Talent Disruption Through the Ages w/ Jeff Taylor

Podcast Episode: Talent Disruption Through the Ages

In this episode, the "man, the myth, the legend" Jeff Taylor joins Chad Sowash to discuss his return to the talent acquisition stage after nearly 20 years away. From the "Jurassic period" of the early internet to the AI-driven future, Taylor reflects on the pivotal moments that shaped the industry and why he’s ready to disrupt it all over again.  

TOPICS

• The "Why Now?": After two decades away, Jeff explains why he is diving back into the "shit show" of recruitment and how a "slingshot" effect led him to his newest venture.  

  
  

• The $304 Million Mistake: Jeff reveals the "back of the napkin" deal he had to buy LinkedIn in 2003—and the specific reason his board of directors turned it down.  

  
  

• The Super Bowl Irony: A behind-the-scenes look at the iconic "When I Grow Up" commercial.  

  
  

• Fighting the "Newspaper Giants": Jeff recalls being introduced as the "number one category killer" to a room of 800 newspaper executives during Monster’s rise.  

  
  

• The AI Bubble vs. The Dot-Com Burst: A comparison of the current AI explosion to the late '90s, including Jeff’s prediction on when the "AI bubble" might actually burst.  

  
  

• Boomband & The Talent Graph: An inside look at Jeff’s new project, which aims to map the entire U.S. labor market of 175 million people to create a "transparent marketplace".  

  
  

• The Death of the "Hostage Data Model": Why Jeff believes the traditional resume is dead and his vision.  

"I’m a big believer in you have to make sure you don’t fall in love with your own shit and that you have to break it... if you don’t break it in the middle of the night when nobody’s looking, then someone else is gonna break it."   - Jeff Taylor

Want to know where the "Boombands" are playing? Tune in to hear how the original disruptor is planning his second act.   

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

0:00:27.9 Jason Pistulka: All right. Everybody, make your way into the tent. Grab a seat. So, our next speakers are kind of a treat. Talking about talent disruption through the ages, uh, the myth, the man, the legend, Jeff Taylor, uh, founder of Monster and now CEO of Bombard?

0:00:57.9 Chad: Boomband.

0:00:58.8 Jason Pistulka: Or Boomband. Boomband. Sorry, I said it wrong. Boomband.

0:01:03.8 Chad Sowash: Boombard. Rebrand. All right, thanks to Shaker for allowing us to have these nice, comfy, uh, seats, by the way.

0:01:15.0 Jeff Taylor: So, we actually removed those, uh... The hard plastic seats, right?

0:01:18.7 Chad Sowash: Exactly.

0:01:19.0 Jeff Taylor: Yeah. Yeah.

0:01:20.7 Chad Sowash: All right. So, questions. No, I'm just kidding. Uh, so, Boombard. No, I'm just kidding. Uh, I have talked to a shit ton of monsters. Just being here, right? There's a bunch that are out there which you've gotta be proud of, right?

0:01:34.8 Jeff Taylor: Yeah, it's actually kind of complicated to walk around this, uh... This area because, uh, there's a lot of Monsters and I'm so proud of this group and I think I've been doing a lot of, like, advocating for us as a team and, uh, there's been some pretty tough, tough words and tough actions from Ronstadt and, you know, different things. And so, it's just been fun to kinda pull everybody back together.

0:01:56.0 Chad Sowash: Yeah, we'll get... We'll get into that, I promise. There's... There's... There's one question I asked them all, right? Ones who have done business with Monster since the early days and then also people who were at Monster and I'll ask them all, if you had one question to ask Jeff Taylor, what would it be? What do you think that was?

0:02:21.8 Jeff Taylor: Probably, are you really gonna do it again?

0:02:23.9 Chad Sowash: It was, why are you gonna do it again?

0:02:26.1 Jeff Taylor: Ah, there you go.

0:02:27.1 Chad Sowash: Right? It's like you've been gone for almost 20 fucking years, man. Why? Why? It seems like you had a great life. Why are you gonna get back into this shit show?

0:02:38.1 Jeff Taylor: So, you know, it's interesting, there's a couple different levels here but one is that I love it. Like... Like the thing you can't get away from, I've been a recruiter my whole life. I started...

0:02:49.5 Chad Sowash: Jeff, you were away for 20 years. You didn't love it that much.

