Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
I mean, it's pretty tough, right? Like when your business goes from like, all right, awesome, we're going to pop off to, hey, actually, I can't pay your salaries anymore. So I have to lay off the team. Yeah, it's not exactly. It's a punctuality test. That test fails 70% of people. You should be doing two things if you're starting a new company. You're talking to users or you're building a product that the users want. And anything that doesn't directly contribute to one of those two things, you're just wasting it.
Welcome to another episode of Shuang Chen Ji, where we chat with overseas Chinese entrepreneurs. My name is Ju Chen. I am Ray Chen. Today, we invited Garrett Lin to be our guest speaker.
Gary is the co-founder and CEO of Airwork, a company that's helped connect employers and the top 5% of blue-collar workers in Toronto, Canada. Airwork did a Y Combinator Winter 2022 batch. Gary graduated from University of Waterloo with a bachelor degree in computer science. Now, let's get started.
To get us started, can you give us a quick introduction to yourself and your company? Basically, what does Airwork do? How does it fit into the gig economy, and particularly in the on-demand blue-collar labor market? Quick background about myself. First of all, my name is Gary Lin. I am the founder and CEO of Airwork.
My background is in software engineering. So I did computer science at the University of Waterloo. If you know anything about that school, we do a lot of internships. The co-op program is basically four months of school, four months of work at a real business.
And then four months of school, four months and a four months of school. And you do that for like five years straight with no breaks. And then that is how you do Waterloo, which is very intense, right? Because for some people, literally, you show up the freshman year, like your first year of university, you do four months of school, but then one month in, you already need to do interviews.
for your first internship. A lot of these people haven't even started coding yet, right? And they already have to do interviews. So it's quite an interesting system, but it's very useful because at graduate, you already have two years of experience at six different companies.
So in my case, I did the first two in Canada and then I went over to California, to the Bay Area. I worked at Nvidia, worked at Yelp, a company called Progressly, which was purchased by Box and then Facebook. And so Facebook gave me a full time offer. Obviously, they rebranded us. So that was after I left. So I was at Facebook for about a year now before COVID hit.
And we decided maybe we don't want to be in California, right? It was not a good time to be there. And I wanted to start my own startup anyway. So I kind of put my tongue to face, but we moved back to Canada to Vancouver. I've never been there before. We just kind of took a U-Haul and just drove the entire apartment. You know, the girlfriend at the time, the car, the dog, cat, everything. I would just move the entire thing up to Vancouver. I would just settle it out. We figured it out, right? So...
I started my first company there. That company actually raised $1.5 million USD. We went through Y Combinator. If you've heard of it, it's a startup accelerator in the Silicon Valley that funded Airbnb, Dropbox, I think Reddit, Coinbase. All these guys came out of Y Combinator. So we did their winter 2022 batch.
So that company, we hired about five people. We grew up for a while. It kind of stalled. Just like a quick tale here. It's like an automated software engineer on-site interviewing tool, if that makes sense. It's for interviewing software engineers towards the end of the slide. Anyways, we automated a bunch of stuff. We ended up pivoting into Airwave. So that's why right now we're working on Airwave.
The story here is basically I knew the context of the industry from my dad. My dad, he started studying in China and then went to Amsterdam to get his PhD. He has a PhD in microbiology. Came to Canada and he couldn't find work for like four years.
four or five years. He just couldn't find work. Canada doesn't recognize foreign credentials. So you literally have to, like he started from the bottom again, he worked at a warehouse and he still works at a warehouse too. He doesn't mind. It's fine. He gets, you know, he has benefits, he has insurance, he's okay. But he told me when he worked with temporary staffing agents,
And so I've heard these stories where they will just call them up at 7 a.m. Then you've got a shift today at 9. I just booked you in for a shift at 9. And it's four cities away. It's like, what? You just told me this right now. So stuff like that happens all the time. So I knew about the problem. We pivoted Lightbulb, the previous company, into Airworks.
After I went to a party in Miami with some of our investors and there's another portfolio company from them called Prava. And they were doing the same thing. It was, you know, it gave economy for temp staff in Miami. So we figured, well, editor, yeah, isn't that solved the problem my dad's had. So let's try it out. That's how that started.
I think I can give you a kind of brief context about what it is, but it's effectively, you know, when you order an Uber, right, you click a button, somebody shows up with a car, they drive you from where you are to where you go, and then you leave and you're done. Everything came in as automatic and everything's insured, I suppose. That's what we're doing for hiring workers. So if you run a business like a warehouse, a factory or a restaurant or a construction company, there's like a bunch of companies that use this.
