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It has been just over six months since Jobster, the Seattle online recruiting startup backed with $48 million in venture funding, chopped 60 employees in a highly-public layoff.
Since then, Jobster Chief Executive Jason Goldberg has attempted to reposition the Seattle startup. The 35-year-old entrepreneur -- labeled brash, controversial and arrogant by some -- says he has learned a lot in the past couple of years and has now come back with a new 10-year vision for how to better match job seekers and employers online.
Jobster's Jason Goldberg (Jobster Photo)
"I think one of the lessons that I have learned is that you can be in hurry up mode, but at a certain point this stuff takes time," he said. "...It doesn't happen over night."
I sat down with Goldberg this week at the company's headquarters overlooking Elliott Bay to discuss everything from the layoffs -- "we were a family, family company" and "it was hard" -- to the business outlook -- its recruiting tools business just turned a profit, with full profitability possibly occurring early next year -- to why some view him as arrogant -- "it is not about Jason Goldberg" -- to the amount of time he spends blogging -- "people would be shocked if they knew how little a part of my job it is."
Jobster now employs 65 people, though it has started hiring again in the past two months (including three people who were let go during the layoff). And the company, which plans to start distributing branded-versions of Jobster to third parties and launch a new application for Facebook, said revenue should grow by 60 percent this year at half the cost.
Goldberg calls Jobster an aggressive and confident company, but he doesn't believe that crosses the line into arrogance.
On how the company has changed since the layoff:
On arrogance and confidence at Jobster:
On why Jobster grew so big so fast:
On social networks and competition from players such as LinkedIn:
On Web 2.0 "features" versus building an Internet company for the long-term:
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Posted by unregistered user at 7/13/07 6:33 p.m.
+1 for posting the audio clips. The first two were especially revealing.
He dances around his mistakes and failures, and through it all shows has zero appreciation for his role in the lose of capital and the wake of career debris that Jobster's mismangement created.