Ryan O'Donnell: Surviving the COVID Hiring Freeze & A Successful Exit artwork
Exit Stories

Ryan O'Donnell: Surviving the COVID Hiring Freeze & A Successful Exit

  • S3E7
  • 40:13
  • October 25th 2022

In this episode of Exit Stories, Ryan O'Donnell, the co-founder and former CEO of EmployUs, joins our host Kevin Mosley. EmployUs is a software company that aims to help employers get qualified applicants through referrals.

As a student at NC State, Ryan launched a startup called Pennies 4 Progress, which ignited his entrepreneurial spirit. He worked as a recruiter post-grad and quickly realized referrals were the most effective way to recruit. At the time, employee referrals were mainly tracked manually. So, Ryan created a tool to accompany his work, and help companies automate their referral programs. Alongside serial entrepreneur Jeff Stocks, he launched EmployUs in 2015. The company grew to over 100 clients across multiple industries, primarily medium and large companies. It even made NC TECH's Top 10 Startups to Watch list. Fast forward to 2021, EmployUs was acquired by Chicago-based Hireology.

Exit Stories

Exit Stories features tech founders, buyers, and sellers from the Triangle, North Carolina and the Southeast to tell their stories about raising capital and selling their startups.

This program is produced by GrepBeat and hosted by Kevin Mosley of Jurassic Capital.

Meet the Host

Kevin Mosley avatar
Kevin Mosley
General Partner at Jurassic Capital

Kevin is a General Partner at Jurassic Capital, a Durham, NC-based Growth Equity firm focused on growing B2B software companies in the Southeast. Alongside cofounder Joe Colopy, Jurassic’s deep entrepreneurial and operating experience from Bronto and other SaaS companies helps grow and scale capital-efficient companies over $1M in Revenue. They recently closed a $20M+ fund and have portfolio companies building software in HR  (Workdove), B2B eCommerce (Corevist), and Test Automation (Cycle Labs).


Kevin spent his pre-Jurassic career operating at growth-stage software companies, including Sageworks, Lulu, Bronto, and Republic Wireless/Relay. He graduated with a BS in Finance from Clemson and loves spending time with his wife in the Triangle as well as watching and playing all sports, especially golf and tennis.