#214 – Getting A Big Exit By Being A Small Player In A Small Pond with Chris Bakke of Interviewed
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What's up, everybody? This is courtland from india hacker's to com, and you're listening to the any hacker's podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these andy hackers to discuss the idea as the opportunities and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. I'm here with Chris bucky, the founder of lakey dot com and also the founder of interviewed Chris bucking.

with the show. Yeah, thanks for me.

You thought on my radar basically a month ago, maybe few weeks ago, you did an ama on andy hackers, and the title of IT was built my last company to two and a half million dollars in annual occuring revenue, became profitable in two thousand and half years and sold IT for mid eight figures, which you clarified to be around fifty million dollars. And then he said, going even bigger this time, ask anything, first of all, how do you sell the company that's making two hundred million dollars for fifty million dollars?

I think that there is a lot that goes into that. I mean, I think clearly, IT has to be some sort of uh, strategic initiative by the acquire. Uh, I mean, there's many ways to to those multiples.

I think sometimes if revenue is growing crazy fast, you can get there. If it's a really hard market, you can get there. I don't think either was necessarily a true for us and an revenue obviously group fairly quickly to get to two and a half three million and about two and a half the years from zero.

But IT wasn't one of these stories. You can hear companies today occasionally who are just growing at like they're doubling revenue month over month or whatever. That was never the case for us.

That was kind of felt like when we were in IT. IT felt like a slow and study ground growing, you know ten twenty percent months over all cases. And IT just compounds quickly, you know if you don't have to turn issue that like that.

But in terms of the acquisition in the outcome, it's it's a long story and happy to go into IT, but indeed is actually one of our early investors. They then became a customer and then they became are acquire. And so IT was really almost from day one, I think, over two years of getting to know the team working with them.

And IT just so happened that, that business, which was a running non technical assessments. So as all of these technical assessment companies hacer in and went, not we're coming up. We saw opportunity in twenty and fifteen and we started interviewed to say all sorts of people applying for entry of our customer support, sales, financial analyst, sions Operations positions.

And right now, those interviews mostly suck because the interviewer doesn't know what here he is doing. Um they're untrained, they don't know what questions to ask. And so if we can put some structure on this interview and make IT a really good experience for about the candidate and the team, the recruit or the hiring manager to interviewing, then we can sell this product in debate companies. And that was an area, I think certainly that indeed, and a lot of other job boards were all trying to figure out around twenty seven hundred and twenty eighteen.

cool. So will definitely go into that story. I want ask another question that came betwen.

The A M. This is my question. You say your company for fifty million, lars, that's a huge amount money. And you know obviously, you didn't give a counter percent that you had a moderate amount of investment. You may have had you actually i've gone to other roof founders or employees, but like it's still probably like changing out of money. Why are you going even bigger this time? What's motivating you to like, you know, your hand ring, start another company and go through the pain and the chAllenge and all the time and heartache that goes into building another big company.

I don't know what out I would be doing is the first thing that is chAllenging. IT is definitely thankful. I respect founders who have done companies many times.

Rather, they you know turn out to be successful, not because the first year, the first couple years. I I think in every case is just it's always a grind starting from zero. And so I enjoyed to the most party I think that know I worked at larger companies, indeed was about twelve thousand people.

I worked at zilla around the time of the IPO, and I worked at a handful of really, really small companies. And I enjoy aspects of both. I think the chaos, I, I, I, first and foremost, like I throw, I like working with friends.

So working with, like, a small group of people who now i've actually worked with this small group of people for about nine years. My code and I have worked together for three companies. And so I really like working with Daniel.

He's a great cofounder or he's a great friend. We get along. We have very different interests and personalities, and we split up work.

I think, well, between the two of us were a lot of things that would probably be big cock fight just sort of go on set between us. So that part makes IT easy. It's almost like at this point, I don't have to worry about the cofounder fit.

We're just simply worried about like the product fit market after that, I love to making money for our investors. Many of them are Angels, who I I think can actually like three cases that interviewed. We were three different Angels, very first Angel investment ever that turned up super great for them and for their families and for our teams families. And so even with A A small amount of money going to early team members, IT can definitely be like changes for them as well. But if that you buying there dream condo house are putting their kids and Better schools, buying the right car, moving, many people ended up moving after the acquisition.

I like that you have mentioned that you've got a cofounder who've work with on three different companies and like that whole part of her businesses desisted. And you actually like the squad of, like I think he said, nine people. You guys work together and you really well together.

And I think this is something that people underestimate the importance of, which is that your company, your job, whatever you start in life, that's a project that's going to set up eight, nine, ten hours a day, is a huge chunk y your life and a huge part of that as a people use in that time with. And like, you don't want to put that on the background. And like, have that be the second or third thing you think about?

That would be almost the first thing you think about who are you actually going to work with. It's kind of like like a moving on to a new apartment and you can see behind me and it's like, well, where am I going to most of my time, my desk and so I got like a really nice desk. I bought really nice chair to sit in because I want to skim p on those things.

My bed. So I got like a really nice matters that followed up on in the other room. And then I get work. It's like the people that I talk to you. And so I want to make sure that are working with really good people. And I think that's not much sure how you are able to find that is awesome squad that you really get along with. But I think more people benefit from thinking about that being like an essential part of how they structure their business.

Yeah, yeah, I I totally great terms of like how we met and how we can fill into this. We were we were all employees at the same company, uh, many years ago. And so almost nine, ten years ago, we were all employees at a company that had gone through Y C.

In twenty twelve, killed forty two floors. And I was an early employee, Daniel, my cook out was an early employee, and we were never like told to work together. I think a lot of IT was just like you kind of cultural like friendly gravitation toward one another. I at the time as sort of burning Operations, he was a product guy um and ah so we were never actually working all that closely deliberately on stuff um or or at least in terms like our OK r and stuff. I think IT was just we ended up getting along and we're able to chop up work really effectively between the two of and so IT was nice being able to rely on somebody to handle just a lot of the stuff s that I didn't enjoy doing and sort of like finding that kind of genius for both of us has been really, really powerful over the last decade.

Yeah, I work with my brother on andy hackers and it's unna that were twins. And we just grew up basically always doing the opposite things like he was super good at sports. He's an athletic freak.

He like five at nine he could dunk a basketball. Like he's jumps and so that he keeps flowing up and up and up to the air. Like, I am never going to be that athletics.

Like, right? I want to be good at school, and he just didn't try heart at school because, like, I was super good at IT. And so as kids, we are very different in every way because, like, we just wanted define our own selves the way we could.

And now I will work on any hackers and this kind of the same thing like the things that I work on. He's like going i'm going to do that. I'm going to be good of a soft engineer you used.

So like i'm going to work on the news letter. It's Better. And then we just don't really bud hats.

We don't have cofounder global s or fights because we're not doing the same things. And we're super proud to work on kind of our own areas of expertise as a solo founder. IT doesn't matter what you're get out, what you're not good, you have to do all of IT.

