that I got to know this whole industry of, of job seekers, of this whole consumer push. I was a voice in that. And so they were aging, they were getting close to 50. And, umm, I'm looking at AARP, and I'm thinking, this is the oldest thing on the planet, still is the oldest thing on the planet. And it's like, nobody's gonna sign up for a AARP. So I basically said, "I think I should build a baby boomer consumer network and do a social network. " And, uh, Facebook had launched, and Facebook was in colleges, but moving toward high school. And I was like, "Okay, I'll launch the social media for 50 plus"

0:34:08.8 Joel Cheesman: Yeah. MySpace was big at the time as well.

0:34:11.3 Jeff Taylor: MySpace was big. Yep. Mm-hmm. And, uh, that did not go well. Uh, I raised a lot of money. Uh, I raised money from Sequoia and General Catalyst, two firms that, uh, are really respected in the space. They looked at me as a second time entrepreneur. Uh, Mike Moritz invested in the company. He's probably one of the top guys at Sequoia. He basically said, "Jeff, you made three mistakes coming out to see me." Uh, he said, "You flew first class. You've hired all your friends, and you really have no idea what's on your presentation." And I flew coach, uh, I had only hired two people from, uh, my past experience. And I'd stayed up all night to work on the presentation before I went to see him. And so he said, "Okay, I'm gonna invest in you." And that was the almost the entire conversation that I had with Mike Moritz at Sequoia to invest in Eons. Umm, it was pretty simple. Umm, Facebook was going from college to high school. I got to 1 million unique visitors a month, which if you, any of you have tried to build a social network is not easy to get the first million unique visitors. It was going quite well. And then the Facebook high school users taught their parents how to use Facebook. And it took me about four months and, uh, I got my ass kicked By Mark Zuckerberg.

0:35:30.4 Joel Cheesman: And that piece of humble pie that you ate, how did that impact you moving forward? Because I suspect hitting a home run like Monster, jumping into, you probably feel pretty good about yourself, and as life does, it hits you in the mouth. Talk about your, how you felt coming out of eons. And what your, what your state of mind was.

0:35:53.7 Jeff Taylor: Uh, it's okay. Uh, I, I'm an eternal optimist and, uh, I think it's an important part of my psyche. And, uh, so I couldn't see that coming. Uh, like it was a surprise for me. And, uh, what, what's cool about it is, uh, I sold it. It was like a bunt. I I sold the company, but I didn't sell it for any money. In fact, I think I only got half the money that we agreed to. Umm, but it was a good learning experience for me. And, uh, I think I did eat some humble pie with that. Uh, but I, umm, I got recruited while I was on the bench. I needed to help this company that bought Eons. Umm, Ray Dalio, who runs the biggest hedge fund in the world, umm, his main headhunter called me and said, "Ray wants to meet with you." And...

0:36:44.9 Joel Cheesman: What year is this, by the way? Is this...

0:36:44.9 Jeff Taylor: This, uh, this is in 2012.

0:36:47.3 Joel Cheesman: Okay.

0:36:48.1 Jeff Taylor: Uh, 2011. And, uh, I went and met with... I saw, I don't, I don't know who Ray Dalio is. Do you guys know who Ray Dalio is? So, umm, he, he is an amazing guy and he's an incredibly difficult guy to work for. And, umm, I went and interviewed with him, and I had a, uh, hour and eight minute interview, and he talked for an hour and I talked for eight minutes, imagine that. [laughter]

0:37:15.7 Joel Cheesman: No way.

0:37:18.1 Jeff Taylor: And, uh, and it's on tape [laughter]. And, uh, he, his feedback, which he wrote on my form, is that Jeff's the kind of guy that would go and sell Bridgewater in the middle of the night when no one was paying attention. Uh, which I thought was actually pretty amazing. And, uh, so for about six months, he just bashed me. And, umm, I sold my house and I moved to Westport, Connecticut, and I started my second week, and he called me into his office and said, "Did you sell your house?" And I was like, "Yeah." And he said, "You moved here?" And I was like, "Yeah." And he said, "You're not gonna last six months." And I said, "I'll work for you for 10 years, not a day more." And, uh, I, uh, for six months, he beat the living hell outta me. And he called me to a meeting with 35 people and basically said, "Jeff, you're terrible at doing this thing that I was working on," in front of 35 people. And I had, the president had just told me that I was getting better at it. And so I was looking to the president to tell Ray that I was getting better at it. And so, umm, we used to write daily observations. So my, umm, note that night was that I was fighting for mediocrity. Uh, it was my reflection from that conversation. But Ray... Umm, do you guys know about the Bridgewater culture? Everyone has an iPad and 130 attributes are on the iPad. And you in live in meetings, you give each other feedback. And so I got 30,000 pieces of feedback from Bridgewater while I work there. And I would make a mistake with Ray, and he would say, "That's a case." And next thing you know, I'd be in front of a camera, we'd be filming the mistake, and then he would distribute it out to the whole company. And then the whole company would rate me on, I don't know, logical reasoning or whatever. And, uh, that was one time I, umm, I took my team and we went and fixed up this flower shop that was in Westport, and it was so awesome. And, uh, uh, Ray found out about it, and he's like, "What are you doing?" And I was like, "I took my team and we fixed up this flower shop that was just falling apart." And he said, "You know, you can't represent Bridgewater that way and you can't use your employees that way." And, uh, so, uh, they made a case about it, and the whole company had to rate me on whether I was a, what's called a loose cannon, uh, inside Bridgewater. That was my learning experience there. But I spent 10 years there, and I think it gives me another 10 years right now because of how hard I got pushed in that time when I was at Bridgewater.

