In this episode, Brandon Amoroso welcomes Roy Mathew, CTO of SCALIS, to discuss the innovative approach behind the platform revolutionizing candidate-company matchmaking. From cultural alignment to scalability strategies, Roy shares insights into SCALIS's evolution and its transformative potential. Join them as they navigate the intricacies of product development, offering a glimpse into SCALIS's journey toward redefining the recruitment landscape.
Timestamps
Roy Mathew
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/roy-mathew-0a6137/
SCALIS - https://scalis.ai/
Brandon Amoroso:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/
Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/
In this episode, Brandon Amoroso welcomes Roy Mathew, CTO of SCALIS, to discuss the innovative approach behind the platform revolutionizing candidate-company matchmaking. From cultural alignment to scalability strategies, Roy shares insights into SCALIS's evolution and its transformative potential. Join them as they navigate the intricacies of product development, offering a glimpse into SCALIS's journey toward redefining the recruitment landscape.
Timestamps
Roy Mathew
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/roy-mathew-0a6137/
SCALIS - https://scalis.ai/
Brandon Amoroso:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/
Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/
I'm Brandon Amoroso, and this is the D2Z Podcast building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of retention as a service agency a lecture as well as a co-founder of Scaless, and today I'm talking with Roy Matthew, who's the CTO of Scaless, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast already, but as a dual sided job board and ATS, helping solve the problem around why job boards aren't able to effectively match candidates to companies. Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Brent.
Speaker 1:So before we jump into things here, can you give everybody just a quick background and overview of yourself and your story?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I joined Scalus the first week of this year, so just after June 1st weekend. Prior to that I'd taken a little time off. I was at Meta as an eng manager over there, and I've, you know, going further back. I've worked as enterprise architect at CVS for about six years. I have been CTO a couple of times now with startups and I've been eng VP for other small teams and startups as well. I've always been fascinated by tech. I started my career at Bell Labs and just moved through staying in tech, staying very hands-on for the most part.
Speaker 1:What would you say, because I know you've worked at some larger companies and then some smaller startups as well. Is there one that you prefer, or is it just sort of a different flavor with the two different types?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think startups obviously have the attraction that you get to sort of try out a bunch of different things to learn on the go and certainly not be hampered by sort of a big hierarchy. If you find the right size company, right size group in a large organization, you know, and if you're lucky, you do get kind of that same umbrella. You get the umbrella of the big company, but you also get to innovate and be in a small group that's sort of fairly autonomous. So I've had those kinds of experiences. I think over the last say 10 years or so the larger companies are becoming sort of definitely more lean, more agile, and you know they're buying up startups, they're buying up tech and those groups tend to bring their own cultures. And so you know they're buying up startups, they're buying up tech and those groups tend to bring their own cultures. And so you know, if you're looking, you can find the startup-y kind of environment in a big company as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a cool sort of framework that some of the larger businesses have started to adapt or adopt within their organizations where they have like sort of little mini teams. And I've even heard of companies that have pretty much separate businesses entirely underneath the larger parent org, that are sort of just there to act as like the startup, the in-house startup, because I think they've done a better job of being self-aware and understanding that, no matter how hard they try, when you have all of these different levels of hierarchy, there's a tendency for things to get stifled or for innovation to get stifled.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah, I mean, it's not that the CEOs of big companies aren't aware of this. I think they try to combat that a lot of the time. At Meta, I know that at one point there were 12 levels between the software engineer and Zuckerberg, and he's done a lot recently to kind of trim that out. So there's definitely a mandate in these companies as well not to have too many layers of middle management, right.
Speaker 2:Going back to something earlier about the culture, though, I think I have to tell this story because when I started my career, I was working at Bell Labs at the time and there was a story going around that IBM had hired, I mean had bought, a company called Rome Corporation R-O-L-M, and these guys were sort of well known and, you know, kind of had their own sort of, had their sort of way of doing things. And I thought, oh my God, that is the dream, right, not to have to go to an office but to kind of pick and choose where you work from and work like that. And obviously they were. You know they were doing some interesting tech and IBM wanted to give them free reign.