You go on an app, a computer phone, whatever, and you click a button. Somebody shows up, you know, next Tuesday, I've got a big trip and I need three extra. So somebody shows up, they do the work, they leave, they get paid on. Everything's insured, time spent is automatic. If somebody cancels, we automatically book a new person. Stuff like that, right? So the whole thing is basically, you don't have to talk to anyone if you don't want. That's what Airwork is. What are the customers that you're looking at? Like who are hiring from Airwork?
Right now, as of late 2024, basically no one. But that's because we're in the Toronto market and Canada's market was hit by a really... Honestly, we're actually in a recession and no one's... You can look this up, the CDC or whatever, they won't talk about it, but we actually are in a pretty bad. Anyways, the industry's supplier office network
If you're a warehouse, you need people to load things into and out of trucks. You need to shelf things. You need picker packers from on the lines. That's warehouse. There's quite a few forklift drivers. There's a couple of roles that we do for warehouses.
Construction companies usually need a lot of general labor because you're carrying like rocks for you and stuff like that. It's just like having labor. We've done a couple of car cleaning companies. So actually, Tesla in Waterloo, they have air workers that clean cars.
before the customer picks it up. Because when a Tesla gets delivered from the factory to the dealership, it's pretty dirty. There's like, you know, there's like dust and rain and everything. So somebody needs to clean it. But because these guys sell so many cars, they're selling like 15 per day out of one dealer. That's a lot of cars to clean. So you actually need a few people to do that. Sometimes it's more. So randomly it'll be like 40 cars. And you need to get them out of the lot because the parking lot is only so big.
So we'll have air workers come in and clean. Customers include Tesla dealerships. We did the Toronto Pearson Airport. We cleaned private jets. There's a company that cleans private jets in the Toronto Pearson Airport. We were there actually doing the cleaning. I think one of the ones we did was Beyonce's jet. When she came in, it was crazy. I have photos of the inside of Beyonce's jet. Seriously, it's just $10,000 bed sheets on her jet.
Yeah. So stuff like that. How does Airwork differ from traditional staffing agencies? And what advantages does it offer employers? I'll just use the word. Actually, this is how it works right now in like 80%, 80, 90% of instances. You're an old school traditional business.
And keep in mind, I think like something I should reiterate on, like a lot of the businesses we talk to, yeah, some are pretty big names, like, you know, Kirsten Airport, Tesla, but like most of them you have never, I have never heard of. It's an unmarked building in a large industrial complex. There's no logos. There's like, you know, the number 78 and like,
you know, industrial street. And you walk up to the front door and you have to like knock on the door. There's the secretary talks to you. And then you find out that it's a business you've never heard of that makes $50 million a year installing ACs trucks. That's all they do. They'll install ACs trucks in the Toronto area and then it's $50 million. So you're like, it's wild, right? It's tough. What is the difference is that they talk to equally traditional temporary staffing agencies. What that, how that works is it's usually a phone number. You don't, you don't ask you, wait,
like a website or any digital product of any sort. So it's like, hey, I'm a general manager, just AC installing company, and I need four guys to mark because I have a really big shipment coming in. I don't have enough staff. I need people to just unload this big truck. It's going to take like five hours. My only option, right? My only option is, well, I guess two options. I could either call up all of my employees and their friends and just get them to bring in random friends. Like, I don't know.
Or I could call an agency and say, hey, I need four people tomorrow. And what's going to happen is two people are going to show up. One of them is going to be late. And then by lunchtime, one of them will leave. So you've only got one guy left. That sounds hilarious that you only get 25% of the labor you got to staff for, but that's like that actually happens. The average fill rate for traditional staffing industry is anywhere between 50% to like 70%.
So if you need four guys, you have to ask for eight. They charge normally a much higher markup. So they charge 45 to maybe 100%. I've seen sometimes 100% markup. What that means is if I need somebody for $20 an hour, I'm willing to pay $20 an hour. I actually have to pay $40 an hour. And then the temp staff takes 20 and then the worker takes 20.
That's the difference. AirWork is digital and it's cheaper, it's faster, and you get the control you need to see. What steps does AirWork take to ensure workers show up on time and are well prepared for their shifts? Whenever a shift gets posted, it gets blasted out at a notification, like a push notification on your phone. So it'll say something like, "New shift available at this place in this city at this time in this much money."
And so if you're interested, you can click into it and see the details. If you're not interested, you just leave it alone. If you request a shift, you get a notification when somebody books you in. You get a notification if they change any information that they are allowed to change. You can increase the rate, you can decrease it. Or you can change instructions on who to see, who to meet in person, whatever. So you get notifications on basically everything.
