Matthew Wilson: Inside Jack & Jill's $40M Series A | The Further, Faster Podcast

Matt Wilson (0:00)

One of the lessons I learned the hard way is, you got to trust your gut on things. I think it's so easy to be talked out of decisions that you know are right deep down, and, you know, build the business in the way that you want to build it.

SPEAKER_2 (0:21)

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Hannah Leech (0:40)

Welcome to The Further, Faster Podcast from Antler. I'm Hannah Leech, and I'm a general partner here in London. Today I'm with Matt Wilson, who's the co-founder and CEO of Jack & Jill. Welcome on the podcast, Matt. It's really nice to have you here.

Matt Wilson (0:51)

Thank you.

Hannah Leech (0:51)

Matt trained as a theoretical physicist at Oxford, shortly after leaving university, founded his first business, Veritrac, and then a few years after that, founded his second business, Omnipresent, which went on to employ 400 people, scaled internationally, and last year sold to Deal.

Shortly after that, he founded his third and current business, Jack & Jill. Very excited to have you here with us.

Matt Wilson (1:13)

Thank you.

Hannah Leech (1:14)

Why don't you tell us a bit about what Jack & Jill is?

Matt Wilson (1:16)

Thank you very much. Yeah. Let me tell you a little bit about Jack & Jill and why we founded the company. So if you think about what the most important things are in your life, it's your relationships, your health, and then next up is your career and what you do for work. And if you think about how the last time you got a job, how most people don't treat that process with as much care, respect, and time as they could. And the tools that exist don't allow us to think about that next step and monitor the whole spectrum of what's possible. You think about the few ways that people think about making a change in their career. One, they might use job boards linked in, and they're on the side of what they're doing, or if they're in an active process, maybe they've been made redundant or they're unemployed, they're going through every day and spending hours browsing through hugely noisy lists of roles, whatever is kind of showing up under the searches that you can do on those sites. And then sending out applications, most of which are actually being read on the other side of the table. Incredibly noisy, incredibly soul-crushing experience, and you only really get to see what is showing up on those job boards with pretty poor recommendations.

If you're lucky enough to have a network and be able to get introductions through your network, then that can be another great way of finding a role. But there, you're only seeing this tiny corner of the universe of what's possible.

Or you could go work with a recruiter.

But again, that's an even smaller portion of the market. Each recruiter maybe is only working with two or three companies at a time. So they're only finding which one's best for you within those two or three companies and saying, look, this is the perfect role for you.

And when we think about how can we make people make the optimal choice in their career, what is possible with technology today in order to help them do that, that was really the finding moment of the company. And that, what we've built is two different agents. So an agent called Jack, and Jack works for you. He gets to know you as a professional, who you are, what you've done, and what you want out of your career, and then works on your behalf to make that a reality. So with this deep understanding that Jack gets through a 20 minute onboarding call that you do with him, Jack is then out there scouring every public job listing that's posted every day on your behalf and sending through only a small selection of the most relevant opportunities that come up. He's then supporting you throughout your entire job search process. So whether that's with mock interviews, whether that's actually with career coaching, as you're thinking about what you could possibly do next, and what's important to you through supporting with applications, through supporting with compensation benchmarking, and even helping you run a mock of negotiating your salary at the end of a process. And Jack is now working on behalf of close to 400,000 people around the world, primarily working in tech in London, San Francisco, and New York. And it's actually the largest network of agents out there in the world worldwide. 400,000 long living agents waking up every day and working on behalf of the individual professional. On the flip side, we've built an agent called Jill. And Jill is the mirror of that for companies. So understanding who a company is, what it's like to work at that company, what that company is looking for out of their next hire. And getting this really rich picture from the company side, we've got a few thousand companies working with Jill today to help them find amazing people. And then these two agents come together and are able to take this massive network of hundreds of thousands of people, of thousands of companies, with really rich understanding on both sides, and identify who would the perfect fits be within these two groups, and facilitate direct introductions between both sides. With the nuance and the domain knowledge of an amazing executive recruiter, but with the scale that comes with software.