0:02:51.9 Jeff Taylor: No, no. You just didn't realize that I was like building up like a slingshot, right? So, you know, I left... Monster basically the average age of the users... Hi, everybody, by the way. Thank you for coming. It is so cool to start again and this feels like a great start again session and I just wanna say I'm very... I have a lot of gratitude, very appreciative people who come and wanna hear the story and my team is here, so welcome. But what... The average age of Monsters when I started our seekers was around 30.

0:03:25.8 Chad Sowash: Yeah.

0:03:26.2 Jeff Taylor: A little bit older because they were using bulletin boards, whatever. So, when I was leaving Monster, and we can talk about that, the average age of my users, a lot of them that had been with me for 20 years, was 50. So, I decided to build a social network. Mark Zuckerberg had just started Facebook or, uh, the Lookbook or whatever it was initially, and Facebook had come out and was in colleges and was starting to go to high schools. So, I decided to start a social network for baby boomers. And...

0:03:56.8 Chad Sowash: Well, before that, though, you start... You started a Monster network.

0:04:01.7 Jeff Taylor: Uh, yeah.

0:04:02.0 Chad Sowash: There was a Monster network because you had... There was a database and it seemed incredibly smart. You had this huge database...

0:04:09.5 Jeff Taylor: Yep.

0:04:09.7 Chad Sowash: Let's go ahead and start connecting people...

0:04:11.7 Jeff Taylor: Yep.

0:04:12.1 Chad Sowash: Right? But that... That didn't... That didn't quite succeed. What happened there? Because it seemed like that's where the world was moving, you already had a database of job seekers, you had a database of people who obviously could easily be connected. Why didn't that work for... For Monster?

0:04:32.0 Jeff Taylor: So, I think... I think what was interesting, we went from an idea, basically, Help wanted, the newspaper, I put the first job posting and resume of the World Wide Web. Over the next seven years, we basically migrated jobs from traditional print to online and Monster at one point probably had about 60% market share and we...

0:04:57.8 Chad Sowash: At least.

0:04:58.2 Jeff Taylor: We opened Canada. What did you say?

0:05:00.6 Chad Sowash: I said at least.

0:05:01.7 Jeff Taylor: Yeah, it might have been 70. And we opened Canada, then we opened London, we opened 19 countries in Europe, we opened a number of Asian countries, couple stories there too. And, uh, I... Up until 2000, we were basically just building and building and building. And then the dot-com bubble burst, which is an interesting discussion maybe for another topic where AI is today. And on the other side of it, Monster was profitable. And so, the board was starting to take less risks. I had a term sheet to buy LinkedIn in 2003 and I... Uh, Reid and I had a back of the envelope, back of the napkin deal, it wasn't an official term sheet, uh, but my board turned it down and so, um, I resigned. The... The network...

0:06:00.0 Chad Sowash: But why did you start Monster networking? Yeah.

0:06:02.9 Jeff Taylor: The Monster network really started in '04 and started to really get traction and actually was successful at the beginning in '07 and '08, and I wasn't there. And, um, one of the things I would never post our Monster jobs on Indeed, and, uh, I was adamant about it. And as Indeed was starting to give away free jobs, it became obvious that it could be distribution for Monster jobs. But I always thought that Indeed had 20 or 30,000 jobs and they would bring Monster's million jobs and they would say that they were bigger than Monster. I... I kinda knew that from the beginning. So, the Monster network, there were probably two levels of that. One is we did partnerships with USA Today and AOL and things like that. That was the first Monster network where we were starting to outreach into getting more and more groups that would use Monster. But...

0:06:58.2 Chad Sowash: That was more distribution and market penetration.

0:07:00.9 Jeff Taylor: Uh, and also, um, to broaden the types of users. Right? And so, market penetration...

0:07:06.3 Chad Sowash: Yeah, market penetration. Yes.

0:07:07.9 Jeff Taylor: Uh, but...

0:07:08.4 Chad Sowash: Different than the actual networking aspect of it, right? And that's the thing that... That... That really gets to me is that LinkedIn, right?

0:07:16.3 Jeff Taylor: Yep.

0:07:16.4 Chad Sowash: They... They were coming up, they were... They were this, you know, this baby that was coming up, Facebook, all of those were happening. It seemed like the market was moving that way and... And you actually had the idea with Monster networking, but it just didn't... So, are you saying because of market pressures and also really the board and focus that it pretty much imploded because they just didn't have the discipline at the time?

0:07:42.8 Jeff Taylor: So, I think what's interesting is the... LinkedIn was not, uh, pressure at the beginning...

