Pod Insights The Chad & Cheese Podcast Monster in the Making: Jeff Taylor, Big Bets and Next Boom About this episode Before job boards were obvious, before résumés were broken beyond repair, and before “AI in recruiting” was a buzzword, Jeff Taylor was already there building Monster from a dream, a notebook, and a whole lot of pushback.
In this special live conversation, Jeff sits down with Joel Cheesman to walk through the real Monster story: the early rejections, the $4M sale that could’ve been billions, the Super Bowl gamble everyone said was a mistake, the LinkedIn deal that never was, and why résumés and job postings are fundamentally failing today.
From DJ booths to dot-com booms, from getting humbled by Facebook to getting rebuilt at Bridgewater, Jeff explains why he’s back and why BoomBand might be his most ambitious swing yet.
Big ideas. Bigger regrets. Zero nostalgia. And one founder who’s still swinging for the fences.
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1:19 Speaker 01 Start using Winston today, or I guess you can stick with...
1:25 Speaker 02 Now we return you to our regular scheduled program in progress.
1:30 Speaker 00 Hey guys, it's Cheese. Last year when ERE asked me to come on stage and interview somebody, I instantly thought of Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster and a few other things, as well as the new founder behind startup Boomband. When I was coming up in the 90s and Jeff was at Monster, he was sort of this mythical figure, a real passionate guy. In regards to his product, the Monster brand was pretty fun and out there. And as I've gotten to know Jeff over the last couple of years, he's a really, really interesting guy.
2:09 Speaker 00 And I think that his story is one that is of interest as well as an archive for the industry and historically relevant to what's even going on today. So I sat down with Jeff at the ERE conference in San Diego, fall of 25. And this is what came out of it. I hope you enjoy it.
2:35 Speaker 00 So I do want to give a little bit of my own intro for you, Jeff. I started the industry in the late 90s.
2:42 Speaker 03 Thank you for staying to the end of the day.
2:45 Speaker 00 There's karaoke. Don't give them too much credit. Don't give them too much credit. There's a lot to look forward to. But I was a 20 something in the 90s in the industry. And you were a bit of a Sasquatch yeti character, almost larger than life and mythological. So the fact that I'm on stage with you today doing this interview is pretty surreal for me. But I appreciate you. And I want to tell your story, basically. We're going to do the good, the bad, the ugly. I know you like to talk and I'm going to 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. I as well.
3:28 Speaker 00 I don't know much about your formative years. And this isn't a tell me about your mother situation. But I do want to know what your childhood was like. 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?
3:50 Speaker 03 All right, just one second before.
3:55 Speaker 03 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 And you still decided to come in the industry again. I want you to know that you guys taught me and kind of brought me up to speed, gave me the things I needed to research and I have equal respect and I 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 it's great. So, all right. Step back.
4:38 Speaker 03 I'm a son of a preacher who couldn't keep a church. My first memory, 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. They were well-educated and let me, set me free. I was ADHD kid, I was in trouble, not in a bad way. I just couldn't, didn't learn the way traditional people learn and I think that's probably still true today. I moved to a town that was pretty affluent.
5:20 Speaker 03 My dad got a job 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 town called Needham, Mass. No friends, 7th grade. And I spent my junior high and high school years in the laws of the jungle blending in to avoid being eaten. Did not have a lot of friends, had a nice little friendship group, didn't really play sports. And then I went to UMass and I decided I was going to be different and 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 going to stand
6:04 Speaker 03 And out in college, I did those things and I forgot to go to class. And so after five and a half years at UMass and DJing full time 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 my degree. So that's my kind of early childhood and I just didn't learn in the traditional way and I think it's 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.
6:49 Speaker 00 So up until Monster, your education upbringing, between Monster and sort of getting that you were DJing, when did you find your way into the recruiting industry?
7:00 Speaker 03 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, 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 I got three job offers. And the one I liked, he said, I know you don't know anything about computers per se, but why don't you place programmer analyst? And so my first job was with a phone book and I was at a company called Search and
7:37 Speaker 03 I placed programmers. And I started out just mapping 128 and 495, all the mainframes. And I'm, this is Jurassic period here right now.
