Hiring Strategies in Emerging Tech: Culture, Compensation, and the AI Generation ft. Invenio Talent Partners

THE EPISODE:   
In this episode, host Ashley Smith sits down with Mathew Low and Dave Edmonds from Invenio Talent Partners for a comprehensive exploration of the hiring landscape in the dynamic field of emerging technologies. While touching upon specific sectors like Web3, blockchain, and AI, the conversation offers a broad perspective on the unique challenges and opportunities in these rapidly changing arenas. Learn about the (sometimes overlooked) importance of evaluating and prioritizing company culture in the recruitment process and how this lens can help shape the success of technical teams, and in turn, entire businesses. Our experts provide valuable insights for startups and early-stage companies, focusing on strategies to effectively build and scale their workforce. The episode further delves into the evolving intersection of AI and technical roles, ways for candidates to stand out in competitive tech markets, and the significance of personal initiative and skill showcasing in job applications. Also discussed are compensation trends, the role of equity in tech startups, and innovative recruitment methods that are shaping the future of hiring in the tech world. Tune in for an enlightening discussion that offers a holistic view of talent acquisition in the fast-evolving landscape of emerging technologies.

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Transcript

*NOTE: Powered by AI (so may not be 100% accurate).

Ashley Smith (00:00)

If you're a founder, entrepreneur or business leader with a special interest in emerging technologies, you are not gonna want to miss this episode. In the conversation you're about to listen to, I speak with Mat Low, founder of Invenio Talent Partners, and Dave Edmunds, one of his top technical recruiters.

We get into interesting corners of the current recruitment strategy and employment landscape of businesses involved in Web3, AI and other frontier technologies. And of course, if you're someone looking at your own career path,

seeking to elevate your own technical skills or job opportunities,

You'll want to listen in for valuable tips and for insights into the thinking of some of the people you're hoping to work with.

Now the reason for this little intro is listening back, I couldn't help but reflect that this is also a really great episode for parents of young people who might be entering the job market, especially those who take a special interest in technology.

The way we go about sourcing opportunities and building our resumes has certainly changed over the last decade. So we sort of get into the nitty gritty and the avenues in which companies and talent are finding one another today in emerging tech, which are definitely creative and resourceful.

However, I also couldn't help but stop and wonder if young women and girls are making sure that they're inserting themselves in the right places or ensuring that they're finding ways to build strong professional networks, finding communities where they can not only learn, but also build their own professional profiles, particularly in emerging tech. As an example, later on in the episode, the guests touch on how they often look to online platforms such as Reddit, Discord, and

Twitter. However, I also couldn't help but stop and wonder if young women and girls are making sure that they're inserting themselves in the right places or ensuring that they're finding ways to build strong professional networks, finding communities where they can not only learn, but also build their own professional profiles, particularly in emerging tech. As an example, later on in the episode, the guests touch on how they often look to online platforms such as Reddit, Discord, and Twitter.

And I stopped to ask myself whether or not that's a place where young women and girls interested in technology are finding themselves. I actually don't really know the answer. And admittedly, as an elder millennial, it may not be my place to make that judgment or assumption or generalization, but I do think that it's safe to assume that if we did a demographics poll of those platforms that we would find the majority of users are male.

Now this is certainly not a criticism of recruiters. I think it's innovative and super interesting that they're spending time on platforms like this. I think my point is more to plant a seed, especially for parents or mentors of young women to think about are there gaps in online communities? Are there

alternative platforms that can be used or existing platforms that can be more effectively used

to help young women be more visible in this emerging job

landscape. to help young women be more visible in this emerging job landscape.

Anyhow, that's just food for thought. Mat and Dave get into a bunch of interesting stuff,

including what to think about as you hire your initial teams and further along as you scale.

Some of the things I was curious about that we get into is like where to find top talent in tech.

What are folks who are looking for jobs thinking about as they enter spaces where there might be less job security or at least more volatility?

What about company equity?

are emerging tech organizations thinking about culture and what are job seekers and employers thinking about when it comes to AI? That's a big one.

anyhow, we get into all this and more. I really hope you enjoyed this episode of From the Blockchain.

Please make sure to subscribe wherever you're tuning in,

leave a review and find us on our social channels, which now include Facebook and Instagram

Ashley Smith (03:51)

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to From the Blockchain. I am your host, Ashley Smith. I'm very excited to be here with all of you today with two special guests. We're going to be talking a bit about the work environment and landscape and talent seeking landscape when thinking about emerging technologies, including Web3. So what are companies doing? What are they looking for? What sort of challenges, unique challenges are they having? And how are they finding help?

Today we are speaking with Mat Low and Dave Edmunds from Invenio Talent Partners. They are doing some unique stuff in talent recruitment. And I'm really excited to dive deep into their expertise, their longstanding experience prior to some of this emerging tech, and what they're really seeing in the current landscape. So I'm gonna start with saying hello to Mat. Mat, why don't you introduce yourself, who you are and what you do at the company?

Mathew Low (05:51)

Yeah, awesome. Thanks for the little intro there. a little bit of context, Dave and I work together at Invenio. I've actually founded the company a few years ago with my partner and it all came about I guess, a decade of prior of trying to I shouldn't say try.

actually recruiting and hiring for a number of different companies, mostly tech, and to your point, a lot of emerging So did it a lot of different ways, but when you deal with emerging techs, that usually means you're a little bit more bleeding edge. The company oftentimes is a little bit earlier, more and

Ashley Smith (06:26)

Mm-hmm.

Dave Edmunds (06:40)

Thanks for watching!

Mathew Low (06:47)

Because of that, it's a little bit more unique. People know less about what they're hiring. There's less people that you can hire. And so being able to be more flexible

in your model and how you approach things, how you partner is really important. And that was really the impetus for us creating and founding Invenio.

The idea there being rather than some of the more traditional contingent type of models where you basically get paid to put a bum in a seat and sometimes the alignment of, let's say, interest is not We could come in on a model where...