0:07:49.9 Chad Sowash: Right.

0:07:50.0 Jeff Taylor: Like in this time period...

0:07:50.9 Chad Sowash: Oh, yeah.

0:07:51.2 Jeff Taylor: LinkedIn was a professional network, started with Reid's friends, a few thousand people and it was a non-issue and it did not have jobs, and I... I would... I... I had a sense... I had a two-legged stool. And, um, um, around your question, but I had a problem because 65% of my revenue was job postings, about 30% of my revenue was the resume database which was a hot product and I loved it. But every other thing we tried was only like 5 or 6 or 7% of revenue. And as a public company, it was my job as a CEO to try to go find a credible third leg of the stool. And I'm like... So, I tried to build Monster networking and what I ended up doing was gonna LinkedIn and saying, I like your product way better than mine and I'm not able to get lift in this idea that I had. And so, we had the agreement. My board basically said, we're so profitable... There's some really amazing lessons right here in my life. The board said we're so profitable that it just doesn't make any sense if we had bought LinkedIn, term sheet, $304 million, I just want you to like stare at that for one second and we had about 800 million in cash. So, the health of our business is also a reflection kind of from that time. Right? But it would have been a... What's called a dilutive deal which means that our... Because LinkedIn was losing a lot of money, that it would have taken our stock down in theory because we were doing an acquisition, uh, through a pooling of interest. I'm sorry, these are sort of technical terms. We would have bought it with Monster stock and some cash and, uh, the problem was that there was a... Um, a thought that our stock would tank because LinkedIn really wasn't a recognized thing as it is today. I thought it was the third leg of the stool. What do you guys think?

0:09:47.4 Chad Sowash: I don't think they have to think because they're... Them and Indeed are really the winners right now.

0:09:50.0 Jeff Taylor: Well... But it's so... It's so interesting to be a Monday morning quarterback about it I'm telling you, you know, 20 years later. Uh, but I should have fought so hard right then, right? And I feel like I... One of my failings in my career was I had an hour and a half meeting where I could have changed the trajectory. It's funny, my wife told me I would have fucked it up. All right, I got the... I got... Because what would I have done if I'd bought LinkedIn? You guys know me. I would have renamed it Monster. Right?

0:10:20.9 Chad Sowash: Monster. Yes. It would have been Monster something.

0:10:22.7 Jeff Taylor: And... And so, she's probably not wrong. And what is... What is cool... Is this interesting? I'm sorry, this is like... This is the history of the history. This is the Jurassic period of... That kind of started us out. But, I mean, I could maybe say that if I hadn't done this, you know, like this whole industry, everyone in this room is in the digital world of employment that, you know, we started awkwardly with nobody liking our idea. Calling it Monster was absolutely out of the question. It's funny, I'm talking about my wife, but my wife said she wouldn't leave the house with me if I called it Monster. My employees said it was like the monster under the bed. You know, there was... That was rough going at the beginning. And my biggest client said, not only do I not like the name, but no one will look for a job during the day while they're at work. And that has obviously, uh...

0:11:16.2 Chad Sowash: Porn. Yeah, porn. We know. We get it.

0:11:18.0 Jeff Taylor: Yeah.

0:11:18.2 Chad Sowash: Uh, so was that... Do you think that was like the biggest point that you would change during your time at Monster? Because again, Monday morning quarterback and go back and really dissect a lot of those decisions that you were able to make in that leadership position. What would be that one decision that you would... You would definitely make different?

0:11:38.9 Jeff Taylor: So, I resigned because of that decision. Um, there were really two decisions right at that time. I was starting to say that it didn't make sense to buy a nursing job in North Dakota for, I don't know, $275, whatever it was at that time and also a nursing job in New York City was the same price, right? So, I had the idea that we could have a bidding model that would sit on top of the traditional thing so we could start to actually profit in some, uh, markets and be more affordable to get more jobs in other markets.

0:12:09.9 Chad Sowash: Wasn't Chief Monster a bidding process?

0:12:11.8 Jeff Taylor: Yeah, it was. Yeah.

0:12:12.8 Chad Sowash: Yeah. So, you would... So, was that... Was that... Were you taking the lessons of that and how... I mean, because Chief Monster, obviously it died. So, wouldn't see it as a success. Were you taking that... The lessons from that and saying, okay, maybe this won't work just yet?