7:49 Speaker 00 That's right.
7:50 Speaker 03 And I had some sightlines into if I could map all the developers on 128 and 495, then I could start moving them around. And that is a theme that I'm still working on right now. So that was, I went from really struggling as a recruiter to be in the top bill or in my office. I really liked the advertising. We would take five, six, seven job offers. Openings, merge them all into one job posting. Sort of not great, I suppose. We would place that in the Boston Globe and then I would take all the responses from that. And I would put those out into potentially making placements. I decided I liked the advertising even more than I liked recruiting.
8:32 Speaker 03 And so I went and started at a company called J W G Associates. Anybody from Boston?
8:39 Speaker 03 And I started at a company called J W G Associates. I took him from eight employees to a hundred and most of the people reported to me. And he wouldn't share any ownership in the company. So I left and I started my first name company, which was called Adion. And it was ads is what we did and ion was a particle of energy. And so that was my first foray into naming. Not calling it Taylor Advertising because I decided I'd have other salespeople and I didn't want them to say, where's Taylor? And so I had some successes with that. A hot recruitment agency in Boston, I had three or 400 clients. High tech biotech healthcare.
9:18 Speaker 00 So around 1993, you have what you called a monster idea.
9:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:22 Speaker 00 Take us back to the birth of Monster.
9:24 Speaker 03 So in my ad agency, 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 then I, my dad was at Yamas 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 I started researching bulletin boards. One of my biggest clients in the ad agency, I placed help wanted ads. I did brochures, I did, I don't know, you know, billboards and subway advertising.
10:09 Speaker 03 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, I guess, mid 1993.
10:24 Speaker 03 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. And I have a pad next to my bed. I wrote down that idea on the pad. And then I got nervous that I wouldn't be able to read my writing, which sometimes happens when I 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. Two of them were the buyer seller marketplace and resumes behind a paywall. And that was the beginning of a process where I was introducing a brand new idea.
11:09 Speaker 00 So talk about the first clients that you're pitching this idea to of putting jobs on this thing called the Internet.
11:17 Speaker 03 OK, so some of these stories are known. Is this interesting, just to go all the way back? So I had a client, Wealthly Communications. It was a hot company. And I was very good friends with the VP of HR. And he basically heard my idea. And he said, "Your idea is 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.
12:00 Speaker 03 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 my employees said it was like the monster under the bed. And the challenge that I had in that early day was, you know, you have an idea, you think you're going to have all this support. I really had none. And that was the thing that when you go back and rewrite history, it's like, oh yeah, yeah. Big success and, you know, change the industry. But at the beginning, it was, it was very, very hard.
12:37 Speaker 00 I think there's a lot of pushback with every new idea.
12:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:40 Speaker 00 Did you, did you own monster.com at this point? Or was it just the monster board?
12:44 Speaker 03 I did.
12:44 Speaker 00 Or you owned both?
12:45 Speaker 03 No, actually, I owned both. And in fact, the monster board was our name. Monster.com was our address.
12:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:52 Speaker 03 Right from the beginning, right from the get. So when I registered, when I started, when I, I was building a bulletin board system. And I realized that had no graphics. And I had drawn these monsters and I had one of my designers drawing the, the Trumpasaurus monster that we know today. And you couldn't put, couldn't put any graphics on the, on a bulletin board system. And so I had an opportunity. Mark Andreessen was at the University of Illinois as a grad student. And he was building this thing called Mozilla. And he's kind of said, I copied your monsters to create this thing called Mozilla. And, cause I already had an article out on our bulletin board system.
13:32 Speaker 03 And he said, I have a browser and it started getting a little bit of attention. 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 world wide web. And so there were 200 websites, 197 websites in the world when I 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?
14:18 Speaker 00 Well, we'll get to some maybe bad timing here in a second. Yeah. So 95-ish, a little company called TMP comes calling.
14:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:29 Speaker 00 And offers to buy the site.
14:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, actually.
14:32 Speaker 00 Let's talk about that.