Speaker 1:But yeah, yeah, I agree, I think that was one of the things that pushed me into entrepreneurship to begin with. Is that the internships that I had in high school or college? Actually I had one in particular. I want to say it was maybe sophomore or junior year of college and it was at one of the largest paper companies in the world, and apparently there's only like three or four of them, because it costs anywhere between one to $2 billion to build a paper mill. I went and visited one out in the middle of nowhere, wisconsin, and let me tell you that thing was a behemoth but also not a super sexy industry for new investment to go into, because the returns just aren't there. I mean, they're all great businesses, but you're not going to go outlay $2 billion to build a plant to try and enter into the paper market. So there's basically like four companies.
Speaker 1:I was at the largest one in the US. There's one international that was a little bit larger, but there were so many things that they were doing that were just painfully inefficient but they didn't really have a reason to change and my boss's boss had been there for 40 years or something. So the last thing that she wanted to hear about was the intern who had a mat lab or whatever it's called and the ability to, because all the paper rolls. They come out in the same size I think it was like 360 feet or inches, I can't remember and then you have to cut them up into various sizes because eventually they go into cardboard or they go into actual paper or whatever it may be, and they were doing that all by hand and they just sort of knew, you know, in their Excel spreadsheets. Oh, you know, if I want to make this role turn into these variations with the least amount of waste, this is how I should do it, versus just giving it to a program and that program telling us how to maximize yield with reducing the amount of waste based.
Speaker 1:And uh, you know, I brought that forward and um, I, I was pretty close with um, my direct report, and he basically was like this is awesome. You know, you're clearly, you're clearly very smart, but I'm not even gonna bother taking this to her because I can already tell you what the answer is and it's gonna be more than anything else. So you know, I actually love that internship because I worked on electric for probably 80 of the time was there, but they still thought that I was very high producing because I was just doing things in a more streamlined fashion and then would crawl back to my cub Electric and then also with Scaleless is just. Every single person should be a contributor, whether you just started, or you've been there for five years, or you have 40 years of experience, or you have one. I think everybody has different perspectives that are valuable, and I don't think that I was going to be able to get that if I went a traditional corporate route.
Speaker 2:Right, that's a good story, I think you know. So. Thomas Edison was famous for like, being that kind of inventor. I think he was working as a railway, I forget it was a guard or something. He was working on the train and every now and then they would. You know this is probably a well-known story, but I'll say it anyway that every now and then they'd sort of send a telegraph signal to make sure he was awake, and I think he invented something to automatically answer that so he could continue his naps. Right, but think of the invention. You know the mindset that really led to so much more from that, right? So you want people who have that blend of like hey, I don't want to keep doing the same thing again. They feel lazy, but they'll spend weeks to innovate and save something they have to do manually in a day or two. Right, it's the invention, it's the process that really drives them, and I think we want to look for people like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. And I personally can't stand remote work. I actually wrote about it in my newsletter yesterday. The sort of the pitfalls that I've seen, especially with you know, as electric got acquired by drinks and we're now fully remote and sort of the. You know the cat's out of the bag when it comes to that, because you know there's no, there's not even one location that we could consolidate into because there's not enough density in a particular city. Right, that would even make a remote amount of sense. It basically would just be like oh, let's just pick a random US city and now all 120 people need to move to that city. That's not feasible.
Speaker 1:But I think starting a new company now the opportunity is there for that hybrid approach, and there was an article that just got sent to me this morning about how two days in office maybe three, would appear to be the ideal amount where you get the productivity and the benefits of getting in person and being able to collaborate with the team. But we're not going back to the. You know the stone ages of nine to five in office, monday through Friday. You know wearing a suit and you know hating the fact that you have to go to work. So I think that that middle ground is really important, especially for, you know, a growing startup, to be able to have that collaboration, back and forth idea sharing, things like that, because nothing is black and white or systematized at this point.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, I mean I think it on like hey, you know, everybody at Tesla is is on the shop floor and therefore everybody, everybody, everybody should be showing up to kind of you know that same, keep that same ethos, right, I think, with us definitely sort of having being able to hire around the world is really fantastic.
