Jesse Tinsley: Founder of Employer.com on TikTok's US Bid, Bench Acquisition, and M&A Strategy

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today I am joined by Jesse Tinsley, the founder of Employer.com, which owns so many incredible companies. And Jesse, I'm so grateful to have you on the show today. I know we've been texting back and forth for the past week or so, and you have a lot of interesting things going on right now, and especially the last month and a half with all the incredible acquisitions you've been making. So first off, I want to say thank you so much for taking the time today. Of course. So thanks for having me. You know, before we dive into all the, you know, I'm sure people that are listening, the, the acquisitions, the, you know, the TikTok deal that's being talked about, which we'll. We'll dive into, I wanted to take a moment and spend some time on something that kind of led me to your content in the first place, which is not only all things domains, but recruiter.com and your story, um, especially leading up to this interview, where, based on what I know, your mom ran a recruiting agency and that was one of the first ways that you made money as a kid. And I, I found it quite the full circle moment, you know, then coming across all the things you're doing now. And I wanted to allow us to really take a step back and say, where did this journey begin in the world of recruiting and HR and all the things that you spend time in now.

Yeah, it's a, it's a really good question and I'm glad. And kudos to you, by the way. You obviously have reached out to me before TikTok and before some other acquisitions. So you're ahead of your time in terms of. But yeah, I'm happy to give the backstory. I think it gives a lot more, like, justice and also, like, probably explains. It's not like I went from 0 to 100 all at once. Slowly learning different things in the business world over a decade. Right. So my background, I grew up in the Bay Area. I went to school with a bunch of, like, famous tech founders, kids like Steve Wozniak, son to my school. So I always had like the latest Apple products and whatnot. So was immersed in tech pretty young and then went to college. I ended up doing my first company in college, ended up dropping out, which is a longer backstory. But I ended up starting my second company, which is with job moms doing recruiting and helping companies scale, like Coinbase in scale AI that became Decacorns. And they were pretty small when we started working with them, scale was like 10 people, among others. And so got a really, like, good experience, like understanding talent density. But throughout that time, other than just doing that, I was also investing in real estate and doing different things. Whereas arbitraging and figuring out how to buy, like, almost like LPOs buying real estate and doing, like, acquisitions are very similar. You're not putting the full, you know, purchase price down on a lot of these deals yourself. You can get other investors, you can do all sorts of things. So it's a really good baby steps. I think my. One of my better investments was. Sounds small now compared to the numbers we're talking about the last year or so. But, you know, I did a deal that was like 150k for a new construction home. I put like 10%, got a deal like 10% down, ended up selling it two years later for like, you know, 310. So my IRR is like, you know, I put like 20, 25 grand down and returned whatever. You know, would that math be 6x my money and something like that in like two years?

Right.

So stuff like that was the baby steps. And that kind of, you know, helped build the understanding of things as I started to scale up through bigger and bigger acquisitions and deals. Yeah, no, Consider myself a business guy.

Of course.

Kudos to President Trump.

Absolutely. And. And I think it's. I'm glad you pointed that out because I know right now. I know. And we're to be putting this episode out today for those that are watching and listening. So, like, we're talking about today's news in the sense of this past week. You've been in the news so much around, you know, this looming TikTok deal. It's been in the US And I wanted to spend some time on this because I know when I initially reached out to you, you know, I saw the acquisition with Bench, and of course I was fascinated with your story. And I'm a sucker for great domains, and, you know, you really just caught my attention. But in the spirit of which I'm sure so many people, including myself, are interested in, you know, we. We talked on the phone last week, and you're like, hey, do you know anyone that knows Mr. Beast? And then 24 hours later, I see these headlines of Jesse Tinsley, Mr. Beast, TikTok deal, and all these different conversations happening. And I'm so grateful to have you here today, really, so that we can not only dive into this, but my question for you is, how did this all come about and where does it stand today? Just Given the, you know, the week that you had thus far.

Yeah. How did this all come to be? I. Well, I moved really quick as I think people are starting to get the gist of when there's opportunity. My team and I will go all in to capture things very, very quickly. I think we did the bench deal in like, you know, for less than 48 hours or. Yeah, 24 hours, so to speak. And same with TikTok, I think we, you know, ran through what should be a. I think most of the other folks, we've talked to some of the, at least a few of the other folks that potentially were bidding and I think they've been working on it for a year. We caught up to them relatively quickly. We move very, very fast. I think that's the big thing. And I think more recently I was in D.C. for most of this week and I think TikTok's a great company and I think that it should be an American owned asset owned by the people, for the people of the United States. And I think that's my goal here. It shouldn't be owned by one rich individual or rich should be a group sort them of folks. And that's, that's how we structured our bid. It would be an all, all American board and all American leadership team on the C suite, top down. So we're really excited about our opportunity here and I think it'd be great for not only the United States but, and its allies, but also the American people. And I think that would be great to have control of a new algorithm.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think. Yeah, I mean, of course, yeah. And I know that in terms of, you know, since we initially spoke on the phone probably early this week or over the weekend, you know, everyone in the U.S. tikTok was, you know, semi quote unquote, banned for I think less than 24 hours. It's back and I believe it was Trump signed something where it's 75 days where there's time to figure it out, if I'm not mistaken, with a deal like this, Jesse. And someone that has, you know, has, as the market has seen in terms of your ability to move quick with deals like benchmark, like what is the, the deal dynamics when it comes to how many groups are maybe bidding for, you know, a deal as such? And what is the likelihood of, or, or what is the likelihood of not only you and your consortium to get the deal, but what's the mindset that you could, that you bring to the table with a deal like this, given it's so complex when it comes to the, you know, the. The political side of things. It's, you know, you're. You're talking about a massive company that's, you know, nearly getting shut down. So, like, maybe just give me your personal POVs. This seems like something that's much different than your typical M and A opportunities that you're pursuing. Of course.