0:39:54.8 Joel Cheesman: So you were torn down, built back up.

0:39:57.1 Jeff Taylor: Oh, I worked there for nine years and 11 months and 13 days. So, uh, I fulfilled my promise.

0:40:04.8 Joel Cheesman: So, at this point, you are a badass motherfucker, you are, you got these ideas in your head. Did we jump right to BoomBand? Or was there a bridge between...

0:40:15.2 Jeff Taylor: Well, so just so you know, umm, working for Bridgewater, I came in the door. I had 10,000 employees at Monster, and I went to work at Bridgewater. It was like, I had never worked a day in my life. I had to completely build what I was doing, uh, from scratch at Bridgewater. And even after 10 years, I think Ray still didn't really know what I had done.[laughter], uh, right? And so, uh, I think that that was a huge experience for me in my learning. And, uh, a big part, I dunno, the principal's book, some of you might know this, and, uh, the videos that Bridgewater has done, I produced all those videos, I produced that book with Ray, and, umm, I learned a ton. And that learning with my Monster learning is now maybe talk about BoomBand.

0:41:01.4 Joel Cheesman: Okay. So you're an idea guy. I assume a lot of ideas are floating around your head over those 10 years, and you land on this one. Talk about this idea, the name. I know you want to tell a Dr. Seuss story in there somewhere. Uh, just talk about the origin story Yeah. Of BoomBand coming out of Dalio's, uh, hell's kitchen.

0:41:20.9 Jeff Taylor: Alright. So, umm, there are a couple things that I just dream about this business. I think the resume is failing miserably. Uh, what do you guys think? Uh, it's a, it's a pile of keywords and performance statements. I, I don't know, it's unrecognizable to any of you. If I looked at your resume and looked at you right next to it, it's like, uh, it's really terrible. The job posting is also in trouble. And this idea of making an announcement to the world that you're hiring, I don't care how targeted you are, anybody can find, it gets crawled, it gets away from you. It's out there for six months. And so, uh, I had a couple of very important things that I believed. And one is that your resume should be one copy always in distribution, easy to change. It needs to be connected to you. And I've had this vision of basically having a job signal instead of a job posting where a signal goes into an arena where you can get access to the top candidates. And so those two concepts kind of anchored me. BoomBand comes from the Dr. Seuss' book, oh, the Places You'll Go. Do you know that book? At the end of the book, it says, "Don't go to the waiting place. Go where the boom bands are playing." And that was always the spot in the book where I'm like, "Yes, that is the spot." And, uh, so I decided to see, I think it brings joy and I think our industry is desperately in need of a little bit of joy. And so that's my commitment to bring this, uh, you know, to here. And so I have this, the basic concept of BoomBand is I went all the way back to my recruiting days, and I decided to map the entire working population in the United States. So I created a talent graph of 175 million people. I did 10 data partnerships, and I ingested about 3 billion rows of data, and I created a layer cake of all the databases. And then... How long have you had your cell phone number?

0:43:21.9 Joel Cheesman: My cell phone number, let's call it 10 years.

0:43:23.9 Jeff Taylor: 10 years.

0:43:25.5 Joel Cheesman: Yeah.

0:43:26.3 Jeff Taylor: Uh, a lot of, you've had it for 20 years, right? So I can look down all those rows and I see a cell phone number. And so, uh, what I did was create this database of public information, and I created a derivative product, and that's now the BoomBand product. And I'm building a profile, I call it a dossier unclaimed for what will be 175 million people. And I also ingested 16 million companies and, uh, did some partnerships on jobs. So I have about 5 million, uh, jobs that are less than 24 hours old. And that partnership with Aspen.

0:44:01.6 Joel Cheesman: Mm-hmm.