14:34 Speaker 03 They came in 1994 and they wanted my ad agency and I was cooking Monster. And I was like, no way. Like, I'm just, I'm not gonna sell. TMP, most of you probably know TMP. 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 about two months after I said, no, my board, I had seven angel investors, they were my board, and they said, you have to shut down this Monster closet thing that you're
15:18 Speaker 03 doing. And 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 it. You know, it's like just this bad thing. And then Andy came back calling again. Andy McKelvey was the guy that ran TMP Worldwide. And he said, okay, I'll give you more money. And so he gave me a lot more money for my ad agency offer. And I said, I have this Monster thing and the only way I will sell, you just gotta hear this, right?
15:59 Speaker 03 The only way I will sell Adion to you is if you buy Monster. So he said, okay, I'll buy Monster, but we're gonna change the name. And I said, "The whole deal's off." And so, this is this thing where you start digging in. And 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, 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.
16:42 Speaker 03 I need to run whatever this Monster plus whatever you have a TMP in the Internet. And I also need another server." So he said, "Okay, we'll keep the name, buy two servers." And I said, "Oh, and I forgot, if we go public, I need you to give me a million dollars."
17:04 Speaker 03 Okay, so he agreed to all that. And a year later, we went public.
17:09 Speaker 00 What was the price tag again?
17:11 Speaker 03 Which price tag?
17:13 Speaker 00 He bought all the...
17:14 Speaker 03 They bought all, let's call all in four million dollars.
17:19 Speaker 00 Okay, we'll come back to that in a second. So he buys this thing.
17:23 Speaker 03 Now, there's not one Internet millionaire right now. When I started Monster, there was no Yahoo, there was no Amazon. I could have bought coke.com, nike.com. Like, you have to like, close your eyes and say, "Okay, you have an idea 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 four million dollars for that.'" What would you do? Especially when your investors are saying, "Shut it down."
17:52 Speaker 00 You're in your 30s.
17:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'm 38. I started it at 35, 36.
18:02 Speaker 00 Okay. So, the Internet takes off.
18:07 Speaker 00 95, let's call it 99, which, did you see that coming? Or was that a surprise to you?
18:12 Speaker 03 Oh, no, no, I saw that coming.
18:13 Speaker 00 You totally saw it. So, Crew Mosaic comes along.
18:16 Speaker 03 And, Crew Mosaic started two months, two months after me. OCC started at the same time I did with the bulletin board. They had a threaded discussion out in the Midwest. And you had, I don't know, Headhunter.net, I think, came in about a year, year and a half later. Hot Jobs was two and a half years.
18:35 Speaker 00 Let's jump to, let's jump to 99 and you make, I think, your first acquisition in OCC.
18:42 Speaker 03 Uh, nope.
18:43 Speaker 00 First major acquisition, I guess.
18:45 Speaker 03 So, so when Andy bought me, I, I basically said, okay, I, I think we should do some of what you've been doing in buying recruitment agencies. I think we should go buy a couple of other recruitment agencies. And I think we should buy a little company out in the Midwest called OCC. And what was crazy is Andy went and bought it and didn't tell me. I don't think that's out there. And so, Bill Warren, who was also an amazing innovator in our space, is running OCC. And Monster and OCC together probably have 80% market share. This was a crazy, what the market share we had. And then we're going.
19:26 Speaker 00 We were running this for a second. Jassy buys this company from under your nose to, to add it. Cause OCC became sort of the technology backbone, as I remember. So, what, what is that conversation like when he comes in and says, oh, by the way, we just bought it?
19:41 Speaker 03 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, we actually own OCC. Because it was in the, it was in the papers to go public. And, which was awesome. It was great because I, 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, I don't know what this would feel like right now. This would be like the equivalent of if two of the big AI, early recruiting players got together and nobody knew they were together. It's kind of what. It would feel like and then 99 we were starting to grow and grow fast.
20:26 Speaker 00 As was the Internet.
20:27 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
20:29 Speaker 00 A lot of the people out there weren't around in 99 to remember it. Talk about the dot com boom of 99, what the world was like, the
20:38 Speaker 03 Yeah.