Yeah, definitely. Very, very abnormal. I think even by traditional deal terms, it's one of the largest acquisitions, regardless of who wins it, in the last decade in the private sector. So. But first off, I think the big thing. I can't speak to the other parties that are. That are bidding on this. I don't know them well, but what I can say about us is specifically that we're a bipartisan group. Right? Like, it's not. It's not like, right or left. And I think that's something that's, you know, a big advantage for us. It's like, I'm not in politics. I don't know, D.C. i've never donated to a con, like a campaign on either side. I obviously support President Trump's administration, but I am not a guy that's playing the political game ever. You can look through my history. Like, there's not. There's very, maybe very few statements over the years, if any, that you can find. So I think that's the first thing. I think that's great for. For everybody, because you really want, you know, TikTok's a great platform to basically be, you know, the voice and voice, you know, freedom of speech. Right. Pro. Freedom of speech. Not be sent, like, basically pushed and changed in either direction, right or left. And I think that that would be my goal with this is to be. I think there's a huge opportunity for everybody in the United States to bring us closer together, and I think that would be a huge win. So in terms of that, I think that's one of the advantages. I think the other piece is the technology side. Like, this is not a trivial matter. It's gonna be really hard to recreate an algorithm from scratch in short order and realign, like, build almost the entire clone, you know, like, basically from the ground up, a new application. So I think. I think those things are things that give us a huge advantage. We already have some of the best. We call them. We call them like subcommittees, essentially. So we create, like, a board of directors, right in our team. We have this integration plan for 90 days. So if we win the bid, which I think we have a very good shot at, well, we have these teams that have worked at the top companies in the United States like Snap and Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, and they've built algorithms there where They've worked at TikTok US previously. Right. They're going to come in and they're going to SWAT team and help us build this. So I think we have folks like that lined up already and I think obviously, like, there's a bunch of great folks at, you know, TikTok address that retain as well. And then we have a really good team ourselves. So I think, like all those things said, we feel very, very comfortable on the technical side and the commercial side of the deal. I think the, the bigger thing that, you know, I'm not again, I'm pretty. This is a bipartisan group. I don't understand the political side of things. I. So I think that's, that's probably thing that we're probably lacking. But I think that's also a good thing. Demands were relatively unknown. I have not. I've no allegiances to anyone previously. So I think that that's a good thing. I think where there could be concerns with other groups buying that they are huge fans of this party or the other thing, I think that's a good thing for us. I think from that perspective and as I've stated publicly, we're big supporters of President Trump and freedom of speech. So I think that should align a lot of those.

It's so fascinating. And even too, just to get this out there, I'm sure we could talk about TikTok stuff, deal dynamics for a long, long time. But I want to make sure we're obviously into specific areas of your journey, the recruiter.com the companies. I just want to make sure we focus on this for a moment because I think it's so top of mind for not only myself, but a lot of people out there that are just following this deal. And last thing I want to mention on it for now is just when it comes to you were in D.C. what did you learn from being there in terms of a deal like this? Maybe the conversations. I know you were obviously with Chris from Rumble, but just in terms of if a deal like this was to take place, maybe like being next to and having conversations with people as such that you've talked about publicly. What have you learned last 24, 48 hours as this week has nearly come to a close since the conversation really started coming out there.

Yeah, Look, I think D.C. is great. Very different way that it works compared to like Silicon Valley, which I'm used to, which is much, much different. So, you know, learning, learning lots really quickly, which we're good at, generally speaking with how quickly we move. So it's been good. It's been good. We've had a lot of good conversations with folks within, you know, President Trump's administration and across, you know, across D.C. just on all sides. So I think that it's been fun. I think we got a good shot at this. And I think it is different in the sense that there's a, there's a lot of. I think somebody told me the joke was like, if you want a friend in dc, you buy it. You get a dog basically or something. Yeah, it's like some joke like that. Very different than Silicon Valley, I'd say. Like you want to talk to somebody in dc, you go through like, you know, some, their manager, their ea, there's no direct, like you reach out to me, right, or I reach out to like a tech CEO, they'll just respond directly. There's no, there's less people, but it makes sense given that a lot of people across the globe want to talk to them. I understand, like, that mechanism makes a lot of sense to basically like there's just so much requests they're going to be getting from all sorts of constituents and you know, and to be honest and fair on that matter, just to be clear, TikTok is, you know, President Trump and his team just got in a few days ago, right into office. The administration just kicked off. They have a thousand plus things that are probably, you know, the 1A or, you know, 1B above, you know, just this TikTok deal, which is a small piece of larger global picture. Right. For all the things that United States is, is working on. So, so I think, yeah, I don't expect, you know, obviously there's a short timeline with the 90 day extension I believe in, but I, you know, I'm hoping that we get at least, I think we can do it pretty quickly within 60 days on our perspective. So as long as we get it to a decision next couple weeks, I think a very smooth, successful transition for all the, all the business owners and content creators on TikTok as well as like the different companies that rely on it to make.