And a lot of people like just never really get over that hurdle was second to somebody in the podcast a few weeks ago. And what he did was basically he would alternate. He would do one of software development.

And then one week of marketing, one week of soft development, one week of marketing. And like that was the only way he could to motivate themselves to do marketing because he hate IT IT. And if you have a cofounder and I daily, you've divided up responsibility well, like you don't have to have with these kind of tricks or strategies like it's just kind of works.

And I feel super easy and i'm sure you feel super grateful for the other person. He's doing all these other things that like you don't even want to do IT doesn't even feel like work them, but that does to you. The other thing you mentioned was that you are hard core capitalist, as am I.

We're on the nd heck of podcast is all about building businesses and making money a lot. To talk you about this a little, but because I just feel like capitalism gone just a bad rap in recent years and I can can see I have my own theories for why that is what i'm curious what your thoughts are if you know i'm going into IT, but. I think any system has its positives and its negatives capitals and clearly has issues as clearly, negative incentives are cost to do all such of horrible things.

And I think it's really easy to sort of latch on to those bad news of what spreads to the fastest. But also like just run this podcast and seeing like the life changing outcomes that so many people had that just made everyone's life Better, like their life has gone Better. Their customers lives has gone Better.

Their employees lives have gone to Better, their partners lives has gone ten Better. And they have like I don't know, it's like improved their communities as well. IT seems to me that like the positive size of capitalism just don't really get talked about all that often.

You know it's this incentive that like promises that you can basically make money and improve your life if you are willing to work really hard to help other people. And there aren't that many systems that basically rewards you for helping complete strangers. So i'm a huge man of capital. And what are your thoughts? Why are you a big fan?

Yeah, I don't know why IT IT feels controversial to say. I think IT does like even when you know in mentioning IT on this podcast five minutes ago, it's sort of like, do do we want to go down this rather pool? Is that something that I want to like fight about today? No, another system as effective as bringing kind of like joy and you gratification for rewarding both yourself and your employees and your customers like you said.

So IT might be out there. I I haven't unfounded. I haven't heard of of sort of what that other system would be. There's all these like weird permutations now advanta capitalism. There's like a CEO guys on on twitter who is like, well, I reduced my salary from one hundred million dollars year to a million dollars year and i'm still like worth tens millions, but I kind of pay capitalism and so I don't know like I think a lot of these things are done for attention and there's there's always personal reward and personal gain from, you know growing your twitter following or your podcast, selling more books because you are this kind of anti capitalists.

And so I think in many cases, that the people at the four front of these movements, the leaders of these movements, are actually being rewarded pretty generously, personally, from, you know, being anticapitalist. Again, I don't know the motivations. I tried like to think too much of IT. I also think just in general, you know, disagreeing with people on the internet is one way ticket to pain.

And so I tried to that of all costs and just, you know, mostly keep my view to myself and yeah I know I I think we generally through the hire ing process of saying, like we try and all of our companies to get, I think, outsize, what do we try to be as fair as we can, the salaries we try to do things like bonuses and commissions and treat our employees and our friends really fairly. And I think that, that generally attracts people who are mostly aligned to those views. And I don't really care if you know we have somebody who's anti capitalist who works for I I think as long as they're working hard and if they want to go to take a hundred percent their money and you know give IT away or give IT to the government or something that totally find with me, IT doesn't bother me at all.

I don't sleep about IT. But I I think certainly on my own personal experience, I don't even think that needs to be that much money. But just coming from a background where watching my parents and my parents friends never make one hundred thousand dollars and getting my first job shortly out of college where I was able to do that and just that amount of money, um I think anything that any company can do or any person can do to try to get to even that level is is massive.

So I also came from a family that was not super financially successful, like there were no like rich people that my parents know, know rich family members or people. My neighbor od and IT was kind of like weird to be an entrepreneur growing up, right? IT, like, not very many of people did that. How did you IT seems to come from similar background. How did you get into this?

How did you get on this this path? Yeah my my mom was a public school teacher. My dad was A A simple l engineer in my project management at a very, very large construction company.

But I think in both cases, you know, neither were ever an executive, neither ever were kind of a founder. Other people in my family had small businesses they had started and and I had seen them be my ably successful or or very unsuccessful in those business ventures. I learned I can cut an early age that to kind of be risky, betis, to sort of like, go and get the college degree. My parents between them, I think cavs, like three advances degrees. My grandparents both had p hd.

And so I was like this family of sort of academics who came from that world of, like, if you study hard and you get good grades, you can sort of get to the next level academy, and that degree will you buy you this, like, very success, extremely stable, extremely risk adverse lifestyle, that you can then buy a house and do all of a kind of things at the very minimum that you want to do? I don't know. I was never particularly interested in that or what came from.

I came to there's plenty of people like me to come from that situation. And I don't know if it's like a minor rebellion and against your parents, for your family where it's like I don't want to be in the same job for forty years. I love the idea of like working on something, know in a sprint and like putting my all into IT and just like spring for a few years and just seeing where that goes. And then after three or four years, in lot of cases that I just get super bored and I couldn't imagine just like waking up to work and and sort of not enjoying what i'm doing just to get the page check just because I had gotten this degree in that in that field.

whatever is yeah think it's a kind of a testable to the fact that the world is getting Better, that it's an option to even live this way. You know there are people who are digital no matter who just like hop around and don't I want to commit to one particularly places just like and sample limit to the best in every place in the world for as long as I can. Now, part of the millions al generation are you are millennial. How old are you?

Yeah, thirty two.

Okay, cool. I'm thirty four. So it's a guard. Generation is like, I don't know what's word of for being entitled and wanting to have cake and eat too. And we we can't just like have a job that pays the bills. We also need a job is going to like make us fulfill and happy at set a and that's going to look down on.

But why should I be looked down on like shouldn't like we all want the world to take us to a place where we can be happy and filled. And what were doing. And so I think that obviously being a sort of founder and having the opportunity create not only the job that you want, but then to also sort of exit from that after a number of years and then try something else. Someone like you get to live a bunch of different lifetimes and one lifetime and like that's A A fulfilling cool.

cool thing to do, right? Yeah there's this kind of meme I don't have to mean or if it's something that again is is talked down upon all the time on on twitter and other places, which is this statistic. I'm not sure exactly what IT is, but I guess you know gensec when they're interviewed, I think our generation, you know, when we were six ten years old, we wanted to be astronauts or teachers or firefighters or uh you test or whatever.

And now you know six and ten year old, they want to be youtube ers or you know, tiktok ers or whatever and it's like, this is terrible. You know, americans over and it's like, I don't know mam, like I I met know twenty five year old who lives in us Angeles who is basically behind the scenes working with you, mister beast, and a bunch of these famous youtube s and his life seems awesome. Like key seems super fulfilled creatively.

He makes incredible money for his age. It's like, why do we not want more of that? I think if that's where the attention is going, if that's where I balls are going, if that's how people are choosing to spend their time and you can actually make decent money, when why should we take that?

