How ClickUp Went From a Month of Runway to 800,000 Teams and a $4B Valuation

Guys, ClickUp. 800,000 teams on the platform. 85,000 are now paying caught north or around of $80,000,000 in revenue on path to break caught a 150, 200,000,000 next year. Crazy growth going back to their series a, 200,000,000 valuation series b in 2020, 1,000,000,000, and now 4,000,000,000, but Zeb is just getting started. Some interesting news coming up. It sounds like on the M and A side, they're continuing to build great products for productivity teams. One app to replace

them all or to empower them all or to power them all. Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it, which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large

fund to do non dilutive deals with B2B software founders. So far, we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling $150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer. Alright. Let's jump into the interview. Hey, folks. My guest today is Zeb Evans. He's the founder and CEO of ClickUp, the all in

one productivity platform that empowers more than 300,000 teams and 3,000,000 people around the world to save time and live more productive lives. He's a serial entrepreneur. He started several software companies with over 100,000,000 in revenue with a focus on building tools that increase productivity and save people time. Zeb, you ready to take us to the top?

Let's do it, Nathan.

How much of this productivity focus... Know you casually mentioned it in your in your last round financing. You've had four near death experiences. How does that actually, like, make you move faster, and how do you pass that urgency off to your team who maybe hasn't had four near death life experiences?

Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, those those experiences made me obsess over time and efficiency. And productivity is is equivalent to time. And so... And and on a personal level, it's time. On a business level, time ends up being money. So businesses should care about productivity more than ever. Individuals should care about it more than ever for for where their time goes. And so, you know, for for us, it's it's easy to

cascade down to everyone in our company when everyone sees the the impact of the products that that we're creating. We can kind of create that that obsession and that culture around saving people time and and making people more productive.

Mhmm. Now you, eighteen months ago, had bootstrapped, I believe. You launched the business in 2017. You'd bootstrapped. I think you shared up to, like, a 20 or $25,000,000 run rate. Right?

Yep. We we bootstrapped into our series a about, yeah, eighteen months ago.

Yeah. But, I mean, again, nice nice scale of revenue, very capital efficient because you'd only raised, I think, 2,500,000 convertible notes up to that point. Right?

Correct. Yeah. Those those convertible notes were actually in mine that I used from a previous company to to fund. So... Yeah.

That's hysterical. Was that Mango?

It's called Fast Followers. He did social media marketing and automation.

Oh, really interesting. Okay. But guys, I'm bearing the lead here a little bit. Right? Because so eighteen months ago, only 2,500,000 raised. It sounds like of his own money, which is great. But bootstrapped in. He hadn't raised NAVC and then said, you know what? I fell in love with David Sachs at Kraft. He talked about that on our last episode together. We're not gonna rehash that. But my gosh, that if something got in your blood because

you raised about 500,000,000 since then, what's driving sort of... It's like, where have you... This is, in my opinion, this kind of capital. You are now a capital allocator. Right? And it's like, how do you allocate capital to hit this productivity goal for the world? So, like, where are you allocating capital today?

Yeah. Like, and I'll start by saying, I think I'm I'm still I'm still a very much an advocate for Bootstrap as long as you can until you get product market fit through through getting product market fit. After your product market fit, raise capital in efficient means when you know unit economics, and you can spend capital in in sustainable ways. I I think... So it's still as as... You know, as ridiculous amount of money that we have

raised, a $500,000,000, it's still... We're... We still very much focus on doing it in a in a sustainable way where we have a net positive impact after spending every single dollar. And so to answer your question, you know, we... Of course, marketing and paid acquisition is is a big piece of of growth particularly in in a very competitive category. We have to out market and outmaneuver our competitors, but product and and innovation and r and d

always has to be top of mind as as well. At the end of the day, the only defensibility that we have is moving faster than our competitors and building better... A better product and a better user experience than than they can as well. So, you know, acquisitions will will certainly be on on our radar in, you know, in the very near future as is scaling globally. We were opening offices around the world and being able to localize our product in in several different languages as well.

