Zaheer Mohiuddin is the co-founder of Levels.fyi, a startup determined to empower professionals to make better career decisions. Zaheer speaks about compensation transparency, negotiating job offers, and his journey building a side hustle into a full-fledged, profitable business.
Levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zmohiuddin/
Zaheer Mohiuddin is the co-founder of Levels.fyi, a startup determined to empower professionals to make better career decisions. Zaheer speaks about compensation transparency, negotiating job offers, and his journey building a side hustle into a full-fledged, profitable business.
Levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zmohiuddin/
For us, I don't want to come at you too hot, but I was listening to one of our earlier episodes that you mentioned something about YouTube and their recommendation algorithms. And I'm sure you know, that YouTube is one of my favorite sort of platforms. I love watching stuff on there. You suggested that maybe the direct recommendation algorithms are so strong, they become too engaging and they sort of trap you within your own point of view. If, for example, you're watching like political stuff, you end up just hearing the same political stuff over and over again. You never get the other point of view. Which I can probably agree to, but you also suggested that maybe we need to revert back to a time where they weren't as strong. Do you still feel that way? I think almost all pieces of software are too engaging at this point. I mean, there was a time, so there was a time in college where I, I, my iPhone broke. So instead of getting a new iPhone, I actually got a flip phone from the nineties because I just found like I'm spending way too much time browsing on Safari. All these notifications, like I get, I get texts and they get sucked into this like smartphone vortex. And all of the things I was planning to do that day are gone. My attention span is shot. I think like broadly speaking, I mean, social media, YouTube, Reddit, like all of these things have become so compelling and so addictive that they have greatly hindered our ability to lead productive lives. So how was that experience working, living with the flip phone? Terrible. Yeah, I that's what I thought. No, I mean, that's what I discovered. Like you can't disengage. It's a very challenging, it's very challenging thing. You can't completely disengage from society. I mean, our society requires these modern technologies. So finding this balance between living in the modern world and benefiting from the new tech that's come out without being addicted to it. Which is really hard because there are really, really smart people who have spent billions of dollars trying to make you addicted to their products. I don't know. It's a very tough balance to strike most people. I know can't find it. Many times I can't find it either. Right. And I know I actually can agree with that, which is you basically have an entire workforce whose, whose salary, their promotions, their livelihood is dependent on you using their software or having your eyes on their particular application for a minute longer than you did last week. And when, when you have so many incentives tied to somebody like entire livelihood, I mean, I'm not going to win. I'm not going to win that battle. So. I'm only a man that gets to compensation, which, which I think is a great segue into what, what we're going to be talking about today welcome to what can you tell me about software? Our guests today is to hear Moki. Dean is a, here is the co-founder of a startup called level's dot FYI. Whose mission is to help people make better career decisions. Let's get into it. So it was it here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me on. So you're the founder of levels.fyi. Can you tell us what exactly you guys do? Yeah. Our mission at a high level is to help people make better career decisions. And the way that we tangibly do that is by collecting all types of data about companies. So salaries. Benefits information. Anything you'd like to know really about a company before joining and we also help so number one is arming them, arming people with data, but we also help people actually improve their situation on a company. And one of the ways we do that is we have a negotiation service. So we actually help people negotiate their offers now as well. So was that a negotiation service or like part of the original idea when you were building this or did that just come about because you had to find some sort of revenue model? Yeah, that's a good question. So it definitely was not part of the idea when we started in fact, actually the idea that when we started, it was very much like a side project. So. I was actually working I was in between jobs actually. I was at LinkedIn and then I was about to join Amazon. And in that transition me and my my now co-founder realized that a lot of people have the same questions around how to how to level themselves correctly when they're joining a new company. Sure what that means is especially at the bigger companies, you have like a leveling system. So like L three L four, you come in as a new grad, maybe as like a L three, then you get from a, to an L four and so on. Now every company calls it something different. So Microsoft, for example, has, I don't know, like 12 levels or something and they start up, I think, 55. And then you get promoted to 56. Google starts out three, you get promoted to L four. You know, LinkedIn starts at a software engineer. Then you get promoted to senior engineer. Point is basically the, all of these call it something different. And so if you're looking to switch companies and you want to make sure that you're kind of maintaining your status, that you reached that one company it's very hard, or at least it previously was very hard to compare which level is a correct level. Right. And traditionally, what would happen is a lot of people would actually get down leveled. So I wanted to make sure that, like I had gotten promoted once on LinkedIn. I wanted to make sure that when I was joining Amazon that I would not get. Like demoted, basically that would come in at the right second level. And so that, that's kind of what we started with is just comparing those levels of different companies. And that's actually why I decide it's called levels.fyi. Because we were just comparing levels. Eventually we realized that people actually want to collect, like know about salaries as well. And obviously that's a hot topic. We started collecting that and it kind of just grew organically from there. So, yeah, we, we didn't have like a business plan or anything formal when we started it. It was very much like a, Hey let's like, let's fix this one problem. And then it just kind of organically grew from there. Hmm. Does in class for already