0:12:29.8 Jeff Taylor: Well, so you gotta figure... I haven't read my LinkedIn, I'm always too early, but whatever way is there, right? You know, so if you're gonna be an idea generator, you've gotta be early. And the idea of intern to CEO was always my, my dream. Um, no... No babies, no dead people. That was... I wanted to do this middle area of the market and I didn't have enough executives. And so, Chief Monster was just a way to start to expand and more deliberately go after C-level jobs.

0:13:04.0 Chad Sowash: It was market penetration for the top of the...

0:13:06.1 Jeff Taylor: That's right.

0:13:06.7 Chad Sowash: For the top... For the executives. But...

0:13:07.8 Jeff Taylor: And then I also did...

0:13:08.8 Chad Sowash: The bidding piece, that's the thing that... Because you're just talking about that. So me... For me, that is interesting because programmatic is a pretty goddamn big deal right now. Right?

0:13:17.0 Jeff Taylor: Right.

0:13:17.2 Chad Sowash: So, you were early.

0:13:18.8 Jeff Taylor: Right.

0:13:19.0 Chad Sowash: You were early. What... What happened with that? Because Chief Monster, I remember being pitched because I had to pitch it. What was... What was the... The fatal flaw there? What do you think?

0:13:30.0 Jeff Taylor: So... So, I would say I had this basic idea that if you had a developer that a developer could put themselves out there, uh, where there's a little bit of mix between Monster networking and Chief Monster here. Right?

0:13:42.6 Chad Sowash: Yeah. Yeah.

0:13:43.1 Jeff Taylor: But I had the idea from bidding that... That a full-stack developer in today's language could put themselves out there and... And people could bid on that person. And there was the kind of slavery and... And the idea that, um, it was, um... You were trying to control a marketplace on a human being. And so, I would say that the pushback on the bidding model in that thing was that, uh, it just had never been done... Anything like that had never been done before.

0:14:10.9 Chad Sowash: Right.

0:14:10.8 Jeff Taylor: So, that was kind of where the challenge was.

0:14:12.8 Chad Sowash: Okay. So, going... Going a little bit further in and you were already gone and the market collapsed in 2008...

0:14:21.0 Jeff Taylor: Right.

0:14:21.5 Chad Sowash: And then we have a new winner coming out of the other side being Indeed. You being out at that point, watching things happen, and Monster wasn't dead, right? It was just losing traction quick. It was literally becoming the Blockbuster of our space. How did you feel? What did you see? And at that point, where... Is that where really the... The gears started turning?

0:14:45.2 Jeff Taylor: So now, you're asking me to make decisions for a company that I had sold all my stock in. Right? You know...

0:14:53.3 Chad Sowash: No, I'm talking about you. So, I'm talking about you and being able to look at this new thing like from the outside because you're on the outside looking in.

0:14:58.8 Jeff Taylor: I got it. I got it. Right. But you're asking me to call shots on... On a CEO that, uh, was not me now in that scenario, right? And so, um, I'm a big believer in you have to make sure you don't fall in love with your own shit and that you have to break it and if you don't break it in the middle of the night when nobody's looking, then someone else is gonna break it. And so, I was... I focused a lot more really talking about the culture of Monster. How many people here worked at Monster? Right? Uh, what was the culture like at Monster? Best job ever is sort of like... So, I focused on the people and I focused on the brand. And so, we did the Olympics, we did Super Bowl commercials. Like... I focused on what I thought were the big swaths that need to be done. Once I left... Oh, I also... I spent $200 million marketing to job seekers and I spent $20,000 marketing to human resources. And so, I... I always felt that if you marketed to the job seekers, that the HR people would see that. And so, my entire motion was to be the place to go and work, uh, as a employer, as a leader and the place to go to find your jobs. And what I wanted HR people to say is I was doing my job by creating that. Right?

0:16:22.9 Chad Sowash: So, right into that, best Super Bowl commercial ever. Right? Because that to me is exactly what you're just... You were just... That's the demonstration of what you're just talking about.

0:16:33.8 Jeff Taylor: Right.

0:16:34.0 Chad Sowash: Doing Super Bowl commercials isn't going after HR. That's not targeted, that is going after the job seeker. It's major high-level brand...

0:16:41.8 Jeff Taylor: Yeah.

0:16:42.2 Chad Sowash: That... That was amazing. Talk to me about that... That process. Obviously, I was there during that launch. It was really exciting for all of us. I mean, the blimps, all the other fun stuff, but talk about that just behind the scenes.