I appreciate you so much for sharing all that context and if any other specifics come up to the conversation, I'll make sure to ask on them. But really want to take a moment to pivot the conversation here a little bit because again, back to our origin of when I reached out. I've loved Seeing your approach to building not only a Holdco, but acquiring these different assets. And especially again, just to emphasize it, I'm a huge proponent of domains. You know, my company's listener.com and when I saw recruiter.com and employer.com I just, I think that obviously you, you know this in terms of the attention that they can bring to the table. Talk to me about prior to going out there and starting to make acquisitions, job mobs the company. What led to the mental approach to hit to say, hey, we want to go do M and A and we want to do it at scale to the intense of doing, you know, eight, nine deals within a 18 month period. What was the company doing? What was your mindset around the business prior to really leaning into the M and A side of things?

Yes, so, so yeah, I can give you some, some info there. I think prior to like in 2020, I was pretty disappointed at the end of the year mainly because I couldn't identify like the strategic inflection points that were happening in the market. And so I think business is very fluid with like and this isn't a political statement, it's just people that I use as a framework of how to build things. And I think like Andy Grove, Peter Thiel, George Soros in terms of like the different concepts that they have with regards to asymmetrical information advantage, market reflexivity, you know, winner take all markets to some extent. And I think so. So after 2020 I did a bunch of research, basically like make sure I never missed another huge market trend again. Like it's happening and you have the data, you can see what's playing out in real time. And so we had that with when 2022 came around because we have all the hiring data. By May 2022, I knew the market was pretty messed up for tech. Right. And we had still had a ton of revenue, we still had a, a lot of cash. And so we basically like this was not popular at the time because the market was still like considered really frothy at the time. Right. We froze pay raises, didn't pay any bonuses in June 2022 and then like sat on a ton of cash knowing that we didn't know what the opportunity was going to be, but we were going to go after it, whatever it was to basically sit on that. And so my team was really not happy.

Sacrifices.

But in hindsight, I mean everyone stuck around, they're very happy. Now I would say like it was whatever 10 or 20k they lost out on was paid in by very Large multiples. So. So that's awesome. So that's kind of what led to all of this. And then from there we started buying up other competing firms. And then from that point we, we pivoted software about a year ago. I'm happy to dive into details of some of these deals like the recruiter.com ones. Quite fascinating others. But I think yeah, we pivoted software fully and it's taken off in the last year.

I appreciate you sharing all that and something you brought up that I'm fascinated with. So the first, I believe the first AC that you guys did, recruiter.com if I'm not mistaken, was a previously publicly traded company. Talk to me about how that came about in terms of that deal and why that deal specifically.

Yeah, I think more I'll tell you about that. But let me just preface that there is when the markets get constrained, generally speaking, and this isn't a statement to recruit.com or others. I think there's opportunity when businesses have distress, whether it's flat growth or slightly down growth. And that's a huge opportunity because what happens is if your revenue goes down, let's say even 5%, banks won't lend to you very easily. If you violate a covenant in your current debt, you can't get a loan. And if your revenue's flat, you can't raise venture capital. Private equity doesn't want to touch like anything that's like a risk asset, especially when the market's coming down, they're losing money across their portfolio on paper. So it basically closes up capital markets to you. So that would be like a strategic inflection point where you're like, okay, now I know I can buy businesses because they have no, like, not many other options. In fact, our saying for, you know, much of the last two years was, you know, we're the, we're the only, we are the only buyer, right? You're on the market in terms of buying, you know, mid cap or small cap businesses. So there just wasn't money, many going around. So that's the first thing to caveat. Everything else say after this, which is retir.com, we had relationships with them prior. We met them in like August, I want to say, of 21. And we had talked about some different things going into like December and we, we couldn't work a deal based on what they asked for then. And I think they came back to us, you know, maybe February, March of 2022 and 2320, excuse me, it'll be 2023, 2022. March it would be August 2022 and then going into 2023. And it seems like 20 years by the way. Two years.

Absolutely.

It's like dog year. Seems like forever. But no. So we did the first deal with them that was like I believe at the end of March of 23, which was just pulling out their recruiter services business into ours. It was very synergistic, which was cool. And then we did a deal with them. They closed in August of that year. It bought out a bunch of the assets and IP and domain, which is recruiter.com and, and yeah, the context there, I think we paid quite a bit for it. So really good deal for the shareholders and everyone else on our side as well. So it's public because of the SEC requirements. So I think it's like 1, I think it's 16 to 18 million cash plus like 10% of the account table, which I think will be very, you know, very good.

No, that's so, that's so great to hear and I appreciate you having the transparency and sharing there and something that you said there in terms of the domain, I've heard you say in different interviews, just in terms of this world that we're living in where tech can become just very like, okay, like what is the moat and how do things differentiate? And you, you emphasize brand and things like domains and hence like you're the way you've built recruiter.com and employer.com and spent the money on that. What is your mindset and viewpoint on domains, their value and how to value them overall when it comes to either buying it for a pre existing company or buying, you know, a domain to launch a new company on. Just would love to get your viewpoint on that and kind of understand where that thought process comes about.