So what was on your mind when you started your sort of first big successful company interviewed? Were you thinking like, I want to live a great lifestyle, I want to be financially successful? What was was sort of motivating .

you but any company there's the the revisions ous history of like, oh, you know, we have this like great mission and we we banded together and there was like this company you have behaved and we wanted to go like fix out. We wanted to go save the world or whatever. I mean, in this case, anything that there are maybe founders who who go out on that journey in and fight that fight, the reality of IT for us was that I was IT was purely accidental and IT was IT was a large chunk of luck.

Um so the story of interviewed was basically we had built a lot of these internal assessments for our own use case at forty two hours, the start up where my copers and I met and we were basically doing, I think, what a lot of companies did back then in twenty fifteen and still do today, which is if you have an on technical higher for, say, sales position, you want to know if that person is good at sales. You have them right and called emails that's commonly done in my google box. You sort of review the results as a hiring committee and make your decision, obviously with other factors baked into that.

Throughout the interview, we entered a hq thon while we were all still full time employees in march of twenty fifteen, winded up winning that hackers on, we got, I think, one hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand dollars from the judges of that hack on which included, like sn banisters, who is that found respond jazan kicanas venture people and so they were like, great. Like your company won the hacked on work with the money we were. Preheat the time they thought perhaps is going to be big.

They wanted to invest even more money, sort of up to three hundred thousand dollars into our company. And I was like key world, like employees at the other company. We have a hard decision to make literally in twenty four hours, which is do we quit our jobs and go work on this thing we're doing that is a very sort of jokey side project full time? Or do you you reject the money and just continue working at forty two, four years?

Luckily, the CEO that business at forty two hours was super supportive of us. And even though we were three senior people on the team, he was like, I want to invest too. I want to become an adviser.

I'm going to help you guys get into Y. C. I think that there is a whole cycle like key had gone through yc as A Y C founder.

I think you are Y C founder. And so he helped to supply. He helped, you know get connected with with microscopy. So IT was like this, like split second jump that was literally made, like entered the hackston on a thursday. Did the hackers on friday, saturday, one saturday night had to make a hard decision sunday to leave our jobs by monday? We have, like incorporated set up a count and sort of off the races.

What do you think about yc experience? I thought .

I was incredible. One of my two co founders, darren, had gone through in twenty eleven. And so he had, I think, what was told the tail end of, like original Y, C.

Experience for program was still involved. And IT is still is like a very small cohort of companies. And there were thirty five or forty companies in his batch.

We had one of the first experiments, I think, because there were blood scaling. And so poems m was sort of he was transitioning out. Just a living son was still one of our part, which was incredible.

Obviously, things have changed a lot last two years, moving to fully remote. But yeah, going down a mountain view and having those conversations with Justin on and Kevin hail and iron Harris and Jessica of instances and jeff all standing, all of those people, incredible. Several of them have sort of moved on from my sea.

Summer, still super involved. But I thought IT was incredible, like I thought at the time. And Y, C, I was like this. I don't know. My take on yc was at the time.

It's like, this is as hard as IT gets, like there is just no crazy time in my life and then I just kept getting harder from there. So is like, okay, now fund raising is super hard. And actually now getting like the first ten users is even harder than fund raising and getting to the first million dollars in the areas even harder than that. So IT just never stopped being a chAllenge. But I think if that was definitely a special time, how was how was your experience?

I love joy c as well. I thought there's just something in the atmosphere of having so many people around you who are all pushing in the same direction. It's a super motivating.

And I think one of the biggest things that a lot of founders, especially today, who like don't raise money and don't go through accelerators, are missing out on as like that come rotterdaam know it's so easy to go from like a company where are surrounded by coworkers to quit and like by yourself. We're coming your basement and you just lose motivation and you've find that it's it's hard to get up and work. It's hard to send that emails.

It's hard to do this stuff. But when you have people around you, it's much easier because we're just social animals like we're just motivated by wanting to contribute, by wanting to not look bad. But I want to not be left behind.

And so I like that aspect of yc. What I didn't like was like the sort of obser sons with fundraising. I was also part of A A tail end of like the original yc.

I wasn't in twenty eleven. So I can think one bagh before your cofounder and program was there and the other original yc partners were there. I think we like thirty five, forty companies in the batch. And honestly, like I would have been super happy just making a company that made living for me, basically being in any hacker.

And I remember there are people on our battle like sold out, like they sold their companies for a few million dollars, and people were like hating on them and saying they are sell out and they quit too early. And this first just made millions of dollars in a few months. Like how are you going to hate on the change? Like, that's incredible.

And I didn't like that. Why he sort of pushed us still. Like only consider that as an option.

But then again, like that was like two thousand and eleven. Now back then, nobody even like attempt to to charge money for most of their businesses. Stripe didn't exist.

IT wasn't even in beta yet like IT just wasn't. IT was a different time and now wasn't replicate like most of the big companies coming out of yc, almost all of them so have their head on straight. Almost all of them have a business model. They're generating revenue to paying customers and IT IT makes more sense for them to raise money. But as I understand the cow.

they can use that to make more money in the future. Yeah, I love this like cohort of companies that came out of, I think, really to mid Y C batches. You know, I think all art comes to mind up here up until recently came to mind.

These are companies that basically only ever raised their their original, you know, I just depending on the batch, twenty one hundred and twenty thousand dollar checks and basically like said no to all investment sense then and built these massive successful companies with know tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of users, millions of users, I think is that yours case? It's pretty cool to see that, and I think it's pretty partner dependent. I remember college jeff Austin, who who wasn't still, as I think one of my favorite people all time, just involved, and start up.

And when we have this software, and I was like, k where, you know, two years inch should be sell for fifty million if he was like, absolutely not like, if you can sell for fifty, you can sell for one hundred. If you can sell for one hundred, you can sell for two fifty. And so IT was like, he was a partner that was really, really pushing, I think, us, but also other companies thinking about taking those early exits to just like you're already through the hardest part, which is getting the first users, building the early team of your first, you know, ten or so people. And so why would you want to quit now? And so I would guess that that's very that was very different, I think, for us from some of the other advice we got from other partners.

Totally cool. You mentioned APP. Er I had waited on the podcast at me two and three years ago. And like zappos going to do in this thing, think they raise like a million million a half dollars. And then like you said, they just never raise money again and just kept growing and growing.

And then recently this year, they announced that they had raised like one hundred and thirty million dollars at a five billion dollar valuation. And it's like they were all intensive purposes, like boots drapped their way there and just grew like crazy, probably resisted investor after investigation for years and now the founders own like just a massive percentage of the company and like that, it's such a cool story. It's amazing to me that they were able to do that.

Yeah, I outside of what I see indeed, who acquired my last company, they raised a total of five million. They never touched most of that money. I think the story was they used about a million of IT.

They sold for billion dollars a couple of years later. And today, I think if indeed were to be valued as like a publicly traded independent company would be probably worth like forty to fifty billion. They're doing in five billion dollars revenue off of an initial united million dollars rates.