Give me a quick team update. Last time you came on, you shared that you were just breaking about a 140 employees. I think you're over 600 now. Is that accurate? And if so, how many engineers?

Yeah. We have we have just just shy over 800 employees today. And on the engineering side, about about a 100 engineers.

And so you've done a really interesting thing in terms of, I think you have at least in terms of quantifying your engineering power based off number of integrations you've launched and all of your comparable pages where it's ClickUp versus Jira versus Trello versus Monday, you talk about, again, more integrations. Why is that marketing line working so well? And how have you instrumented your engineering team to pump these integrations out so quickly and keep them updated?

Yeah. We we we say we'll not have to replace them all. That's that's the familiar messaging that we place. But the reality is, you know, we're we're not trying to replace every single application. We do think that we can put all of your workplace productivity software in one place, and and that is is ultimately our true mission. And outside of that, we play very nicely with every other integration on on the market. And so we've, you

know, built our our platform in a scalable way where we can build integrations very quickly, and we can also build features very quickly that that actually use separate teams that don't even affect our our core product teams, but are still within that same platform, the same ecosystem. So we've been very mindful of doing that since day one because, essentially, with our vision, we're putting 15 different products inside of one. And so traditionally, that's not the thing

you do in software. Right? You're supposed to do one thing and and do it well, and we've kind of always been the antithesis of of that.

Talk to me about growth. So since 2020, when you guys decide to go in and do that series a... 35,000,000 series a, how much have you grown revenue since then?

Yeah. We can't we can't really talk specific specific revenue numbers right now, but, you know, we've we've grown... We now actually have 800,000 teams that that use our product. We had 200,000 when we raised our our series b, and I believe around a 100,000 in in series a. So, you know, you you can kinda kinda back the math out there, and and we've grown roughly four x since our our series b.

Mhmm. Now I think you said in the in the press release for the round, you have 85,000 teams who are actually paying. Did I read that correctly?

Yep. 85,000 paying teams.

And so that's against 800,000 that are using you altogether. Are you happy with that conversion rate, is there room to improve there?

There's always room to improve everything for sure. And and we just started building, you know, product growth teams that are more focused on activation, retention, and, of course, upsell monetization, increasing our free our free to paid conversions. So there's always room to grow in in in everything.

How are you structuring those teams? Can you tell me about the last, like, little SWAT team you put together and what they're attacking specifically? How are you motivating that team?

We we have always had a a very functional focus to product and engineering in the first place because it's such a wide product. Like, you can't have everybody do everything, every engineer do everything. So we've always had these these teams focused around our our core product. Now what we've done is is really hyper focused them on very individual features so that you have a squad of of five to to six or seven people. You got a

PM, you got an EM, you got a few engineers, and usually a designer that... That's tied to each of those. Project manager, engineering manager? Product manager and engineering manager. Yep.

And then I cut you off. Sorry. I just wanna... I wanna note this down. So those two are part of the five to seven squad. Who... What are the other four?

Then you have engineers. So depending on the feature, maybe it's more back end heavy. So you'll have four just back end engineers. If it's front end, you'll have a a mixture between those. Then you'll have a designer that's kind of tied tied to that team, which we don't actually count as as part of that team. So that'd be a a plus one in addition to that because designers have multiple themes. And and so that's that's what

has allowed us to scale EPD, like, engineering product and design, is building these hyper focused teams that are focused on very, very specialized pieces of of our product. And and product growth is is one of those teams.