do exactly what you described? Partly but no. So one, they don't have anything, any lovely type of comparisons. So that's completely big gap that they don't have. Second thing is they have compensation data, but It's actually quite inaccurate. And most people, especially in the tech industry will tell you that it's inaccurate as well. And the reason for that, actually, one of the biggest reasons is they they don't take total compensation into account very well. And so especially at the tech companies, right. You'll know that a good chunk of your compensation is in the form of stocks or non-monetary compensation, right. Stocks or RSUs, or maybe for a startup in the form of like options or something. And so when you're comparing. Compensation, especially at the big tech companies. Most of your salaries will actually cap out at like one 51 60 per year. And so it's not really useful actually to compare salaries and almost everyone's salary is going to be around the same in that, you know, 100 to one 50, one 60, maybe one 80 to 200 range. The real kind of compensation is in the form of stocks. And that's where you get to, you know, 200, 300, 500 K packages. And that's kind of our specialty or the niche that we carved out is within tech, especially we realized that there was that. Information gap early on. And we were one of the first and only sites to actually factor in total compensation. Right. That's definitely in line with sort of my experience and like my family's experience and our friends experience. It seems that. It's always a non-monetary compensation that ends up being the most opaque and not a sort of clear it's clear as mud. And then, and then people could potentially get screwed over in that particular case. So that sounds like you're, you guys are really helping there. Is that, is that the case that non-monetary competition competition is the most the pig compared to a regular salary? Yeah, generally, it's the most opaque. And it's also the hardest to value in some cases. Because like stocks, for example, you have the value that you got at the time when you joined the company. And then over the time, over time, like your stock might've gone up or down. Right. And so after two years, what's the value of those stocks. Like when you're looking to switch companies, are you going to look at the. Current value, which might have increased, especially in the last five to 10 years. Something interesting is that like part of the reason why software salaries have gone up so high is because the stock market has gone so high in the last five to 10 years, right? The bull market, right? Literally every year, especially at the major tech companies, you can expect five to 10% of stock growth. And if that's the case, and let's say I had a 200 K stock package when I joined four years ago. Now that 200 K is now where it's, whatever, two 50 or two 70, 80 a K. And so when I'm looking to switch companies, I'm not going to take anything less than what I'm currently making. Right. Right. And therefore other companies have to now match that new increased value. And so it's kind of like like. Like a game like, Oh, like two years ago, now my stocks are worth more. And then the two, two years in the future, it's going to be worth even more. And so that way the price keeps on increasing. Right. And so that's, it's kind of interesting. It's, it's, it's opaque in the sense it's hard to value and it also leads to actually sometimes increases in, in value as well for, at least for the employees. So it seems like one of the major challenges that benefits the employer rather than the employee is asymmetric knowledge, right? So the employer knows how much everybody is getting paid. And honestly, these tech companies probably talk to each other. Whereas with employees, there's not some giant pool of data for them to have. Do you think that this is the cause of some of these kind of level issues? Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned that. And when we started this, we had no idea, like what was going on with companies and the information asymmetry, like when you like, okay. Yeah. They probably know more about. Salaries than us. But we don't utilize like what extent that actually happened. And so what we found out actually and what's interesting is most companies will actually have access to these salary surveys. And there are companies whose entire job is like literally to collect salaries from. Companies they'll anonymize that information aggregated, you know, generate statistics and then sell it back to those same companies. And so there's surveys like Radford option impact. There's a number of basically salary surveyors and that's, that's the way they w you can't see like how much a specific company is paying because that would very kind of antitrust laws and that's. The reason why they, they anonymize that information. But if those laws weren't there, like who knows what would happen. Right. And, but the re like all of these companies are essentially sharing their data with some third party entity, which is going to aggregate, you know, and summarize that data and then sell it back to those companies. And so they know exactly like, okay, 95th percentile of the market, this is how much companies are paying. You know, this is how much. Companies are pinging this region in the specific area for these levels. Literally when they give their data to this third party, it has everything right. Level, years of experience that candidate, the person. Sometimes if I have like what the skill is of that individual and so on. How much money do you think people are leaving on the table? Because of all that? That's a good question. I think I would answer that through the lens of our negotiation service. What we've seen is generally we're able to almost reliably negotiate between anywhere from like five to 15% of a package. Fairly reliably, almost on every offer. And that's kind of expected, right? Companies will They're not going to give you the higher, highest offer out the gate generally. Right. Unless you're like an all-star candidate. And so you can reliably negotiate around five to 10%, pretty easily without doing much. Right. But if you actually push hard we've seen. Huge increases 10, 20, 30, 40%. Right? Well, we had a package the other day that was a 400 K and we negotiated it to close to 500 K. what role was that? This was a designer actually. And it was at one of the major fan companies. And a hundred gain increases is nothing small, right? I mean, that's a huge, huge increase. And what's interesting is this kind of ties back to the last discussion where Level is what actually determines your pay range. Right? And so we found the biggest increases, typically correspond to, if we're able to negotiate a level and negotiating level is actually very difficult, but if you are able to