Pod Insights SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders Kadence Reaches $15M ARR Managing Hybrid Work for Revolut & Boeing About this episode How do you completely reboot a dying hardware startup, restructure a heavy cap table, and pivot into a SaaS product doing $15M ARR? Dan Bladen is the co-founder and CEO of Kadence, a workplace operations system coordinating people and spaces for hybrid work. After realizing his wireless charging startup was a "vitamin, not a painkiller," Dan pivoted during the pandemic to help companies like Nasdaq, Revolut, and Boeing manage their office space. Today, Kadence serves over 600 enterprise customers. You'll learn: How to manage board expectations during a hard pivot The exact mechanics of resetting a cap table for new investors Why shifting from SMB to enterprise accelerated revenue How they achieved over 130 percent net dollar retention Why seat-based pricing still works in the enterprise The math behind saving half a billion dollars in leasing costs How launching SpaceOps AI drives multi-product expansion Why high-ticket dinners replaced SEO for customer acquisition Dan started his career managing technology for a church before founding his first IoT business. He moved his family to the Bay Area just before the pandemic forced him to rethink his entire company operations. Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2ySF3YMDcnY Connect with Dan: https://kadence.co/ Connect with Nathan: https://founderpath.com/
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 What was the highest valuation you raised at Chargeify?
0:02 Speaker 01 40 million US at the time.
0:03 Speaker 00 And was that 2021 timeframe?
0:05 Speaker 01 No, it was 2019.
0:06 Speaker 00 How diluted were you at that point? Were you under 20%?
0:09 Speaker 01 I was down to about 15% of the business at that point.
0:12 Speaker 00 You were around a million of revenue. Can I ask when you broke your first maybe four or five million of revenue? What year that was?
0:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, we broke that early last year.
0:18 Speaker 00 Are you comfortable sharing where you're at today in terms of run rate?
0:21 Speaker 01 We've grown a triple percentage digit since then.
0:24 Speaker 00 Wow, okay, so that would put you at 15 million AR today, somewhere in that range.
0:27 Speaker 01 We don't talk too publicly about it, but yeah.
0:29 Speaker 00 Hey, folks, my guest today is Dan Blade, and he's the co-founder and CEO of Cadence with a K, a workplace management operations system that coordinates people, places and projects to improve hybrid work. He previously founded Chargeify, a wireless charging company. Dan, you ready to take it to the top?
0:43 Speaker 01 Let's go.
0:43 Speaker 00 All right, so talk to us real quick about Cadence. When I hear that quick bio, what I think is, okay, when I go to WeWork and I need to book a room, they're powering that transaction with your software, is that right?
0:53 Speaker 01 Kind of, but imagine instead of WeWork, it was a company's own offices. We work with about 600, WeWork, 600 companies around the world. Think Boeing, Bombardier, Rolls Royce, Porsche, Revolut, helping them manage their own workplaces. You're absolutely right. Many of those companies want to have a similar WeWork experience for their own corporate real estate, but inside of their own offices.
1:14 Speaker 00 Okay, so I'm here on your website. I'm a sales rep at Cargor or GWY at their main office, wherever they're located. I need to get on a call, I need a quick side room quickly. I log into the app that's powered by Cadence, I find an open room, I book it for an hour.
1:27 Speaker 01 That's right, yeah, so you can be a company like Willis, Tal, Watson that works with us, right? They've gone from 10.1 to 4.7 million square feet. So now that everybody's not in the office every single day, though that's obviously a various difference across lots of different companies, how they deploy hybrid. But they've gone from 10.1, 4.7 million square feet, roughly saving about half a billion dollars a year in annual leasing costs. And they use Cadence to coordinate the people and how they meet inside of those offices.