That solves, again, half the problem. The other half the problem is just finding the right workers. Most temp staffs just take in everybody. If you apply, you're in on it. Give me your resume. I will give this resume to the managers. They can pick who they want. There's no vetting involved. Or if there is, it's like 15 minutes and they'll evaluate, they'll surrender people. They just skim through the resumes. Airworks vetting process is actually quite complicated.
We do, there's a video intro and then we analyze it. We have some machine learning that analyzes your video, does transcripts, and it also does sentiment analysis. We do resume parsing so you can upload your experiences and we parse your resume to see if it's out. If you job hop too much, that's a bad sign. If you work a job and then you take two years off and then you work another job, that's a good sign. What did you do for two years? Why didn't you say what you
It's fine if you were on mat leave or whatever. That's not a problem. You have to specify why you put that on. We look for obviously keywords on things that people have done. So we match up the skills. We do that part. Then there's also
I believe an actual skill quiz at some point. I think we've released it. Yeah, I'm pretty sure we released the school code. So it's just like answer these very basic questions that sort these things in alpha numeric. You can't do a problem. There's quite a few things. And so the result is it's not actually hard. Like if you do it, it's not really that hard. It's just if you're able to stay consistent. Sorry, one more thing. There's an attendance test. So you know that video intro, you don't just take it immediately. You schedule it for the following day.
You have a 30-minute window for when you schedule. Oh, okay. So it's simulating working at a job, right? You have a shift tomorrow at 8 a.m. If you show up later than 8.30, you're late. You're pretty late. So we do that for the video intro. If you don't make that window, you just can't film it and you're locked out of your town for six months. Yeah. Punctuality test. Yeah, exactly. It's a punctuality test. That test fails 70% of people.
Wow, 70%? 70% of people fail that test. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah. Which is why like getting the top 5% of workers is not hard. Like, you get what I'm saying? Like, it doesn't take much to get to the top 5%.
Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. For those people who sign up for the test and they pass the test, what incentives did Airwork offer to let them go through this complicated process instead of just going to a staffing agency? It's the same incentives you get if you go on things like Fiverr or Upwork or TopTal.
where you are available for work, opportunities are presented to you asynchronously whenever they pop up in real time, and you can decide whether or not you want to do it. So it's effectively jobs that are open up for you that you don't have to apply for. Remember, all you have to do is click request, and then the manager has to request, has to click accept or deny.
That's all they have to do. Most of the time, you don't get booked for a shift. That's fine because for every one opening, maybe 20 people. But if you're the top worker, you're always going to get picked. The key here is flexibility. You can work whenever you want to, wherever you want to, location-wise. And you get to control your own schedule. So that's the biggest value proposition.
I'm a bit curious. So for the workers working, that's usually for them, it would be as a sort of a side work, not a main job. Yeah. There are three groups of workers on the platform.
The distribution of these groups have pulled over in the last three years. But when we started off for the first year, it was pretty much equally split between the three groups. The first group is international students. Actually, in general, just students. Students that come into Canada that need work on the side, which is inflation's high. So that's like every student. You just work whenever you don't have exams, whenever you don't have things to... You work on the weekends, you work nights.
Because it's flexible, you can do that. You can choose to do that. The second group is people that own their own... They either work full time somewhere else or they have their own contracting business. I'm a roofer. I'm a landscaper. I already have a business, but I don't have jobs every day. Maybe one day I don't have a job. Okay, I can pick up something on Airworks.
I already have all the tools and the landscape or some landscape needs help and just come in, work for shipping and not put any effort. So that's really easy to lead. Three is people that actually do work full time. There are several dozen people where all they did was they quit their full time job and just still work all the time. And the benefit there is because they've gotten close with a couple of employers near them,
they would just have shifts available to them every day if they wanted to do 9-5 Monday to Friday at a specific company they could because that manager the shift was available but because of the model of work anytime you want to they could just choose not to work one day and they'll be fine and you're allowed to do that you're allowed to do that you get no penalization so you could just take it's effectively a regular job that you could take as much time off as you want to which is very rare in the industry
in the blue colonies. So those are the three groups. And you mentioned there are fluctuation between these three. How does it fluctuate? It started off being equal, right? Every group was equal. As of right now, at the end of 2024, I think it's like 90% international students. Canada brought in a lot of immigrants over the last two years. So we're averaging about 1 to 1.2 million immigrants per year for the last three years.
For context, the Canadian population, I think, now is about 40 million, 38, 40 million. America, their population is 10x, but we import the same number of immigrants. So on a per capita basis, we're importing 10x the number of immigrants as the US. And because of the problem that I told you about Canada not recognizing foreign credentials, that means everybody is starting in general wages.
