Richard Gregory Co-CEO, Jodel

Company

Jodel was founded in 2014, as a live social media feed using geolocation services on smartphones to allow users to follow and participate in online conversations with like-minded users locally. Jodel enables people to exchange ideas, seek information or quickly find the most recent news in their area. Starting with university students, Jodel quickly spread among other communities. Jodel enables people to exchange ideas, seek information or quickly find the most recent news in their area.

Headquartered in Berlin with a team of 70, the business has grown a user base to millions of users across multiple geographies, including DACH, Scandinavia, France, UK, and Saudi Arabia. They raised a successful series B in 2021 following a Series A from investors in Europe and Silicon Valley. The backers include Adam di Angelo, Facebook’s first CTO and founder of Quora, and the Floodgate Fund, with participation from the Global Founders Network, Rubylight, and Atlantic Internet.

Search Background

As with many social platforms growing explosively, Jodel have had to face the need to develop the product further to cope with the challenges of a geographically and socially diverse user base. Having initially started with and grown rapidly through the student community, mass market success naturally resulted in different users with different interests. Curating content and iterating the product to maintain relevance and hyperlocal approach has been a critical product challenge. They experienced growth in newer markets such as Finland, where DAUs are growing without the specificity of the product being compromised for users (something few social platforms have achieved). Having cracked the problem of maintaining hyperlocal and certain user groups through the product, and having cracked monetization strategy early, Jodel was in a position to rapidly re-ignite growth and continue to tackle new markets.

Requirements

To enable the Founder to focus in on product and innovation Jodel were seeking a Co-CEO to work alongside him as the day-to-day leader of the business, focused on providing the structure, processes, leadership and execution mentality to unlock growth. This person needed to be an incredible operator and leader, with a keen focus on commercial disciplines. In an ideal world the right candidate would combine stage appropriateness (ideally experience of growth from a low or early-stage base, with a level of transformational capability). The individual needed to also understand network-based businesses, that would involve experience in a social network, social gaming environment or UGC environment.

Result

Conducting an international search across the Europe and the USA, Erevena introduced Richard Gregory, who brings in-depth experience of building out network and community-based platforms from leading Nextdoor’s international business where he led the expansion into 11+ markets across Europe, Asia, and North America, including a relaunch into the German market.