1:55 Speaker 00 Makes a ton of sense. Just for clarity, again, I'm on this screen right now. This little orange desk right here, in the old days, it might have been like, this is Joe's desk. Joe's the only one that works at this desk. But now Joe might only come in two days a week, so it's open. That real estate's open. The other five days a week, you might put Sam or Sylvia at the desk on Thursday and Friday, something like that.
2:13 Speaker 01 That's correct. Yeah. So lots of companies have what we call structured hybrid work. So they might be in one, two, three days a week. Other people might be in every single day. Cadence works with all of the above.
2:23 Speaker 00 Got it. Okay. This makes sense. Before we get your backstory here, I don't want to bury the lead in terms of how you price today. These customers that are paying you today, how do you charge? I see it looks like it's a high-touch model. I don't see a checkout with credit card here on the website, so you must be higher ACV. How do you bill?
2:36 Speaker 01 Yeah. So it's 48 bucks a user a year is what we start at. And that goes all the way up to about 80 bucks a user a year, depending on what modules you use from us. When we started the business, we pivoted from this wireless charging company called Chargeify. We looked at this space and like, hey, there's going to be a ton of corporate real estate adjustments over the next few years. Nathan, it's crazy. There's $22 trillion of corporate real estate in the US alone. And so what we wanted to do was fix our pricing not to square foot, but to the people that use that space, which was a very new model at the time.
3:09 Speaker 00 That's interesting. You're seeing in the age of AI today, a lot of people saying the seat-based model is dead. You would say, no, we are literally a seat-based model, literally sitting a butt in a seat. You're fine.
3:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. To be honest, we're figuring all that stuff out right now. We're not seeing any retention problems in our cohorts right now. But we've obviously got a lot of agentic opportunities in front of us, particularly around a product that we call SpaceOps, which is doing a lot of the work and a lot of the grudge work that our facilities leaders are having to do day in, day out.
3:36 Speaker 00 Let's talk more about your new AI tool towards a later episode. I'll come back to that. But just to confirm, you said on average it's about 50 per user per year?
3:42 Speaker 01 That's correct. Yeah.
3:43 Speaker 00 Okay. Interesting. And are most, like if a startup is listening right now with 10 people and they have a very small office space in Austin, Texas, are they a good fit for you? Or do you require minimums?
3:51 Speaker 01 They're not a really good fit for us. We do have a product called Cadence Flex, which does allow you to get access to about 15,000 coworking locations around the world. So you know, you mentioned the WeWorks, the Regis, all those kind of industrious places. And so yeah, if you're a 10-person company, you don't have an office, but you need to grab space, you can use the Cadence Flex product to get access to about 15,000 workplaces. One of our investors is a guy called Frederick Caress, co-founder of Okta. And he was like, Dan, my friend, it's going to take a long time for us to get to 100 in ARR if we're just...
4:23 Speaker 00 Back then with the SMB of quantify that.
4:25 Speaker 01 It's about.
4:26 Speaker 00 Five K per year.
4:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:27 Speaker 00 Okay, so 200 customers, 5K per year. Obviously, you guys come back into the revenue then. What year was that?
4:31 Speaker 01 This was 2023.
4:33 Speaker 00 Interesting. Okay, so 2023, that's when you break like a million of revenue, but it's 200 customers paying five grand a year a pop. And you're going, I don't want to slug this out for the next 10 years.
4:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah.
4:42 Speaker 00 Don't obviously share your customer name, but can you share the largest contract you have today? Do you have any million dollar customers?
4:48 Speaker 01 No million dollar customers yet. We've got a couple that are pretty close in our pipe, so appreciate your prayers and best wishes for that in the coming quarter. And but no, our biggest customers are banks, quite honestly, particularly neo banks. So we work with Revolut, we work with Starling out of the UK, we work with folks like Dow Jones here in the US as well. So those are our larger customers.
5:10 Speaker 00 Interesting. Okay, we know where the company is today. Take me back to the origin story here. If we go back to your LinkedIn and look at sort of where you've been and how you got here, start off at St. Paul's, it looks like, technology guy and tech stars. Walk us through this.
5:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I started my career at 18 year old. I always grew up building tech. My grandfather designed the launch mechanism for fighter jets on aircraft carriers for the US and British Navy. So I was kind of really interested tinkering with things as a kid. I built my own version of Dropbox.com at home in my toy cupboard as a young teenager. And then, yeah, went and worked for church for five years, straight out of school, where I did music there. And then I became head of technology. I did a theology degree as well during that time, just to make it even more eclectic. And then I founded a business called Chargerfy. It was an IoT company back in the IoT boom, which more felt like pilot purgatory at the time.
6:01 Speaker 01 And Chargerfy was a wireless charging business. The idea was, hey, we could put wireless charges, you know, those little induction pads. We could put those on coffee shops, tables, restaurants, hotel bedside tables, office desks and meeting rooms. The dream was to build Cisco, but to build it for wireless power. We had intellectual property, I like to say, from phones to drones. So anything that moved that had a battery, we wanted to wirelessly charge. And so we did the cloud management platform for wireless charging. We raised about 17 and a half million dollars from. Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Fast forward eight years, the pandemic strikes, strikes three months after moving my wife and three kids under five to the Bay Area, and no one cares about our wireless charging business anymore.
6:45 Speaker 00 Wow. Okay. So what happened? It just lost for everybody? Shut it down?
6:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, so we didn't shut it down. We had tens of customers at the time. Still wasn't anywhere near like a million in ARR. We were always like the anointed winner of a market that was inevitable, but never actually happened. So it felt like a vitamin, not a painkiller, if I'm honest with you, Nathan, which is very different to Cadence today. I lost a bit of hair doing it, but it was fun. But we, we had, our biggest line of business was with offices. So we're fortunate. Accenture were customers, Okta were customers, Uber were piloting with us. And this was the time of agile working was a phrase. So basically you could pick up your laptop and work anywhere in the office. And so Cadence, Chargeify, rather, we have a swear jar every time I misname it. And you could wirelessly recharge all around the office, right? And so
7:33 Speaker 01 this is March 2020, when we all get that text message saying shelter in place. Pandemic strikes, NASDAQ come to us and NASDAQ say, hey, we're going to go from three buildings to one building. We're going to reduce in Manhattan, we can reduce the number of desks we have by 49%. Hey, Chargeify, your cloud management platform for all these wireless chargers that are going to be on all of our desks, can we ditch the wireless charging part of it and just use your software to manage our move to hybrid? And Nathan had three very quick thoughts. I was like, man, that sounds boring. I don't want to build desk booking software was thought number one. I was like, I'm a deep tech founder. I don't want to build desk booking software. Number two, I was fascinated by the TAM. This TAM is just absolutely colossal. There's a lot of desks and a lot of
8:16 Speaker 01 expensive offices. And then three, I was fascinated by all the moving parts of hybrid work. Who should be where, when and why? So yeah, we pivoted the company and essentially reset it.
8:27 Speaker 00 Oh, interesting. So the cap table Cadence today, you've carried that over from the Chargeify cap table, the 17.5 million bucks you raised, that there's to some degree still on the cap table today at Cadence?
8:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, to some degree. We, we went through a lot to change things up and it's quite a journey for, for probably for another longer podcast. But it's one of the main things I'm trotted out to for portfolio companies now. Hey, how do you pivot? What I think you're getting to Nathan is that, you know, we had a lot of hair on the deal at the time is probably the way VCs thought about it, right? We Cadence was up and coming, it was growing incredibly quickly, but nobody wanted to invest in the cap table of Chargeify. On the other hand, I was like, hey, these investors have fed my kids for eight years now. I'm not gonna just ditch them. And so we had a lot of investors saying, hey, new investors, we want to come into Cadence, just ditch them, start this afresh on the side. But that didn't feel like winning the right way to me.