Yeah, totally. So I mean recruiter.com put us on the map I think in terms of everything's credibility, right? So like even though John Mobs had a good brand within, you know, within like tech and whatnot, I think the fundamental thing you're seeing, like when I go to tell like after we bought it, I'd say oh yeah, dot com and like you know, whatever friends or whatever family, like, oh, do you work there? Like what do you do? Or what is it? Right? So like they think it's this huge, huge company, right? Because it's such a big like it's a notable name. Like everyone knows recruiter.com the same way, you know, like, you know, realtor.com or whatever the domain is I think that fundamentally cars.com, you know, go down a list. Right. But the point is, is it makes everything else a bit easier. Right. So and it means, it means also some social credibility. You had to have spent a good amount of money to at least obtain that even if it's not a big business. Right. So it checks a few boxes. Right. It means that hey, you're not, you have cash, you've made money. Right. In order to do that. And I think that's a huge thing. I think even with like fast forward a bit like when we bought employer.com, it wasn't that long ago but we spend you know, 4, 400,000 or something in, in like the interesting, the interesting thing there is like is in D.C. i think every person I've met across you know, business or political spectrum, you know, they've all heard of employer.com even though. But by the way, it's not because, it's not because of like they've heard of it news. Maybe they have a bench or something but like maybe some good percentage of them have. But the others that don't, they knew what it was conceptually. Right. And that's important because I don't have to explain what we do. Oh we're an employer. Right. You probably do payroll in hr. Right. Like technology. Right. And so I think that gives us a ton of credibility and that's great. And obviously we have a big, we have a big business. Like you know, I think we're right around like 100 million revenue in the trailing 12 months which is not like trivial. But you know, you would think that employer.com is a multi billion dollar company. We're probably valued, you know, very high, you know, probably close to, you know, a billion. I think I had to guess but I think that like that it sounds a lot larger than it is and that that's super helpful I think in any context. So I would, I personally pay quite a bit for many domains. So list obviously a great one.

Yeah. And even when you. Because I get this question a lot and I think it's something that when you, because I know you posted about this publicly on x the employer.com domain just to spend a moment on it when you're valuing something like that and I think you said just over half a million dollars on that. I'd love to understand some of the creative deal making and thought process behind it because obviously some people may think like okay, I need half a million dollars just to wire and then I get to domain. I've Interviewed a handful of great founders on the show and we'll talk domains and they'll either share like, hey, this is how the domain played out or this is how to think about a deal structure. This is what's even possible. And I think it's helpful for like the awareness around that. So I would love to get your thought process on that in terms of like deal structure.

And yeah, so we negotiated, give you context and probably it was probably worth a lot more than we even paid. But we negotiated the price with employer.com for like I want to say like a year, like a very long time. Behind the scenes we were like ah, no, we'll pay 300. And like you know, we're being, we're being very fiscally conservative I would say which maybe like in hindsight it was like maybe you should have just done it sooner. But I think but it worked out. So like it's not what, like things aren't as they seem. I think. Hopefully I don't have an NDA. The person we bought from is pretty friendly so I think they'll be fine. But like I think that the, the 450 is like what I'll say is that without getting specifics so that it doesn't violate any issues there, but basically we paid some upfront amount that I think let's say 100 to 150k. Right. And then we structured it where there was. We paid a higher price. I think they wanted like 350 cash or 375 cash and said nah, we'll give you the number you want but we'll give it to you. We want the terms. And so we have like we put it through escrow.com and then we put basically terms where you have quarterly payments until it's paid off of like 30 or 50k every quarter. So we basically financed the deal over two two plus years. It was over two plus years. Whatever the math is on that. Not looking at on paper but something and help us out. But I think that's generally what it played outside. So they're even outlay 450. So that means like if you're a buyer you want to go buy something like you know, whatever the domain is, dogs.com or whatever it is. And like you want, they want a half million or a million bucks. Well you can do that but finance it against the business. And then bas basically you set up the mechanism for forfeiture on that is you know, if, if it's. Actually there's a funny story that's all I'll mention. So, so like the forfeiture on that is that, hey, we'll pay you this, we'll pay the court if, if for whatever reason you default, you just get the asset back, right? So that gives you a head, right? Because you can get it cheaper, less cash up front than you want to outlay. Because especially for us right now, every dollar we, we save, we can 10x on the back end by buying businesses for our shareholders. So that's the reason it's not that we don't have the cash, is that the cash is more valuable being deployed into acquisitions and buying, you know, very expensive domain. And so that, that is a, a big thing. And I think it was actually funny. This isn't a knock on escrow.com I'm a big fan of them generally speaking, so a shout out to them, not, not a negative. But I freaked out in January. I think like we had made the payment and I got an email from the person we bought the domain from that like we, we had breached, like we hadn't sent payment. And I was like, what, what are you talking about? Like it's on auto. Because we have an auto draft, right? And it was an error messaging error on escrow escrow.com that they didn't like they sent the wrong message even though we'd sent the money. It was pretty funny. A good freak out.

Oh man.

So yeah, that's the story. But you can buy domains relatively like cheap with like creative deal structuring like that. And for us, it's not that we don't have the cash, it's simply just there's better uses of our cash and we'd rather pay a higher price.