negotiate the level, then you are able to negotiate a very high pay or a high pay increase, really. And. You know, a lot of it, a lot of the work that we do is, I mean, we're not doing magic. Like there's only so much we have to deal with like. All we're doing really is crafting the narrative of the individual of the person in a better light for the company. Right? Most people struggle with actually putting together their story, their resume, whatever you want to call it. They struggle with actually pitching themselves. In the best possible light and pitching themselves in a way that the employer would actually understand or desire. Right. Every company has their set of values or their set of like ideals. So for example, I know I, Amazon, they have their leadership principles, right. You know, customer obsession you know, disagree, but commit or whatever. Right. All of these different leadership principles. And so if you can craft. Your personal narrative in a way that fits the mold of the company as best as possible, then it's easier for whoever's making the hiring decision at a company to actually you're doing their work for them. Right. You're making it easy for them to promote you or get you to the next level, or, you know, make that hiring call that, Hey, this guy is going to be a good fit for my company. So here you just gave away your paint service for free. You know, it's funny. Like we were, we were thinking of, okay, like, should we put out like blog material, things like that. Right. Cause it's good. Like SEO is good advertising. And what we realized is like, Hey, there's already tons of blogs out there that like, say the same exact stuff that we're saying. So like, yeah, we can say everything. All of our strategies, we can put in a blog post out there for everyone to read, but it like, and there are actually blog posts out there that. Pretty much have all the it's not magic. Right? It's like all the strategies are the same for the most part. It's what people struggle with is execution and that's, that's kind of what people are paying for. So have you found that under leveling and being on the lower band end of compensation is particularly an issue for underrepresented groups in tech? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we see this we see this all the time with just like, I mean, it's obviously anecdotal because it's, whatever the view that we have of people purchasing our service. But based on what we've seen that certainly underrepresented groups typically are less confident when they're negotiating. A lot of times the question that we'll get is like, are you sure I should ask this much? Like, is it. Like that seems a bit high I'm like, I don't know if I even want to negotiate anymore. You know, it's a pretty good offer. Like you know, I'm okay with this offer. Like, I don't know like this is good enough for me. Right. A lot of that, right. They feel almost guilty. Negotiating. And so a lot of actually another good chunk of what we do is just coaching people to give them and in confidence that, Hey, no, like you absolutely shouldn't negotiate. This is the range you have. You're not falling at the top of that ranger in the middle over here, or maybe you're at the bottom end. Like you should ask for more, right. You're worth this much. If you find another, if you have another competing offer like you can actually see that. Like we, we can get both of them up as well. Right. And a lot of it's just like instilling confidence is another huge part of what we do. And it's not even negotiation. It's just general coaching. Right. And that's why we call our, our team like coaches right there. Whatever you want to call it, it's like, we're just not, we're not just negotiation coaches. It's actually almost like a career coach or like a in some ways there's a little bit of like life coaching newness that comes out in it as well. That's great. Awesome. So yeah. Who would you say are your major users? Like, do you know what the personas of the people who use your product are. Levels as a whole we're predominantly US-based right now. Predominantly tech industry and predominantly at the tech epicenters. So, you know, San Francisco, Seattle and New York et cetera, all of the major tech epicenters we've started. To expand beyond that quite a bit. So both internationally and even within the U S to different regions in different industries as well. But that said, I would say our, our strongest or our core demographic is those kind of the epicenter of those three, right. Tech tech epicenters. And US-based so that's, it's, it's really kind of focused within the tech market though. We are certainly trying to expand to broader than that. If you had to describe the average user of your negotiation Side of your business. Who is that person? Is it, is it a designer like you were just describing or maybe it's an engineer? Yeah. It's mostly engineers. Though we do see like, and part of this is also just statistics, right? There are more. Engineers don't designers. So for every 10 engineers is maybe one or two designers or something like that. Right. So we like, and it actually reflects in the companies as well. It's interesting though. We've got a ton of Amazon negotiations. Why not? Because people Amazon want to negotiate more it's because Amazon's hiring like a hundred thousand people a year. And so naturally we're going to get more customers in that direction. But yet the average persona is probably our found. I would say they're kind of mid mid-level in their careers. So maybe around like anywhere from two to 10 years of experience. And so they're not super senior, usually at the higher. Very senior candidates kind of know the routine on negotiations. They may be also switch companies much less. Whereas, you know, folks that are younger in their careers are typically tend to switch companies a bit more. And so yeah, we see that a lot and most predominantly engineers, I would say as well. So To shift gears a little bit. I don't know if you guys heard about Google's events than use stories on unionizing. So over the last couple of years, there have been some employees at Google who wanted to unionize for a variety of reasons. Part of it was to protest some of the projects that Google's working on with like border control and ice and the department of defense. And Google came back hard. They hired many of the employees associated with this and they hired a firm that specialized in union busting. So you know unionizing is, it seems like a very like a kind of a it's a very unusual idea for white collar jobs. It's much more common for blue collar. So how do you feel about people in software, people in tech unionizing? Do you think that benefits the benefits them, or what do you think. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I think whenever you Mo most of the power at between companies and employees is in the hands of the employer. And so whenever you. Start to bring more power in the hands of employees. I think that's generally a good move because that helps that helps equalize the kind of dynamics, right. And generally, at least to a better outcome for the employees. And so even things like salary transparency, what we're doing at levels, right. You can think of it that we're, we're reducing the discrepancy of power between employers and employees. And I think unionizing is one. Another Avenue for doing that as well. And so generally I do think it's, it can lead to good effects for employees. And I've seen, I've read a lot of the discussions about it, about as well. And a lot of people say that, Hey, like, what are you fighting about? You're already making a hundred, 200 K however many K a year. Like you're already being paid like amazing. Why do you need a union? Like, why are you crying about, you know like whatever proper pay or, or this or that. And I guess my response to that would be You know, just, just because you may be better off than others, if there's injustice or if there is something not right happening, you should always try to counter that. Right. There's no, like relative, like, yes, there may be. You know, bad is bad, regardless of how it's happening, the scale of it's happening. And, you know, people should always try to counteract that. Right? Why does it matter that like, yes, these are mostly privileged people that are still trying to fix their situation at the end of the day. If a company like Google is able to fix that dynamic or the improper things that are taking place, whether it's sexual harassment or racial profiling, things like that, it benefits the broader ecosystem because you know, that's one company amongst many and you know, once. You want to start that wave basically, of, of equality. Right. And so the more companies that fall in line into that, it really benefits everyone. Right. So, you know, it's, it's kind of interesting. I think it's. Like I've seen a lot of the reaction to the unionization has actually been in some ways, at least for people like that are not in the tech industry. Just from my anecdotal reading has been like kind of negative of like, okay, these are very privileged people. Like, why are they even unit nice thing. Right. And so I just, I guess I just wanted to put my thoughts around that because I felt like that was unfair or or not right. In some ways, right. Do you think it's going to happen? Think what, like do you like, there's going to be, there's going to be like a thing union for the employer side and employee side. You know, that's, that's interesting. Like, although I think it's, it's probably like a good it it's a good idea and it could lead to good outcomes. I'm a bit doubtful that it will actually transpire. And part of it is because again, for the same reason, like folks are fairly comfortable. You know, if you're getting paid like a lot of money, like most people are going to be like, Hey, like, yeah, there's probably some issues, but. I'm getting paid a lot. Like, you know, I don't want to give up my job. If you're working at one of these big tech companies, like you realize that, okay, how much the difference is between how much a big tech company is paying versus a lot of the other companies. Right? You realize that you're in a pretty comfortable position. And so I can see that most people are just going to be like, Hey, like, yeah, I know that's bad, but like, I'm not willing to risk my career for, for something like that. Right? Yeah. I think another thing which might be kind of interesting is what if the cause of these unions is not necessarily compensation, but rather like, what is the impact of the company you're working on in the world? Right. I mean, now we're starting to see these maybe negative effects on democracy and society from is like massive tech companies. And so if employees use their collective power to demand change to demand accountability. I think that would be kind of interesting. So what, what do you think about that? Yeah. I mean, and we already see some of that, right. Facebook, for example, like pays quite a lot. And part of the reason why, I mean, I would hypothesize why they pay a lot is because not everyone's willing to work there. I, a lot of people actually don't choose. And just personally, amongst my friends group, I actually know a number of people that choose not to work at Facebook, even though they could. Because of their policies and because of their stance on certain things. And you know, that's, that's a personal decision. That's a personal thing. And I think the like I'm sure for, for every company, right, there are a certain group of people that will not work for that company because of some stance that they took. And we've seen this at many companies, right? Amazon just last year or maybe a couple of months ago, there was a very senior level engineer, principal, or level engineer that actually resigned that because. She didn't actually like the policies of why Amazon, how Amazon was freeing their warehouse workers. Right. And so I would say that people are actually already voting with their feet of leaving or not working at some tech companies. Right. It's not common. I would say, I don't think it's hugely common. And I mean, There's so much, there's so many engineers on there. So many people, I don't know how big of a difference it makes. I'm sure it makes some sort of difference. But it's just, you know, there's, the world is massive. There's tons of people willing to stand in your shoes if you're not willing to stand in them. Right. I suspect though that the reason, you know, The one person who's willing to leave because they don't, because they are really concerned about the, about how Amazon treats its warehouse workers. There probably would be a lot more if they all agreed. If they all said like, okay, we're going to take collective action against this rather than one person having to just be the flag bearer, you know, being the martyr. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I don't know, like, like I'm not sure how that will play out, but like, I agree, like as, as a union or as a collective, you have much better bargaining power. Right. And so the question is, are people willing to participate in that? And frankly, like, I dunno, like RP, like my hunch or my intuition is that like, you know, people are fairly comfortable. Right. And it's the same reason why like, A lot of like social justice causes, right? There's, there's tons of injustice going on in the world, right? Not just that, like this, this is maybe like a minor or a relatively smaller type thing, but like there's tons of things going on around the world. You don't see. Everyone kind of taken arms and being like, Hey, that's wrong? Right? Oh, like, Hey, let's do something about this. You know? And imagine just like for every other injustice, there's only a small fraction of people that actually care. In the same way, there's only a small fraction of people that will actually care in this scenario or care enough to do something. Right. I think a lot of people care but fewer people care to actually do something. Right. And it takes like a major trigger or it takes a major. Event or something big to actually spark people into to move from that people that care to people that care and will take action camp. Right. And like for every civil rights issue in the last whatever years, like there's always been one major like trigger or what, something that's kind of sparked like a movement or sparked some actual, tangible, powerful change. Right. And so in the same way, I would say like, Like, I don't know what that spark is yet. Maybe it's happened, maybe it hasn't, but I would say something like that is needed to actually bring significant change. In a future episode, we can bring on a hiring manager from one of these companies and get the, get the other point of view. But I have been thinking about something that I've actually never said out loud. It's sort of a theory of mine, which is not even a theory, like a comparison that the way this, this dynamic works between software engineers and these humongous tech companies is not. This similar to how basketball players operate in the NBA. So in the case of the NBA, you have these basketball players who, who, who are effectively doing the majority of the work, right? And the majority of the revenue bringing is because of, because of these players they create this product to play this game. This game is then taken and then sold. The jerseys are sold. And so there's recurring revenue that occurs. Much longer after this product has been created. So very similar to like software engineers, you create the software, which is then taken it sold in both cases. The number one cost base is the talent. And it's the most important crux of the business without the talent you cannot operate. And it's interesting that the NBA, you do have a union, the NBA is unionized and. It is, I guess, white collar. I don't know if you consider that white color, but definitely white color. They're getting paid millions and millions. And the way that CBA works, the collective bargaining agreement, which they operate under is the players are entitled to 50% of total revenues that the league makes. So the revenues can change year over year, which we've seen because of during COVID. They lost a lot of money. So players are expecting lower salaries going and going, going forward. And so similarly, If we, I was just thinking if we had something similar, how would it, how would the, you need even work in Fang? I think it would operate somewhere like that. You would revenue rather than off of. Like the arbitrary numbers. Yeah, exactly. You, you, people wouldn't be like, Oh, this guy is getting paid 300 there for doing the same job as me. So maybe I'm being 200 right now. Maybe I should pay two 50 or two 75 just to get me closer. It'd be more like, well, in reality, I'm actually worth I'm really worth like 500. And we're both getting shortchanged. So that'd be, that'd be an interesting thing to look at and maybe levels at some point, we'll have enough data to even try and break down revenue models and things like that. And see, what's really bringing in the majority of the revenue, which, which I think would be super interesting. Yeah, no, that's super interesting. I didn't realize that they had, well, I think I've heard of like the union for basketball players, but I didn't, I didn't realize like the exact percentage that it was like 50% stuff, 50% of everything. So it's everything from the NBA, two K the money they make on two K game jerseys international. And now, now it's NBA top shot, which I don't know if you guys are familiar with that where they're selling the digital. So the players are also getting 50% of that income that the league is generating that super interesting. We can move on though. Yeah, for sure. So what other asymmetric knowledge is there beyond compensation or benefits companies rather than software engineers? That's a good question. I think like it's really on all, it's really on everything that between that relationship, right? Like From, from salaries to levels to to even if you think about HR, right. As a function, HR is a function typically is on the side of the employers. Right? A lot of people think that, Oh, like, let me go to talk to HR about this. There's some issue that happens at work. They go talk to HR. HR is hired and paid by the company and they are. You know, generally going to be on the side of the employer. Right. And we've seen this play out. Time and time again, right. Google or you name it. Right. And so I think just the relationship of that dynamic structurally, you're always going to have some sort of asymmetry between the employer and the employee, right? They're the ones that are paying the money. They're the ones in charge. The employee is coming with the need and their employers satisfying. That need now obviously the employer has a need as well to get some work done. But the question is like for every person again, right. There's, I'm sure there's 10 more people willing to stand in your shoes. That. And that can replace you. Right. And it's not always the case, but like generally I think employers always have that kind of power dynamic where they are in more of a position of power. And so really for anything I would say there is that kind of level of asymmetry and knowledge on, on every house level salaries, benefits, HR you name it. It seems like the problem of asymmetric knowledge would be an issue across many industries. You guys have any plans to expand beyond software? Yeah. Yeah. We we've certainly expanded actually. So we, we have expanded to like a little bit of like banking, finance. We've expanded to other sectors beyond just tech. It, it is it's a bit more of a slower process. I think we were able to carve out this niche and tech pretty quickly and. Like I think better just because we are from the tech industry. So I know for example, like if I need to get levels, the leveling structure, like Google, I can just call on my friends and be like, Hey, like what does Google's lovely structure look like? Right. And so we were able to bootstrap that very fast because of that. And so now I think the more that we're able to solidify our tech. Ecosystem of data. The more that it'll be easier also to branch into other areas because, you know, once we're known very well for one use case, I think people naturally from other industries or other areas will start to look at the site. And when they stumble on the site, they'll see