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Fuel50: Helping Employees Figure Out Their Career Path, With Anne Fulton

If you're an employee in a big company, sometimes it can feel like you're not sure when your career is going. Los Angeles-based Fuel50 (www.fuel50.com) – backed by local investors Rincon Venture Partners and Bonfire Ventures—is helping to solve that problem, with its career pathing software designed for helping employees at large enterprises figure out what's next. We caught up with Fuel50 founder and CEO Anne Fulton to learn more about the startup.

What is Fuel50?

Anne Fulton: Fuel50 is a career pathing startup, part of the HR technology landscape. We're a disruptor, the third wave in human resources technology. Recruit management, performance management, and career pathing is still old school. The whole space has been neglected. However, everyone has a career, and everyone wants a future. That's the piece of the puzzle that Fuel50 is dedicated to, which is allowing employees to see what their future is within a business, to get transparency into an area they don't have now. It's really Match.com meets LinkedIn for your business. It helps you figure out what you can do in a business, what roles are available, what might be my future here. You can find a mentor, a coach, a project, or experience, to help you prepare for the role you are looking for. It's very much matching pieces into a puzzle. I don't know if you've done a career test since leaving school, or thought much about your career, but it's career testing on steroids, using machine intelligence and artificial intelligence.

How did you start the company?

Anne Fulton: I've always been a technology lover, although I'm an organizational psychologist by training. I spent a lifetime building predictive recruitment tests. They got so good at it, if 1,000 people applied to a job, 997 would be rejected. Instead, what I wanted to do was build a career test to allow everyone to find the right job, and starting from the employee talent, the reverse side of the equation. We were originally operating as a coaching company, and we built out this assessment technology for our own clients. A large bank started using us, with 18,000 employees in Australia, and the next thing we new we were delivering the product to the the U.S. with a global, top bank, with 30,000 employees in 28 countries. That was in 2014, and that was our pivot moment. We got really serious after the success of that customer, who wanted to make this technology available for all of its employees across the globe. Three years later, and after growing to 75 clients, our business is going really well. We've been flirting with profitability all year, and are approaching $3M in ARR, but we also want to scale and build up our business, our product acceleration, and continue our client success. This coming year, it's all about ramp and scale for us.

What were you doing before Fuel50?

Anne Fulton: I've always been an organizational psychologist crossed with a serial entrepreneur. This is like my fifth business. Even when I had babies, I started a company making baby clothing with designers for a few years. I can't help myself in being an entrepreneur. I'm addicted to the entrepreneurial journey. In this particular journey, it really morphed out of two of my prior businesses. This one really fulfills my destiny, in terms of building career tests and helping people make amazing decisions about their future.

How is it your first customer was in Australia?

Anne Fulton: I'm actually a Kiwi, a New Zealander, and all of our product and marketing is done out of New Zealand. Some of our earliest clients were telecom and big Austrlian employers, so they became the proof point for our product. It wasn't long after that I ended up in the U.S., when that leading bank found us and took us to those 30,000 employees in 28 countries. It all happened in 2014, really fast.

So how did you end up here in California?

Anne Fulton: That's a good question. California is amazing, and it's also basically one night of sleep back home to New Zealand. It's a lot like New Zealand in that you can live on the beach—and I can't live without being on the beach and looking at the waves and seeing the birds flying by. I also find that Southern California is an amazing place for talent. We've got three of the team also based here in Southern California, and it's proven to be am amazing hub. We're working from Manhattan Beach and Long Beach, and we've found that Southern California is really friendly. Obviously, we managed to connect with the amazing folks at Bonfire Ventures here in Southern California, and that's really a marriage. They're really dedicated to B2B and they really loved the vision of what we're working on and the traction we have. It was really a meeting of the minds with the fund. We're very excited to be working with them, to help us create a platform for us for future acceleration and growth, and we're working on additional investments down the track.

What's your biggest entrepreneurial lesson so far with Fuel50?

Anne Fulton: That's a big question. I think the lesson is that sometimes it's a waiting game. With our product, we are hunting whales, and we are elephant hunting. Capturing a bunny rabbit might feed the family for a day, and the deer might feed the family for a few weeks, but what we're looking for is the elephant, that big organization. In that case, patience is needed. It's trusting in your position, and early adopters who believe in us. Some of the early adopters we have have been such logos as MasterCard, eBay, and Indeed. I think we're seeing our growth finally is starting to be exponential, while back in 2015 and 2016 we found we needed to have some patience.

Given your roots in New Zealand, what's been the biggest difference between doing business in the U.S. versus New Zealand?

Anne Fulton: The most interesting thing, is the HR and buying decisions are actually identical in both countries. The education around new products and bringing them to the market is the same in both markets. However, we've had some learning curve around global security requirements. We pass ever audit test with 100 percent flying colors, but having our product penetration three times a year has been new. It's business as usual in such a competitive market here, and thankfully we have an amazing team managing our infrastructure and security, so we've been able to fly through the due diligence on the product in that area.

Finally, with the new funding, what's next for you?

Anne Fulton: In terms of product acceleration, the most important thing we need to work on is our next wave iteration of pathing. People think about their career in terms of job titles, but it's really more important to think about their career as being about experiences. Reid Hoffman likes to talk about the gig economy and tours of duty, and Fuel50 is now enabling people to find a gig, find a tour, and find an experience or a stretch project. That will allow them to build their skills for the next opportunity. That's super exciting. We've released the initial version of that now, and have provided that beta version to some of our really big clients with 100,000's of employees. The second big thing we are working on, is predictive retention capability. We're getting some really incredible insights and intelligence into the workforce, and what their motivations are, and drivers. We're really ramping up that workforce intelligence using AI. Plus, we're really ramping up our client success team and sales team to meet the demand in the U.S. We'll have three times the number of customers in the US this time next year.

Thanks!