So these things happen. I think there is another one out here next to me in pleasant in that raised seven million and there are forty billion dollar company company right now. It's hard for there to be more of that. I don't know what happy story was, but I think that there is just so much capital being turned around that if he's happier, why wouldn't you want to add one hundred and thirty million to your coffers if if you can add a crazy valuation? So I think IT smart for founders to wait as long as they can in many cases, and then for other founders, that definite makes sense to take, take the money and and run with IT.

So these are some obvious huge numbers. And you know, a lot of these companies, abc, yours interviewed and d like these, are companies focus on people helping get jobs, helping people hire they're, helping people find jobs. I love this sector because a lot of money changes hands. If if you think about like where companies spend most of their money, it's usually employees, especially the technology employees, are super expensive.

And if you are a founder trying to come up the business idea, I think one of the best things you can do is sort of anker on I only want to provide value to people who are going to pay a lot of money for i'm doing, you know, if you're selling pencils and people are paying you like fifty cents for a pencil, your pencil isn't that important. They're not going to stop to talk to on the side wall like you can going to tell how important people think your thing is by how much they pay for IT. And almost without fail, most of the people do I know we start companies in the hiring space who do a good job tend to have outsize returns and gains compared to people in other spaces just because they can charge so much per customer.

So I want to talk about, uh, your first business interviews a little bit. Um you can give us the world when tor, why do you think IT was so successful? How do what do you even get able to ramp up to two thousand million dollars and and you're occurring revenue in less .

than three years? You're absolutely right. Is an area where you tend to see sizable budget. Uh, you know a company's pencil budget be nearly as much as there as their people budget.

And I think that people budget get split out in a lot of ways where if you think about sort of the tech sac in in people Operations or talent or recruiting hr, whatever want to call IT. You have your like hr information system, you have your up and tracking in system, you probably using video interview software. So there's there's a lot of budget there.

And I think a lot of these companies in that sack can get a lot of money for what they're selling. The other thing is similar to like a sales horse on the R M side. These are tools that are really hard and painful to rip out. And so I think another component of IT, at least in the software side of the people business, is you don't see companies that have a lot of turn problems because once you start using something to track all your applicants and let's say you're five years in and now you have five years of canada data in that system migrating IT over to something that looks pretty or looks Better is really hard. And so part of IT for us was that on the assessment side, canada assessments had been plagued by these very old school companies that we're doing, like santron multiple choice test for entry level customer support people for many, many years.

And a lot of these businesses, like if we go down that robot, hold some of these businesses that were run and started by, you know industrial organisational psychologists, is the middle of oka home of fifty years ago, are making forty to sixty million dollars in revenue. So it's a crazy space there. There's virtually no technology in the space, least there wasn't six years ago.

And so in a lot of cases, all we were doing was trying to say, look at what hacker rank and some of these companies are doing for the technical interviewing space. And if we can do some of those same things, there's not rocket science involved here. But if we can just take things from being a forty five minute pencillings and paper tests that you have to do to get an entry of call center job, we can move that online.

We can make a mobile friendly. Again, these are not hard of things, but there's clearly going to be budget for that because you're already spending a million dollars with the scene scan tron company for your testing. And so that was IT was still this like very intones an industry.

There's not collectively like when you look at the adresse market of that you know assessment industry, it's not massive. I think that we were we were a small player in a pretty small market, but I also made IT easy press, you know manuva and I think get spent from from other companies. We weren't necessarily growing spend. I think we appear ly replacing spend from other kind of more legacy solutions.

What did you learn about how to actually find customers? Because I think when you're selling something for presumable, a pretty high Price point, lot of early stage financiers get intimidated like, well, how i've never done sales before. I don't even know who to email, who to call. Like how I going to convince somebody to buy something that cost more than just five dollars a month, but I cost hundreds of thousands .

of dollars a month. Yeah, I think that the first thing for us was that you you do have to start somewhere. I think that there is um you know people get paralyzed by the idea of picking the perfect Price like we see IT with so many of our friends.

We see IT with companies that even invested in. And my thought on this is, no, I don't think anybody ever picks the perfect Price on day one. I don't think many years the company most companies have the perfect Price.

You like you linked in, in the space, linked in is updating their pricing like every other month, they're A B testing, different things. They're testing how do you package or recruit cy? What do you get for that recruiter's seat? It's been this constant evolution of the last fifteen years with linton pricing.

And so I think for us in terms of getting customers IT was um just get somebody who's paying something in the door and then leverage that first customer for us. That was a customer called task. Us was our first customer ever.

They're based on all Angeles. And we had actually gotten that relationship through a relationship, uh that um we had at forty two floors where task us was basically our outsource customer support and data entry company. And we knew that they were hiring a ton.

And so the conversation of the founders in twenty fifteen and interviewed was, hey, I was the CEO of this company. We spent a lot of money on you guys. We took an early, but on you guys, could you repay the favor? And I think that that happens all the time.

Like, you know, one founder said to another founder that founders, by in their stuff, is just just like you continuous cycle but um IT worked and and I think rice and jasper, who were the co founders, that company they took about on us, they paid a tiny amount of money for the value that we were delivering. But the important thing was we hadn't really customer with in the first couple months who is paying us for an actual prototype. We quickly convince them to do a case study.

We roll back into another company, another company and all these companies are paying us five hundred month. And then I think after you know probably six or seven of those customers where we had built out the case study, we also got, I think, four of the seven as investors. Um so JoNathan Watson was one of those who was running dum tack at the time he came on as an investor.

Um uh rice and jasper from tasks came on his investors and so we got like four of our first seven customers to actually invest in interviewed I think around the time prey c um which was super powerful because if we were able to leverage their networks to say, now I have a reason as a city to go talk about this company to my other city of friends were also you are struggling to higher non technical talent scale. And so that was sort of the really journey and IT was really, I think for us to we really, really, really prioritize what we call the three els. That was let us as in like cash, money learning and logo.

And so we always wanted to get two out of the three. And so in a case with like task us where we weren't getting a lot of lot us, we are getting lot of money from them. We wanted to learn a tn from them and we wanted to get their logo to go leverage into getting other logo.

So getting other customers. Um and so that when I continued, I still use that framework today for like our own sales team at asi. I used IT all the way through interviewed and IT was a pretty good framework of like that when your first hundred customers, I think for some businesses in your first thousand customers, you're never going to find your perfect customer.

I think you could make an argument that you should go strive to go find perfect customers in the early days. I I think for us, IT was take the customers. But if they are paying you a ton of money and they have a really good logo like know, well, Sarah was using you early on, don't get too concerned about not learning a lot for them or about the expansion opportunity or whatever else, like take the money and run, take the logo and run, try to get a case study.

But if if a company doesn't have a lot of money to pay you, I think that they can still be a really valuable early customer as long as they agree to do things like give a testimonial or a quote or a case study or than that can be leveraged into getting, you know, a customer that actually pay more money. And so I think we were very we were very flexible with our early customers that interviewed um and I think taking bets on ah Young emerging companies worked out super wall for us. It's worked out super wall for other companies.