Ashley Smith (07:27)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (07:39)

we would be your partners. You would pay us for our time and effort rather than just hiring someone specific. And that way we could talk more strategic things like how you can hire for some of these emerging talents, what the market looks like for that, how you need to think about the process of doing that. A lot of questions that founders, business owners, leaders have answers for.

some of the questions, but not always all of the questions. And, oftentimes don't have the experience of doing it at the next stage. And what I mean by that, you know, if hiring for 10 people, um, sorry, I should say for hiring for a 10 person company, it's not the same as a hundred person company or 500 or a And so, yeah, you know, that's how it came about. So we could start to.

Ashley Smith (08:32)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (08:38)

walk people through those different processes, give them better ideas and partner more.

Ashley Smith (08:43)

Cool. So before we move over to say hi to Dave, maybe just to clarify, Invenio works with a range of scale, like different sized companies, and with a focus on this emerging tech Like, can you just give me an idea of who your typical client, what they look like?

Mathew Low (09:00)

Yeah, absolutely. So typical client is for the most part earlier stage. So startup, you might have funding like a seed, series A, B, C type of thing and growing. So they're at that portion of their life cycle where they're scaling and usually getting into next Definitely we have some larger, more mature companies that we work with as well, like...

Ashley Smith (09:12)

Mathew Low (09:29)

Majority of our companies are at that stage. Industry, domain-wise, all over the place. Everything from like, autonomous driving to AI of many different kinds, to of course, Web3. We've been doing a lot of that over the years. Something we're really excited about personally, of course. To just traditional software, you know, SaaS type of companies, but you name it, we've done a little bit of it.

Ashley Smith (09:58)

Cool, cool. Dave, Dave Edmunds, welcome to the show as well. Dave, you're a technical recruiter with background in hiring engineering and go-to-market staff for some of the fastest growing companies in Web3 and tech. I know you've had a range of experience with startup style companies to some pretty big ones as well. Dave, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in Invenio and what you're thinking about in this landscape.

Dave Edmunds (10:25)

Totally. Well, thanks for the intro. Nice to be on here, Ashley. My story, very similar to Mat's, started off in the Vancouver market in a boutique agency servicing more of the Vancouver market, startups here and established companies, mainly on the tech side, like you said, go to market and product. During COVID, made a pivot over to the San Francisco

Ashley Smith (10:29)

Mm-hmm.

Dave Edmunds (10:43)

market where I was we said, rapid growing companies like Startup, pardon me, rapidly growing companies like TikTok and other startups in the Bay and across the US. So that's where I started getting to a deeper.

line into call it more enterprise web3. So yeah, my background comes from a rapid scale, highly technical roles, and like Mat said, kind of a similar background of if it is highly technical and those people are hard to find or maybe don't even exist yet, that's the stuff that I would love to work on and I have been working And yeah, it's within Invenio joined the team earlier this year and yeah, we're just making a big concerted push into even more frontier tech, you know,

really, like I like to say, if it is just getting started, we like to hire for So yeah, that's my quick spiel there.

Ashley Smith (11:26)

Mm-hmm.

Cool. So I guess before we dive a little deeper into some of the unique challenges and some of the anecdotes that maybe you can help bring some color to this experience for our audience, what I'm wondering is, I'm sure there's folks listening and they are probably wondering just about the landscape in general. So what I mean by that is.

Um, you know, the last year and a half, there's been a lot of ups and downs, not only in web three blockchain crypto technology, but of course, just in the tech sector in Um, you know, we know that companies have tightened their purse strings to some extent, perhaps that might be changing. Um, you know, at the moment, maybe you can speak to that. I'm not sure that's just kind of my Um, but if someone's listening here and thinking about what you do.

They're probably wondering, are people spending money on hiring and are they spending money on having people help them hire for these particular roles? So what are you seeing in the landscape right now generally revolving emerging tech and perhaps with blockchain and Web3 tech in particular?

Mathew Low (12:33)

Yeah, a good question. We could probably spend a lot of time diving into that one, to be honest. Like you said, it's been a bit of a tough year, a couple of years for sure, specifically in Web3, but in tech in general. The good news is, at least how we're seeing it through our lens in the market, it seems to be picking up.

Ashley Smith (12:41)

Yeah.

Mathew Low (13:03)

I, you optimistically, I'm looking into earlier half of next year as when we'll start to see some the actual companies in the market start to turn around and start to build There's all sorts of things that are factors in that, but just what we're seeing and feeling so far in the market, that seems...

about right. As the kind of, I guess, the, the fuel of the market as it is today, it's for sure. You know, the fact of the matter is that there's a big crunch on these companies to spend Not necessarily conservatively.

Ashley Smith (13:48)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (14:00)

But if you pressure on you to spend in a certain kind of way, then you're going to want to be really practical about it, really conscious about where you're spending. So are people spending money to hire and with companies like us to help them hire? Yes. But rather than say, like, everyone's hiring and everyone's trying to find something, it's you know, there's a.

Dave Edmunds (14:03)

you

Ashley Smith (14:14)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (14:30)

select group in the like some small section

that is hiring a lot and hiring for more difficult roles, more complex searches, and they're spending more money in kind of a more concentrated manner than a broader So yeah, a little different.

Ashley Smith (14:49)

Mm-hmm. Are you able to add some clarity as to like what those types of roles are that people are actively looking at right now?

Mathew Low (14:57)

Well, it's a good time to be in AI. It's like a hot button thing, but the more senior roles, the more technical roles, the more niche roles, whether that's like domain or industry expertise, those are still on hot The search for good people has not Amount of good people proportionately.

Ashley Smith (15:00)

Right? Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mathew Low (15:26)

hasn't really changed. Like there's a subsection of what people might consider like the best of the best. And those people are always gonna be highly sought after.

Ashley Smith (15:38)

It does seem like this very strategic approach to hiring, as you mentioned, matters more right now. It probably matters more than people like to recognize just generally, but if you're, as you mentioned, being thoughtful about your spending, you're probably also being thoughtful about onboarding, training, trying to avoid much in way of turnover, building culture.

you know, in a new organization, in a startup, I'd like to you know, how important is culture when For example, in these technical roles, is this something that business leaders are thinking about Dave, maybe I'll ask you.