Speaker 2:I think I, you know, I've had a good round of sort of success with finding people. We'll see how they turn out, but at least you know, finding people with talent, you know, seems definitely to have worked out recently. More than sort of prescribing a time or an amount of time to be in the office, I think it's about sort of you know to me the more interesting question is how do you motivate people? Right?
Speaker 1:And how do you sort of?
Speaker 2:make them want to really be there and produce.
Speaker 2:And I think if you do it right, you can sit back. It's like planting, you know, using the right fertilizer, right. Your encouragement and the direction you set is kind of going to create that environment, and I think if we do it right, we can get a lot out of people without sort of explicitly looking like we're breathing down their neck. Ideally, you want to sit back and let people kind of run with it and surprise you with what they're able to produce, and so that's my holy grail, that's what I'm working towards, and so that's my holy grail, that's what I'm working towards.
Speaker 1:And as you've been building the Scaleless team, we've brought on quite a few new team members in a rather short amount of time. I was looking the other day in deal and we've got 11 that have either started or are starting in I'd say, a four to six week period. How do you think about or what are you looking for when you're interviewing folks, when you're trying to build out your own team? That'll end up in that sort of ideal state where you know you're able to help with motivation but at the same time you know you don't have to sit there like a court martial or a drill sergeant and make sure that people are, you know, checking into work and then you know leaving, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, I mean so. So at the hiring stage, I think it's it's really about, like, finding a cultural fit. I know that this is sort of sometimes laughed at, sometimes frowned upon, like, oh, cultural fit, you know you've got, you're looking to hire people like you, right? That basically that's the kind of question that people think when you say that um, but I think I think more of like the, the mindset, you know, of being curious, um, and being honest, like you know, the, the best candidates I think that were at least the ones that I pretended to favor are the ones who tell me what they don't know, right, what they haven't done, and not try to sort of present like this huge repertoire of stuff that they claim to have dabbled in. And you dig a little deeper and it's like, oh, wait, a minute, sorry, I didn't think that was a very good answer.
Speaker 2:So you want to hire people that are smart enough and sort of self-aware, right? So that they can tell you what they know. They have the confidence to tell you what they don't know, right? But once they're in, I think managing them is definitely, you know, ideally you want to do as little managing as possible, right? You want to sort of be the one who who handles exceptions, not the routine day-to-day right. So I'd like my day to be focused on, uh, researching, you know, kind of seeing what's going on. I want to experiment with new ideas, you know, new architectures, things like that, and I don't want to be breathing down the neck of my team. Uh, we just started three people today and, uh, the first thing I did was pair them with three existing people and said hey, you know you're the mentor even though you've only been here three weeks.
Speaker 2:Right, you know this new person. I think there's a certain amount of empowerment that comes with that, you know, and a sense of responsibility, instead of people waiting, sort of to be anointed. I think you just you trust them and you say, hey, you know, can you go with this? And you only intervene if you need to. So I see a culture of the team finds its own. The team settles, you know, in its own way, and my job is to weed out the anomalies.
Speaker 2:Right, we have a principle at Meta no jerks and I think we definitely want to carry that forward. I'm not looking for a 10Xer. I'm not looking for somebody who can write the entire code base and basically take us to levels of glory. I'm looking for somebody who can understand this, communicate well and doesn't try to do it all right, Knows when to ask for help, knows how to delegate, knows how to collaborate. That kind of person is always, in the long run, much more valuable and it also attracts, you know, the same kind of people. So if you build a core culture with a few people that are that welcoming mindset, I think that when they interview other candidates, I think they tend to bring in. You know people like that as well.