Um we took a nearly bet on canvas when they were like forty people. Um we took jord. Ash was one of our first customers. I think they had eighteen people out of yc uh maybe two years before us or something. Um task us grew from like a thousand people at the time to I think biggest IPO this last week, and they're now like twenty four or thirty thousand people. So being in the hiring space, I think the other thing is if you take of that on an early customer, they're only easier to close, but they also grow with you.

And so we didn't have to do any incremental work on door ash shore left or can va or task cus or any these companies or sum tack like these all just, you know, they were already fair police size will start ups call IT like twenty to two hundred people. We got them in for a small amount of money we Priced based on volume. So the number of candidates, they were screaming with us. And you know at the point that some of those went from screening you know one hundred candidates a day in march of twenty fifteen to um you know one thousand candidates a day two years later, that contract sort of teeth. You know with that relationship, which was super powerful for us.

I think one of the most important parts of pricing is actually kind of like what are the sort of unit what is the unit that you're charging for by picking kind of a unit where you are getting paid more?

The bigger of the company is because they are hiring more people, are lining your incentives because no company's really complaining about like getting bigger and hiring more people, and you're kind like the incentives sort of bet on customers who are going to grow like you wanted get the customers were going to grow the biggest. And so like it's kind of everybody wins, rising tide, lift all boats. Sure you're getting paid more.

They're paying. You want be like everybody y's happy and IT seems like kind of a fun sales process to be involved in. And I think also people also unrested mate, how fund sales can be you know what kind of seems like us is huge chore.

It's terrible. If only they could just have a marketing driven company or I don't see anybody and they just sort of seen an add on the internet and they read a blog post they sign up with, that would be great. But actually like some of the fun and turning a company is like talking to your customers and getting to know them.

And in your case, like a lot of them became friends and investors are partners and maybe even future employees. And like these are people who are going to help you solve your problems. Are there are people who are going to help you.

Do know one of those three else like learning and tell you, oh, hey, why don't you reject your home page like this? And I want to be off for this service. And IT just makes the entrepreneurship journey much more rewarding and I think more likely to be successful.

And so I wish more founders. Didn't run away from sales in early days. I wish more of them. We're willing to do sort of what you did and just pick up the phone, email people, contact your previous act or employees or customers and just say, hey, like you know, will you be our first customer?

yes. Yeah, I totally agree. I think everything everything is the founder comes down to sales or eighty percent of things comes down to sales like your you're recruiting and that sales, you're trying to convince people to take a bet on you and on your vision and on your company. In many cases, especially today, for way lower initial compensation that they would be making at a large tech company.

Um you you're selling you know investors in a lot of cases or you know if you're booths strapping in a lot of cases, you're trying to get loans, you're trying to structure debt, you're trying to get bank relationship set up, you're trying to get like you're payment processing all set up and all that is sales. And then I think you know I think a lot of founders are okay with that. But then IT comes down to, like you said, talking to those really customers.

And I think a lot of IT comes down to, you know, people and AI don't like to be rejected by rejection sucks. You have to go through a lot of rejection when you're fund raising or when you're hiring or when you're selling. And so if you're doing in another area, this can be painful to have customers tell you know, one hundred times a day.

And then I think a lot of IT, too. I remember this that interviewed a lot of IT and and even here last you like in the first, I don't know how long this is a different every company in the first couple months, in the first couple years. In some cases, I think it's embarrassment.

It's like I think great husband at lincoln have the thing of like back in the day, if you are not embarrassed to deny your product to your first user, you have waited like way long to go find your first user something like that and think that there is like a huge embarrassment when I just you working by yourself for you and your copy der in a room or working remotely and you've spent months on this thing and you're afraid to get you embarrassed fied by having some fire at some company, tell you this thing sucks. I think the reality is that never really happened to me. I think most, most people tend to be pretty nice on the internet if you, if you if you approach them.

And so yeah, I mean, there is definitely always that fear of the rejection. That's one of the things I loved about the hackers ama in the community, which is, I think in your comment box, it's like say something nice to crest or like say something to support this project. And I think, you know, you have these communities like that to do a great job of like lifting one another open.

We talked earlier about motivation, and I think ultimately, nothing else matters if you lose motivation. And so like forcing yourself in the really days of your company to put your product out there and to get IT in front users and get their feedback. The feedback is never as bad as you think it's going to be like those people will be very pleasant, very nice even if they are not going to buy and having those i'm not going to buy this because of x conversations that are real and you actually get some boy's candid feedback.

Honestly, it's just as valuable as as getting really customers. So we maybe buying for the wrong reasons. I think in the early days.

yeah, I mean, you basically said the most important thing to do is to to to not quit, right? To not lose motivation and is super important to just continually therefore find like what's tapping your motivation if you are in fact having that happened to you and get IT of IT.

And I think this sort of three else that you three else framework that you had, we were total going for like latest learning in logo, a super smart because IT gives you a very concrete thing to latch onto that give you wins. You know why you're taking a particular action? Like why am I trying to set up this customer? Because I want one of these three else.

And then you know how to handle that interaction? Because you trying to always to try the conversation to one of those three else, you don't feel like you're sort of aimless and then when you get IT that you have a little went, you're like, okay, I got a logo out of this. Maybe they didn't pay me my full Price.

Maybe I didn't learn anything in my products is just as bad as I H yesterday. Like i've got a logo I put on my home page and that's going to make the next time easier. And I think if you have this sort of like upward staircase, like when you have always know like what you're doing contributed to like making the next step easier, it's just easier to maintain motivation and that's ultimately what matters.

And you start up in the very early days, like if you are start of fails, it's because you're quit. You know, if you quit, it's because you're run out of money or something else. But like it's ultimately because you weren't motivated because even if you're run out of money, there's other ways to go get more money even if no one's buying your thing, you can like restructure your product peseta. And so I really just comes out of motivation and I love this sort of framework where you always know here's why i'm doing this and here the when i'm going to get this onna, keep me motivated .

yeah hundred percent over the last year and a half. I mean, we've we've been running remote teams for seven years. But I think with remote uh remembering to celebrate wins is particularly important. I think we suck at IT and asked.

I think we are bad about IT at interviewer and um when you do get together with a team like I indeed we had sixty officers all over the world and I would like cr, I visit our product teams and ourselves teams and our engineering teams and our customer sport teams. And um you would get those winds throughout the week like somebody closes a deal on the sales fall and the people around that person or like celebrating with them. And you have the like this persons been here for one year, like balloons on our deskin, like all of those like micro wins that you get by being around other people.

I think you have to be super intentional if you're working remotely. And even with customers like IT, especially the hiring space like we win when they win, which is hiring somebody like how do you help celebrate with the customer who may be based in brazil or mexico or year per like ever, it's really hard. You have to be intentional about IT.

You'd have to find ways to like help your team win to stay motivated as a founder and keep your cofounder ers motivated um to keep your customers motivated to keep like betting on you and keep you using you. And so I think it's definitely hard. I think the winds are important and it's like one of the most under disgust parts of of the entrepreneur journey.