So all like, you know, three plus million people that just kind of came in and keep in mind, like you're not moving to anywhere except for Toronto or Vancouver. Everyone lives in either Toronto or Vancouver, right? So if you, if we're in Toronto, which is our market, we just got flooded with worker signups all from international. Anything that's came to you as unexpected after
after these years of working at Airwork versus the first time you've ever developed this idea? The thing that was unexpected was that everyone tells you when you run a business or when you start a business, and keep in mind, this is kind of, this is my first real go at it. I'm still pretty new to the entrepreneurial space. Everyone tells you, hey, the market dictates the winner and the market changes all that. You have to adjust to the market. I didn't realize how...
like volatile that could be. I don't really, like it's, it's the way markets changes. You almost get whiplash. Like Canada within the course of about two to three months, like three, four months, give or take. We went from, there are no good workers anywhere. Everyone has a labor shortage. Everybody needs workers. There's way too many workers. We don't need you. But then like that, that changed instantly. You can actually, if I showed you my revenue graph,
Our revenue graph went from zero to 14,000 in like three months. So we went really like it literally is drawing an exponential curve upwards, like really fast. Right. And then all of a sudden just stall and it's now just kind of flat. And it's actually dropped down. And that's entirely basically just because the market died for temp stats. There is no more market for temps. I know this because I've talked to other temp, like older temp static companies.
half of the industry just like ran went out of business right like like a lot of these guys just didn't have works that they have to do layoffs they were business um and so that volatility in the market was not expected like you think oh if you build a if there's a problem you go solve it but like
Sometimes the problem solves itself to no other, not because you lost to a competitor. There's no other competitors. It's just like there are, but it's like, you know, it's a pretty big space, right? It's like, so we didn't lose to a competitor. We lost because the market just died. So how did you manage, you know, with all this huge fluctuation, how did you manage your business throughout this fluctuation? Your cash flow and other operations?
Well, the cash flow, luckily, if we were bootstrapping, this is probably not an idea I would do unless you were venture backed. We had one and a half million USD in Canada, that's beyond 2 million in the OCD. So we had cash flow. That wasn't a few for... If one month suddenly we got a lot of people that need... We could pay out all the workers and then invoice the customers at...
and then get all that money back. So within one month, we'll be $50,000, $60,000, which is not a big deal when you've raised some capital. If you don't have that, that's harder. That's a lot harder. You got to put in your own capital and to manage that asset. How to deal with the fluctuations in general? This actually applies to marketplaces because you have an enter side and a seller side. And any given time, what is going to be harder? You're always going to have either too much demand or too much supply.
Airbnb for a while and not enough supply, and then they ramped up supply and then they have too much supply. So if you rent it out and you're Airbnb, you'd be like, hey, nobody's booking this. You have to compete. But that's how it was. And eventually it stabilizes those that you could build. So if you have too many, in our case, we have too many workers, not enough companies. We could incentivize companies to say, all right, you can get your first 10 shifts completely free.
Just try it out for free. There's no contracts. If it works or doesn't, just stop using it. And we will pay out of pocket for that because we're confident that once you try it, you're going to make it. There's different levers that you can pull to make sure that one side signs up faster than the other. So we've talked a lot about the supplies. Maybe switch to talk a little bit about the demands. How did you guys acquire your first set of customers? So first,
I can give you the statistics now to date we have
about a thousand in-person door-to-door visits. So we would literally drive to an industrial complex and just knock on doors and just be like, hey, hello, I know your reception. I'm Gary Lynn. I'm the owner of Airworks. Or in the case of my sales guy, I'm the sales manager here at Airworks. We don't have an appointment, but it'd be great if we could talk to our general manager. And then one of the first things that we did was actually...
I'll show it right here. We actually printed out these business cards. Our director of operation and also my wife, she did these business cards. These are like $2 each. So these cost a lot of money. Okay. We printed like a bunch of these and we just went out and handed them out to conferences in person where we're like,
And they actually, you know, it's thick. It's like, it's heavy. Yeah. Like matte black with it. So it feels good. It looks good. And people actually remember it. You put it in their wallet. And then at some point, they're like, hey, you know, what's this card? This is pretty cool. Oh, Gary actually needs somebody next week. Maybe I'll get him. Right. That has happened for like, we've got like 10, 15 customers like that. Well, the stats are 1,000 door-to-door visits, about 6, 7,000 phone calls, cold call.