0:44:02.3 Jeff Taylor: And, umm, I put the two together in an arena. And my, the idea of this business is that you as a seeker can put yourself in the center of the arena and the jobs will come to it, that match. And on the other side, you can put a job in the center of the arena, and the people that match best will come into the arena. Very visual. I'll show you tomorrow. There's n AI. I have five minutes to show you what I'm doing tomorrow. Uh, and so I'll show you, uh, and, uh, it's working. Uh, I've built the software. Uh, my team is here, Madison, uh, Chipra here. Uh, Chip is Chief Revenue Officer. And, uh, it, uh, Madison has, uh, done the data partnerships with me. And, uh, we've got, software's working. We have about 50 development partner customers that are starting to play with us. And I have about 1,300, uh, job seekers. We call 'em players that are signed up to build their first dossiers. And so I'm very much at the beginning of the process and, uh, what do you think of this idea?

0:45:05.1 Joel Cheesman: Always selling, isn't he? Umm, I know we're almost out of time. I do want to end with this, Brian, if we can, just one more question if we can.

[background conversation]

0:45:15.4 Jeff Taylor: Oh, yeah. Come, come up, yeah.

0:45:19.9 Joel Cheesman: All right. Yeah. If they don't ask, I'll ask mine. If they have questions, go ahead.

0:45:19.0 Jeff Taylor: I can do it quick. It'll take only take me five minutes to answer.

0:45:24.2 Brian: Line up at the mic if you got questions.

0:45:24.1 Joel Cheesman: All right. Come up to the mic if you got question for Jeff. Otherwise I'll keep...

0:45:29.5 Jeff Taylor: Yeah.

0:45:31.3 Joel Cheesman: So Jeff, we...

0:45:31.6 Brian: No questions, Joel, the floor is yours.

0:45:33.4 Joel Cheesman: Okay. So, so the more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm interested in your perspective on starting Monster and now starting a new company from in your 30s to now, in your 60s. You look at the industry now, are, should we expect Super Bowl ads? Should we expect blimps? Like have you changed your mentality around starting a company versus what you did at Monster?

0:45:57.5 Jeff Taylor: I mean, that's sort of a sweeping question, right? Umm, building a brand is timeless. Like, I think that's the first thing I would say is that, and how many of you are connected with me on LinkedIn? Are you watching me build a brand right now? Any of you? Hello[laughter]. A few of you. Okay. So I'm building a little brand right now.

0:46:19.6 Joel Cheesman: Nobody wants to have connected to you, Jeff.

0:46:21.6 Jeff Taylor: Uh, yeah. So I, I'm, I'm starting, and I don't think there's really any difference. I don't, I don't feel old. Umm, I, you know, it's, it's interesting you get some wisdom. Uh, but in what I do when you're... I say right on my LinkedIn profile, it's like, uh, if you're an entrepreneur, you're early, because what other way is there? And when you're early, it is the same every time. You start with an idea, you start with, everyone that you think will believe in you does not. And then you have to find people that believe in the idea. And then you start finding more people that believe in the idea. And then you get enough people where you can start to talk to companies and you don't know what's gonna happen, right? Like, that's the beauty of the, and that's the exciting thing about this process. I am so fucking ready to do this right now, like[laughter]. So, uh, I, I hope, uh, I'm just getting to know all you guys. Again, this is, it's unfortunate that I can't just talk to everybody. Uh, but please come up and say hi. And I'm really an advocate for this business. I'm proud of what we do, and I wanna bang the pot on that.

0:47:32.8 Joel Cheesman: Do we have any more time, Brian? He'll keep talking forever.

0:47:36.2 Jeff Taylor: Yeah, go.

0:47:37.6 Brian: I know. He'll keep talking, I have to interrupt you.

0:47:41.0 Joel Cheesman: Do you have a question? I know you do.

0:47:42.4 Brian: I don't have, I don't, I mean, my question is, hey Jeff, we got karaoke in a minute. What are you gonna sing?

0:47:49.3 Jeff Taylor: I am not.

0:47:51.1 Brian: You're not gonna sing?

0:47:52.0 Jeff Taylor: No, no. I... You do not want me to sing, but I will come and support all of you singing. Uh, and, uh, and, and I like, I would like to hear some toto that, that sounds like a really good place to start.

0:48:03.6 Brian: Awesome.

0:48:04.0 Jeff Taylor: Uh, and, uh, so are there any questions? Just yell 'em out.

0:48:07.9 Joel Cheesman: Jeff, in with this, for anyone that wants to, uh, connect with you, learn more about BoomBand, where do you send them?

0:48:13.6 Jeff Taylor: So, umm, come to my LinkedIn, which is actually rather comical, uh, because I really am building my, my crowd there. Go to, uh, boomband.com, sign up for our backstage pass, and, uh, just, just support, like, do the trust fall with me and let's try to do this in a new way and find the joy in it.