Dave Edmunds (16:25)

Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's something that they were in startups. I mean, culture, your early hires, like you said, these strategic points early in a company's life cycle are really key. Culture does really play itself in when you're building that team off the ground. Really, you're putting a lot of.

autonomy, a lot of ownership onto the individuals you're going to be bringing on board. As Mat mentioned before, you're zero to five, you're five to 10. Culture is key because these are the people who are building the foundations of the product you're bringing to So really finding not so much, I mean, I shouldn't say not so much, but you know, the skills are important to actually get the job done, but these are the people that you're creating an entity with creating a product with. So that's where that culture piece comes in. You know, you often have the same vision, belief system.

Temperament even to a degree you guys are going to be spending and gals mission Make that general point. Um Everyone's gonna be building this product together So that's where we do find culture is a big thing that shows up early and then it continues to grow itself out and kind Of evolves as the company grows itself out into a different life cycle

Ashley Smith (17:26)

I have sort of an ignorant follow-up question to that. I wonder a little bit about sort of the stereotypical tech person. Let's even say tech bro, like someone who really understands and who's an that sort of thing. Yeah, I think we all have an idea of what that person looks like. And I don't necessarily...

associate that person and I'm sorry tech bros, this is not I'm not meaning to be offensive, but it's not something I necessarily associate with like team culture and you know, that sort of very inclusive personality and you know, EQ is that something that you guys think about or talk about EQ has just been in the narrative so much I think especially when thinking about senior leadership as an example. But I'm wondering whether or not it's in the narrative.

comes to important roles like and of course building and developing such important products likely for the future of all of our daily lives.

Dave Edmunds (18:30)

Mat, do you want to take this one or me?

Mathew Low (18:33)

Sure. It's pretty important. It's among my opinion, some of the most important factors that you can have. Outside of the baseline of whether someone can do a job, is whether you want to work with them and do the job with them. Whether or not companies recognize that, whether or not leaders and hiring managers are prioritizing it, is a different question.

Ashley Smith (18:50)

Yeah.

Mathew Low (19:02)

But it's one that we put forward a lot to Sometimes if that's not something that's brought up, it's something that we will flag to them and be is this important to you? Because it should be. What does that look like? But just a really pragmatic nature of the hiring problem, sometimes it doesn't matter because you're under such-

Ashley Smith (19:05)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (19:29)

pressure, you're under the gun and it's like, look, we just need to deliver. Like it has to be done and we'll suck it up and we'll have not as good culture or not as good people who fit our culture in order to get it done. Whether or not that's a long-term play, you know, is, is a whole nother story. Uh, but it, it can sometimes, you know, just be what it Uh, but that being said, you know,

Ashley Smith (19:34)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mathew Low (19:59)

we try to push through like, look, you should think about this because there's a lot of extra baggage that comes with hiring someone who may not be a good fit in the long term.

Dave Edmunds (20:03)

Thanks for watching!

Ashley Smith (20:08)

Right. And ultimately, they'll end up coming back to you, looking for your assistance once again, if it doesn't work out. I do wonder though, that brings up such a great point. I'd love to know generally

Dave Edmunds (20:08)

a lot of effects.

Thanks for watching!

Mathew Low (20:15)

the

Ashley Smith (20:20)

speaking, like, what is the sort of life cycle of the hiring process generally when you're looking at these more technical roles, when companies are looking to move really fast? And I can appreciate that because I think that just for our audience you know, at a point in time,

2022, for example, if folks had their stuff together in a matter of two months and ready to go, that may have made a huge difference in their funding and their ability to go to market where if it took maybe four or five months, that it may have simply been too late for them to have the same sort of success. So it is a conundrum. So I'd love to know generally when folks are looking for these more technical roles, what kind of timeframe are they typically expecting?

Dave Edmunds (21:04)

Thanks for watching!

Mathew Low (21:08)

the short answer is everyone wants it like yesterday. There's, there's never been a time where they're like, Hey Mat, can you help us hire someone for like six months from now? It's like, no. Um, usually what we actually have to tell them is like, you've probably heard some variation of this. It's like, uh, there's the triangle of time, cost and quality pick two, right? Like, if you want it really fast, it's either.

Ashley Smith (21:11)

Yeah.

Dave Edmunds (21:12)

That's right.

That's true.

Ashley Smith (21:17)

Hehehehehe

Mathew Low (21:35)

at the sacrifice of it being really expensive or maybe the person not necessarily being as skilled, let's say, or like whatever portion of that you wanna optimize for. And the reality again of it is that there's only so much you can do, right? Companies always want people to be hired as soon as but the market may just be like, yeah, that's not gonna happen. So, a realistic timeline is probably like,

Ashley Smith (22:01)

Right.

Mathew Low (22:05)

Maybe like a month and a something like that.

Ashley Smith (22:07)

All right, that's fair. That's fair. I do wanna get into a bit about talent pool, but first, maybe before we jump into that, I would like to ask you what advice you might give to startups or early stage companies that are in the web three space as an example. What advice would you give them regarding building and scaling their technical teams effectively?

Dave Edmunds (22:32)

Want me to jump on that one, Mat? Yeah. Well, I don't know. a lot of different things you can kind of jump off with. I think it really depends on where that company is in their life cycle as well. For example, they have a lot of funding, they've got a MVP that they need to get to market and actually like turn this into a viable product that they can start getting funding customers I mean, that is gonna be a little bit of a different search and different maybe...

Mathew Low (22:33)

Yeah, please.

Ashley Smith (22:33)

Go for it, Dave.

Dave Edmunds (22:58)

the bar to what the talent they're looking for is going to be a little bit different than if they already have a product to market and they're just trying to grow their teams. So, you know, you do have situations where the market has matured. You have individuals out there that may have already done similar projects. I'll use the example of web3 exchanges. There's been a million built, there's probably a million people. Yeah. Hyperbole numbers here. But there's a lot of people here who've now built exchanges that you can maybe move that over to a similar project. However...

you know, you were in the situations where maybe you're building something, as we mentioned, that hasn't been built before. Well, then you're going to have to look at maybe more of an MVP model, the minimum viable product. Does this person have the skills and the ambition to build a thing that's not been built yet? So that's my little quick answer, but I'm going to hand it back to Mat. But I think it really does depend on where that company is in the product life cycle.