And on that note of just all things acquisitions, Jesse, the deal that I believe a lot of people, including myself were very, not only interested in, but we saw go down obviously publicly on Twitter was the bench acquisition, which I believe, as you said, you got a deal done of that size with a company that previously raised over 150 million in venture capital. You got a deal done in a weekend after they initially were getting shut down. And before I ask about the specific question on that deal, I want to ask when you think about the future ofacquisitions within employer.com, what percentage of them, or I guess in the opportunistic standpoint, what percentage of them do you see coming from deals that can happen quickly versus deals that are more like, hey, like we're looking at specific companies, we want to acquire them. Maybe this is a 612 month thing. Or do you Think the speed aspect of it will be a continued just strategy behind it, given the opportunities that, you know, may be in front of you and things that you see happening.

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. I think that. I think that. Well, first off, I much preferred not to do deals in one weekend. That was a crazier sprints. But I think that the, the bigger, the bigger thing, like under, like the fundamental thing that you're. You're asking or kind of inquiring about is very important. Basically everyone in life, like most people in life, I'd say not everybody. There's guys like Elon and Bezos and whatnot that like, crazy work ethic. I think the, the thing is, is most people, you know, walk slow, talk slow, move slow, like everything's done at their own pace. They want to get off work and go watch Netflix. Netflix. And there's nothing wrong with Net. I'm a fan. But like, I think that whatever your goals are in line your life with what you want to do, right? So if you're. It's valuable to you to go be, you know, in Maverick and like, you know, build great businesses within the space. Like, focus on that if it's. Be a good, you know, parent or mother, teacher, what, whatever it is, father. I think align your life with that is the first thing I'd say. And then, and then if you are like myself, who appreciates all the things I just mentioned, but it's really driven. And you can't sit on the beach because actually on a beach. When we bought Bench. Oh, man, busy. So I was on vacation. I can't sit still. I always joke with my team and I'm on vacation for one or three days. Like, that's the, that's the tipping off point of me doing something. Oh man, it's written by another company. So I think on that, like, speed is really important. So you think about, like think about how long it takes to ipo, right? That's very slow. Think about how long does the normal acquisition process. Six to nine months. Think about how long it even takes the average fund to make a decision on investing. It's a couple weeks at least. Sometimes they have investor committees on Mondays. A lot of firms, like a lot of private firms, and then they can't deploy. They have to go make capital calls. The big misconception is a lot of these firms actually have the money they're like sitting on, right? It's not. They have to go call their LPs and pull in the capital. And I think that a Lot of people don't understand that fundamentally. And I think that by moving quickly we have, you know, especially as we've gained more and more momentum, at least me personally, like, we have a ton of people that will back us across, you know, the spectrum that love to, you know, support our acquisitions. Because we get removed really quick, we're able to operationalize them, which is very different also than a lot of firms we compete against or people or institutions. Because we've actually structured our team in a way that can actually jump in and operate them. Day one. So when we close Bench's deal like between Saturday at 1pm Eastern and like the end of the day Sunday, we had the servers back online in less than like six, eight hours or seven hours on like 4am Eastern or something like that. So. And that wouldn't be, that wouldn't be possible if our team wasn't ready to like jump in and operate businesses and stand them up. Yeah, obviously TikTok would be a much larger challenge, but we've already kind of progressed too with you know, quite a bit of resourcing and folks that are lined up that are some of the best people in the world at what they do. So we feel pretty confident with that. I think those are the two things. Move quick, can operationalize businesses. Hands up. We're in the trenches, right? I think that's the big thing. Most investors are like 10,000 miles away, 10,000 foot view. We're in the trenches operating businesses and that gives us a unique advantage. Not saying, oh, I think we can operationalize, I think my team can do it. It's like, no, no, we are going to do it or going to execute on and I think that's a huge fundamental advantage because especially as you make more wealth. For me, I don't like, I'm not rich by any means. I'm pretty humble background and beginnings and all that. But I drive like a Camry, right. I don't care about the material side of it. For me I like winning, I like creating great businesses and satisfying customers. And that's where my mission like driven is. And I think once you get to a certain level, most guys like the drive's not there to do it. For me it's continuous drive at least on the business side. Don't care too much about the material side of things or on the political side it's not.

I think that's a great answers in terms of the standpoint of fast deals or more thought out sniper approach type of deals. Two people that I think is relevant to this conversation that I know you're familiar with that I read both of their books probably within the last two months, which is Andrew Wilkinson and Brad Jacobs and their whole approach on like a very m and a focused strategy to building these large enterprises. Obviously you are focused heavily in the world of HR tech. And I'm curious now, now that obviously with the press coming out this week and being doing deals like bench so quickly, how has the inbound looked from companies that are looking to get acquired? Because I think that's always the question of, you know, I'm curious, you know, you have in your, you know, the Twitter bio, acquiring companies. Curious to know how the last month, two months has looked for you when it comes to the inbound and the assessment of deals.