And it's so easy, I think, and remote work to just be like if you're coating all day or you're selling all day or your fund raising all day, you just be like, you know, heads down and everything is very tactical now you're you know using checklists for everything and just checking things off. But like looking back at the end of a week and realizing how far you've come and if the week sucked, okay, what are you going to do to change at next week? If the week was great? Like remember to say something about IT. I I think that something that I tried to remind myself of all the time and i'm still terrible at after eight years of remote working, is just something that I think is way harder. If you are working remote rivers in person.

how do you celebrate selling interviewed for fifty million dollars or somewhere their bets?

Yeah, that that was easy. One, I do have a good answer for that. My two cofounder and I, we paid out of pocket for our entire team and all spouses, kids, whatever, to a fight, lost vegas.

Uh, we gave everybody two thousand, as in gambling cash. We paid for berties White hotels, know restaurant meals out, whatever. And then we kind of went back to IT. So that was about thirty days design the company. And so we had a nice little retreat.

And then on an ongoing basis, I would say that is actually an extension of something that we've done now that I learned from Jason freedman, who was the pounder forty two floors back in twenty twelve, and I was working for him, which was to do, if you're going to be a remote company, you've got to spend the money to get the team together on a semi roo basis. And so we would do vocations back in the day we've done them, you know, now for eight years across three companies. We've done sollie city, we've done Austin, we've done nature, we've done vegas, we've done napper, we've done total. So like finding somewhere where you can kind of fly the entire team in, build those relationships once a quarter, once every six months, whatever IT is. I think that, that has been super critical for like celebrating in the winds remotely as well.

Do you think you've like climates to that high? Because I mean, you spend years building a company. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of chAllenge. And then you have the sort of like one almost instantaneous like exit event or it's like, bam, you did the thing you know you on and that feeling fade and the high goes away and you climate. And even if you are celebrating IT, like eventually this a sort of the new Normal, how was IT felt for you having sold this company? And like sof reached this success?

I think IT has common levels. So working at my first start up out of college, where I was in sales and I was in business development and partnerships that was hostile at the small company for year and a half and then that company was sold to silo um for about forty five million.

Didn't see like a founder size exit, but I A nice little chunk a change at sort of a Young age and and that felt you, I think, very briefly, like OK on top of the world I made. I can remember what I was one hundred or one hundred hundred thousand dollars in equity from the sale. And I get a higher salary, salo, and I get all the zillow stock.

And like this is this is good as IT gets. And being in the the area, it's like our congratulations. I can afford a marginally larger apartment now or whatever.

This is not life changing money by any means. And then kind of having a couple more experiences as as an early employee, zero stock goes up you to get to that next level. Sorry, I think for me, I think some people, i've definitely had friends where it's like they have a negative baLance in their bank account.

They like literally have a couple hundred dollars in their bank account and they're making like ten or fifty million dollars personally like that is like a giant. You know what up? I think for me, IT came a little bit more incremental.

Certainly interviewed, I think, was the first like massive win where IT was an order of mande higher than anything I had received before. But I don't know that IT faded for me OK. I think that there are still things that I try to remain.

You don't super grateful open and I I think you overall certainly life is Better with one hundred thousand dollars than with zero dollars and you ten million dollars than with one hundred thousand. Lars, if that goes back, like the capitalism conversation earlier, like you know, things at least for me, like my experience was things get Better. I think there is probably it's not as life changing.

If you're going from you know you're making a million dollars and you already half half a million in the bank where you're making a million dollars and you already have one hundred million dollars in the bank, like i'm sure that level IT fails to be this incredible thing anymore, but there's definitely obviously this temporary surge in this temporary russian. You want to go spend the money or invested or become an Angel investor, whatever IT is. But for me, over the last four years, sin selling interviewed has been, I think some I sustained like super grateful to live. I live super fortunate and feel blessed to have like the house that we live in in neighbor od we were in and and I think all of that just wouldn't have been possible if I just stayed in my first shop driver or had not worked in gy. Not risk of myself for starting a company.

How did you transition from, I guess, feeling this high and like having this huge success to starting another company because not working on another company called li is the one you didn't name about on the hackers.

What was that transition like a long and painful transition just in the sense of there's this period in between building interviewed for tune a half years and then selling IT and then working at our acquire at, indeed for about three years and then starting lakey.

And so there was a period where I had to go and like, put my manager head on and like, put my executive head on and like, IT wasn't my company anymore, but I still had to hire one of people. Our team went from, I think, about twelve people at interviewed at the time that we were required to several hundred people within, indeed, very quickly. And so that was just like a whole different bees.

I think I was, on one hand, trying to keep my like founder entrepreneurs head on so that I didn't get used to the conflicts of working at this, like massive companies, thers and awesome paycheck and perfect benefits. And like everything is calm and I travel the world, all these officers and I just like hired over somebody money, and I spend somebody else's as money. Like, first, real time, I think my life I had done that.

And indeed, was this like wildly profitable company where I just felt like money did not matter. Like all the time I was looking at budget. So like eighteen million dollars and million dollars for this and two million dollars for that.

And I was like, holy shit, like, this is crazy. Like, and this is like a very small part of, like, what the total organization is seeing. And so IT was this baLance like trying not to get to sucked up in that but also enjoying IT and trying to learn from IT like our CEO and our our executive team.

And indeed, they're brilliant. They're incredible Operators. They're incredible what they do. And so I also wanted to learn from them. I I didn't want this to be just say like, oh, i'm only teaching the people on my team how to work effectively at a big tech company.

IT was like, how do I learn from our CEO? How do I learn from our our chief product officer? So they gave me a lot of opportunities, which I am, again, super grateful for. But I think the transition was after about a year and a half, I was feeling an edge to get back to something smaller.

IT took longer than I then I had kind of originally thought, but I that I would partner back up with dania, my cofounder, and I was just sort of a matter of timing for us in terms of what that baLance was going to be. You know, I had got a married in that period. He had his first kid in that period. And so there there is just a lot of like lifestyle came up for both of us, I think, around when we would ultimately start last year.

But I was a pretty famous transition like I was fortunate to leave dead out of point where kind of regardless of what happens with aska financially, I wasn't taking nearly as big of a risk on doing another company like I was starting interviewed um and I think that that made IT easier in some ways but IT also IT made IT really scary because it's like the interviewed again, IT happened so fast and happened in a day we didn't know we were doing and they're also no expections like founders fail all of the time. I think that they're like way higher experts takes like raising from all of our existing investors, bringing our team over to be like don't fuck this up because like we know that you nail at the first time and if you're going to go bigger than like we expect like a big outcome at this one. And so I think that was like honestly, a good six months of IT was just deciding like what's the area we're going to spend.

So IT IT was night day like the first company was formed and I went to wells fargo and set up the bank account. In twenty fifteen, you got our our company checking account set up and know incorporated with this like random lawyer, we met over the internet, which turned out to be a disaster all in twenty four. And here I was like, I had like amazing resources to go like higher ora and like higher, you know, all the best people that like kind of help us set up in the in the right direction.