9:21 Speaker 01 So we, I did over a hundred investors to get the round done. I had to say, no, I'm not going to go that way to a lot of people. And then we got there in the, in the end, in a way that I can be proud of when I'm a little bit older and look back on.
9:33 Speaker 00 Guys, remember I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com, if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those, just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. I want to unpack this, Dan, I'm gonna beg you to teach us because the majority of founders end up in the exact position you're in. We only read about the big exits, but everyone else, which is the majority, end up in companies maybe they've raised for, that they realize it's just not going to grow. They, you stuck at it longer than most do, you stuck at it for nine years, most quit after three or four.
10:18 Speaker 00 But the reason they stay stuck is because they've raised money, they have money in the bank, they've got investors they don't want to let down and they just don't know what to do. You figure out a way sort of out of this. So a couple of follow up questions there. At Chargeify, what was the, and I'm not asking this because I care about valuations, I just want to get the context of the switch and the change. What was the highest valuation you raised at Chargeify?
10:35 Speaker 01 About 40 US, yeah, 40 million US.
10:37 Speaker 00 And was that 2021 timeframe?
10:40 Speaker 01 No, it was 2020, yeah. Sorry, 2019.
10:44 Speaker 00 2019, okay, 40 million valuation. Okay, then NASDAQ reaches out, COVID hits, you and your kids move, you're on the West Coast, you have this new project idea, Cadence comes along, there's a Investor interest, what do you do?
10:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:55 Speaker 00 Like, how much did you raise for Cadence? And how did you treat the old cap table?
10:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I went to our board in the summer of 2020. I said, hey, we've got two, two, two decisions we can go. We can either go down from 30 to five people and sit in a cave for three years and hope that wireless charging comes back, or we can go after this new thing. It wasn't even called hybrid back then, Nathan. It was called like flex work or something. No one even come up with a name. And even the name is slightly odd now to me. Anyway, hybrid work, but anyway. And everyone said, let's go for it. Like, let's catch this wave. So the board were aligned behind it. One of our board members at the time was the founder of Aruba Networks, amazing guy called Kirti Malcotte, sold to HPE for 3 billion. And then one of my, one of my advisors mentors, a guy called Kirti, who's the co-founder of TechCrunch, he's a Brit, he's been here for 30 years in the Valley too, is like, hey,
11:43 Speaker 01 you're never going to get your next round done for the reasons that you've mentioned. And so I went to my board at the time and said, hey, this is going to be really difficult to get this round done because the investors that are coming in are going to want to see me north of 30, 40% ownership again. They're going to want it to look like a seed stage cap table.
12:00 Speaker 00 How were you at that point? Were you under 20%?
12:02 Speaker 01 I was down to about 15% of the business at that point. And so, yeah, I went to them, proposed, hey, we're going to have, the way to protect everybody's ownership, keep you guys all in, is to do an options increase. So that's, that's what we did. In the end, 220 DocuSigns, we did a Delaware, we did a Delaware flip from the UK to the US. We had a UK government COVID bounce back loan note as well that we pivoted, that we flipped over to the US entity. It was a whole deal. This was now August 22, was the time we got it done. But you know what, Nathan? It served me really well in the end. We ended up having three people wanting to lead that kind of quote unquote new seed round.
12:44 Speaker 00 Okay. And so, guys, a lesson for you guys listening right now, right? In case you didn't follow what Dan did, he basically brought in the new investors, but he said, look, I'm so diluted. And his employees, he's probably looking out for his employees to charge by too. They're also diluted. Anyone sticking? He needed to reset the, it's called the ESOP pool, the option pool. I don't know if I can get Dan comfortable to share what he reset it at, but hopefully Dan said something like, guys, look, I'll take on the 10 million. But I need to establish a 30% ease out pool post close and immediately reissue 50% of that, so maybe 15, out to, you know, current go forward management. Dan, am I sort of, is this sort of the right?
13:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, roughly. We had, the most aggressive we had was, and by the way, this wasn't me pushing that. This was like the market saying, you need to look like a seed stage cap table for optics, for future investors, for making sure that it all looks like you guys are still in this.
13:27 Speaker 00 Interesting. I want to end on the last four or five minutes. You're talking about your product, AI, your go to market motion. But since we're on the cap table question, just finish up. Have you raised any more at Cadence today? Just fill out the rest of rounds.
13:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we did a series A last year in the summer of 20 million in August last year.
13:44 Speaker 00 Okay. And where are companies, there's a lot of people wondering, we're not trading at 2021 valuation multiples anymore. You just did one last year in 2025 without sharing your actual valuation. Can you give a general sense of ARR multiples you saw out there?
13:56 Speaker 01 Mid teens.
13:57 Speaker 00 Okay.
13:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, where we're at at the time. Because year over year growth is really strong. I think what's super interesting right now and what I'm focused on is quality of revenue. Obviously, everybody wants growth rate, but I think, you know, whatever the phrase is, the cows are going to come home on growth rates versus the quality of revenue later this year. I think quality of revenue is going to go back into vogue, back in vogue. So we've got absolutely stellar net dollar retentions. You talked about land and expand. Many of our customers land with Cadence in one geo or one location and then grow from there. And so not only we got the natural quote unquote seed expansion, but we also have now got the multi-product expansion too.
14:34 Speaker 00 We're recording this here in March of 2026 to get a good sort of answer on net dollar retention. If you go back and look at the cohort you signed up in March of last year, 2025, what is their net dollar retention as of today? Are we talking like 120, 130%?
14:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, north of 130%.
14:49 Speaker 00 That's really impressive. Yeah, I'd say world class is like 140, 150. So wow, that's, that's congratulations.
14:54 Speaker 01 Super sticky software. I mean, you're signing a seven to 10 corporate, you know, lease for your office. This, this product becomes a system of record for what's happening and who's happening in your office. And so, yeah, it's incredibly, incredibly sticky.
15:08 Speaker 00 And you pivoted from the SMB motion back in 2023. You were around a million of revenue. When you broke your first maybe four or five million of revenue, what year that was?
15:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, we broke that early last year.
15:18 Speaker 00 Okay, early 2025. And are you comfortable sharing where you're at today in terms of run rate?
15:22 Speaker 01 Uh, we've, we've grown a triple percentage digit since then.
15:26 Speaker 00 Wow. Okay. So like that would put you at like 15 million AR today, somewhere in that range.
15:29 Speaker 01 We don't talk too publicly about it, but yeah, we're in and around that range.
15:32 Speaker 00 You've been super transparent, so I want you to have the option, you know, the option to talk more about your product here, go on a go forward basis. So tell us, I told you I'd come back to, I think you called it your space ops AI tool. Tell us how you're thinking about AI and growth going forward.
15:43 Speaker 01 Yeah. So as you know, the way the world works has changed forever. Nine out of 10 companies are now in some sort of hybrid modality. That might mean one day in the office a month, all the way through to four and a half, five days a week in the office. What we've discovered as we've gone up market, Nathan, is just how much more product we need to ship to secure repeatedly six-figure deals, right? And so many of our customers not, don't just want desk booking, room bookings, facebooking, visitor management. They want move management. I've got 40 people starting in Sydney on Monday next week. Where do they all sit? Um, when do their desks get moved? Uh, who are they in adjacency to? I've got to shut down an office in Lehigh, Utah next month. How do I reallocate all those people and these resources?
16:25 Speaker 01 How do I scenario plan for who's going to be where and when? What's my cost saving? So scenario planning, move management, and what the industry calls stack planning. So who's on what floor? These are all huge pieces of work. Uh, and so what we've done is we've basically built agents around this work. Uh, that enables our VP workplace that we typically work with to go from a three-month window for getting this kind of stuff done to about quote unquote, a three-day period to get this stuff done. And we just, our first customer with space ops, um, was the HR company, uh, Bamboo HR. Um, quote unquote, I can't believe the power of cadence. So we've really, really enabled that team to have a ton of leverage in their workflows.
