COURTESY JEFF TAYLOR

Monster.com CEO Jeff Taylor on his company's monster success

Few Internet companies have achieved success quite like that of Monster.com's. Begun in 1994 as a jobs bulletin board, the job-search company today posts nearly 400,000 job listings, is nearing annual sales of $300 million. The company aims for rapid growth, and to that end will spend nearly $110 million on marketing in the current year. Its advertisements, aired on the Super Bowl and thousands of other times last year, have helped it gain more than half of the lucrative market in online job searches. Even with the large outlay on marketing, Monster has achieved that dot com rarity: profitability.

CEO Jeff Taylor, 39, has been with the company since the beginning. He created the Monster bulletin board as a service for clients of his specialized recruitment advertising agency, Adion, Inc. Taylor experience as a business leader began as an undergraduate at U. Mass.-Amherst, where he ran four businesses, including the school newspaper, The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Taylor came to Yale on Mon., Apr. 10 to talk to students about his experience as an entrepreneur. His timing was particularly apt; his speech that night to members of the Yale College Entrepreneurial Society (YES) came just a few days after YES announced the winners of the Y50K Entrepreneurship Competition.

The Herald talked to Taylor about his company, his career, and his plans for the future.

YH: You said at your speech to YES that the name "Monster" was a big boon to your company. Was that mainly because it was catchy, or was there something distinctive about the name monster?

First of all, it's a catchy name. The second thing is, I was able to brand early on—instead of going with career this or job that, I was able to brand that name. We ended up with an early-to-market advantage, and I was able to redefine the category around me. I was able to tie a theme in, with the monsters. Looking for a job in an electronic database is inherently boring. Wrapping a theme around it has made my site fun.

There are nine dinosaur. Our lead monster is Trumposaurus. "Trump" is to trumpet our success. "Saurus" shows that it comes from dinosaurs, so it's big, not scary you hear it once and you remember it, most web addresses you don't hear, you hear them but you don't hear them

I think there are three or four different naming styles on the Internet today. One is to go with the kind of i or e of the new economy; you're an ibusiness or an ebusiness. I think with this trend, immediately every common name with an i or e before it is taken. This category includes eTrade and iVillage.

Then there are those companies that take the tack that they're going to call themselves literally what they are, like women.com, or furniture.com, or garage.com. The problem here is, that as the dot-com in the names go away with time, these companies are going to be called things like "furniture," or "women."

Then there are the names which are the more irreverent names, like Amazon, Yahoo, and Monster. There's a huge entry advantage to those who can actually pull off an irreverent name.

And then there's the names that are kind of the old economy to new economy ones, like 1-800-flowers.com, and autobytel.com.

YH: How important is marketing to Monster? Are you worried that with all the Internet advertising out there, it will become a zero-sum game?

This year, our sales are nearing $300 million, we'll spend $110 million on marketing, and we'll be profitable. The interesting thing is, like advertising on the Super Bowl the last two years: in 1999, we really had to create a strategy for doing television ads for an online company. We ran our ad [a tongue-in-cheek spot featuring children saying things like, "I want to be a yes man."] 3,300 times last year. Most of the dot-coms that advertised even on the Super Bowl only advertised once or twice. Of the 17 dot-com advertisements, maybe 10 of them only advertised on the Super Bowl. The other seven are the ones you see: eTrade, pets.com, and Monster.

So a big part of this is reach, and frequency—how many people can you reach and how many times. Just to do the Super Bowl is bigÑyou can reach 130 million people in 30 seconds. But you can't just leave it at that.

YH: How involved are you directly with marketing?

I'm very involved. I've spent a fair bit of time, both with our marketing group, and with the Mullen Advertising Agency, Wenham, Mass.

I basically feel that it's my job as CEO of the company to create the momentum behind the brand. Sometimes that means coming up with the ideas, like having a blimp, and sometimes it means being actively involved with making sure the mission of the company is captured in our advertising.

For a new-economy CEO, your skill set has to be pretty broad. One of the areas I think you need to be able to understand and excel at is marketing and branding.

YH: If the Internet economy takes a downturn, will the ripple effect hurt Monster?

I don't think so, I think that some of the challenges that Nasdaq has seen is a kind of flight to quality.

I think I mentioned that I spoke at seven or eight different college campuses in the New England area. I saw a number of people starting dot-coms. There will be an influx of new startups. It's an interesting combination of the new and old economies. Everyone's desperately looking for people, and I expect that to continue.

YH: What were your impressions of visiting Yale, in comparison with the other colleges you visited? Also, you said in your speech that many of the Yale students in the room are going to be CEOs. Why do you think that?

You guys are just coming off your business-plan competition [YES's Y50K competition], so you get a real sense of people's excitement about being an entrepreneur. Some of the colleges seemed to be more entrepreneur-focused than others. I think there's a general sense among juniors and seniors right now, as well as among MBAs, to believe that the new economy is going to reinvent every business on the planet, and I see the potential for the majority of these classes to move toward the new economy. In fact, I've been an advocate for that, for those who are thinking otherwise.

YH: How do you go about recruiting new employees, both through these trips to colleges and otherwise?

One of the things I do, by speaking at the schools, I get interest from typically two, three, or four students who will come up to me and say they're interested in either sharing business plans or coming and working with the company.

I've been speaking at the schools regularly for the last five years, developing a pipeline for interns, and developing in people the idea of coming to Monster. About 25 percent of our staff is right out of college or an MBA [Master of Business Administration] program.

I think we have 5 MBAs who are corporate officers. I'd like to double that over the next year.

YH: You mentioned that Monster is looking into expanding into Hong Kong. What is the company's international base now, and what are its plans in that area? What are the costs of expanding into a new country?

We're in ten countries now; we're in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Singapore, Austria, and New Zealand. We'll be in 20 countries by the end of this year.

We typically warm a market up with three or four sales people, then come in with a general manager, and then add marketing, and business development. Then we fill out our sales staff.

We have a European Call Center located in Glascow, Scotland, so we have some economies of scale, as well as some great efficiencies of the business. We're going to be expanding to Japan and Hong Kong, Malayasia, India, Latin America, Spain, Central Europe, and Scandinavian countries, and we're really into that process right now.

YH: Are you concerned about the competition? Do you fear at all that an established Internet company like Yahoo! would try to expand into your market?

Right now, our market share is over 50 percent. I mean, Yahoo is not going to come in and take a big chunk of what I do. I don't see that to be the biggest business risk. Where we are in the business right now, we essentially compete with ourselves. I look closely at the general competitors in our space. That's something I'm conscious of. But it's not my big worry. We have over 50 percent of the revenue in the entire space. If you look at the traffic, we have somewhere around twice as much as our nearest competitor, and more than the next three combined.

YH: Monster.com's success is predicated partly on the large turnover of the Internet economy. Have you thought about pursuing some other idea you have, perhaps leaving Monster to get in the wave of excitement again?

I think, if you look at the opportunity to build a consumer brand, this is one of those things that's pretty rare at my age. So no, no plans.

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