20:38 Speaker 00 Just the optimism and
20:40 Speaker 03 So, 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 mean, selling it, posting jobs and we needed to go to companies and say, look, we want all your jobs. And people say, well, we're, we're posting them in the newspaper and I would say, okay, and also online. And one of the advantages I had early on was, and, and I don't have any regrets about selling to T M P, by the way. The opportunity that I had to have those 13 or 15 recruitment agencies all adding Monster. So as companies would come in, post their jobs in the newspaper, we were adding Monster for $75.
21:23 Speaker 03 That was early distribution that I wouldn't have had otherwise, which gave a big unfair advantage, I think, just in the U.S. marketplace. And so 1999 came around, the Internet is now growing fast. Companies are recognizing that this is going to 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. It's a stat from 1998, 1999 and 2000, and it's talking about the percentage of
21:59 Speaker 03 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.
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23:02 Speaker 03 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 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, 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.
23:38 Speaker 00 So you said you don't regret selling, but around 99, you know, Mark Cuban selling broadcasts for a billion dollars. I mean, like, big money is flowing.
23:46 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
23:47 Speaker 00 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?
23:54 Speaker 03 So, you know what's funny? I would not be sitting here right now. I would have, I'd be on Shark Tank or something, probably. But I have had this joy in this industry 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, in each country, I would go buy the company that copied Monster. And then I would go in and meet with their employees and tell them we 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.
24:39 Speaker 03 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 are doing and I just couldn't wait to meet all of you. And I have a passion for this industry that is second to none.
25:00 Speaker 00 I've never met your dad, but I'm guessing as an old hippie, he would love that answer, that you found peace in that decision. So 99 comes around, a lot more competition is popping up. The internet's a big deal. I can speak for my period at the time, 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.
25:30 Speaker 03 So I made a decision to merge OCC and the Monster Board and to rename the company Monster.com, which was our web address, and to go on the Super Bowl. And that was very popular from my side, from the indie side of OCC, that was not popular. But what was important is that we had, you mentioned this, the tech team at OCC had a couple of crackerjack developers. And so I said, let's build a new version of Monster that doesn't exist and let's run
26:12 Speaker 03 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 advertised on the Super Bowl. You guys remember our Super Bowl spot?
26:24 Speaker 00 Remind them if they don't.
26:27 Speaker 03 When I grow up, I want to file all day. I want to have a brown nose. Yes, sir, no, sir, anything for a raise, sir.
26:34 Speaker 00 Who gives credit for that idea? Was it an agency?
26:37 Speaker 03 Yes. So the agency was Mullen. I'm in this story though, because the three big ideas they had, I didn't think were very good. But they, 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 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? And so we did that, we shot that commercial. They ran in the Super Bowl.
27:23 Speaker 03 I had spent 2.5 or 3 million dollars in 1998 on marketing. And in 1999, I spent 2.3 or 2.6 million dollars in 90 seconds. 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 going to press the accelerator and how are we going to 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.
27:56 Speaker 00 How did that Super Bowl ad change the business?
27:59 Speaker 03 Well, first of all, it was the fourth worst rated commercial in the Super Bowl.
28:07 Speaker 00 By what, USA Today?
28:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, USA Today had these atometer people. I tell you, life is so different. And so they had, they hired 200 people to rate each Super Bowl commercial. And our, our commercial is not funny. It is ironic and maybe thoughtful and thought provoking. And so I went and bought a USA Today in the morning after the Super Bowl. I sat in my car and looked at it and I'm looking, looking, looking, looking all the way at the bottom is monster.com. And I'm like, shit, here we go again. And the reality was we believed in it. The Today Show and a couple of the morning shows said, there's something to this commercial. It's good.
28:51 Speaker 03 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.
28:59 Speaker 00 So as a, as a competitor at the time, I can Say that it catapulted the brand into the leader in a big way. And things 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 big potential acquisition that I'm sure you want to talk about as well. 2000, 2005.
29:26 Speaker 03 So, um, let's see. There were some things that happened in there, like so, amazon bom was about April or May of 2000. And the dot com bubble, that's funny, all this stuff, just remember these moments, right? The bubble burst and most of the dot coms like blew out. They just didn't have any revenue. They didn't have any plan. But Monster 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?