the, Hey, Oh, there's like my industry is also listed on here. Let me check out the data and potentially contribute as well. So we actually have a bunch of industries and a bunch of different roles listed. Have we done a good job of actually capturing all that data? No. But I think as we grow hopefully the hope is that we actually do a better job there. Cool. So I was actually chatting with your co-founder earlier this week and yeah. The story of how you guys started the company is quite interesting. So you guys were not originally making a product for compensation. You were just doing pure leveling systems, right? Yeah. So can you kind of tell me the journey of how you guys. Found this sort of product market fit. And when you decided to pull the trigger on leaving Amazon and I mean, take us through the journey. Yeah. Yeah. So let's see. We started about like, around that transition time between when I was between LinkedIn and Amazon. And like I met her around that time too. And it's funny, like, the way that we met was because like our name, our names are actually very similar, right? So his name is a hair. My name is here. The letters look very, very similar. There's probably like four letters of difference or something. And the reason why we met is a mutual friend had introduced us because Hey, like your guys's names are very similar and you guys built like hacking on stuff and working on side projects, like you guys should talk. I'm like, all right, cool. Like, yeah, sure. So we met a couple of times and literally on maybe like the second or third time that we met, we were like, Hey, like, We identified this kind of problem just based on, you know, we're looking at different forums. I w was kind of going through the same problem myself. So heard was starting, just starting to look at the industry. And and you know, we stumbled upon this and decided to solve that, just that one thing. And again, very much a side project. We just did it on the weekends, launched it up, threw it up, started marketing it, advertising it. And it started picking up. You know, it just, it took a while, but it, it, it started, you know, naturally within a couple months we started seeing people come to the site every day. Right. And like our chart basically looks like very slow initially. And then you start to get that inflection point, right. Just like, I mean, that's like a typical, like. Everyone would love to see that kind of chart of like, like a, what do you call it? Exponential type growth. Right. But that's really what it looked like. It was very slow. Initially took a while to go isle and then it started really going up. Right. And when did you guys hit product market fit? I would say you know, it's, it's a hard question for me to answer. Like, I almost want to say that we hit it, like. Pretty early on, like people love the product and people started sharing the product right away. Right. I think about like, when I think of part of product market fit, one of the things I think about is like NPA score. Right. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's like net promoter score. And what the scale, it's basically a scale of like one through 10 or something. And it's how the question is, how willing are you to share this product with someone else? Right. And. I think we saw right away that people were willing to share the product with other people. So initially what would happen is we would be like answering questions on people. Like we had this level in comparison and we would answer the question. Someone would ask like, Hey, what is a level of 65 at Microsoft compared to a Facebook? And we'd go on there and be like, Hey. It is this level, go check out this website to see the comparison. So we did that for maybe a month or two. And then after that, what we noticed is other people were starting to link to the site and we're like, Oh great. It's like, we don't, we don't answer that question. It's like, Hey, did you answer that question? Is there, no, I didn't answer that. Like, that must have been someone else. And we were like, Oh cool. That's awesome. Like other people are picking it up. Right. And from that we realized, okay, like, there's, there's a real problem. People are actually sharing this as a real need to this. Right. And start over. People started sharing it right away, very organically. And so, you know, going back to product market fit, I would say that we kind of found at least for that segment of things pretty early on now we've organically kind of grown the product over time. Right. And then for each of those instances, I would say that. We found product market fit again for that product evolution fairly quickly, because it was a reaction to what users were asking us already. Right. In some ways we've taken a very lazy approach to product, vision, where people would request like, Oh, like you know, what if what are the salary bands at each of these companies? And we'd be like, Hey, that's a good question. Maybe we should start collecting salaries. Right. Or maybe what are the benefits at these companies? That's a great question. Let's start collecting benefits. Hey, like I have all this great data that you guys have shared, but like, how do I actually negotiate a higher package? That's a great question. Why don't we start a service to actually help you negotiate more money. Right. And so we've been very reactive to all of these, these different things. And that's really how we've. The growth of the company has really just been responding to customer feedback, keeping a kind of closer to the ground of what's going on. And I think I left Amazon after three years. So that means the product naturally was about three years old at that point. So we were around for quite a while before I actually left. And at that point we had actually, we already had some revenue. We were already profitable because partly because our costs are so low, it's just a website. And we had pretty good traction already. We had tens of thousands of users per month. And I left because I was like, Hey, like if we want to grow this more, if we want this to grow even bigger. I think naturally, like I was already spending a lot of time actually, like just fixing bugs or like responding to customer feedback, things like that. And I'm like, like my brain was getting too split. Like I, I didn't have any time at all. Just nights and weekends were going towards levels, the daytime moms at Amazon. So like, I was just kind of losing my mind and I was like, you know, I needed to just focus on, I need to focus on one. And that's. That's really kind of like, that was like the breaking point of me being like, okay, like I cannot keep working at Amazon and do justice to levels. Right. Like I CA I w if I kept working at Amazon, like one of them would have suffered. Whereas in the past it was like, Hey, like