And but that means that I think when you have a limited options to go choose whatever you want to do next, IT actually makes IT way harder than I think. And sometimes just stumbling into IT and being like, okay, you know, I found this opportunity, whatever, i'm not even going to think about IT, i'm just going to go sprint. It's definitely IT was very different. I think this time around.

how do you approach deciding what you wanted your idea to be? Because if you know you want to go bigger, that automatically excludes like some ideas add some constraint that you have to to pick an idea that actually can give.

That was definitely an interesting conversation that we the day and I spoke about a lot. But just of IT was that we got to you about three million dollars of our in our last company in a market where there's probably only one hundred to three hundred million dollars in spend, at least in in the us, like in that antara industry. So we did a small thing in a small pond and IT worked out well.

And I think ultimately be, you know, at this company, what we're doing is helping people hire faster, hopefully higher, with a higher bar. I actually like delivering the talent, the software. So we kind of taken a lot of the software learning's over the last five years vertically integrated into a safer and hiring business.

And so with that, you see a ton of competition. There are like a nearly unlimited number of companies popping up every day that are like doing the exact same thing. However, this is like arguably the largest business in the world are one of them, which is like hiring and recruiting and staffing in people and paying people and tracking people and tracking hours.

And like you kind of go down that like people, talent, hr, sd, massive. I will say in the first five months being five months in the last year, IT has been easier in a lot of ways from a market perspective to get really customers. And I think that simply based on the fact that we picked a much larger market this this time around where it's lot easier to get initial customers.

Now how do you compete with all of these other staff in companies? Had hunters recruiting companies long term sort of different discussion for a different day, and pop had up in a year and figure that out. But in terms of like finding initial differentiation, I think in the begetting of interviewed, we actually tried to go way too differentiated, like we tried to totally like turn the assessment in this around its head.

And we spent like six or nine months like actually building out all of these like machine learning models to assets like typing speed and whether or not a candidate was using sort of the proper grammar to address the difficult customer situation. And then we would show this to companies. And there would be like, that technology is incredibly impressive.

What we actually one is just like a multiple choice test that you can do on your phone instead of on, you know, pencillings paper really like, oh yeah, like there's actually lot of money in this. Okay, I like I think that a lot of industry is the learning was you actually only have to be five percent Better. You have to be ten percent Better to build massive company.

Like I don't think I totally respect, I totally admire founders were able to go make an incremental change in an industry and like totally revolutionizing industry. Very jealous of that. Love investing in sounds like that.

But I think for me, it's just like being you fundamentally lazy at heart and knowing that like the median recruit experienced, still so shitty, it's a pretty low bar to get five percent Better, ten percent Better than than what those companies are doing. So yeah, was picking a big market and being one of a number of companies in a much bigger market. And I think initially, that's actually been a bit easier than being one of smaller number of companies in a small market.

I love that idea that you don't necessarily need to be I mean, the old montreal sts, you need to be ten times is Better than the competition to sort a sort of like you know hard IT is to make something that's ten times is Better than the status quo. If that's an exaggeration, someone says two times Better like. It's so hard to make something too.

Time is Better than than what exists already. But if you enter a market, we're like, guess what, people are paying for particular solutions and they don't blink IT paying for these things. And they're always going to want like a small commented improvement if they can get IT, you don't need a two x improvement over the existing stuff can be five to ten percent Better when people go to make their purchasing decision like they might buy your option.

I think what's chAllenging is in hiring. You going to mention this earlier, people don't tend to turn. They pick a solution to like this is working really well for us. We're hire ing people like we're not even in the market for a new tool looking for a new tool sea. And so when you come out here at lakey like your brand new tool, like you're stand at a marketable a bunch, people who already have this problem more less solved, how do you get your first customers? When you in that situation where IT doesn't seem like people really need something new.

you know you can go compete on pricing so that actually in hiring is quite different, cheated where if you have the ability to place a really high quality, you know, it's a engineering contractor who's working forty hours week. And because you have a Better database, because you have a Better brand and you get more engineers to come to you versus a traditional staff in company, you're able I mean, there there's there's plenty of staff and companies out there that traditionally are taking summer between fifty one hundred percent margin on the early rate of a outsource remote engineer contractor.

So if you look at a company like i'll pick up like redit because they hire a ton of contracted engineers, they have even just like a couple hundred engineers who they are paying, let's saying, an effective rate of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Year two, for every engineer, they are probably paying summer between fifty thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand to a staff in company. So I think Price is one massive different traders in this industry where if you can actually compete on Price, if you can take fifteen and thirty percent margin versus fifty percent margin, you get a lot of people to pay attention.

It's sort of a cop out answer. But I would say in early days, you can definitely lean on your technical background and you can lean on your ability to build solutions very quickly for a customer. And I think really customers love that, which is if you're working with ron STD, who places a ton of engineers at big companies, I think that from a recruiting standpoint, they're about doing thirty to thirty five billion dollars in revenue and think there's about fifty thousand people that work at on stud.

Um you know one start is not going to be going to the average yc company and saying, you know, outside of just getting the talent like what are the other chAllenges is that you're trying to get get IT faster. Are you trying to pay them in a different way? What about compliance like you are you able file all their paperwork? And I think that there are some of these small things that like again, that's the five or of the ten percent improvement.

It's like we're going to swarm around you like the ten first ten people ask you, we're going to a swarm around you and we're going to like make these changes. We're going to like put this into the dash ward and we're going to give you that discount or we're going to give you this person faster. And so again, I think some of that can be speed.

I think some of IT can just be you relying on on your ability to quickly customize for your first ten or one hundred customers. And I think there is a fear in the industry, especially as a small business around that, which is oh, like I don't want to create a consulting company, but what you do for your first customer, you don't have to do for the next ten. What you do for your first ten customers, you don't have to do for the next hundred like airbnb is actually one of the best of examples of this.

We're like the founding team is unable around new york while there nyc like physically in people's apartments taking pictures because they recognize that photography is like one of the big differentiators with them like you to investor. It's like love that's on a scalable model you know to a founder, it's like will full out or that eventually. But like we want to make sure we know the experience. And so I think that as much as VC and as much as other founders urge you to not go down a consulting path, which I think actually can be dangerous for all the companies, I think we take a very consultative approach with the first companies and and the the ability of the customizes is definitely a huge differentiator. I think outside .

what eat that is a different to in companies. We get kind of sucked in to that consulting path and can never get off of that treat mu and what you want to do, which is now start there, but eventually build something sort of standardized and able.

you eventually get confident and you learn to say, no, no, I treated the other day, which we're going through this actively right now. I think first, you first of all going out of the gates in being a one month of the company and closing a million dollar contracts just doesn't happen.

And on the other hand, closing a customer for a thousand dollar month thing where they have one hundred thousand dollar a year budget is way harder than closing a customer that has it's going to spend a million dollars, but they have one hundred million dollars budget. See you like look at those sort of like orders managing to difference between those levels of spend. And I think some of IT is getting the confidence back to the like.

Let us logo learning of like we learned from early customers, we adapted to that learning. We made changes for them. We worked hard for them.

