Local Limelight: Jesse Lipson on Levitate's big hiring plans
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Jesse Lipson is the founder and CEO of Levitate. Photo: Courtesy of Levitate
Jesse Lipson has been one of the Triangle's leading tech entrepreneurs for the past two decades. He founded the Raleigh software company ShareFile, which he sold to Citrix, and he now leads Levitate, a maker of communications and marketing software.
Why it matters: Raleigh-based Levitate recently raised $16 million from investors, which will help kick off a hiring round of more than 100 new employees.
- That will take its Raleigh headcount at its Gateway Plaza headquarters to around 300, and help fill out new offices in Toronto and Wilmington.
What they're saying: "We see a path to grow north of $100 million [in annual recurring revenue] over the next few years, and to do that, we need the capital and more workers," Lipson told Axios.
Zoom in: In the past three years, Levitate has grown from around 4,000 customers to more than 8,000.
- And at a time when many startups are saying they are slowing hiring because of AI, Lipson is hiring across all departments, though Levitate needs more customer-facing roles, like sales and customer success positions.
- "I think people still want to engage with humans in those customer-facing roles," he said. "Where we're seeing a lot more efficiency is in some of the back office roles. We're not laying off anyone in those roles, but we're not necessarily hiring as much, because we're able to get so much more efficiency using Cloud Code and other tools."
We talked with Lipson for our latest Local Limelight conversation. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
🎓 How did you end up in the Triangle? For school. I went to Duke and met my wife, Brooks Bell, there. She was two years behind me, so I decided to stick around until she graduated, and so we kind of accidentally put down roots here.
🍽️ Favorite place to eat in the Triangle? For a fancy dinner, it's still hard to beat Herons at the Umstead Hotel. One of my old favorites, though, is Bida Manda.
📱 First read in the morning? Unfortunately, Twitter. I am on there a lot more than any healthy person should be.
📕 Last great book you read? "Project Hail Mary."I am a big science fiction reader these days.
🎧 Do you have a go-to podcast? I like 20VC, which is a venture capital podcast.
💻 What do you think the Triangle is missing: Just speaking population-wise, we are still mid-tier in terms of size. So for companies that are trying to hire in the hundreds of people per year, you do bump up against the population size, especially considering that there are a lot of software companies in Raleigh for its size.
📺 How do you unplug at the end of the day? Brooks and I have TV shows we like to watch. Right now, it's "DTF St. Louis," "Rooster," and "The Pitt."
- If it's a weekend, I really like getting outside and taking long walks. I could probably take an hour-plus walk every day, if I had the time to do it.
✈️ What are you looking forward to outside of work? Travel is a big thing that Brooks and I kind of look forward to. This was related to work, but we just got back a couple of weeks ago from Paris. I was looking forward to going to the Final Four, but unfortunately, that dream got dashed.
⛰️ Favorite long weekend spot: Our Airstream trailer up near Blowing Rock.