17:09 Speaker 01 Um, to look after thousands and thousands of people.
17:12 Speaker 00 And we're seeing your product where as you're giving the overview here, but it sounds like this scenario planning here that we're currently on is what you're referring to.
17:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. And one of the things that we're excited about as well is looking at peer indexing as well. So we've got so we've got about 10,000 teams that use Cadence. So we can say, hey, for finance in London, this company size, what does your cost per square foot look like in comparison? What does your hybrid cadence look like in comparison? And then, yeah, here, we were the first to market with what we call a concierge Cadence AI inside of the workplace in the summer of 23. And so basically, you can use this for anything you might use an EA or assistant for inside of the workplace. Hey, who's going to be in? Grab me a desk, register a visitor. What meeting rooms are available today on the fifth floor, all through our AI here.
18:02 Speaker 00 As we wrap up, there's a lot of people saying that pricing models for tools that are built on sort of agents or agent swarms, especially legacy models. So I would say Cadence was a legacy model. You're now really aggressively investing in AI and these underlying agents to help your folks be more productive. People are saying we're going to shift to more of a jobs-to-be-done pricing. So a jobs-to-be-done example for Cadence might be number of booked desks per day instead of how many heads do you have using the platform? Is that an internal debate right now or no?
18:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't think anybody knows in our industry right now, Nathan. What I do know for sure is that CFOs like to know what they're going to be spending each year, and they don't like to have an uncapped limit.
18:41 Speaker 00 Wrap us up here in the last 60 seconds. Go to Market Motion. How do you scale from 600 customers to 1,000 customers? It doesn't look like SEO is a big focus. Looking at your Ahrefs account, how are you finding new customers today?
18:51 Speaker 01 Lots of events, Nathan. So yeah, most of our customers aren't Googling us anymore. Back in the start of the pandemic, it was desk booking, Microsoft Teams. Like, that was like the key word that we defended to the hill. That's not the case so much anymore. It's much more events, dinners, social content. That's where we're seeing larger ACVs coming in.
19:13 Speaker 00 All right. Well, hey, if people want to follow your story, where's the best place for them to follow you online, Dan? LinkedIn and where else?
19:19 Speaker 01 Dan Bladen. That's the best place to follow what we're doing in the future work.
19:22 Speaker 00 Guys, he launched after working at a church for a while out of college, he founded Chargeify back in, call it. Before 2019, ultimately raised at a 40 million valuation, 30 FTEs, but he was diluted down to a call of under 15% at that point and realized, you know what, man, we got to pivot this business. Moved his three kids and wife to the Bay Area around 2022. Still had about a million bucks of ARR with a bunch of sort of small customers and eventually said, you know what, we got to pivot. He worked his current cap table, raised a $10 million new round, reset the ESOP pool, so it really looked like a true seed round, and pivoted to a brand new business model at Cadence. Cadence is what enables you to help plan your workspace in this age of hybrid work than world's number one workplace operations platform. Today serving over 600 customers, average new ACVs call it in the $50,000
20:06 Speaker 00 range, a 10x increase over 5K from 2023. Doing north of 10 million, we'll just say north of 10 million bucks of revenue, broke four or five million in early 2025. And what he says, which I love, is quality of revenue is really high, 130% net dollar retention as he continues to invest in products to help folks like NASDAQ plan their hybrid workspaces. Dan, thanks for taking us to the top.
20:25 Speaker 01 Lovely to meet you, Nathan.
20:26 Speaker 00 You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.
Previous How Buildern Reached $2M Revenue With 300 Customers | Hmayak Tigranyan Next Flip Reaches $12M ARR with AI Voice Support for 250 Brands Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