And I think in our case, it's very coolly kind of going up market to larger and larger customers where it's not expected that again, rolls fargo is going to ask eroto ch. Oran daughter, one of these like massive recruiting companies to make a change. They just want the people.

They want the people delivered fast. And maybe pricing continues to be a differentiator, but we're not always customizing for them. And so I think we saw this that interviews a lot where it's about going at market and taking a lot of cases and with other cases is just learning to say no.

I think you know with the consultation had on, you're generally saying yes to everything. I think I don't know if it's right, but I think with my founder had on, i'm saying yes to almost everything for the first three or six months. And then as we hopefully find hints of product market fit or hints of success with those early customers, it's starting to say no and no and no.

And I think it's scary as a founder. And again, i'm actively going through this with last year to say no, we're not going to discount that pricing. No, we're not going to discount these terms.

No, we're not going to build that for you. Um but or like that the proverbial like h will put IT on the the croft backlog that you know nobody ever looks at. Um and so saying those things to customers can be scary, but I think ultimately, good customers will respect you for them. They don't expect you to be their consultant long term. And so I think lot of cases people will push and you have to push back.

So I want to to wrap up here with A A question of my ideas, because I think one of the places where these were visionary, the funnel of entrepreneurship, the very top of the fun of people, haven't gone started yet. And the very bottom of the funnel, people like you like already had an exit and you're onto the next thing. There is way more people top the fund.

And for a lot of them, they just don't know what to work on. They have no idea what to work on the private in the epsom. And okay, like the hiring space seems right.

But what should I do? How do I even figure out, like, you know, how to break end of this space? I've talked to a few and hackers who ve done different things.

I've thought to john dirty. He runs a complete al credo. He's kind helping small businesses connect with service providers, whether their web designers or audio engineers.

Is that of a touch to my friend in thi? SHE runs a company called key values. Key values helps engineers find jobs at companies based on their values. So you could go to her website to be like, I want a company that no values, family time and pets and healthy eating and or show your companies that based on, like you, the salary range, but based on like these sort of intangible values.

And she's found a corniche there have talked to bentos, a maker pad who helps people learn how to, you know, get no code skills, and then has got a job board there for people hiring no coats. I thought to like legion who run side hustle stack, which is basically kind of a giant notion document that's like, here's a bound to different places for side hostiles. Here's how to find a job here, so much they pay. Here's a tips of getting a job there, something different, like cool ideas that are all sort of kind of working. How do you think about, you know, maybe how do think in any hacking might go about figuring out how to break into the jobs space if they want to create some of a modest boot draft business?

Yeah, I think there are a lot of different APP arches here. I generally like to I find it's very valuable to go talk to the people with the money. You know, the way that I would start in hiring, let's say that you want to to go down that path is I would talk to a lot of hiring managers.

I would talk a lot of a cruisers. I think all about this is fairly obvious. IT can be really hard to break in there.

And so one hack that I think works particularly well is just like spending instead of framing the first one to three months of your company as a customer development phase, why not just frame IT as a news letter? So when we were starting asking if we have the substances we were publishing toward kind of a couple of months ago, all of the story about like interviewing people um at at tesla, and I think we interviewed some people at strike, right? And so we're like going to big companies where you're hiring fast.

And there is like this huge growth curve in terms of hiring. We talked to Emily joy at at coin base is a co coin base. And so we talked to all of these different executives at at fast growing companies.

And reframed IT as an interview series, which I think can be a lot more powerful than like, hey, i'm a founder, I want to interview you about x and the advantage is like maybe i'll publish this, maybe I won't. I'll put on my sub stack or right up like a nice review. You can then share that with your network.

What that does is that exposes you and your early brand in your name to that person's entire network. Um and so you get some these early network effects were like when we started last here, we spoke to a hundred and ten hiring managers and recruiters, but we didn't know any of them. So instead of championing our existing network, we went down this path of the like hitting somebody up through a twitter dm and try a coin base.

And she's like, oh, I can't do IT but h why don't you talk to VP of people you know hd want to call with you in that call we're asking for who are two other people ears that you respect. And we're generally framing those conversations as what's the harder part of your job and you're going to get a wide range of answers. And I think it's it's correct to go through ninety five percent of those responses in the trash because they don't apply to you.

They're not interesting things to solve. You can solve them like they're technically impossible to solve right now with your skill set, whatever may be. But I think in those hundred and ten conversations, we had five or ten conversations that deeply resonated.

And IT was like, oh, that is something that I could go solved and I could get excited about that. And would you be an other user of that? And I think like that is a good way to kind of turn customer development into this like research phase, but also find hopefully early users.

I think that, that dance can be really hard. You don't want to promise some hey, I want to do a profile on you. I want to do an interview and then i'm going to private and sell you something.

It's like you're trying to learn from them, you're trying to explore. But I think that if you do this correctly, you can have that initial conversation, be a lot of learning about what they're struggling with as a hiring manager or recruiter and then get a lot of information. I I think the second thing that I would do, that nobody does, that I would totally do IT sort of like a pro move, is go talk to corporate development, especially as an any hacker.

I think I talked about this in the ama. The advice from like polygram and a lot of people just categorically is like if you're a founder, don't talk to corporate development until you ready to decide your company. I actually think that, that might be a mistake.

I think for us, we spoke to corporate development teams a lot in the early days of interviewed and talking to the corp doubt team at work day and linked in and indeed in some of these big talent forwards, corporate development is generally very plugged in to not only where the product team is going from a product in engineering perspective, but also from a investment perspective or an acquisition perspective, where that company is going and what they're biggest problems are. So an individual hiring manager, let's say, that indeed may not be able to give you an an amazing idea on which company to start, but the head of corp. Dev or somebody on the corp.

Dev team out indeed might. You know, if you can get them on the phone, they would probably tell you a lot of like the top ten things that indeed is just struggling to solve internally right now. And so whether you want to just go build a business that throws off in extra thousand dollars a month or you want to build a business that gets acquired for a million or ten million, one hundred million in a few years, like using those ideas to say there is a big company that has a lot of money that has smart people and they are unable to solve this problem. Like if you find an idea at resonance, it's within your skills set. I think it's a wonderful way to sort of like come up with that idea kind of in a space.

I love IT. When is the pro moves? Read the end of the episode. Thanks a time for comment on the show.

Have you back again at some point when last few little further along just to shoot the shit and talk about what you wrote to you. And the meantime, where can listeners go to find out more about what ruck you now to find? I think you're like a cool be to be business sales playbook as well. And whatever else you .

post on the net, feel free to go to asi dot com, L A S K I E dot com. You can follow me on twitter at Chris j boche C H R S J B A K K E twitter. And then if you want access, we do have like um we've sort of told our story about uh going from zero to two and a half million an area in air on our last company. I think I link to a couple times in the city hackers ama, so i'm free to just search me there or if you just want to send me an email to Chris at lakey dot com, i'm happy to send you a copy of IT to cool.

And I will put all this in the showers. Chris.

thanks for me. Thanks so much.