And then like 40,000 emails over the course of two years, over the course of the first two years. That's roughly the numbers. So yeah, it's a lot of work. When you start off the business, there's no, you don't have any sales people, you know, it's just, you have to do founder-led sales for a while just to learn how to sell, right? So, you know, I would do in-person visits. I would do phone calls. I would do email. I would do LinkedIn. LinkedIn was not as useful for that. You know, email, email, email was free. Um,
We tried selling it. By the way, when we first started Airwork, we were actually in Vancouver. And we tried selling Airwork for like a month and nothing. So, side story. We visited 50% of all warehouses in the greater Vancouver area. We literally counted all of them. We visited 50% of them. And then of that 50%, half the time, during a Monday to Friday 9 to 5, when people should be working in the office, it was empty.
The office, I guess this was still kind of closed, so I can understand a little bit. But the building, the lights were off. There was no cars in the parking lot. And it looked like it was out of business. But you know it's not because you can see the trucks on the road, right? There's obviously a lot of these trucks on the road. So the business is active. But their headquarters is just... And so we couldn't get a hold of people, right? But then I took a quick two-day business trip to Toronto just to try it out in the Toronto market. And we closed the first time.
In two days, I'm like, okay, well, I guess Toronto is the market to start with. That's pretty stark difference. Yeah. So yeah, we moved, I moved to Toronto to Ford Airworks. We moved our, you know, we did California. I think we were just anyways. Um, yeah, we, uh, uh, and, and that one. Why do you think Vancouver didn't work out? Was it culture industry or some other reasons?
I don't want to throw shade at Vancouver. I love the place, but you don't go there to work. You go there to retire. Vancouver is the kind of place where you go to at the end of your career when you want to buy a house on the nice water and just chill and go. It's not really the place to go and try to make a career early on. People aren't as... They don't value business as much as they do other things work.
Which is normal. I think that's fine. Certain places have certain vibes. If you go to California, all you do is work. If you're in tech, all you're doing is doing networking and stuff like that. But yeah, it was hard to find workers and it was hard to find both sides of the
Yeah. I guess like Troy is your place when, you know, your business really scales. Like, can you maybe tell a little bit about the city and like, did the city actually, you know, good fit for maybe you can share a little bit tips to other entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs to be, how can they learn from choosing where to build their business? I gotta, I gotta think about this for a little bit because I have a lot of thoughts on this topic and I,
I think to start off with what's most relevant, if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to pick the location for where you start, that only matters if your business is location dependent. It's a service for physical, like people need to physically go to another place, right? They're going from A to B and somewhere in the real. If you're doing digital stuff and everything, transactions are all digital, assets are all digital, where you're physically located might
And I would try to keep that in mind because I think the topic is a lot less about like, oh no, is it like Cronoverse or like Hulu? But usually as you go and watch any of the YC videos, like the Y Combinator videos or the Silicon Valley kind of like Twitter, TikTok, like Twitter talk or at Stockholm Hodge, it's all about like, oh, is it as San Francisco as in New York City, you know, like Los Angeles for a while, was it Miami or and so it's like
you know, what is the best? Austin, Texas, right? Tesla moved their headquarters to Austin, Texas. So like, there's a lot of big debates in the US about what city to kind of build in. If you're starting off your career and you need that network, I think networking in tech, yeah, you should probably be in San Francisco. Bay Area, I think is just the concentration of talent is huge. We've met so many people just casually going to a coffee shop and just talking to the person sitting next to you and be like, hey, like, what do you do?
"Oh, I'm the vice president of engineering at DoorDash." That actually happened, right? Or like, "Oh, yeah, no, this is just random." We went to Cassie at Caramel, what it's called, in Palo Alto. And we met one of my good friends, Tim Sloan, who was the founder of Plural, just chatting at a coffee shop. This happens all the time in the Bay Area, but in Canada, it's a little bit less. It's okay. In Toronto, if you go to the right coffee shops, it's actually still pretty dense.
It's just, it's more centralized towards kind of downtown, right? There's some parts. If you're an entrepreneur and you need to pick location, just think a little bit about is it actually matters for you? In the case that it matters, yeah, you should be like in the specific neighborhood. Like if you're trying to sell, I don't know, if you're trying to sell a,
software, I guess like port for the ports, right? And you're starting off in, you know, somewhere in the port in, I don't know, I guess like Boston, you should live like near that port. You should live walking distance there because that would help a lot, right? That's where your customers are. I think this is really interesting. Maybe we can devise like a term called like coffee shop visits to like founder or entrepreneurs ratio or something like that. Like that, yeah, that's a good, that's a good ratio.
Yeah, I heard a story of like people sharing stories on LinkedIn of, you know, they met people who keep like their LinkedIn QR code as their like lock screen photo. Never they met like someone at a coffee shop, they just like opened their screen and then said like, scan me and we'll take a photo. Let's connect. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, that's the thing. I've seen people do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've actually seen it. Yeah.