Mathew Low (23:45)

Yeah, definitely. a question of why usually first is like, okay, you want to hire this, but why are you hiring good for it? And ultimately what I normally put back to the companies we work with

the answer to why is usually, they need some kind of business impact, and what is the business impact, right? And you start from If they have something to Dave's point, really well defined, you have a really good idea of what this looks like, then the process to get towards it is relatively You know what it looks like, you just kind of replicate it. If on the other hand, you have no idea what it looks you know,

the process of where you start hiring can be a lot more vague and what you're hiring for can be a lot less defined or less clearly defined. And so you need to start out by asking the questions of, okay, where do we need to start? Do we need to start out like what even is it that we need to build? And like, we need to find the people who can ask those questions and get those answers. Is it?

Ashley Smith (24:55)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (25:05)

person who knows what we're building but needs to kind of like define what that will look like, shape it out. There's a lot of different things but ultimately it's like what do you need to get done? What is the actual impact you want out of this? And then you kind of define from there what that looks like and start to build what kind

of hiring process you need to support that because it'll look very different depending on what that is.

Ashley Smith (25:31)

Mm-hmm. So I wonder, sorry, wonder if folks are listening and they're thinking about hiring and they're in the position where, you know, they'd like to seek out support through an agency such as yours. You know, I wonder how frequent do companies come to you well prepared? Like, I guess my question is if they're feeling underprepared, is that normal?

Dave Edmunds (25:32)

reverse engineer out of the business demands.

Mathew Low (25:47)

Mm-hmm.

Thanks for watching.

Ashley Smith (26:00)

And just to build on what you just do you help walk them through some of these things if they're not quite there And perhaps maybe they feel like they need that guidance to move through things quickly rather than do some of the guesswork, what might feel like guesswork if they're... I just think about entrepreneurs and sometimes if they haven't done this sort of thing in the past, maybe is where they're coming from. Any context, any thoughts on that?

Mathew Low (26:20)

Hehehe

100%. A lot of the reasons why we built Invedio is because the emerging tech, the early stage companies that we love to work with, they don't have all the answers to those questions. Sometimes they don't even know to ask those questions. And so in the way we work right now, where we can partner in and embed ourselves, we really have an opportunity to take

Ashley Smith (26:43)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (26:56)

a seat at the table and ask these We have the benefit of having hired for hundreds, if not thousands of companies and roles. And we've seen a lot of the goofy stuff, the really strange things that people have done. And we can give you some insight into how maybe you could do it better, what kind of questions you should be asking and the way we do it now. Like that's...

Ashley Smith (26:59)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (27:26)

what you would hire us for. You would bring us on to figure out your talent recruitment. And it doesn't matter if you don't know the questions, you have all of the answers, you're somewhere in between. We can sit there and help you figure it out, help you get through to the right type of process. And hopefully, the idea is we leave you enough with kind of the process we develop, the ideas, the strategies, the tactics that

eventually you scale beyond needing us.

And we go to help on the next person who maybe hasn't kind of nailed all of that. Or just bring us back whenever you need help. We're happy to do that too.

Ashley Smith (28:03)

I do, I have a sort of almost selfish question and it's purely curiosity, but like, I have to wonder, in particular with the startup type of company that you're working with, the founders and or the CEOs, typically speaking, how often are they coming with a tech background? And the reason I'm asking is, as an example, I've spent a lot of time

you know, looking at blockchain web three technology over the last few years. I'm by no means a technologist. I don't understand how it all works. I just know that there's potential for things to work. I also have a background in an industry and sector where I'm like, I have some ideas, right? And I'm just um, how often you're finding people like me with ideas who were able to go and get funding, but then like this technical side of like how to really build what it is you're wanting to Like,

Do a lot of people look like me or are they more the tech people coming forward that you're seeing that are having success?

Mathew Low (29:08)

So answer this in a couple

Ashley Smith (29:12)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (29:15)

In particular to Web3, well, I should say in particular to emerging tech, you are more the exception than the general person. And because it's emerging tech, there's bias there. Outside of emerging tech, I think it's a lot more balanced. I think it's closer to 50-50. And in my personal

Whether or not you are a technical person, as a founder or a leader or whatever, generally, if I'm gonna be honest, the more important piece is being able to drive the business. Whether that is getting funding or that is finding clients or that's figuring out how to build a product or service or whatever that is, that side of the

is the business in my opinion. Ultimately, you know, tech aside, you can figure out a lot of things on how to have it work. Like it doesn't even necessarily need to be a tech solution all the time. But if you don't have a business model, a business plan, a way to build a business,

Dave Edmunds (30:29)

Thanks for watching!

Mathew Low (30:45)

you can't just do tech for tech, is what I'm trying to say. That being said, especially in emerging tech, but in general, someone still has to build it at the end of the day. So it really is a partnership that requires both sides of the equation. more niche side of it usually is the tech side in emerging tech. So that's why there's a big bias towards, OK, there's a lot of technical founders in emerging tech because like,

Ashley Smith (30:50)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (31:14)

who else would be pushing the emerging tech, as the tech people generally speaking. So, you know, that is what it is, but there's in the wider scheme of the if I'm gonna be honest, like majority of owners are not necessarily technical. It's like people who have a business idea and they wanna build the business, doesn't necessarily mean that you know how to

Ashley Smith (31:19)

Mathew Low (31:45)

I don't know, manufacture a car or you know, take out the garbage yourself or whatever, Like it's, it's not that important if you have the drive and the ability to build team and product and service around it.

Ashley Smith (32:02)

I guess it's a lot about connecting the dots. And that's obviously a big part of your role, what you do. So in that vein, I would love to know a little bit about the talent pool. Now, you guys, as you mentioned, are based here in Vancouver, but I'm sure you do work abroad and in different You know, through the pandemic, the big, you know, you turn on the news and everyone's talking about you can't even hire for like a fast food restaurant. Like there's such a shortage.

of potential employees. And I think that's shifted and a bit of a power shift as well. And obviously, you can't compare entry level work to something like this. But I would love to know, generally speaking, what does the talent pool look like right now? Is it strong? Our one thing, and I'm sorry, I'm kind of known for my run on questions. But one thing I, you know, you do see potentially is when there's a bit of a shift in...

the interest in emerging tech, people maybe go to different places, they move to different sectors or they shy away and go to something that's maybe a little bit more stable, steady, reliable in the short term, something like that. I'm wondering, what are you seeing? How is the talent pool, are folks actively looking for these types of roles right now and what's on their

Dave, what do you have to say about that? Mm-hmm, sure. It's all good.