Can you go deep on one of those? I mean, can we talk about the new docs product a little bit more and and the team specifically around that and

how it's split up? Yeah. So our our docs product is actually is one of our our larger ones. I think it's it's 12 people. So it's it's it's it's kind of an abnormal abnormality there, but it it is a big piece of our product. And so that is is we we have a real time collaboration. There's two people working on real time collaboration so that's... Now if you picture any doc where you can see somebody's cursor

and typing, that stuff is is very complicated to to make great. And so we have two people that are are fully focused on on that. And then within that, the rest of that team got five or so front end engineers and and four four... Three or four back end engineers. Then you, of course, got our our PM, our product manager, and you got an engineering manager there as well. And so docs was docs was one that

we've been working on for a long time in the background. It was probably a month ongoing project that we've been working on. And we... Because we really felt that, you know, we needed to to to be the kind of the category leader there in in our space and get feature parity with those point solutions in order for people to replace those point solutions with with ClickUp.

Mhmm. How do you think about putting together these mini squad teams for digging for new ideas? Like, the PM is talking to a 100 customers a month. They're testing some of the engineering. And then can you tell me a story about one that you shut down where you spun that team up, they tested it for x amount of time, and it just... It... You you said no because the metrics didn't work or whatever.

Yeah. We... So we have a Zeb team also. And the the the ZEB the ZEB team is is for the things that you're talking about, really. It's for the bets. Right? The big bets that we're taking. And it... It's really our our early kind of principal engineers that are on that are on my team, and we take big bets. I have I have an idea on Monday, and we'll try to get it shipped by Friday. Lots

of times, we will test it. We'll only put it in certain workspaces. You gotta enable it. We'll see we'll see how... The feedback from that, and, know, you sometimes we'll shut we'll shut it down and and sometimes we'll we'll we'll continue shipping. But it's it's the the fun it's the the fun that you're come on.

Tell me about your lack because people read you in the press. They go, this guy can't do anything wrong. His shirts look great. He's got a great smile. He's raising all this money. What's the last thing? You had an idea on Monday, and it just flopped on Friday. I mean, it was just bad.

You know, there's... I... And there's been been several things that we we ship half assed. Right? We ship 10% of it, and we just never finished it. A feature called lineup is honestly... It's one it's one of those where the whole vision for it was to be able to prioritize your work and know exactly what people should work on next. So picture a list of five tasks that each person has in your company that's... This is

their priority. It just it just never took off. It never really went in anywhere. And so it actually still exists in our product, and I and I I know we'll be able to get back to it at some point and use automation to make it better. But that was that was certainly a flop.

Round that team out for me. How many people are on the Zeb team?

Six people.

Six. Okay. And is it PM, EM, four engineers?

So I'm the PM in the EM. So it's it's it's five engineers plus myself.

I love that. Okay. Very cool. So you still get to participate in that on the ground, test that stuff day one sort of stuff. Yep. That's nice. Exactly. Held on to that. Alright. Yeah. Tell me more. For people that maybe you don't know, mean, you're the guy that's in the videos. You're doing all this stuff, but you do have a CTO that you worked with also at a prior company, Mango, which sounds more like a venture studio where ClickUp is the thing that took off. Tell me about your relationship with him.

Yeah. So Alex was at IBM when I when I found him, and I I knew I needed a a very technical CTO and cofounder to to build this thing with. So I had always been pretty technical myself. You know, I know how to code, but it... I was using old technology. I I knew PHP, and I don't really know their JavaScript, at least in the back end the back end side of it. And so when, you

know, when we were starting... And by the Mango is just the the the name for the parent company for ClickUp. Mango is a DBA DBA for ClickUp.

So you always... You... That wasn't a venture studio. You weren't testing a bunch of ideas. It was ClickUp from day one.

No. You're right. We we were we were testing. We actually were gonna do a Craigslist competitor where you could pay in app and remove sketchiness from Craigslist. And we built ClickUp as an internal tool in order to build Craigslist. And we just kind of... I had always been obsessed with efficiency and time again from those near death experiences, and so I was always that person that was trying to squeeze out an extra hour a day and

trying to get an extra 10% more productivity for everyone on the team. And that's why we built ClickUp, was so that we could do that. And it wasn't one of those, like, Slack stories where, you know, we were using it for years and then kind of decided that this was the product. It was, like, a matter of a month. It was, like, a a month where we started building this, and we just realized we were more passionate about this than the Craigslist idea, and that there was a lot of opportunity here even in a very competitive category.