Speaker 2:So, uh, you can create an organization by seeding it the correct way, and that's what we're trying here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the foundation is is very important that first you know five, 10, 15 team members. If they're not strong and they don't have the you know sort of the mindset that they are truly a part of the team, and I think that like a feeling of ownership, even if you know you're not, you know, technically, the founder, you are an integral component to building the future of the business. And if you don't have that, then you know everybody that follows in after that is sort of going to start picking up on you know, just little things here and there, but also just not be set up for success. And I think people want to work in an environment where, you know, not only is it exciting but they can see their impact actually, you know, manifest itself within whatever the business is doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean each job, you know, and I I don't think I appreciated this enough. I think early in my career I try to get away with doing as little as possible and I'm I've been atoning for that the last you know, the latter half of my career, right, working hard. I'm up early in the morning researching stuff. But I think each job and this is what I sort of want to tell the team is, each job is like university, right for the rest of your career, and so you get out of it what you put into it it's not. You know, the employers shouldn't be in the position of sort of trying to extract things from you. I think you should give, knowing that you're going to leave with really analogous to the university, really like a solid background and understanding what it is, and very confident for the next one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you know, having gone from a giant business like Meta, you know headfirst into Scalus here, what excites you the most about? You know, this year given that it's almost it's almost been sort of three months to the date for you, um, what excites you the most? But also, what are you most I don't know if afraid of would be the right way to phrase it like what are some of the things that you're?
Speaker 1:You know you're looking out for some of the gotchas that you think could happen, you know, over this year, as I think this year is a, is is critical. You know, sure, every year is critical, but this is really the first year where we'll have the core team in place and the product will be pushed into market and we'll be off into the races. So, you know, if you know things don't go not not according to plan would be the wrong way to phrase it, because they obviously won't go according to plan but if things don't go well, then obviously there's gonna have to be pivots and things like that. So, hey, you know, what I really like is to work at scale right and to communicate.
Speaker 2:There were two things that I sort of had as my calling card there. Oddly enough, when you work in a company like that, even though your product, you know, is deployed at scale, you're not working at scale. You're working small code base, that code base that is doing something very specific, and you hardly get to see kind of the scale aspects of the different teams and the deployment. You just sort of feed it into the deployment machine and then it goes from there and then somebody else handles it and if there's production outages you just roll back a version but you're not really seeing scale. I don't think you can. I mean, there are some design things that you think about, you know. But honestly, you know, if you interviewed for Meta you'd think, oh my God, I'm going to solve these algorithmically hard problems every day.
Speaker 2:And actually, you know, you end up sort of doing much more mundane things. A company like this is, you know, focused on OKRs, like how can you improve the retention of the product, or how can you improve the engagement on this page by 0.3% in this quarter, right? Those are the kinds of numbers that people are talking about.
Speaker 2:Of course, there's millions of users that you know when you look at those numbers, but that's sort of the actual impact is that you're making, except to say, well, you know, I'm pushing the product along ever so slightly, right, scaleless is like completely different right? So I came in Jan and my assessment of the product is well, it certainly wasn't designed for scale. It wasn't tested to scale, so it needs to. Oddly, with the name Scalus, right, yeah, which is ladder, not scale. But I suspect scale and ladder are somehow related etymologically. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Scalus is the Latin word for ladder. As you can imagine, there's thousands of businesses with the name ladder and there weren't any businesses named Scala. Actually, I think it sounds more techie anyway.
Speaker 2:It has an interesting ring to it.
Speaker 2:But I'm saying that when you talk about scaling a product I don't know if the roots of the word scaling there are with the ladder, because you're scaling a ladder, you're climbing the steps and I suppose it's sort of about that. But anyway, the thing that sort of really interests me this year is to take this product to scale, but before we get there, I have to make sure it functions correctly, and so we've spent months now two or now I mean two or three months all my time here, basically, you know, improving the test coverage, making sure that my and the message to my developers is like hey, I want you guys to sleep well at night, so when you make a change, you want to make sure that the tests run and validate that you haven't broken anything else, right? The big danger is, of course, you know what you're doing when you check in five lines of code, but have you affected somebody else's module, right? And this is what test coverage is about is everybody incrementally makes you know several commits in a day, and so the cumulative effect of this validation running in the background is really huge. I think it's been said about testing in general and in particular, unit testing, that never before in the history of software has so small a concept had such a big impact in terms of quality, of course. So getting to correctness and then getting to scale, I think, are the two sort of foundational things.