Mathew Low (33:24)

Dave, you want to? Yeah.

Dave Edmunds (33:24)

Want me to take that one? Okay. No, I was just, I don't want to cut anyone off there. I think, respective to the niche that we're talking about, it can be a little bit different. Like with Web3 right now, I think we've mentioned this at the beginning, it's, not to say that it's not hiring, it's just a lot more of the funding is now in AI. So those people still exist, they're still there, the market's still strong, but kind of like you said, if the more senior people who are going to be working within these roles leading initiatives, they're not always going to be pivoting out of say like blockchain over to AI.

Because a lot of these people in AI at the senior level probably already existed for a while, like the NLP engineers, these kinds of people. It's not like they just kind of manifested, like they've been doing this probably since before COVID. So the talent pool is good. I think you do see a bit of a pivot in terms of like maybe your middle tier engineers who have that kind of more versatile but not overly niched experience, for example.

web developers who might be able to leverage their skill set in building a called crypto platform versus maybe an AI platform. And now the tool sets kind of a little bit more democratized. You do see a bit of a shift. So the talent market is there. I think it just starts coming down to with our clients and those who are hiring, where is that bar? Are you taking the approach where you could bring somebody on board who's a strong engineer, who maybe hasn't done this yet, but is super interested in say like artificial intelligence at this point. If you go back to the web three side, if you're doing hiring,

Are you still able to bring in people that I've either done this before? Or are you still okay kind of take that AI approach like they are now with that MVP model, getting somebody on board with that skill set, who's used to a fast growing company, like Mat said, getting a product to market, and they can learn the rest. So the market is good. It's just where the kind of dilution of availability of roles are is just kind of shifted away from Web3 for right now into the higher funded areas.

Ashley Smith (35:08)

Mm-hmm. I wonder how AI generally has impacted the thinking around these sorts of roles. And I don't mean so much about the sort of attention that AI is getting, but more about what might some of these technical folks be thinking about when it comes to how AI might impact the work that they actually do.

Like are some of them perhaps feeling more empowered because they're able to, this is again, this is super naive of me, but like they're able to now, you know, develop more code faster, check things, look for security issues, or are they feeling more tentative and nervous because they feel like their skill, their very unique skill might be at risk a little bit because of this technology.

Mathew Low (36:01)

it's a subjective answer, but my take and my opinion on it is that the people who are more senior, more experienced in their roles will look at AI as a tool that can supplement what they can do. I'll give you an example.

a photographer that I know is using generative AI to like draft out photography scenes. So like, he'll be like, oh, I'm going to do a beach set. And so sunset, beach, wedding dress, certain time of the day, certain kind of clothing, whatever. And he uses that to get idea of how to picture the actual photography set that he's going to do. And then he creates that as a storyboard.

And he uses that for his actual photography. Similarly to the examples you gave, there's lots of engineers that I know these days who are using whatever AI tool to write their test cases. There's artists who are using generative AI to like create crazy scenes and then they build off of that. So I think, and from my experience, anecdotal as it is with a lot of different people,

AI will be very supplementary, at least as it is right now. I mean, for sure, there's definitely gonna be someone who's like, you know, I'm an AI generative search term dude and you know, I'm just gonna create stuff for you and I'll do it cheaper and blah, blah. But at least right now, we're not at the point where that replaces someone who's truly a craft.

Ashley Smith (37:30)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (37:54)

person who like knows their craft and has that experience and can really do crazy stuff with it. It'll just make them faster at it. And so yeah, I mean, that's where it is today, where it is tomorrow, who knows, but you know, it's an exciting time for people who can do things faster, better, hopefully.

Ashley Smith (38:02)

Mm-hmm.

Is this something that you're... Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Dave.

Dave Edmunds (38:14)

To drive? Oh, no, I was just going to make the point there, to build on Mat's point. A lot of the time when you're talking with engineers, AI is a lot like a nail gun to a carpenter. It's maybe before they use a nail and hammer, but like the nail gun never replaced the carpenter. They can just now hammer more nails faster.

Ashley Smith (38:33)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. that makes sense. I do wonder from an organizational perspective, business leaders, are they talking to you about AI in this kind of context? Are they telling you or asking you, do we really need this role, X, Y, Z, or can we just get AI to do it? And on top of that, if that's not what they're thinking, are they prioritizing...

Mathew Low (38:44)

Hehehe

Ashley Smith (39:03)

talent who know how to use AI effectively. Like, is that something that they're talking to you about and wanting to discuss with prospective employees?

Mathew Low (39:14)

So the way this has worked anecdotally, because we've actually had this come up a lot over the last year or whatever, this happens with a lot of emerging tech, by the way. It's like emerging tech X has happened. Every single company out there is like,

Ashley Smith (39:20)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (39:27)

what is this? What can we do with this? How do we do this? And what ends up happening is you either want to have someone at the company who knows a little bit about it, it's excited. It's like, I'm going to champion this. And like,

give me some budget and some time and I'll do what I can and here's the business case. The more common scenario, no one in company knows what this is really, someone has to do research and they're like, okay, like ultimately let's just hire someone who knows what they're talking about here, like what are we doing with Or three, it's like, that's just a fad, screw it. Like, you know, this is nothing to do with our business. Most common.

right now with AI in particular is like they were already an AI company, they don't care. If they're not an AI company, it's like, okay, what can AI do to improve our business? Is it replacing anyone? No, it's just not there But it's creating new roles, actually, where it's like, okay, can we hire someone who's going to take whatever, AI is a very vague general

Dave Edmunds (40:29)

Yeah.

Mathew Low (40:40)

Whatever AI business case we have and actually do something with it that's useful to the hire that person. We're going to spend some time, some money, some budget there. And like, we'll look at it like six months, a year from now and did it work or did it not? No, if it worked, great. Maybe we can build more of a team. If it didn't work, well, okay, we took a crack and we can at least say we have some kind of AI in the company kind of a deal. Um, and that's like.

Dave Edmunds (40:45)

Thanks for watching!