Now, Zeb, you had no idea... Alex had no idea where ClickUp would be today back then. Right? So maybe you do things differently. But back then, did you guys just split the... You know what? Let's just split equity right down the middle fifty fifty day one, or did you do something different?

We we did something different. I I kinda... I I was the one that was funding everything still, so it was it was all it was all my bets as far as the resources go. And and, you I wasn't wasn't being paid a salary or anything like that. So it was it was it was definitely different than than I think your your normal say then...

You can quantify that for what it is. You're betting on yourself. You you had some success. You said, you know what? I'm gonna fund this thing. They'll take less equity, I'm pay them a lot. I'm gonna take nothing. I get it. Where did you make money before ClickUp?

Yeah. So I I... I've an entrepreneur since I was, like, five years old. So I was always always doing something. Every year of my life, I have I have some type of story of of a hustle. But I actually was... I I was... I had a a mobile DJ company, an entertainment company, and and a friend and I of mine were were... We were managing some rappers. Actually, we were at we were averaging the tech, and we were managing a couple rappers. And and we

were This after your monorail days at Disney, I assume.

This was this was after my monorail days. And and we... There was a problem that we noticed where, like... And and big big events. And this is... I don't... Maybe it's not a problem anymore, but when there's 10,000 people in one space, you didn't have cell phone service back then. And you couldn't send out tweets for... And we were managing these these rappers' social media. You couldn't send out tweets. And so that's where my brain got

spinning where I I wanted to just, like, being able to automate sending out tweets. And then I wanted to be able to look at who's following you. Back then, they didn't have APIs to do that. They... Twitter didn't have their own reporting platform to do that. And so I kinda just built things that scraped your follower list and was able to show, like, who's following you. You could automate engagement with people. And so we kind of...

It it was it was a SaaS model before I knew what SaaS was. We started getting people paying a monthly subscription. And and then it turned into more of the... What we found the real money was in was managing more high profile celebrities' social accounts in order to gain gain followers, gain engagement, and increase the quality of their content based on who was following them. How much revenue do do

in the best year there?

Several million dollars. And you sold it? I did not sell it. I actually... So I I I had my third near death experience, and I realized during that period that that business was not adding net positive value for the world. I I actually felt bad about it. I was like, we were inflating people's egos on social media, you know, and we spent four years of my life doing that. And so I felt like I had wasted

so much time. And so we shut it down. That next... We paid everybody six months at our... At the company, but but we shut the company down. And and that was when I moved out to Palo Alto, drove across the country from from Virginia, and thought that... Yeah. I I got to Palo Alto for this. Like, I was picturing Vegas with start up lights. Know, just like start ups everywhere. And you get... Anybody that's been to Palo Alto is, like, the sleepiest town in the world. In fact, they have an ordinance against putting signs up.

It's like the sweet the sweet green on the corner is the most exciting thing you're gonna see.

The sweet green in the ice cream shops.

Yes. That's exactly right. That's incredible. Okay. So you shut it down in 2016, but what you're is you were running that profitably. You took dividends enough where you could fund the two convertible notes early on into Mango and ClickUp.

Exactly. Exactly. So so that was... It was... I mean, we we got to a point where, you know, there was... We had, like, $25 left in the bank account, so that was, like, enough for another month's another month's runway, really. And I had a little bit of money left, but not a that, Zeb?

What year?

'20... Had to be... It's, like, 2017.

End of twenty seventeen. 5 k left in the bank.

Yeah.

Wow. And So you burned through, like, burned through, like, 1,000,000 at that point then.