Totally, Casey. Great. Really good question. Yeah, so I actually don't know. I don't know Brad. I don't know much about him, but I met. I'll tell you a quick backstory on Andrew because it's funny. So I knew, I knew of Andrew as a design consultancy owner right previous. I didn't know he ran a holding company. I honestly didn't even know what a holding company was. About a year ago, I had no idea what that concept was. Right. And then people started bringing up to me like, oh, you run a Holdco? I'm like, what is a Holdco? When I look it up. And then I obviously got familiar with Andrew about six, nine months ago. We actually talked, you know, a bit recently. He's a really good guy. Super, genuine, authentic dude. Really big fan. It's actually funny. I tweeted about it last week. I think fundamentally we look at business segments differently but have very similar thoughts around deal construction and how to do them. So we have different thesis. It's actually really synergistic. I think we're meeting up in Vancouver here pretty soon. But I think that we think about business very similarly and have different target business acquisitions, which is great because when deal flow, I can send him deal flow and vice versa. So Andrew's awesome.

The bench deal and this TikTok and the press you've received. A huge part of obviously buying companies is having the deal flow or the opportunities that you see and obviously approaching them, but also the inbound. And I'm curious to know your viewpoint on inbound deals. Companies saying, hey, I think this would be kind of looking to sell versus you trying to go and reach out and kind of be the buyer. Obviously there's two different viewpoints.

We do both. I think we gen like it's really tough to educate founders about selling their business until, till they start to go through it and meet other buyers. Because we're actually the way we built our brand is we're the friendly acquirer. If something goes wrong, we'd rather give the extra million in stock, cash, whatever because we want the reputation's worth more to us over the long term and screwing somebody out of some small amount of money and having everyone being upset about it. So that's the first thing. And then generally like what we tell you up front when you're a founder, like and I can give you an idea of this, let's say I'm buyinglistener.com as a business. Let's say we give you like a third and a third, a third like cash equity, rolled equity and then make an earn out. Well what they don't like most buyers won't tell you like oh this is like what we need for working capital. Right. So then they, you don't realize they're keeping some of your cash on your balance sheet, right. And they don't tell you all this to the very end and then they'll change the terms. We don't do any of that. We just tell you hey, this is what it is. And they're like oh your offer's not good. Get back to me in like three months when they've beaten you up in diligence for that long and they change your offer and it's way worse than what I'm telling you at least. So we're very transparent and very founder friendly and so that that creates a ton of goodwill. So we've had a lot of founders even reject our offers. But they'll introduce their friends and whoever else that's selling their business because they know that we're good guys. We're not trying to pull a fast one. And that becomes apparent very quickly for them as they go through what I would say is very sharky waters with everyone else in the process for six months. And we hear back from all these companies inevitably. So I think that's a huge advantage. We're playing long term games similar to Berkshire mixed with like a tech play long term buy and hold. So it's less private equity, less like holding company or roll up so to speak. Business generally is focused on like G suite for business back office. Simple way to think about it and we'll buy businesses but at least employer.com around that that pieces great perspective.

Appreciate you sharing that context. And as you as you're thinking about that a question that Popped up in my head, which I'm curious about, just, you know, talking about integration with deals. I know you said, you know, the servers were up, back on bench in six to eight hours. Something that, just to go back to TikTok quickly. If a deal like TikTok closed and you became, and your group became the owners, how would that change your approach and mindset around employer recruiter.com and just your business interests overall? How do you think about that? If, okay, green light says go, you own this asset in the group. What's your viewpoint on that?

Well, my life's gonna change. My life's been changing really rapidly as it is. So I think, I think it'd be really good. I think fundamentally, honestly, things would be shifting to take a step back. So my shareholders and also anyone listening understands too, the way we've set up our business is fundamentally different than most other companies. Like my CEO and CTO run the business day to day. The CEO for a lot. The way we set up is similar to a lot of great Silicon Valley companies. Think like, like Coinbase with Brian and Emily. Emily runs the day to day like operations, the coo, right, and the president. And then like Sheryl Sandberg originally and Mark at Facebook, you know, Cheryl is doing like operations and handling a lot of business. So that's how we are structured in the sense that my coo, David, cto, Ben, they run a lot of the database stuff. I come in and push like strategic vision and outward facing marketing and relationships. But so that allows us to move really very agilely and it doesn't really impact the business too much from that perspective. And so I think that's the first thing and I think that we can operationalize and stand up. Obviously TikTok's a very large business even in the US just by itself. But we're ready to do that. Like I said, full fledged plan set up to basically go and execute on this the same way we've done with Bench. And by the way, one other similarity with Bench and Tick Tock is actually it was, you know, Bench was a Canadian company. So we were dealing with, you know, basically taking a business that's in a different country, right, domiciled in a different country and rolling it. Obviously it was all in this case for bench it was 100 U.S. customers. So it's a Canadian company servicing 100 U.S. u.S customers. And that's the same thing. In this scenario this would be Tick Tock, right? From, from China. China, obviously and ByteDance. And we were taking that and it'd just be only us. And so I think that that's a huge, huge point that not many people have done that and stood it up very, very quickly and dealt with all the international laws and regulations and stuff of that nature. But we just went through this. So I think we're probably the best buyer from that perspective too, having not our first rodeo and it's a very recent rodeo that we've done it. So absolutely, we're excited.