I could do both. Right. I wasn't like taking too much of a time commitment. And that, that was kind of the switch for me to be like, okay, I got, I got to leave. The one interesting thing that also happened was I was like sitting I was having lunch at Amazon one day. Like just in the, we had like this outdoor like patio area and I think I was having a late lunch, so I was just sitting alone and like I overheard this like conversation, like behind me someone was asking about like salaries and something, and then another person was like, Hey, you should check out levels. And I'm sitting there like my lunch. I'm like, Like, what, what did I just hear? Like, like, I'm like, Hey, I need a level. It's like, like that's me, that's my site. Like and like at that point I was just like, Oh, dang, like, I should be doing this like full time, like there's people that are referencing us and it kind of like, you know, it takes a while for it to hit like, like, Oh, like you are a thing, like, this is real, like, you know, like people are referencing it. Because we had grown so slowly and so like organically. It never felt like we never kind of jumped ship and we're like, Hey, we're starting a company. Like, let's go raise money or let's go like form our corporation, things like that. It wasn't like that. Right. It was just very much, Hey, let's do this. Let's iterate. Let's do like, it was very slow casual process. And so like, it took a while for me to kind of like internalize that we were actually like a company. We were actually like a thing now. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, I left it's been a bit more than a year now. It's been, it's been great so far. Has COVID helped you guys or hurt you guys. Initially it hurt. So I remember like last year, just around this time, actually, literally I think March 11th was the day, maybe March 13th, maybe. It's when we saw, like, that was when I think the lockdown started or something and literally traffic just like sh. Since then, right. And hiring slowed down, everything slowed down. That's when things were getting shuttered. And like we saw traffic just kind of like come down and then it slowly grew, grew, grew, and, you know, late it was, it wasn't until like several months later when we kind of were back to the same place and actually overtook all of that. So it hurts. Initially, but I'm, I'm actually pretty optimistic that this next year we're actually going to see a lot of growth. And part of it's, you know, companies are going to be playing catch up. Right. Now to now that the economy is going to start to open up, businesses are going to start blooming hopefully. Right. And we'll start to see the companies that expand more and more. And that comes with hiring obviously. So. Right. Has and I think, I think, I mean, I'm curious, I'm sure a lot of people were curious, how are you guys funding office? Do you guys have VC funding? We're we're fully bootstrapped. So you know, I think it helped that, like we started, it started on a side project and by the time we both left actually started left full-time. He joined levels. He started at levels full-time a couple months before I did. He was working on another startup before that. But by the time that we both started full-time we were already making some money. And so because of that, we were able to bootstrap it and, you know, our profits where our costs were lower than the money we were bringing in. And so we, we had some profits. Nice. You guys aren't eating ramen and beans though. Yeah. Yeah, not we're, we're fairly at this point now where we've gone to a good level of profitability. So nutritious food is pretty nutritious, nutritious level profitable. Okay. Okay. That should be the real, real growth rate indicator for startups is what type of, yeah. That's, that's really interesting. I think you know, having just like heard a lot of start search stories in the Valley and just listening to the podcasts and, and, and these, these sort of like huge periodicals, these journals will write about entrepreneurs. It always seems there comes a point where The entrepreneurs left with this decision where they need a lot of money in a really short amount of time. I don't know if you guys will ever get to this point where maybe you need like a million dollars the next day to pursue some opportunity or something, something if that came up, how would you find something like that? Something like that come up, I suppose. So. Right. If we want to grow at a rapid clip, I mean, that's why people raise money. Right. When they will want to grow very fast and they don't have the capital to, to actually do that. And and it's honestly like a question that we ask ourselves, like there are a lot of product features and things that we want to add and we don't have the time. And we don't have the hands for it right now. And so. You know, do we want to raise money? That's that's a good question. I think we ask ourselves all the time really. And you know, so far we've been able to grow just based on our profits alone. But there probably will come a point where we're going to be like, Hey, like, you know, we, we needed to go faster. Or we need, we need more help. And Not at that point, we would probably go about raising money. And I think a lot of people like to raise money just because like, Hey, like we raise around. Right. It's a nice like status symbol. It's a nice, like it almost gives you confirmation that, Hey, like when I'm working on is, is valuable. Right. And like, I mean, I think we realized early on that and partly because of the way that we started very organic and all of that, that we, like, we didn't want to just. Chase VC funding just for the sake of it. Right. And because of the way that we started, it never was a question that like, like it wasn't like we set out to start necessarily a company initially. Right. And so, because of that, that question was, it was, it was delayed. It never came up as like a forceful, Hey, like, should we raise money yet or not? It was kind of like, Hey, we're just building a product. And eventually we had to incorporate and things just to naturally. Protect our legal liability, but there was never this one point where we were like, Hey, like, yes, we, we have to raise money or things like that. And so it's a good question. I don't know when or if we will, but it's certainly something we think of cool. So just to kind of wrap things up here the, the podcast is called Joaquin telling about software. So let's get a little tacky now. What is your tech stack? The tech stack? You'd be surprised. We're actually a static site still. Oh, wow. Wow. So no react. You know, we're using jQuery, we're using bootstrap Twitter bootstrap or it used to be Twitter. We don't have any fancy tools. We just literally use JS JavaScript, HTML, CSS, raw JavaScript, HTML, CSS. JQuery