Yeah. So let's go back to Airwork. So you just talked about in the first few months, Airwork saw rapid growth, but then demand started fluctuating. We wonder how did those ups and downs impact you and the business? I mean, it's pretty tough, right? When your business goes from like, "All right, awesome. We're going to pop off to, hey, actually, I can't pay your salaries anymore, so I have to lay off the team," which is kind of what happened. I did actually lay off the entire team.
Right now, it's just my wife and myself and we pair ourselves busy enough. But yeah, I used to have a team of like three sales guys, three engineers. Yeah, three sales guys, three engineers, my wife and I had to lay everybody off because when your revenue doesn't grow and your expenses stay this high, you can see your runway count down to zero very quickly.
And so it's like the best thing to do, like if you've run out of ideas on how to grow this, you got to restart. Don't just take the team and then try to find some other idea. That's what I did the first time and it didn't work. Right? Like going from light bulb to air work, I guess I don't work, but it's like,
we laid off the team then took a break for like a month and then restarted and at that time I would have still had enough runway to do a lot I could have had enough runway to do a lot of different things to try to find bottom market but we never found bottom market I guess twice or to be fair Airwork had bottom market I know we lost like the market changed yeah
Right, right, right. I want to ask further on this question. So like you said, it's sometimes better to just take the team off for a while and then restart. Do you mean like give the whole team a break and then tell them to go back to your office one month later? So during that one month, maybe the team members can explore some new ideas without burning money? Yeah.
Right now, what we're talking about, the branch of conversation, this is for what you do if you've hired people and you don't have product market shit. The answer is you should not have hired people if you didn't have product market. That's the answer. If you listen to any of Paul Graham's stuff or actually anything coming out of White Dominator, the idea is even if you raise money, even if you have a lot of time chatting to me, don't hire people unless you really...
Like your, you know, the phones are flying, kind of the lines are always on fire. The emails are stacking up fast with customers that want product, can't support that demand fast enough. Okay, then maybe go hire people to help you grow. The answer is never to hire people and see if you can get a business to work. Like you end up in a situation where, well, you didn't work, so what are you going to do? Are you going to lay them off or are you going to just keep them on and then run out of money? So my mistake was hiring people when I couldn't know.
That was my mistake, which is, by the way, like, you know, it's your first time. You see that calendar, like almost it's a very common thing or maybe I'm just justifying, you know, hiring people when I shouldn't. But the sorry, I lost. Yeah, it's okay.
Yeah. By the way, how did you go to find your first several hires? Are those your Waterloo alum? How do you find those people? Are they working remotely? Everyone was remote for the entire time. Everyone was remote. My first hire was one of my good friends from a previous startup. Both of my good friends from University of Waterloo and somebody that I've worked with before through another...
kind of another startup back in the day. And she actually worked initially for the first few months for free. She basically just like, "Oh, I think this is cool. Let me just team." And then when we actually raised funding, that's when we started paying. From there, she recommended somebody from her previous workplace, great engineer, very senior. And then I did an open hiring thing
just ran people on LinkedIn. And we happened to come across a really good engineer, Aaron. And to this day, I still, you know, next time I start something, actually hit product market, I would hire Aaron again because he was great. I think he's at Microsoft now, so he's doing pretty well after the layout. We, you know, I guess the first one was somebody I knew and then their recommendation and just hold it. I'm curious to see, like, because Airwork hired...
did some screening process for workers. Do you guys have a similar philosophy for hiring people? Maybe you also do punctuality tests for these people or anything like that? Just curious. I get the feeling seeing yourself 100 years would be a little bit nostalgic. You should do a punctuality test for them. I mean, you can observe if they're
go to meetings on doc. If they're late to the interview, definitely not a good sign. Which actually has happened a couple times. Here's the thing. Our first three hires were software engineers. At the time, our startup was not their work. It was actually a pool...
who interview software engineers. So we use the tool ourselves for ourselves to test out the engineers, which was great. And I can tell you a little bit about this. The philosophy here is if you know anything about software engineering, like legal style questions like legal and rank and codility, they're basically, it's like a quiz. Like a time quiz does this very specific, peculiar thing that you never actually need to realize.
Write it in whatever language you want, you type it in, and then they run some private . It works or it doesn't, right? Or how fast it runs. That's just not how you actually include it in real life. What actually happens is a product manager writes a spec, a designer gives you a set of Figma mockups, you have an existing code base with a front end, a back end, a database, like everything on AWS, everything's hooked up, and you have to build a new feature. 99.9% of all real software engineering is just...