Ashley Smith (40:58)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (41:10)

That's pretty much being like the last several company asks that we've had like, hey, like we don't have anyone who really does AI here. We have some people who could maybe help them but not lead the AI charge. Can you help us hire someone who can do that basically? Yeah, and like I said, applies to everything. Like same thing happened with web three originally, same thing happened with every other random emerging tech.

Dave Edmunds (41:38)

cloud. Yeah.

Mathew Low (41:38)

You kind of start there.

Ashley Smith (41:38)

Mm-hmm.

cloud. Yeah. It's, wonder about some of the more sort of expanded areas within an organization in terms of whether or not you touch it with the work that you do. So just to your point, like AI, Web3 tech, it's kind of some organizations or companies may be looking at the underlying tech to help build their products. And that might be all that they're looking to

Dave Edmunds (42:09)

Mm.

Ashley Smith (42:09)

I say that so dismissively, but others are wanting to really build it into their infrastructure. So whether it's about supply chain management or they're looking at their marketing strategy. And so, you know, here on the show, one of the things we've talked about in terms of blockchain technology is like these loyalty programs that people are starting to experiment with. And what it seems to me is...

a lot of the companies who are trying this and doing this maybe well, it's not so much starting from their IT teams. It's actually more of a marketing arm and an idea of something they want to give a try with.

But they need folks that better understand kind of the ecosystem and what can be done. So my question is for you, are you touching those sorts of roles as well?

you know, even social media managers, I know that sounds kind of silly, and maybe it's a little low on the pay scale side of things. But like, if you need folks that know how to speak the language, you know, are companies looking for that? And is that something that you help companies look for?

Mathew Low (43:20)

Totally. absolutely. To your point, understanding the community, the landscape, the industry, the domain space across any of whatever version of that is, whether that's Web3 or otherwise, is important. Sometimes it's a little underrated. Sometimes companies are like, whatever, marketing's marketing, sales is sales is sales.

Ashley Smith (43:20)

Mat, I'll let you.

Mathew Low (43:50)

We've just figured it out, but if you want to be the most successful that you can, it's really, really helpful to have someone who knows what they're dealing with, what they're talking about, and can communicate that to whoever your audience is. And so we do that very often. In fact, it's a really common ask is like, hey, like, can you bring in someone who understands?

x like whatever their role is, their role is y, they also need to understand x and that might be the community, the industry, the domain, etc. But it's that thing that those two things combined make the ideal hire across whatever space that is creative marketing, sales, finance,

Ashley Smith (44:43)

So I do have a couple of questions. Whether people are say engineers or maybe more in some of these separate roles and wanting to elevate their career and they want to make a shift in their professional pathway and they're trying to figure out how to best position you know, to find new employment.

When looking at emerging tech just in general, let's just say, what should they be doing? What should they be thinking about to have themselves stand out as a great candidate for a number of different

Dave Edmunds (45:24)

Mind if I run with this on that? Nope, I mean, cut me off at any point you guys want. I think...

not to kind of sound like I'm using the oldest recruiter advice in the book, but I think it is really important for them. First main thing is like you're going to start applying for roles like target and customize what you're doing because you do as somebody who's going to be working in frontier industries, if you have a little bit of experience, how you present that can be just as important. So I know Mat and I were talking the other day about web three, you know, if you want to make a move into say like an exchange, I'll keep using this example. Well, maybe you've worked

for Coinbase or Kraken or Binance. Being able to take that experience, the tools and literally the projects you've worked on, be able to frame that for the hiring team that you're applying to. That is going to be that kind of like Mat saying that holistic packaging of experience, because at the end of the day, it's not just like, have you used React or Node or Java or C++? It's have you solved this problem with these tools?

And if you've used these tools, you know how to solve these problems. Like it's making sure you are articulating that through your application process. that's what we're looking for. Really, it's like, are we going to hire the individual, like Mat said, who have both the skills and kind of the cognitive know-how to solve this issue that our clients are Yeah.

Mathew Low (46:44)

Yeah.

Ashley Smith (46:44)

What's generally a good starting point for someone that maybe doesn't have the work experience, maybe can't necessarily answer some of those questions well yet, but they want to? We've kind of moved beyond the days where

people have a prerequisite on job posting is like your four-year degree or How are you finding quality candidate?

How are you finding quality candidates are building their skills in an effective way where they can showcase those skills if they don't have the previous work experience?

Mathew Low (47:21)

Totally. the way that this is kind of typical to merging tech, but the way you go from like, I'm interested to like, professional, this is my career, is by doing anything you can. And what I mean by that is like, start doing it as your hobby. Start building projects. Start putting stuff into a portfolio.

It may not be at the professional or career level, but anything that you do there is building relevant skill sets. Especially in emerging tech, as I was mentioning, having an understanding of the community, the industry, the space, the lingo, just the type of people who are involved, can be a really valuable asset, that usually is a very valuable asset. To take that, add onto it,

But whatever you are, you're an engineer, you're an accountant, you're whatever. I'm also doing this fun stuff in Web3. I figured out how to do Web3 accounting, whatever that looks like. I figured out how to build this small little tool in whatever platform or tool set. It doesn't have to be like, hey, in order to work at, I don't know, some big...

crypto company, you have to have done specifically what they're doing. But to be honest, in order to stand out, you need to do something, right? You need to be able to say, I'm working on it. I have this enthusiasm, this passion, this interest. And here's where you can see all of Right. That's a big thing to Dave's point, how you present that. It matters, right? Like, is one thing to have on your resume and, you know,

At the bottom it says, interest, blockchain. Great, now I can apply it to all these blockchain companies. It's like, OK, so what? I'm assuming anyone applying to a blockchain company, unless it was by accident, has an interest. So instead, it's like, OK, I took these online courses, or here's a link to my website where you can see all these little things I've built, or examples of fake 

work that I've created just to work on this and have some kind of That's all how you got to do it. Like there's no magic answer. It's a bunch of little baby steps and incremental things that you do to show your your practice in whatever this is, and put that in front of whoever you're trying to get involved in.

Ashley Smith (50:05)

Mm-hmm.