So cool to hear and even to this conversation, I'm, I'm loving it. We could go in so many different directions. And one thing that you know, keeps coming to mind for me that I'm curious about, which is, you know, a company like Employer Recruiter.com and the viewpoint of the bench deal, I think there's a lot of founders that you know, when you talk about Holdco, or maybe there's founders out there that say, hey, like, yeah, we've maybe considered doing some like micro acquisitions or maybe we've considered doing M and A. But you know, they may think oh, like we don't have the cash or oh, like we, we're not in a position to be an acquirer. Like what's your framework or the mindset or maybe some advice that you'd have for founders or maybe early stage Holdco founders, if they're sitting there like, wow, I see a handful of opportunities, I don't know how to approach it. We don't have the cash on hand yet. Like, how do you best give advice to people that may want to get into M and A as a part of their strategy?

Yeah, fundamentally I think first, I think it's getting down like your, your costs around that. So like if you go, you like, I'll give you an example. Like when I first started, I was a novice this myself not long ago, maybe two and a half years ago. Right. So two years ago, something like that. If you call up a lawyer. Right, let's call up any lawyer. You're a small firm, big firm, you say you're doing an acquisition, they're going to charge you at least 100k. Now if you tell you callers and say, hey, I'm doing a business transaction, like partnership type thing, even though that may not be true, they're going to tell you what their hourly rate is, you're going to get a deal and then the whole transaction will cost you 20 to 30k as opposed to if you just frame as an acquisition, they're going to charge a lot more. So that's the first thing understanding the economics of how to do it in a cost effective way where you can do a lot of acquisitions quickly without breaking your company's bank, so to speak. Because you'd rather spend an extra 100, 200k on buying businesses, not larger businesses or better businesses than. Or domains. Right. Than like premium domains, things that help grow your business as opposed to just one transaction. And so I think that that's a good thing, is you want that playbook. How do you get things done at an economical price if you plan on making it part of your strategy? Right. What's your cost? Basically in this case you're like M and A, you know, cost of an acquisition rate. So I think that's the first thing and I think that you can be really creative. There is literally people don't think about it this way, but I think most people, when they make acquisitions, especially large companies, they only want to do it one way. The reason is because you get similar to tech debt when you build a system from an engineering perspective, you have things that create other dependencies and things that create critical points of failure in the future. Well, it's the same thing with law because you get different contracts that conflict across an acquisition sprint. But it's also a huge disadvantage. So you have to weigh the pros and cons of that because the way we do deals generally is like, hey, look, case of a buying listener. What do you want? Right? You want all cash. And we'll give you a range of how you can structure it and you can pick within that. Like we're relatively flexible. And so I think that gives us a huge advantage. And people don't realize you can literally buy a company by just saying, I'm going to give you like $100 in like a warm six pack of beer. Now that's a very simple simplistic. Simplistic. But you could literally do a deal like that. Right. The lawyers probably want you to specify what time of year. Yeah, what time it's going to get there, how are we going to keep it warm? But like, but the point being is like, you can do literally anything on that, like within reason. Obviously it's like legal. But the structure does not have to just be, oh, people see a $100 million acquisition, they assume it's all cash. Most deals are not all cash. Right. It's at least some rolled equity. It's some burnout. I think that probably changes people's scope and thoughts about it quite a bit. But I know that's the case even for folks, friends or family. I know, they'll see, oh, you guys bought this company for hundreds of millions or whatever the case is. And like, oh, you mean you must be rich because that's not the case. Right. It's not like my money. It's not the company. And separately it's not. You're not paying all cash in that case. I think we've only got one deal that's all cash. For context, in every deal it's been different. So every deal we've ever done has.

Been different in some way. Shape up until this point, how many deals have you done? And then when you think about 20, 25 and you know, the next year, two years to come, how do you think about the amount of deals? Is it less is more? You're hyper focused on specific deals or what's the mindset around the future of acquisitions given that you've done very many in a quick timeframe up until this point?

Yeah, I think we, I think we've done 10. 10. I'd have to go back and count, honestly, I don't remember at the moment. I think it's going on 11 with TikTok. And then we've got a bunch of others closing, actually. So employer.com does that. They're obviously different entities. Just to be clear, they're not the same. Employer.com will not be tick tock TikTok.com but like, but employer.com was already, we were already in the works of closing like a half dozen deals and we were, we'll be spinning those in, you know, the end of the quarter. So that'll be big. So it'll be another call, five or six deals there and then obviously the TikTok deal by itself. Either way, I think like one of the things I think fundamentally that I'll be working on at least for the rest of my career that really excites me is like marquee acquisition opportunities. So whether, Whether we get TikTok or not, I'm going to go buy something else that's really cool. Maybe, maybe it'll be a listener, maybe it'll be Joe Rogan's podcast, I don't know. But something that's like fundamentally like a game changing marquee business or thing. I'll give you an example. They're not for sale and I'm not soliciting them per se, but something that comes in mind of prestige within their. If you think about basketball, for example, obviously I think the Celtics are notably for sale right now, but the Lakers, the Knicks, those are marquee acquisition opportunities. And then within technology, some of those might be like, who are some great private companies, obviously like opening. We're not buying OpenAI, but those types of brands that attract similar going back to the domains thing, that's something I'm going to be focused on too, is going after those acquisitions. So either way, that'll be what I'm focused on, I think for the foreseeable future is going after really great brands, really great businesses, whether it be sports or technology. I think fundamentally businesses at the end of the day are one part like systems and technology, but at the core, a lot of those businesses are people. It's a living organism and we've been pretty good at making sure that we can support and nurture those companies and people to grow further. And it served us well. And so that's my future.