0:16:56.8 Jeff Taylor: So, there's... There's so many levels of this. One is, you're right, I was targeting job seekers, right? And I knew we had a model that worked. Some of you have models that work right now, you know when it works and you know when you have to press the accelerator. And we were right there and we had only spent about $3 million on marketing in 1998 and 1999 in 90 seconds, I spent $2.7 million. I spent my entire year before this budget, we weren't really doing consumer advertising yet.

0:17:30.9 Chad Sowash: And the tech did not implode, by the way.

0:17:33.0 Jeff Taylor: Uh, no. we actually... We built for it. Uh, we had very good tech, uh, and, uh, so decided to go in the Super Bowl is really interesting. It's the only show of the entire year where people say, shhh, shhh, shhh, the game is on and then people say, shhh, shhh, the ads are on. It's really the only show that you watch the ads. And we'll come back to this, but you wanna laugh and, uh, so you don't know when to pee when you watch the Super Bowl is really what it comes down to. And so, the... Uh, the thing for me was, okay, we have to do an ad and I wanna be there. What I completely underestimated was we probably got $10 million worth of coverage because we were first dot com that was going on the Super Bowl. And so, even before the game, I probably already paid for it. Uh, we had two spots in game and we had one spot in pregame. And the way you found out... So, the ads ran. You guys know this commercial, right? When I grow up, I wanna file all day, I wanna have a brown nose. Yes or no, sir. Anything for a raise, sir. I like the last vignette. When I grow up, I wanna be forced into early retirement, which is sort of our lives right now. And, um, what's interesting about this is that our commercial was ironic. Uh, and you've probably heard this story. I'm sorry for those that have heard. And, uh, so, nobody laughed. And so, the next day, the way you found out how your Super Bowl commercial did was you went to a USA Today full page adometer people that typed in and said, good ad, bad ad, good ad, bad ad. I was the fourth worst ranked commercial on the Super Bowl because we were ironic and people are confused. And irony in a Super Bowl is just an odd approach. But, uh, the... Uh, some of the critics really liked it and some of the value came in the Today Show and some of the banter afterwards. But... But our traffic grew... I was... I was trying to go back and look like 700%, uh, and our service did not go down. And that was when Monster, I'd say, probably hit the big stage. And we had already bought, uh, our first company in Europe, maybe second company and that propelled us to go be able to buy more companies, and that kept the flywheel going of growing the original Monster business.

0:19:50.0 Chad Sowash: Gotcha. So, you're... You're out of Monster, you're doing your own thing. When did you... When did you get the inkling that you wanted to come back? You say it's kinda like been this long journey...

0:20:00.8 Jeff Taylor: Right.

0:20:01.0 Chad Sowash: When did it happen? What was the point?

0:20:03.0 Jeff Taylor: So, I still don't know what the point is. Like, you're... You're... You're challenging me on this. I'm figuring that out. But ChatGPT came out, I was a pretty early user I think around maybe May of 2023 I started using it. And I started doing things like I was a recruiter very early on in ChatGPT and I'm like, okay, holy shit, like this... This is the first time I've got a product that will... I can ingest my resume and it understands it and it starts to make suggestions to me and I'm like, okay, I think the time... I... I... People have been saying to me, start another company, do this again and I just hadn't had the timing where I thought it was right and also didn't have the idea. And I started using ChatGPT, and this sounds a little like a commercial now, like it doesn't seem quite real, but I decided right then in the summer of 2023 that I was gonna come back into the business. And then I flew to Phoenix. I... I rode in somebody else's car, it was a Turo, stayed in somebody else's house. Obviously, someone else did my grocery shopping because there were six of us in a house and we were at a conference and I came back from that and that was in November of 2024 and... I'm sorry, November of 2023. And I basically said, okay, I think the disruption with the technology and I did an audit of the top 10 job boards and LinkedIn. I looked at everyone is still using our patents, my patents that I got for the buy or sell marketplace and for resumes on a paywall. There were CPC and CPA and there were, uh, other twists but generally it was the same. And so, I kinda like said, okay, like I think I can go back into this. And that's where the idea for Boomband came from.

0:21:51.8 Chad Sowash: So, back in the Monster days there... There... It wasn't easy to start a job board. You had to have developers to build a job board. Today, we've got job boards in boxes, right? So, back then, you were early... You were... You were there, you were the first guy. Right? You were...