I think I think more than that. It's probably probably $22,000,000. And and, you know, it might have been it might have been twenty twenty eighteen. Yep. But the the point is that, you know, we we had about a month of of runway left. And and we were getting to, you know, we were getting to a point where we don't... We weren't... We didn't know if this was gonna be successful or not, and we could not raise

raise funding at the at the time. And so, you know, I was I was, like, thinking to myself, like, should we... You know, should I invest a little bit more money? I really only had, like, a $102,100 grand left that I could put into it. And so I pulled my head out of product and started focusing on go to market. And we added paywalls, and we introduced promotions for for one of the holidays that was during

that month. And literally, in in a matter of, like, forty five days, you know, we we were net positive. We were we were cash flow positive. And so the bank account got really low. I think it got down to a couple grand, but we we we turned it around. We became we became net positive.

2018, was that your first million dollar revenue or your million dollar run rate?

I believe so. I'm I'm not I'm not the I'm not the numbers person, Nathan. I'm the I'm the product I'm the product marketing.

Alex is engineering. He's definitely not the number person. You had to be the number person back then.

I still was more... Like, look. When when I realized we had $25 in the bank account, I realized we had 20... That was the first time I realized it. I should've I should've been thinking about that six months ahead. Like, how much are we burning? And that was after we cut down a shit ton of our expenses where where, like, maybe before we're spending much more. I think we're spending, like, a $100 a month, and we started cutting things down within, like, thirty days because I was like, shit. We're running out of money. Jeez. So so so yeah, I I honestly haven't haven't really been that that numbers person.

Crazy. Well, hey. Before we wrap up here, I would love to get some numbers out of if you're if you're comfortable sharing them. I'm only asking this one because you've already shared valuation in the press releases, 4,000,000,000 recently, 1,000,000,000 in 2020. But I don't know what you raised at 35,000,000 at. What valuation did you raise at the 35?

Our our our series a was 200,000,000.

Cool. There you guys have it. Little bit a little bit interesting news there if that's that's that's manageable. I like how you're managing. I mean, you're basically selling 10% every time you're doing a round. So you're really nicely managing dilution here. You're not gonna be one of these CEOs where if you go public, you only own 5%. Right?

Exactly. And a little trick if... Notes is a really great way with the cap to invest in your own company if you ever wanna invest in your own company.

Don't... Is that... Full disclosure. I don't understand that. I don't... Why did I give you leverage? Why don't you just put in money directly? Why do need to put on a note?

Well... So I I put in a cap at 5,000,000. Yeah. So so, essentially, I was investing at a 5,000,000 valuation. And then when we invested at 200,000,000, your nerds... Your notes convert at that same... I mean, I I took... I've got, like, another 30 or 40% of the company.

Oh, so it's basically a way where if that series a investor says, please put up a 15%, like, ESOP pool, you can sort of get some of that back with a note conversion because they're happening at the same time.

Well, you you normally, you know, if you get... And this was several years ago, 5,000,000 was... Wasn't out of the ballpark. I mean, now 5,000,000 is very low for for convertible note cap. But if you have 5,000,000 convertible note cap, you would expect normally to raise a series a much sooner. Right? Much sooner at like a a $4,050,000,000 valuation, and then it becomes realistic. When you raise that 200, those those those convertible note investors get a a bit much bigger portion of of the company than they would have previous... Previously.

Hey, I... Last question before we wrap up. We're two minutes over coming off of you have a hard stop here, but cash and bank and m and a. How are you thinking about m and a?

There are... Our m and a strategy is, you know, I I I don't wanna say too much about it. We'll have we'll have some announcements to make to make soon. But we only we only really focus on things that can be part of our core product or ecosystem. We are a unified productivity platform. Right?

That's always No one's gonna build better than you, Zeb. I mean, when I look at this product, I don't understand how you look at anyone and say, you know what? We... We're just gonna build a better, sexier version. Why would you ever buy someone and deal with the operational risk there?

Well, so we're not looking at competitors competitors to buy where where we would we'd have to roll up teams and roll up products. But what we what we are looking at is somebody that these companies that built something that we were going to build that would take us six months, a year to build, we're buying time. And so if we can buy time and find people that are within our culture with our values, but that also know how to move really quickly and have built something awesome, then then that's something that that we are we are open to. And and like I said, we'll we'll have we'll have some announcements to make very soon.

