Sam Parr  ⚪️

Indeed was co-founded by Paul Forster and Rony Kahan in 2004, after Rony previously founded and sold Jobsinthemoney - a leading job board for people in finance. The goal of Indeed was to create the largest search engine for jobs in the world.

The founders established dual-HQs far away from Silicon Valley - in Stamford, CT (sales + support) and Austin, TX (product and engineering). Throughout 2004 - 2005, Indeed began scraping the Jobs and Careers web pages from thousands of individual companies.

In 2005, @fredwilson invested $5m in it alongside the NYT (the only money they'd ever raise), saying "they bootstrapped the company, launched the service, and were well on their way. They didn't need our money. But eventually we convinced them to take it..."

By 2007 (as a 3-year-old company), Indeed was profitable and became the #1 source of hires in the US. Around the same time, Indeed began an email list to push relevant and targeted jobs directly to the inboxes of jobseekers.

By 2010, Indeed added two more products that became critical to their success: -Indeed Apply: a standard application to apply to many jobs at once -Resume: get jobseekers to upload their resumes - Indeed quickly collected over 1m resumes that could be searched by employers