0:22:06.9 Jeff Taylor: Well, I don't even know what you're talking about. It wasn't easy to start a job board, there was no such thing as a job board.

0:22:11.8 Chad Sowash: That's what I mean. It wasn't easy.

0:22:12.0 Jeff Taylor: The reason why it's called the job board is because we named our product the Monster Board and... And the board name of Monster actually stuck for other people's boards. Right?

0:22:22.2 Chad Sowash: Right, the forums.

0:22:22.3 Jeff Taylor: But yes, it was not easy.

0:22:23.9 Chad Sowash: So, it was not easy.

0:22:25.0 Jeff Taylor: No.

0:22:25.4 Chad Sowash: Right?

0:22:25.7 Jeff Taylor: So, we built the first board system...

0:22:27.0 Chad Sowash: But you... But you were early.

0:22:28.9 Jeff Taylor: Yeah. I mean, there were... There were 195 websites in the world.

0:22:32.8 Chad Sowash: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, competition-wise, no, not as much competition. Although, the newspaper, you were sucking dollars out of the newspaper traditional kind of... Traditional kind of dollars into the internet.

0:22:44.9 Jeff Taylor: Yeah, don't underestimate. These were some of the most powerful companies in the world that I was competing against. I got invited to speak at the Newspaper Advertising Association of America and they introduced me as the number one category killer of all time in the newspaper industry. That was the way they introduced me to go talk to 800 people. And so, yeah.

0:23:04.5 Chad Sowash: They didn't throw tomatoes?

0:23:07.7 Jeff Taylor: Uh, so... So, yeah, things were... Were different. But I would say right now it's like, okay, you're gonna build a company, you need to build a brand, uh, you need to have an idea, you need to get people around you excited about that idea, uh, and you need to deploy and solve a problem in a marketplace. There is no difference from 1994 to 2025.

0:23:29.7 Chad Sowash: It's a hell of a lot more noisy.

0:23:32.6 Jeff Taylor: Well, so noise is all relative. It was extremely noisy back then and I was making no noise. Right? Okay, it's extremely noisy... Noisy now and I'm still making no noise. Like, I'm just starting. People don't know what Boomband is. Do you wanna know why I named it Boomband? So, the Dr. Seuss book, Oh, The Places You'll Go... I love this book, by the way. Do you know this book? At the end of this book, it says, don't go to the waiting place, go where the Boombands are playing. And I always got to that spot in the book and I'm like, yes, that's where I wanna go, that's my life, that's my career and I love the joy. And I don't know what happened, but all the power is now sitting in the HR stack and there is no joy. You've got a queue line that's a frigging mile long of applicants and every recruiter is like, this is the worst time ever for what that queue line looks like, like it's really bad. So... So, part of me in starting Monster was to find the joy in the disruption and then push it. And that's what I'm gonna do again.

0:24:39.3 Chad Sowash: But you think competition is the same.

0:24:43.0 Jeff Taylor: No, I didn't say it was the same.

0:24:44.1 Chad Sowash: Okay. Okay.

0:24:44.9 Jeff Taylor: I...

0:24:45.9 Chad Sowash: It was noisy before but...

0:24:46.9 Jeff Taylor: There's... There's a cool expression. Uh, it's like when people say that history repeats itself, I like the expression that it rhymes.

0:24:53.2 Chad Sowash: It rhymes, yeah.

0:24:55.0 Jeff Taylor: I think that's really good. Right? And there's a lot of rhyming. If you look at 1994, the internet was just getting huge. It's funny, I was in the Shaker booth and I listen in Station 2 and it says, World Wide Web starts in 1989. Well, actually it didn't because the internet was starting to be popular in '89 but the...

0:25:15.1 Chad Sowash: DARPA.

0:25:15.8 Jeff Taylor: Uh, but the web, uh, the browser was in 1994. At the same time, email, Hotmail was free. So, you had... Um, you had a rocket ship and you had the ability to get on it for free. Right? And then H1B visas got approved in 1992. So, all of a sudden, you could hire outside of your region. The newspaper tools were failing. I don't know, a resume on linen paper that you licked an envelope and sent off to a company. I'm sorry, it was... It was not good. And so, the...

0:25:46.3 Chad Sowash: Faxing.