You think you're gonna buy your way past a $100,000,000 in AR next year with the acquisition announcement coming up?

We we will be we will be far beyond a 100,000,000 next

You think... Will be more than 200? Yeah. No. You... Seriously, it'll be more than 200, Zeb?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

That's incredible. Like, you're not you're not north of a 100 today. I have you right now pegged at, like, 80.

That's close.

He's like, he can't he can't comment. I don't wanna make... I don't wanna push you too hard here. That's impressive. You remind me so much of Johnny at Hopin. Like, he came on a year and a half ago. Oh, well, she... With no revenue, and he's basically bought time and bought his way. It's a crazy strategy. Is there enough deal flow out there for you where you feel like you can go buy a company doing $30.40, 50,000,000 in ARR for a relatively okay price?

No. No. Our m and a strategy is is is... We don't we don't focus on the revenue part of it. Our our m and a strategy is purely product focus. Product and team. So acquihire and and product.

Interesting. Very cool. Let's wrap up quickly with Famous Five. Number one, favorite book.

What is... The slight edge is what we make everybody read at our company. It's about 1% growth every day, but I I love everything storage. Bezos play.

Yep. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

I'm always a Steve Jobs person.

Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building ClickUp? You can't... This is gonna be hard. You can't say ClickUp, but you do so much. You have to pick something else.

Figma.

That was hard for you. Okay. So is it... Are you gonna be building tools? I mean, look at Canva. Are you gonna be building tools for designers here? Are you gonna focus mainly on, you know, productivity teams?

We we focus on on on just productivity as as a whole. You know, there will be things like virtual whiteboarding in the in the very near near future. But at the end of the day, you know, we're we're we're not trying to to compute the point solutions for designers now.

Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night?

4.5.

That's not a ton, is it?

No. It's not. I I I actually have... I I was diagnosed with narcolepsy a long time ago, and I went to a Tony Robbins conference, and he only slept four hours a night. And I was like, I've gotta try this. I was... I used to be that guy that slept, like, twelve hours. And I I was always wasting time, and I started sleeping less, and I was more... I I changed a lot of things. Don't be right. I changed my diet, changed my health, but I also start... Was able to to sleep less. So... Yeah. So I sleep four point five to five hours now, and I'm

I not feeling love that. Alright. Five. And then I think... What? You had a birthday. Right? You're 31 now?

I'm 32, but you can you can say I'm 29.

32. There you go. Alright. 32 years old. And, Zeb, is that situation married single?

Single.

And no kids running around?

No kids. Alright. Just Just ClickUp

on the in the 12 product babies under. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

I would say this is, like, everybody's just figuring it out. Everybody's just fucking figuring it out as you go. Whereas I used to think that all of... Especially the big tech founders knew exactly what they were doing. And the reality is entrepreneurship is just figuring it out. Even when you get to our level and and beyond the the the, you know, the huge CEOs that I that I talked to, I just, yeah, I just I just

spent a a week with Richard Branson. And he himself is just figuring everything out as he goes. Right? Just just really taking big bets and and hoping that they work out. And then when they don't work out, maneuvering really quickly and changing. And so I wish I knew that that's what entrepreneurship was, but that's certainly one of the biggest lessons that I've learned.

Guys, ClickUp, 800,000 teams on the platform, 85,000 are now paying caught north or around of $80,000,000 in revenue on path to break caught a $152,100,000,000 next year. Crazy growth going back to their series a, 200,000,000 valuation, series b in 2020, a billion, and now 4,000,000,000, but Zeb is just getting started. Some interesting news coming up. It sounds like on the M and A side, they're continuing to build great products for productivity teams. One app to replace them all or to empower them all or to power them all, whatever is politically correct. But, Zeb, we're rooting for you, man. Thanks for coming on the top.

Thanks so much, Nathan.