30:04 Speaker 03 So in that 90 days, 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. And I said, we're profitable, our culture. How many of you worked at Monster?
30:26 Speaker 00 Any Monster alum? Couple?
30:28 Speaker 03 A couple. It's crazy. And so I can go in almost any room and there's a lot of Monster employees. 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 going to become the chairman and chief monster. 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 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.
31:13 Speaker 03 So you get a little sense of the levity of this situation. So if we laid off 18% of our workforce or something like that, and I didn't want to do that. And so I have no regrets for that. I feel like that to this day is the relationship I have with a lot of Monster employees. And so I was traveling the world, opening offices. So I started to remove myself from it. And then you referenced something in 1993, 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%.
31:56 Speaker 03 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. And so I went to Reid and said, "What do you think about putting LinkedIn and Monster together?" And we got an agreement. Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn. And we had an agreement. 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." And we agreed at 304. Kind of back of the envelope, an agreement between the two of us.
32:40 Speaker 03 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 going to press the accelerator." But we had 800 million in cash. And so it would not have hurt us. You understand accretive and dilutive. If we had bought LinkedIn, it was losing a lot of money. It would have been dilutive to our stock, which maybe would have meant it would go down.
33:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
33:19 Speaker 03 But in my view, I thought that it would, that it would have driven it up. And so I resigned that, after that weekend. And I gave 18 months notice. I didn't have a temper tantrum, but I signed a bunch of papers and basically said that I wouldn't, wouldn't be a going away party or anything. I would just end at 18 months.
33:40 Speaker 00 Now, you did, you did buy a network called Tickle.
33:43 Speaker 03 Uh, yeah.
33:43 Speaker 00 Were you, were you part of that? Was that yours?
33:46 Speaker 03 I was. Actually, Andy McKelvey bought Military.com and, and Tickle.
33:51 Speaker 00 Okay.
33:51 Speaker 03 Uh, coming out after 9/11, we needed traffic, we needed engagement, and 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 test. Anybody remember Tickle? Uh, it had a test where you could figure out what dog you're like. And 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, I don't know, 14 million monthly unique visitors, something like that. And James Courier was the, was the founder of that. And he now owns a big hedge fund. And it's very successful.
34:35 Speaker 00 So '05, you take off. I want to back up a little bit because
34:38 Speaker 03 Yep.
34:38 Speaker 00 you, Indeed launches around '06, '05, '06, somewhere around there. So, 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're gonna stop me?
34:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, Indeed was there. Indeed, I think
34:55 Speaker 00 '04, maybe?
34:55 Speaker 03 Uh, '04. And Indeed was coming around all the job boards saying, we'll, we'll take your jobs for free. And there was a big buzz inside Monster that we can get the distribution from this thing called Indeed.
35:08 Speaker 00 Did you see a threat there at the time?
35:10 Speaker 03 I did. And I wouldn't let our company do it.
35:12 Speaker 00 Yeah. What impacts, talking about threats, to me, Google was as much of a threat to your business as Indeed was. Because before Google,
35:24 Speaker 00 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 no?
35:36 Speaker 03 I mean, it might be naive, but Google really hadn't started to broaden its horizons. Yahoo made a 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 any other categories. And so even though you could do searching for career stuff, it just wasn't a thing. And it was probably, I actually don't know when it really started to become
36:15 Speaker 03 a thing, maybe around 2010, 2012, it started to become 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 going to have a job board.
36:29 Speaker 00 Well, we'll save the Google conversation for another time, maybe. You couldn't let go of the network thing because in 06, you wasted no time and founded Eons. Talk about that.
36:41 Speaker 03 So, 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 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 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 going to sign up for AARP. So I basically said, I think I should build a baby boomer consumer network and do a social network. And Facebook had launched, and Facebook was in colleges,
37:25 Speaker 03 but moving toward high school. And I was like, okay, I'll launch the social media for 50+
37:32 Speaker 00 MySpace was big at the time as well.