0:25:46.5 Jeff Taylor: The rhyming... The rhyming of right now is, yes, there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of players out here, there's amazing things. I've been going to all the booths and talking to people and I've been going to lots of the conferences, and I think that, uh, the interesting thing is that there's a lot more focus on what's happening inside the stack and I see an opportunity to build a talent graph and to build a marketplace similar to the vision that I had even in the noise.

0:26:15.3 Chad Sowash: So, you had mentioned it earlier, the web explosion. Right? The bubble bursting.

0:26:22.1 Jeff Taylor: Yep.

0:26:23.8 Chad Sowash: We're hearing a lot about the same happening with AI. What are your thoughts around that?

0:26:28.0 Jeff Taylor: So...

0:26:28.2 Chad Sowash: Especially getting into the space in building as a startup.

0:26:31.0 Jeff Taylor: So, ChatGPT, uh, I... I just have been doing some parallel checks. Right? And so, ChatGPT, a million people in the first week. Uh, I think it was like five million people in the first couple of weeks and 100 million people in the first two months. Right? And then if you look, the growth rate is actually slowing a little bit because it went from 100 million to around 400 million, I think, at the end of last year and I think it's at about 800 million million right now. I think I may have skipped one... One metric. And so, the growth of ChatGPT and the growth of the browser and the web together, they have similar pathways. And I think that because the businesses are different, the most important thing to look at is the pathways and look at the marketplace. And so, I think what you're gonna see is you've got a battle right now that's similar to the Lycos, AltaVista, uh, I don't know, Yahoo and Google battle. I think that battle is gonna go on now. I don't know how many of you use anything but ChatGPT. You use Grok, you use Claude. I love Claude, by the way, if you haven't used it. Right? So, I think we're gonna see this turf war and you know how everyone is making these hyperbolic statements and it's all about their raises and who's gonna raise the next trillion dollars, whatever. I think that battle's gonna continue, my prediction is for the next like two years. So, I'm thinking that the bubble, we're about it like the 1997, 1998, probably 1997 in the dot-com bubble... Bubble. But they were starting to talk about it, but it wasn't really until Amazon dot bomb in about mid 2000 that you really saw the bubble burst. And you know, you might argue that that AI is more transformative, the internet was something to ride and distribution. AI is actually reinventing everything. You might argue that the... The bubble won't even look the same, but you gotta figure that there's this insular thing that they're talking about where every company is doing companies with other companies and there's a lot of kinda money that's trading hands. But the thing is, these are the strategic kinda partnerships. When you start looking at some of the development tools that are going in ChatGPT, I don't know if you saw you know ChatGPT starting to actually do Zillow and do these other things. All this is really cool and it's a ride that we're all on. I hope you're on the ride. I actually don't believe the people that are saying, oh, it's overhyped and don't worry about it and it's not coming after my job. I would just ignore all that. I would say it's coming after my job and I have to do something about it and own it and learn it. I am a huge believer in actually being on the front side of that wave because right now they're talking about AI slop, but the AI slop is one of the... Gonna be one of the fastest things to fix. Everything is 10 times faster than, you know, kinda past explosions in the way we looked at the internet.

0:29:33.8 Chad Sowash: Yeah. So, I have from a very good source that you actually had Boomband, not the name, but the actual product process on a whiteboard at Monster at one time.

0:29:48.0 Jeff Taylor: Yeah. So... So, I believe that resumes should be our people first of all and one copy always in distribution, easy to change. I don't really understand the kind of, um, hostage data model that happens in our world right now. And the idea that I'm here at this conference and, uh, I'm with Sean and I'm gonna take a picture in five minutes and I wanna post that. My life is changing just being on stage with you right now, my resume is still stuck in some company from a year and a half ago and it's being evaluated or not because some recruiters don't like to look at their applicants that are are in their pools. But I see this transformation happening and I'm... I'm really excited about this side of the marketplace and how we're gonna build this out. So, that's one of my challenges, this idea of one copy always in distribution, easy to change.

0:30:39.8 Chad Sowash: Right before we go to Q&A, my last question, you talked about browsers, I think, um, that is very poignant with regard to Google...

0:30:50.0 Jeff Taylor: Yep.

0:30:50.4 Chad Sowash: Putting Gemini into Chrome. They don't have to divest in Chrome now, they can keep it.

0:30:55.9 Jeff Taylor: Yep.

0:30:56.0 Chad Sowash: You also have Comet that's... That's coming out. Right? Perplexity is creating Comet.

0:31:00.7 Jeff Taylor: Yep.