And I don't know if this has changed so much, but it's just maybe changed the way that I look at the world. But I think traditionally speaking, you'd see a job posting, you'd see the, you know, qualification requirements, and it's kind of a checkbox, right? You're kind of going through the list. Do I have this check, check? And to me, it feels like in some of these emerging tech fields, it's almost like you're creating your own checkbox, like you're needing to package what you've done.

and making a case for how you might be able to add some value to that Does that make sense? Yeah. I do wonder for, let's say someone that has been working for some time, they're a quality candidate in general for any role. When looking at some of these emerging tech companies, especially when they're

Mathew Low (50:45)

Totally. Yeah.

Dave Edmunds (50:46)

Yeah, yep, that's a fair way to look at it.

Ashley Smith (51:06)

early seed, startup what are the general expectations around compensation? And I don't mean in terms of numbers, but I just think about, you know, you're potentially taking on a riskier role because you don't necessarily know if the company is going to have the you know, in terms of, you know, a five, 10-year…

sort of tenure. You don't know that company is going to be around as long as you might hope. But maybe you're the type. You're willing to take the risk. You're willing to jump in. You want to be a part of something that's growing. You want to be part of the early story. Sure, so all that's great. But what sorts of things are organizations, companies looking at in terms of compensation for these types of employees? And this might be a super basic question for anyone that's in startup.

Mathew Low (51:34)

Yep.

Ashley Smith (52:01)

culture, but for me, I actually have no idea. What are they wanting?

Mathew Low (52:07)

Um, normally the startup spiel is, okay, you're probably taking a hit on cash, but here's some equity, you know, have a piece of the Um, what that might look like specifically can vary quite a bit, but what I do suggest to people is to do your homework, figure out what the heck is equity, you know, what does that mean? What, what does that entail?

you're giving up for what you potentially are gaining. It's not quite as simple as like, here's a lottery ticket and hopefully you get the cash it in one day. But sometimes it feels like that. And so if you're the kind of person where you're like, I love it, I want to be able to dream about cashing in that lottery ticket. And like,

I'm already picturing my whatever, my $50 million payday and what I'm going to do with all this money. That feeling that kind of vibe of like, I love to dream the high reward at a high risk potentially is what drives me. Then that equity component is something that you're really going to want to understand, right? Like it's the excitement. It's what

a small company can offer you because frankly, they don't have all the money that bigger companies have. Not that bigger companies always pay the greatest either, but at the very least, you're much more likely in a small company to have that kind of equity

component of your compensation. Other things, the intangibles that should hopefully be a factor that you're thinking about is emerging tech is exciting.

It's emerging tech for a reason. You can have that impact, that value of being not just a cog in a wheel, but like if you're the first person in a company or the first hundred, even the first few hundred people, you're gonna make a real impact. You're gonna have real tangible impact on the business, on the company, and you're gonna be able to do things that you may not have the opportunity to do at other So,

There's a lot of different reasons to be in a startup or in emerging tech, but a lot of it is driven by your passion, your excitement for opportunity, for impact, for maybe that payday. to be honest, if you're really looking for a cash check, you should get into like investment banking and just call it a day or something.

Ashley Smith (54:33)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Dave Edmunds (54:55)

I'm sorry.

Ashley Smith (54:57)

I do. I'm recognizing right now what a newbie I am and an amateur. So I have some questions for you that I think folks who are just familiar with this landscape, they know the answer But I am wondering, you know, for these companies, when they're coming to you, and they're, for example, offering equity to their prospective employees, you think

Are they coming to you having a game plan? They've spoken to their lawyers, they've spoken to their accountants, they have a framework for how much equity, for example, they're likely planning to share in the first two years and they know how many employees they're expecting that's going to cover. Is there a scale here where that ends, I guess? And to what end do companies come not knowing that and you're helping them?

Mathew Low (55:49)

it's a really good

Any experienced founder will have those answers. An inexperienced founder,

talk to your lawyer, talk to your accountant. But also, there are a ton of resources out there. Y Combinator has a guide out there. There's a number of really famous people coming from A16Z or whatever VC groups out there who've put it out like templates effectively. Like.

You're this stage, this is what percentage of equity you may want to put up. This is how this might roll out to specific roles, like your very senior person, your founder, your executives, or whatever. So there's a lot of resources out there. It is important to get it right, because you can't take it back. It's not very easy to take it back, I should say.

Ashley Smith (56:48)

Mathew Low (56:51)

If you, if you put up a certain amount of your company, you have to realize that you are putting up a certain amount of the company. Like if you're saying like, I'm willing to put up 10% of my company to all my employees, that's 10% of the company you no longer own effectively, right? Like you don't get a cash out on that. Um, really, really amazing example, uh, locally, plenty of fish, a hundred percent

It's like zero dollars went to anyone but that person, right? Like that's amazing. Much harder to do, certainly. So if you're like, okay, my payday was X amount of money and 20%, 30%, 40% of my company now is owned by VCs, is owned by employees or whatnot, you kind of have to scale up what kind of exit you want in order to make your certain goals.

Ashley Smith (57:27)

Mm-hmm

Mathew Low (57:48)

make sense in a So there's a lot of important things to think about there. Sometimes it feels like that's a problem for like, I don't know, Mat of the future, not Mat today, but your lawyer, your accountant will certainly have a lot of very specific questions that they'll want to take you through.

Ashley Smith (57:53)

Mm-hmm.

Ha ha ha.

Mm-hmm. It has been funny in the Web3 space in particular, like, you know, in the NFT world, you know, over the last couple years, there was just a lot of creative ways people were looking to compensate their teams, which I think has was innovative and interesting and created a lot of excitement. But I think in hindsight, ended up with a lot of folks kind of ending up not compensated,

Mathew Low (58:20)

Yeah, absolutely.

Ashley Smith (58:37)

war wounds good experiences to help them with their next step. So I am cognizant of time, but I would love to know if you have any anecdotes or speaking of war stories, anything that you think would be interesting to share with our audience in terms of some of the work that you've done that might be unique to some of this emerging tech world when it comes to recruitment or

Mathew Low (58:40)

Yeah.

Ashley Smith (59:06)

So I'd love to hear what you might have to say about that.

Dave Edmunds (59:10)

I mean, I'll... I mean, just on the nature of finding talent, I think it is just a fun one. When you get into these kind of more modern niches and tool sets and so on and so forth, like Mat's saying, your search gets to become a little bit funner.