37:34 Speaker 03 MySpace was big, yep. And that did not go well. I raised a lot of money. I raised money from Sequoia and General Catalyst, two firms that are really respected in the space. They looked at me as a second-time entrepreneur. 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. 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. I had only hired two people from 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 going to invest in you. And that was
38:19 Speaker 03 the, almost the entire conversation that I had with Mike Moritz at Sequoia to invest in Eons. It was pretty simple.
38:27 Speaker 00 It's commercial time.
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39:40 Speaker 01 It's showtime.
39:43 Speaker 03 Facebook was going from college to high school. I got to a 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 I got my ass kicked by Mark Zuckerberg.
40:09 Speaker 00 And that piece of humble pie that you ate, how did that impact you moving forward? Because I suspect hitting a homerun like Monster, jumping into, you probably feel pretty good about yourself. And as life does, it hits you in the mouth. Talk about how you felt coming out of Eons and what your state of mind was.
40:31 Speaker 03 It's okay. I'm an eternal optimist and I think it's an important part of my psyche. And so I couldn't see that coming. Like it was a surprise for me. And what's cool about it is I sold it, it was like a bunt. 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. But it was a good learning experience for me and I think I did eat some humble pie with that. But I got recruited. While I was on the bench, I needed to help this company that bought Eons, Ray Dalio,
41:15 Speaker 03 who runs the biggest hedge fund in the world. His main headhunter called me and said, Ray wants to meet with you.
41:21 Speaker 00 What year is this, by the way?
41:23 Speaker 03 This is in 2012.
41:25 Speaker 00 Okay.
41:26 Speaker 03 2011. And I went and met with, I don't know who Ray Dalio is. Do you guys know who Ray Dalio is? So he is an amazing guy and he's an incredibly difficult guy to work for. And I went and interviewed with him and I had an hour and eight-minute interview and he talked for an hour and I talked for eight minutes. Imagine that.
41:54 Speaker 00 No way.
41:56 Speaker 03 And it's on tape. And 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. Which I thought was actually pretty amazing. And so for about six months, he just bashed me. And 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 I, for six months, he beat the living hell out of me.
42:41 Speaker 03 And he called me into 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 we used to write daily observations. So my, my note that night was that I was fighting for mediocrity. It was my reflection from that conversation. But Ray, 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.
43:26 Speaker 03 And so I got 30,000 pieces of feedback from Bridgewater while I worked 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, would be filming the mistake, and then he would distribute it out to the whole company. And then the whole company would rate me on, on, I don't know, logical reasoning or whatever. And there was one time, I, I took my team and we went and fixed up this flower shop that was in Westport. And it was so awesome. And Ray found out about it and he's like, "What are you doing?" And I was like, "I took my team and we fixed..." fixed up this flower shop that was just falling apart. And he said, you know, you, you, you can't represent Bridgewater that way and you can't
44:10 Speaker 03 use your employees that way. And so 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 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.
44:33 Speaker 00 So you were torn down and built back up.
44:36 Speaker 03 And I worked, oh, I worked there for nine years and 11 months and 13 days. So I, I fulfilled my promise.
44:43 Speaker 00 So at this point, you are a badass motherfucker. You are, you got these ideas in your head. Do we jump right to Boom Band or was there a bridge between?
44:53 Speaker 03 Well, so just so you know, um, 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 from scratch at Bridgewater. And even after 10 years, I think Ray still didn't really know what I had done. Uh, right? And so, uh, I, I think that that was a huge experience for me in, in my learning and a, a big part, I know the principles book, some of you might know this and the videos that Bridgewater has done, I produced all those videos, I produced that book with Ray.
45:33 Speaker 03 And I learned a ton and that learning with my Monster learning is now maybe talk about Boom Band.
45:40 Speaker 00 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, uh, the name, I know you want to tell a Dr. Seuss story in there somewhere. Uh, just talk about the origin story of Boom Band coming out of Dalio's Hell's Kitchen.
45:59 Speaker 03 All right. So, um, there are a couple of things I, I just dream about this business. I think the resume is failing miserably. Uh, what do you guys think? It's a pile of keywords and performance statements. 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, 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, 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.