0:31:01.0 Chad Sowash: Do you think that the browser could prospectively bypass the app or even a lot of what's happening on the web? Google's not... The way that the Google search of yesteryear is going away entirely. How do you think the browser is going to affect our businesses, especially startups?

0:31:21.1 Jeff Taylor: So, I like the idea of Chrome extensions and the idea of being able to kind of track movement and to be able to serve ads through that process. I like the idea of being able to manage your career so that you could get feeds from different things through that. I think the biggest challenge overall is at Boomband, we're mapping the entire labor market right now. So, we're mapping 175 million people in the United States States, building a... Kinda a dossier, we call it unclaimed dossier for all 175 million and we've also ingested 10 years of all the companies' job postings. And so, we're gonna start to do some forecasting on job postings. We were talking about this on the phone and... And I... I'm hoping to get it 65 to 70% right on both sides and then I'm building an arena for matching. So, if I go to your specific question, I think one of the problems we're having right now is yes, you can use ChatGPT and you'd say, okay, go find me somebody that was at a, you know, series B company as the head of marketing and do basically what you're seeing out here in demos. I think the reality is it's not finding or looking at the whole marketplace and my... My theory is that the whole marketplace should be transparent and you should have access to it and you have the ability to actually go and search into that to find the most qualified people.

0:32:40.9 Chad Sowash: Literally workforce intelligence on steroids compared to what we've been...

0:32:43.9 Jeff Taylor: Yeah, so all of the... The kinda bolt on tools are not looking at the whole marketplace, they're looking at whatever they can find...

0:32:52.0 Chad Sowash: Segments.

0:32:52.3 Jeff Taylor: And I... I did a post on like the ant farm theory and you know, the idea that you actually... An ant can find a piece of chicken then all of a sudden there's a thousand ants on that piece of chicken. You know, you see this, right? And I love this... This concept of like what happens is the reinforcement learning of AI and you have a applicant that's really hot, the system says, okay, that's a good applicant and starts pushing people toward that person. And so, I think we're gonna limit the exposure, the fairness factor. Once you do that, some people are gonna get isolated and get burned out right away and other people aren't gonna get found. I love the idea of getting found, creating a randomized engine for people that are close in qualifications so that we actually distribute the wealth. And so, I've got some ideas in this new arena.

0:33:42.3 Chad Sowash: All right, questions anybody? Come on, Ethan, give me a break. You know you wanna...

0:33:47.0 S?: There you go.

0:33:47.8 Jeff Taylor: Yeah, how about no mic, I'll just repeat it. Go faster.

0:33:52.8 S?: All right, so you talked about Zillow and now Walmart's gonna be directly selling in ChatGPT. I'm on the vendor exhibitor side as well but as I look at the future of the business, why would anybody go to Boomband or anything I'm building if everything can happen and... And ChatGPT becomes an operating system and a browser. To your point, why do we need all these new apps? They have $300 billion in value to out-build you, me or anybody else in the room. So...

0:34:24.7 Jeff Taylor: All right.

0:34:24.8 S?: Why do we need Boomband.

0:34:26.0 Chad Sowash: We're gonna have a bunch of vendors on suicide watch, Ethan. Thanks.

0:34:28.9 Jeff Taylor: Well, well... So... So, I think what you're saying is the values in Walmart are the values in Zillow, right? And that's why they're being sucked in. So, you're gonna still have to create value, but AI is basically a distribution engine and it has embeddings. So, it can actually do a better job of matching people. So, I can... I can imagine just like I was at AOL powering their career site, that Boomband could be powering its own ChatGPT. So, like, I... I think that that is the challenge right now. That's the unknown. I... I don't claim to have the answers here, but I know you gotta be in it and you have to have something great. And so, what are you gonna say? I guess I might as well not build something great and, you know, I'll just let it happen, right? That's fine. That's not what we're gonna do.

0:35:16.0 Chad Sowash: All right, who else? No?

0:35:17.8 S?: We... We got next speaker in six minutes, so we gotta turn.

0:35:20.0 Chad Sowash: Six minutes?

0:35:20.9 Jeff Taylor: Yeah, I'll... I would love to talk to people out here.

0:35:24.0 Chad Sowash: Yeah. Where are you at, Jeff? You're gonna be...

0:35:26.0 Jeff Taylor: I... I'm... I'll just come right out in this area right here and talk to people and thank you for coming and saying hello.

0:35:30.7 Chad Sowash: Round of applause, guys.