you know, it's, people will say, Oh, it's like an old, like you're not using react. You're not using whatever the hot new thing is. But I mean, like, I, I dunno, react. My art is I heard that or know, react really well at the time. And, you know, we, we built it using regular tools and nice. It worked just fine and solve customers issues. So like, why, why I need, why throw like a react like beast at it. If we can get by fine with simpler tools, right. Do you guys have any plans, any features that would require a sort of like the Marine stock or anything more complicated? Yeah. Yeah. So we're, we are starting to move towards that now. Initially we didn't even have like an API and things. So now we're actually building like a server API. And at some point you will hit that level where you have to move towards those things. Even prior to this, we did have like some Lambda functions that would. Process some of our data. But we were still static for the most part. Right. But now we are starting to move. Like we didn't have a server for whatever two, three years. And now we're starting to put kind of those things in place. But I would say for most people, I think like you don't need fancy technology to get started, right. At the end of the day, your customers don't care. And I think people hear that all the time, but it doesn't really, it doesn't really hit. Them hard. And like, you know, they'll, they'll start to like create software or things with, or the fanciest nude pool is, but really you don't need that. Right. That's great advice. I can definitely tell you, like, from the software engineer's perspective there is sort of like, you know, like we're craftsman, you know there's like some purity in that, but at the end of the day you're selling a product it's like commerce, not art. So just to make something great, you know? Yeah, exactly. All right. So just to our final question that we love to wrap things up with is what do you think is the best piece of software ever built either of all time or in a recent memory? That's interesting. I was thinking about this and at least in recent memory It might be an, I dunno if it's a interesting answer, but I think Excel, Microsoft Excel. And the reason why I say that is because you'd be surprised how much of the world runs on Excel. How much people rely on it for as a database, as a, as you know, as for creating applications based applications with VBA script and things. And I don't, I don't think I fully grasp this until until recently. So my wife actually works in as like as an energy engineer worked for like an East coast company that are not techie at all. But they do like insane Excel programming. Like th they have formulas that are like, like a paragraph long. And like some of the code that they do in Excel. Insane. And like, you know, people talk about, Oh, like we have to teach people programming and things like that. Everyone should know how to code. People have been coding in Excel for a long time and they don't even realize that they're coding. Formulas is coding, right. If you can have a formula with, if this, that whatever, right. And you can have in Excel, right. There's tons of powerful features to that. People use that. And they don't even realize that they're coding, like VBA scripts and stuff. Right. And so I think Excel is one of those things that I don't think he gets enough credit for what it's doing. Like, like it's, it's place in the world of like how much people rely on it and how much people have adopted their thinking models and how much people have adapted their skills to actually code within it. And they don't even actually realize that they're coding half the time. They just think they're putting formulas together. And so it's, it's something that's super, super intuitive for people to do. Like it's intuitive for the most simple use case. And it's. Intuitive for super complex use cases. Right. Where I've seen, like, literally, like some of the spreadsheets I look at, like I've seen not, my wife's workplace is like insane. Like, you know, like 200, like, like character, 300 character, like formulas and like functions and things like that. And like, she doesn't know how to program. Program in the technical sense of the term. Right. But she's able to put together these like insane formulas and other people at our company that have never taken a programming class are as well. Right. And so, yeah, I think I would say XL just because of of the sheer, like power and the flexibility and versatility that it has. Yeah. You know, this is a super easy and it's free time because being for us have talked about that pretty, pretty W we've talked it through and my whole take on this is I'm totally with you on I'm a huge fan of Excel. My background is like finance accounting, and so XL ends up being like our bread and butter for basically every, every aspect of the job. And then, and you're right. I mean I th I think I can, we can refer to it as like a no code tool. I know you were saying like, you are coding on it, but maybe it falls into that category of like no code. It's the best use case for no code. It's the best evidence that no code works. It's been around for 20 years. It's, it's changed. Business's entire, entire. SAS companies that are being built right now are trying to disrupt one particular use case of Excel, not even like Excel, but just the one thing that it's used for, if you look at like the average small sized businesses in America, their entire financial like accounting infrastructure is built on Excel in most cases. So the fact that. Yeah, exactly what you were saying, which is, you know, it can be, it can be used at this energy engineering. It can be used at this sort of this really, really more sophisticated sort of business. And it can be used at a, at a gas station business. It, it, it really tells you like the power of it. I think. Anyway, I think it's, I think that's a great answer and probably, yeah, I think you're going to be the song's favorite guests. Just because you said Excel. No, no. For, for other reasons, cause one day I might need his his website. Yeah. Yeah. When you graduate, when you graduate, he's going to look up levels of FYI to see how much podcast hosts make. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's a new category for that. We're going to have warmer the fire information by providing you with yeah. Ask your seats anyway. As I hear, it's been wonderful. I, I, I learned a lot. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. Really, really, it was great. Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening guys. That's our episode for this week. Make sure you leave a comment. Tell your friends about us. Review us on Apple podcast, subscribe on Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts and we'll see you for another episode.