46:44 Speaker 03 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. Boom Band 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 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.
47:26 Speaker 03 And so, that's my commitment to bring this to here. And so, I have this, the basic concept of Boom Band 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 cellphone number?
48:00 Speaker 00 My cellphone number, let's call it 10 years.
48:02 Speaker 03 10 years. A lot of you've had it for 20 years, right? So I can look down all those rows and I see a cellphone number. And so what I did was create this database of of public information. And I created a derivative product, and that's now the Boom Band 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 did some partnerships on jobs. So I have about 5 million jobs that are less than 24 hours old. And that partnership with Aspen. And I put the two together in an arena.
48:44 Speaker 03 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 a, there's an AI, I have five minutes to show you what I'm doing tomorrow. And so I'll show you. And it's working. I've built the software. My team is here, Madison and Chip are here. Chip is Chief Revenue Officer. And Madison has done the data partnerships with me. And we've got, software's working.
49:28 Speaker 03 We have about 50 development partner customers that are starting to play with us. And I have about 1,300 job seekers, we call them players, that are signed up to build their first dossiers. And so I'm very much at the beginning of the process. And what do you think of this idea?
49:43 Speaker 00 Always selling, isn't he? I know we're almost out of time. I do want to end with this, Brian, if we can.
49:49 Speaker 02 You want to give a what?
49:50 Speaker 00 Just one more question, if we can.
49:52 Speaker 02 I want to give them an opportunity to ask.
49:53 Speaker 03 Oh yeah, come, come up.
49:55 Speaker 00 All right, if they don't ask, I'll ask mine. If they have questions, go ahead.
49:58 Speaker 03 I can do it quick. It'll take, only take me five minutes to answer.
50:00 Speaker 00 All right. Line up, line up at the mics if you've got a question. Come up to the mic if you've got a question for Jeff. Otherwise, I'll keep.
50:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
50:09 Speaker 04 Okay, good questions. Joel, the floor is yours.
50:11 Speaker 00 Okay, 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, 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?
50:36 Speaker 03 I mean, that's sort of a sweeping question, right?
50:41 Speaker 03 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? Few of you? Okay, so I'm building a little brand.
50:57 Speaker 00 Nobody wants to admit being connected to you, Jeff.
51:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I'm starting and I don't think there's really any difference. I don't feel old.
51:09 Speaker 03 You know, it's interesting. You get some wisdom.
51:15 Speaker 03 But in what I do, when you're... I say right on my LinkedIn profile, it's like, 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.
51:54 Speaker 03 So, I hope... I'm just getting to know all you guys again. This is... It's unfortunate that I can't just talk to everybody. 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 want to bang the pot around that.
52:11 Speaker 00 Do we have any more time, Brian? He'll keep talking forever.
52:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, go.
52:15 Speaker 04 I know he'll keep talking. I have to interrupt you.
52:18 Speaker 00 Do you have a question? I know you do.
52:20 Speaker 04 No, I don't have... I mean, my question is, hey, Jeff? We got karaoke in a minute. What are you gonna, what are you gonna sing?
52:28 Speaker 03 I'm not.
52:29 Speaker 04 You're not gonna sing?
52:30 Speaker 03 No, no, you do, you do not want me to sing, but I will come and support all of you singing. And, and I like, I would like to hear some Toto. That, that sounds like a really good place to start.
52:41 Speaker 04 Awesome.
52:42 Speaker 03 And, so are there any questions? Just yell them out.
52:46 Speaker 00 Jeff in with this. For anyone that wants to connect with you, learn more about Boom Band, where do you send them?
52:52 Speaker 03 So come to my LinkedIn, which is actually rather comical, because I really am building my, my crowd there. Go to boomband.com, sign up for our backstage pass. And 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.
53:14 Speaker 05 Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Chase podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bugfights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western,
53:59 Speaker 05 you can't quit them either. We out.
Previous Indeed Battles the Hot Resume Injection | Artisan vs. LinkedIn Next Shredded: Toptal, Graphite, AINA, Resquad AI, Boomband, Delta Air Lines, OpenAI & More Page updated November 11, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