So we figured, why don't we just build a software that not just mimics that, but actually does that. So the light bulb was effectively a way for you to interview people with an existing code base, with Sigma mobs up, with specs. And then the interviewee has to commit code into GitHub. And so you see their commits and you see their pull requests and you see how they actually solve this real ticket in a real work environment.
right and also you're not given like 45 minutes to do it he's like here's this take home do it in the next five six days which is again realistic you know you have one week two weeks friends or whatever get it done by the end of the sprint right um and then we would automatically evaluate how so so that was our philosophy i mean well i don't have a lot of thoughts about this like our philosophy is just like mimic uh mimic the real world environment as much as possible
turned out to be like working just well, very well for Airwork and you know, the previous company. Yeah. Light bulb, like the light bulb and that's what I was calling it. Hey, we found Aaron. It worked. Out of, out of like, out of 50 something people that did the interviews, Aaron was the only one that did it, like did a good job, properly did it well, did a good job on it. And so we said, hey, well, he passed the interview really, you know, so let's try it out. And he ended up being, I was still like one of our basic, right? Yeah.
Yeah. How do you balance running AirWork, maintaining a family life, and still finding personal time? Because we know that you've got another project going on about, I think, YouTube for kids. And, you know, I can see you're multitasking. It's like, how do you manage all those tasks?
Yeah. So it's one, it's a lot. Honestly, like the work isn't even that bad. It's mostly just a baby. Oh, okay. Having a under one-year-old newborn is the hard part. That's a very time intensive, very, very time intensive endeavor. Obviously, like I wouldn't, I've chosen to spend a lot of time with family during those periods because I actually want to.
I love the baby, you know? So it's like, like, it's actually really fun. Honestly, I'm having a lot of fun right now. Like just like she's kind of learning. Anyways, I don't want to draw out about my baby. The point is, if you have family and work and, um, let's see. Oh yeah. You've got multiple projects, family, work, personal time. My answer is you find the one or two things or the three things that are like really, really better. And you kind of just, you kind of just cut everything else out.
So my personal time consists of going to the gym for an hour every two days, two to three days. But that's basically all of the scheduled. I have to have this. This is the thing that de-stresses me. And I like doing it. And I have some friends there. It's fun. So I will go to the gym for an hour, two to three days, every two to three days. And that doesn't change. Pass that, it basically has nothing else.
Like life, I basically have nothing else for myself. Right. You pick one or two things and you stick to that one or two things. Or for family, prioritize your family. I used to be the kind of guy who's like, oh, my God.
Back when I was 21, 22, I'd be like, okay, I don't need a family. Maybe I'll just work like 14 hour days for my 20s and just become like a multimillionaire. And then I can go figure out family. That's just not realistic. If you're in high, by the way, whoever's listening to this, if you're in high school or university right now, hey, maybe I can, maybe I could just like work super, super hard, not have a family for now. And then just like, I'll figure it out in my late 30s. You could do that.
I don't recommend it personally because I started getting my work got better after I got married and then it got better after I had a kid. Having more time made me less effective and less efficient. I used to work 12 hour days, but I would maybe only get like six, seven hours of actual productive work.
The other five was just a waste. I would just like go on LinkedIn or go on like Twitter or I'd go to like networking conferences and shit like that, which didn't help the way like most of the time, obviously, I don't want to do it.
There's just kind of a waste of time. We did Miami for Tech Week. We did Tech Week on Miami for a week straight. And we saw what we're networking, but basically, we just drank for seven days. It was such a professional waste of time. You know what I mean? Right, right, right, right. Whereas when you get married or when you have a kid and you have your own life that you kind of, hey, I'm working hard so that I can provide for my kids so I can give them a better life. For education for my kid, which apparently is impossible now.
We actually want to put units in private school. So that's a lot of, that's a lot more money. But it teaches you to, it forces you to basically get more done in less time. And I think that is, that is the TLDR for this whole deal is if you have people in your life that you love, it forces you to work for less hours, but you somehow get more work. Does it somehow like, yeah,
come, come with a point that, you know, like when you are kind of multitasking, but these tasks are not like very well related. They are not, not all work. They don't fall into the same categories. They're like family, personal and work. You somehow like you can switch some moods and actually they complement each other. So basically like some of their family kind of gives you inspirations or energizes you to better prep you for work.
going to the gym and then going to the gym rather than prep you for work, later worse. Do you think that kind of like statement holds true? Yes. Yes, I think it does hold true. I think that statement holds true. And I think there's kind of a couple of different little zeros. You learn to just stop doing things that don't matter, one. You learn to work, you learn to context switch really, really fast, which is helpful at work anyways, really. Basically, I used to be able, back in, you know, back in school and like kind of, I had to sit down
I would focus after half an hour of studying. I would start work, but not really be that focused. It's not really that I'd be in my zone. I got the music going. I'm pulling those out. Right now, I can do that instantly. In the middle of this interview, I can go and write a feature and then stop and get back to this interview and be at equal context. I don't have context. It just works. So having kids kind of dug that, it just works because you only have 10-minute chunks at a time.
