About This Episode:

On today’s episode, I’m joined by Carolyn Betts, founder, and CEO of Betts Recruiting. Betts is a nationwide recruiting agency that partners with the hottest venture-backed startup companies to scale for growth.

Since 2009, Betts has partnered with the biggest names across various sectors offering a customized approach to each search. Her knack for spotting top talent and pairing them with an ideal company has led to developing a trusted marketplace in the SaaS space, ensuring that every partner, both talent and client, who comes to Betts succeeds.

Prior to founding Betts, Carolyn was in sales at CareerBuilder.com and became a top-performing enterprise sales executive working with clients including Netflix, Symantec, McAfee, and many more. She is currently a board member at BUILD, an advisory council member at Beam Founders, and a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization and Entrepreneur’s Organization. She received her BA in Journalism and Mass Communications from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is an alumna of Harvard Business School. Carolyn has provided her expertise for Austin Business Journal, Business Insider, CNBC, Fast Company, Forbes, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.

In our discussion today, you’ll hear about Carolyn’s entrepreneurial family including parents and grandparents who had businesses in the Bay Area, why she prefers bootstrapping her company to the often “demoralizing” process of capital fundraising, and some advice for founders looking to staff their startups.

Startup Growth Stories is hosted by Don Muir, CEO and Co-Founder of Arc Technologies. In each weekly episode of this podcast, you’ll hear from first-time, bootstrapped, and unicorn founders around how they secured their first customers, convinced their first employees to join, and grew their business. Founders and industry insiders share their greatest successes (and failures) and the things they learned along the way. In the final minutes of each episode, guests get vulnerable - they share very personal stories about the impact of their work on their wellbeing, their relationships and their families.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

[00:46] Who is Carolyn Betts?

[01:55] Carolyn gives insight into what “The Founders Pledge” involves - Founders commit to giving a percentage of their personal outcome to the team upon exiting the business

[02:45] How did she build her own business? Seeing the spinning wheels of recruiting process, knew she could do better. Dad encourages her to strike out on her own, not join him in the centuries-old manufacturing family biz

[04:29] Entrepreneurship in the DNA – Dad had a manufacturing company, and grandparents had the oldest art gallery in Bay Area

[05:54] The initial tribe that supported her start included a boyfriend who worked at LinkedIn and previous bosses, trade show prospecting at DreamForce gained first clients

[09:24] Betts is bootstrapped, and almost all clients are gross venture-backed. Carolyn found it “demoralizing” to raise capital

[12:48] Why demoralizing? She didn’t like the “no’s” and negative feedback about her business

[13:47] Being bootstrapped means approaching growth more intentionally – not “growth at all costs” or too quickly

[15:38] Even though the economy has been swinging from Covid to the Great Resignation to the Great Rehiring, startups con