Mathew Low (59:10)

Dave has a couple of fun ones, for sure.

Dave Edmunds (59:23)

in a way, because you're not just on LinkedIn looking for people. I know, like, there's been points Mat and I have been hanging out in

like Reddit subreddits for tools that are very specific to Web3 and attending product demos to learn and talk to the people who are doing, like using these tools on a daily basis. So we've had some Web3 clients at the States where literally I do my recruiting on Reddit rather than going on like a LinkedIn or something or a So like, that's a good example of where.

Mathew Low (59:46)

into a discord.

Dave Edmunds (59:48)

Discord, yeah, there's a lot of really fun ones where you kind of get outside of the norm where it's just in male blast everybody But I know for me that's kind of some of the fun stuff for me is getting into those Like really nichey places where the really techie people are and then kind of see what's happening from there so yeah, that's one of the kind of anecdotes from my and Mat you seem like you got a really good one You want to share?

Ashley Smith (59:48)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (59:54)

Yeah.

Ashley Smith (01:00:04)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (01:00:11)

I was just gonna say, you know, emerging tech is super funny. Like way back in the day, I had I don't even know if I would qualify this as emerging tech, but they're like, do you know what cryogenics is? I was like, no. I was like literally going back to my computer, Googling, I like, how do you spell cryogenics? Anyways, it was like super niche. It was like a.

purely academic thing at this point. Long story short, I ended up calling Russian institutions because they had programs that taught it. And can someone speak English? Can you connect me to your PhD program? Because I randomly found this guy's PhD paper. And it says he wrote a paper on When you get emerging texts, you get weird niche,

Ashley Smith (01:00:59)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (01:01:04)

does it exist in this world type of things that you have to find.

And you get to play detective, you get to play researcher, you get to play call center sometimes, where you're just picking up the phone and just, do you know anyone? So there's lots of really fun things to Dave's points that you get to do when you're doing something really And you also have to pair that with the company. So from the company.

Ashley Smith (01:01:25)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (01:01:36)

a company step up, I'm hiring for a really big well-known name. Great. You know, I'm hiring for Google. That's an easy conversation. You know, what if I'm hiring for Rugal? Oh, you've never heard of Rugal. Like, here's what they do. Here's here's all this. Here's all the benefits. Here's the compensation. Here's what we're trying to achieve. Here's the impact, the mission, etc. And then circling back to the point about equity. Oh, by the way, you know, we pay like middle of the market or below market. But

We have a lot of equity or, you know, you have to balance all these things to put a persuasive argument. But ultimately at the end of the day, everyone has to be happy, right? Like you, the person coming in, doing this role has to get a lot of value out of it. The company who's hiring the person has to get value. And so you run into a lot you know, interesting dilemmas where you're trying to balance everything.

Ashley Smith (01:02:13)

Mm-hmm.

Dave Edmunds (01:02:18)

exactly.

Mathew Low (01:02:35)

Can the company put forward a little bit more money to make this happen for someone who's really awesome? Is the person willing to take a little bit of a cut from where they're at because this project is awesome. No one else is doing this or it's just super exciting. You're the only person in this company who's gonna be driving this It's just, it's a very people oriented Everyone has to come to the table and figure out eyes wide open.

Ashley Smith (01:02:35)

Mm-hmm.

Dave Edmunds (01:02:48)

Yeah.

Ashley Smith (01:02:59)

Mm-hmm.

Dave Edmunds (01:02:59)

difference.

Mathew Low (01:03:03)

What are we getting ourselves into? Does it make sense for everyone? And the fine balancing act of actually getting everyone to say what they really mean and what they really want can be a really challenging thing from the talent recruiting side. Unfortunately, not everyone has this super savvy approach to...

Dave Edmunds (01:03:05)

Yeah.

Ashley Smith (01:03:22)

Mm-hmm.

Mathew Low (01:03:33)

negotiations. Some people read like a book and now they are the expert and they hardline things. There's a middle ground somewhere. But you know, it's sometimes a real journey to get there.

Ashley Smith (01:03:41)

Mm-hmm.

Yes, that's fair.

Dave Edmunds (01:03:45)

Yeah.

Ashley Smith (01:03:51)

Mm-hmm. That's a whole other can of worms. Maybe we'll leave that one for another episode. But I can appreciate that. before we go, rapid fire, super serious question. If you're looking for a job in Web3, as an example, LinkedIn, NFT, PFP, yes or no?

Mathew Low (01:03:55)

Yeah

I'm into it personally. It's not necessarily you're gonna exist in LinkedIn. Like I'm probably gonna find you somewhere on like Twitter or like a Discord. And if you have like an actual nice TPFP, it's credibility, right? At the end of the day, you know, like I love that stuff. And if you're gonna look for someone who's in web three, you're gonna want someone who's in web three.

Ashley Smith (01:06:39)

All right. Thank you so much, you guys, for joining me today. It was such a valuable conversation, lots of insights. It's really interesting to dive into some of the nuances of how, you know, employers and business owners and startups are thinking about talent and acquisition and hiring. I think it's a tough thing to begin with, let alone adding emerging tech as a layer on top of it all. Before we go, Matthew, Dave, where can our audience find you?

and the company and we will put the links in the show notes so you don't have to spell it all out but maybe you can give us the best places to find you.

Mathew Low (01:07:17)

You can definitely check us out at Inveniotalent.com. I'm easiest to grab on LinkedIn for sure, but you can definitely find us on Twitter, Instagram. I think we're on all the socials for the most part. Personally, like I said, for me, LinkedIn is where I live most of the days.

Ashley Smith (01:07:41)

it makes sense

that you would be there. Dave, yeah, that's where I think we first connected was on LinkedIn. So I'm very active on there. I, yeah, and you guys obviously share a lot of interesting things, you know, through your channels as well. So I would encourage everybody to find Mat and Dave and Invenio on their website and we will have all the links there. So you guys, cheers. Thank you so much. Maybe we can grab another conversation in the future, talk about this evolving landscape.

Dave Edmunds (01:07:41)

same with me.

Ashley Smith (01:08:10)

I hope you all have a wonderful day and everyone listening. Thank you so much for tuning in to From the Blockchain. See you next week.

Mathew Low (01:08:16)

Thank you.