You basically have a day of 15, 10-minute chunks. You have to get something, and you have to get things done in 10 minutes at a time. Otherwise, you get nothing done. You don't have a choice. Oh, this is pretty counterintuitive. Yeah, I think that sounds pretty reasonable. Also, previously, you've mentioned about you've been trying to automate the error correction. How does that work? And does that also explain why you're able to manage your time so well?
Okay, yeah, that is fair. Being in the software world, you learn that in school. If you're running a business, you're building a B2B SaaS or a digital marketplace. You automate all the standard stuff that you would see. Signing up for an account, posting shirts and getting paid. All of that was automated from the beginning. Then you start automating the things you don't think like
For example, interview. So when somebody posts a video intro of themselves, we used to have somebody take a look at the video and judge like, is this person yes or no? It's just automatic. We don't have to do that. Or like billing at the end of the month. Like invoicing used to cost, I would have to go through every invoice and add up the numbers and times 30%, which is bus tax and everything.
but you can just automate it. It's Stripe, so we should have done it. It's automated now. I don't want to touch it. You could just do that for one thing after another after another. And eventually, you realize there's nothing else to do that you need to actually put time into. You can basically fix bugs. It's just support tickets. And by the way, even that is automatic. Intercom, and we use Atlas, but Intercom has a thing where it's just like it's a chatbot that answers your support tickets, but it's completely automatic.
Like no human is actually doing it. They just read your documentation and they read your code base and they like go through your app and then it just knows how to answer questions the way a human support person 24/7. And it'll be like $40 a month. It's not expensive. You know what I mean? So you can automate like everything.
Got you. Got you. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. So maybe like looking back on your journey so far, what's the most important lesson you've learned from running Airwork? And I mean, this can be like several important lessons, but you can choose like your top one and then maybe, you know, parallel that with second and third. Take care of those around you, work hard, be a good person.
Right. Like a lot of a lot of business. There's when you look at the nitty gritty, it's a ton of just random small things that you need to know, like laws about this, about that, like ways technology works, you know, UI, UX flows.
But when you do that for a couple of years and you look back, what you realize is the core principles are the things that really matter because that stays with you down the line. Businesses come and go, right? As I've learned. Businesses go up, they go down. You go do something else. You join some other company. You go start another project. You move. You get married. You have kids. What stays with you are the principles that you actually believe in.
So long as you have that, and by the way, it's easy to say that and everyone thinks, oh, well, I believe in this thing. You don't actually know that until your principles are tested, you're not really sure. You shouldn't be sure yet. Right?
But once you have your principles tested and you're confident, those are the things that really matter in the city. So take care of those around you. Be a good person and work hard. Pragmatically, those are good principles for business. We actually won against competitors because we were just better human beings. We're just like honest.
like just purely being an honest person won us several clients even though we were more expensive than what they were with the other letters or whatnot so yeah like nice
Yeah. Being genuine actually pays off. Yeah. So as a closing topic, we always ask like every, like every single guest speaker of this channel, what are some like information sources that you can recommend? These can be like books, podcasts, or other resources that have inspired you along your entrepreneurial journey. What are something you can share with our audience?
Basically, I'm going to be biased because we were funded by Y Combinator, but literally everything Y Combinator puts out, watch it, read it, absorb it. If you're a new entrepreneur, that stuff helps you.
That's your first article. I don't want to give you a bunch of other things. Just start there. Y Combinator, the YouTube channel, they post a lot of YouTube videos. I think nowadays a lot of the YouTube videos are more like stayed on the market thing. So not really. But the startup school videos are super, super useful. Paul Graham's original essay. So go look up Paul Graham on Google and Paul Graham essays. It's very bottomless.
And just read all of these. They're very, very useful if you're an entrepreneur. Hopefully, if you absorb it, it'll save you a lot of money. Because it's basically just... It repeats over and over again the concept of you should be doing two things if you're starting a new company. You're talking to users or you're building a product that the users want. And anything that doesn't directly contribute to one of those two things, you're just wasting it.
Right. I will say they'll listen to videos like founders will listen to videos and they'll still end up doing shit that does not relate to one of those two things. Trust me, I still do. But those are the only two things that matter. And if you're an entrepreneur and you want to get started, how many customers do you have? If the answer is zero, then go get some customers. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing your insight. Not a problem. Yeah. Thank you so much.