The evolution of a successful company involves a typical storyline that goes from the founding team focusing on product and growth at the earliest stages to the founders’ roles transitioning to storytelling and finding, engaging, and retaining the right talent after product-market-fit is established. Eventually, as company roles become more specialized, many companies are hiring Chief People Officers (CPOs) to manage the strategy of building and retaining exceptional talent with a focus on hiring, training, professional development, and performance management. Knoetic is a platform built for Chief People Officers by Chief People Officers. The platform is a workforce analytics platform that also has its own professional social network of 1000+ Chief People Officers that are able to support one another and provide best practices. The analytics side allows CPOs to take an unprecedented data-driven approach to their roles. The company is emerging from stealth but has its roots in another startup that combined analytics and community founded by the same team – Twine.
AlleyWatch caught up with Founder and CEO Joseph Quan to learn more about the business, strategic plans, recent round of funding, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised an $18M Series A, led by Accel. Vas Natarajan @ Accel was our partner.
What’s unique about our round is that we brought in over 100 angel investors (many of whom are founders or executives from our own community!). They include great folks like:
- The current & former Chief People Officers of companies like Mozilla, Pinterest, Gusto, Box, Blue Bottle Coffee, Twilio, Fitbit, Kickstarter, Looker, Github, and more.
- Adam Grant, NYT bestselling author of Give & Take, Originals, Option B (with Sheryl Sandberg) and Wharton professor
- Pamela Thomas-Graham, board member @ Bumble, Compass, Peloton, and more
- The cofounder of Segment and founder of Mulesoft.
Tell us about the product or service that Knoetic offers.
Knoetic is a platform built with Chief People Officers, for Chief People Officers.
We run the world’s #1 Chief People Officer network of 1,000 CPOs, and build a powerful people analytics platform that pulls in millions of employee data points to help companies make better decisions on compensation, recruiting, retention, and more.
Knoetic is the first platform to ever unify those 2 products (a community & an analytics tool) together. By embedding our exclusive social network of 1,000+ world-class Chief People Officers directly into our people analytics software, the resulting “Insight Engine” gives CPOs both quantitative and qualitative insights, enabling them to make smarter, holistic decisions about their workforce.
Chief People Officers use Knoetic to build their board decks, present data to their CEOs, solve challenges with peers, and improve their employee retention, compensation, and hiring.
What inspired the start of Knoetic?
Knoetic was entirely born out of the pandemic. Chief People Officers were thrown into the spotlight. They suddenly became the most important executives in the C Suite as they had to think through answers around COVID responses, return to work policies, the reckoning around BLM, and much more.
They were suddenly incredibly critical to their companies, but also alone and lost. Our CPO community arose as a way for these Chief People Officers to open up and strategize around the most pressing topics they faced as executives.
This positioning has led us to quickly become the #1 network for Chief People Officers for leading technology companies. The network has a double-digit monthly growth rate and is adding cohorts of 100 new CHROs/Chief People Officers monthly. Because we keep the network curated, acceptance rates have been falling to keep member quality high.
Personally, I’ve always loved people data and analytics, and spent my early career and time in school studying organizations and teams at Berkeley, Wharton, Nike Innovation, and more. As a founder, I incubated many different ideas in this space (HR tech) until founding Knoetic in Q2 of 2020.
How is Knoetic different?
First, we are the only company building an integrated social network and SaaS business.
Second, we co-built the platform with 1000 CPOs – leading to our mantra “built with CPOs, for CPOs.” No company is more customer/community driven – our angel investor syndicate is a testament to this!
What market does Knoetic target and how big is it?
In the short run, we are competing in a category of 1. That’s how we’ll win. We are the only all-in-one platform built exclusively for Chief People Officers, and we won’t stop until we have every top CPO in the world on Knoetic.
In the long run, we’re targeting a $30B market for what we call “people decisions and analytics.”
What’s your business model?
For top Chief People Officers who are accepted into the network, we have a community that gives them an immense amount of value for free (the value for us is building awareness of Knoetic in the broader market).
For CPOs who want data superpowers, they buy our analytics suite, which is priced based on company size and access to specific modules.
What was the funding process like?
It went by pretty quickly. We got to the offer stages within 2 weeks, given our brand, early user love, and growth.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Given the velocity of the process, the biggest challenge was picking the right partner. I found that partner in Vas & Accel. In him, I found a good human being and an incredible thought partner, with great pattern recognition for SaaS companies and plenty of big wins under his belt.
The second challenge was telling the story around our community – some investors saw it as a distraction, but that simply signaled we weren’t a good fit for each other. Building a community that our CPOs love is the beating heart of our strategy.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We run the most vibrant, active, and curated network of Chief People Officers in the entire world – that was a huge differentiator. Imagine having 1000 influential executives on your side. We had dozens of CPOs vouching for us, telling investors how excited they were about our product – so there was hype around us and energy in the market. We also hold our position as #1 in our category.
Another set of factors were the macro undercurrents.
We’re in the right space at the right time – people analytics & people tech are super hot.
Every board and CEO cares deeply about people issues right now. This is a trend we only expect will grow larger – our investors agree that the 2020s are the decade of the Chief People Officer.
Investors also mentioned they liked my background working on multiple ventures in this space. Many had also seen me navigate real adversity before launching Knoetic.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
In the coming six months, we will cement our position as the world’s #1 Chief People Officer Community, going from 1,000 members to several thousand. We’ll also double the size of the team, with a heavy focus on community and engineering, and further build out our strategic/prescriptive analytics engine.
In the coming six months, we will cement our position as the world’s #1 Chief People Officer Community, going from 1,000 members to several thousand. We’ll also double the size of the team, with a heavy focus on community and engineering, and further build out our strategic/prescriptive analytics engine.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
It’s not all about the money.
If you’re great, you can make it happen without the funding.
Diamonds will shine anywhere.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We’re focused on our near-term goals (revenue growth, membership growth, team growth, product features) and disciplined about how we’ll grow. We want to be the best product in a small market – Act 1 is about getting to $100M in ARR first, in the narrow market we’re personally defining.
We will build the greatest all-in-one platform for Chief People Officers, ever.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC
Sorry, not outdoors but was at Jungsik several weeks ago (right before Delta popped back up) and it was phenomenal.