I love to hear that. A couple more questions before we wrap up here. Jesse, when you think about the journey you've been on from, you know, I mean, I mentioned it right, when we kicked off this interview of your mother and I growing up, being in the recruiting world, your family being entrepreneurial, growing up in the Bay, I feel that right now, this inflection point with AI, I would love to hear your point of view. You know, especially when you. Every day, every week, there's new, massive changes. Things like what open AI launched yesterday with operator and agents and just the, the velocity of that compounding over the next two, three years. What is your viewpoint on that as an individual? Obviously in the business sense of it. And, you know, your, for your pov, like, where do you see it going and how do you see it impacting? Whether that's your strategy or just the business world overall.

Yeah, I think so. Look, I think that what I, what I assume to be true is AI is moving faster than I can imagine. My understanding is probably slightly greater than the average person globally just because they work in tech, right? So I think most people, like, oh, it'd be an issue in like 5, 10, 15 years. But so for me, my thought is 5. And so what I do just to hedge on that, on the conservative side, I assume it's gonna be like two to three, right? So maybe two to three years. And so my thoughts fundamentally, like how quickly things are going. And I think that you can actually see that track with kind of what we're doing. So you look at the pace paradox, right? The paradox of how quickly you need basically how quickly innovation's happening and how much you have to stay up to date on that innovation. It used to Be like every five years, you could stay up to date, then it was every couple of years and now it's probably every six months. And I think that'll keep accelerating, accelerating until if you weren't here 30 days ago, you wouldn't know what's going on in the technology world. And I think that's going to be very hard for us Humans with 10,000 year old brains to process and compute. Me personally as well, and so that's why I'm always very conservative with it. But I think it'll be fundamentally good for folks in the world as a whole. I think we're already seeing this with the Stargate project they announced this week with a ton. There's going to be tons of construction, innovation, reworking American infrastructure for AI. So I think that that's really exciting and I think it'll help grow quite a bit everything across the economy and I think as well as globally. And I think that one thing I'll say is it's a good opportunity over the next few years for companies to accelerate growth like what we did@employer.com, basically after these acquisitions close, we'll have product parity or superiority. I won't name names of our competitors. We will have paced what they've done in 20 plus years in less than a year. That's unheard of. And we spent tens of millions, not billions or hundreds of millions to get there. So you're seeing that innovation move super, super quick and I think that we'll continue to see that. So people that move fast and adopt and jump in, you can go build $100 million or $200 million business over the next two to three years and absolutely make a really big name for yourself. And I think that opportunity exists for a lot of people out there if they want.

Love that perspective. I appreciate you sharing that. And before we wrap up here, Jesse, one question that I want to spend a moment on is you have so many exciting things that you're not only building and working on and deals that are public, such as the TikTok one, but when you think about the future business personally, like what excites you the most around what you're building, whether that's a specific thing, a specific result, or maybe a specific opportunity. What is most exciting to you as you think about the next six, 12, 18 months ahead?

That's a tough, tough thing to say. Generally speaking, like anything I'm doing just as a fundamental like base layer from the values perspective is like first off, our users and how do we make sure they're safe and taking care of our customers, right? That's the first thing. And then I think so whether that's tick tock, right, Making sure that you know we're using all US servers and everything, all the data and stuff is here in the US I think that similar to that and I think separately with like Bench, you know we had a lot of upset customers. We've retained I think like 92% of them at the last data I checked and we're growing, right. And so I think that's how we run business, is how we take care of our customers. Like that's my core value for anything that we're doing. I was like technology building businesses and I think it's universal across like I think, I think business is not silo like you can be, you can be really good at this one type of business and it translates somewhat the people and systems doesn't change too much business to business. Obviously a lot to learn but on like the social media aspect of running social media company but I think that fundamentally you can get in my background being in recruiting originally I know how to hire the best people. So I don't need to be the smartest guy something I can hire the best person to find the best person to jump in and be that leader, subject matter expert that will get me again moving a lot quicker or as opposed to having like you know, thinking that I'm smarter than I am it's something would be an actual issue. But having the lack of like no ego basically and okay, being wrong and getting the best people in to basically lead those different functions is a huge advantage. So generally I'm excited about a lot of things but I think yeah I'm excited about, I'm excited about like making small businesses operate smoothly. I think that was one of the big issues I had when I started my business. Like you spend 90, like the Pareto distribution, you spend 90% of your time doing like the accounting like tax filings, all that stuff, payroll and you know, not only the 10% on the stuff that really matters for your business and so we're trying to automate that. I think that also be great for content creators too. If we get TikTok, there's some awesome opportunities there to make all of that streamlined for them too. And I think that could be a big win across the board and I think we can make make TikTok even better platform.

Appreciate you sharing that. And it is my hope that in 90 days when we're doing a follow up interview here. I'm talking to the new owner of TikTok. So I could not be any more excited for you, Jesse. And I'm not only super inspired by just your story, but it's really cool to see the public keeping people up to date on what you're doing and the way you're going about it. And again, I really grateful for your time. You have so much going on right now and can't thank you enough for taking the time to come on the show today.

Awesome.

Of course. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening, everyone.