Speaker 2:Getting to correctness I've done plenty of. Getting to scale, I think it sort of again, like I said, my meta story, you know, doesn't really sort of make me feel like. You know, I've rolled out WhatsApp from beginning to end and I know all the pieces of it, right. But I know how to scale. I think the challenge here is scaling in the cloud at a reasonable cost, right. So the product, the way it is today, it will probably not hold up in terms of cost. I mean, we looked at some basic metrics and we're not sure yet. But at the same time, I think there's so much we can do, so I'm going to launch a parallel effort.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to have two teams, one working in correctness and the other working in scale, and in a few months I want us to be at a point where we can predict, you know, the incremental cost of adding a user, and that should be low.
Speaker 2:You know pennies or sub pennies a month, right? And the other thing that we want to be able to do is make sure that there are no bottlenecks, that when a million users simultaneously hit the system, uh, that nothing chokes, and so that means monitoring, that means you know good architecture and good design, um, and I think getting a team to know you really are the conductor in this role, and getting a team to sort of play music, to really create that piece that doesn't have the discordance, is really sort of about communicating. It's about working with people. It's about digging in yourself, like knowing how to play the pieces yourself so you can instruct somebody right and how how to handle the instrument. Uh, and I think, uh, if we do those right, uh, we should definitely have have, uh, you know, a much different system than we started the year with.
Speaker 1:I think that's why alignment at the you know, the the top of the company or at the exact level in a company is, is so important.
Speaker 1:Because you know, I'm I'm assuming that you know if you had started at the beginning of January and sort of the you know, the only thing you were hearing from me and Parker was we just need to get this into market and you know we we weren't expressing how, you know we want to sort of walk before we run, so that way we can have the foundation for scale because, like you know, we all have different roles here and I'm out in the market, you know, selling this into new companies and new customers, and I see how quickly things are going to ramp up.
Speaker 1:If that communication or that feedback loop wasn't making its way into, you know, the development org, then we'd be operating on different wavelengths here and you know, we would have launched in March and we would have onboarded 10 companies and we'd have, you know, tens of thousands of job seekers on the platform. And then we'd wake up one morning and the whole thing would be down and I'd be freaking out and you'd be like well, you know, you told me just to get it in the market. So I think that's why having that alignment is so important and sort of a mutual or shared understanding. I'll never have the full depth or understanding that you do, obviously, of the intricacies of the system, but there needs to be that sort of shared common ground and understanding of what the long term goal is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I really appreciate the air cover there. I think that you know Parker and I work very closely together and I think that's very valuable, right? I'm not just like, okay, hey, tell me about the tech problem you want to handle and let me go off and figure it out, Right, and then I'll meet you, you know, every two weeks or something end even though he's not necessarily an engineer.
Speaker 2:I want to make him understand, hey, architecturally, you know, this is kind of where we are right now and this is how it's going to look differently. So I'm big in pictures. You know, I love whiteboarding. I think that bringing people on board and not assuming that they're just one role right is really important. I'll talk to my designers and I still want to tell them a little bit of like what they're working with and what the backend sort of is facing, without bogging them down in the details of that. So you know it is.
Speaker 2:It is really about all of us talking through what we're trying to get done. You know, I do appreciate that. You know there are times when I have to just ship right or I have to just land something, because you know we don't have time for perfect. And I think you know I, you know, having been lots of different places, I understand that. You know the perfect is the enemy of the good, obviously. But here what that means for us is that you know we actually can learn if we have controlled releases. So we're not going to just infinitely, like you know, for several months just kind of push back and say, oh no, no, we can't ship. I'm looking forward to shipping something to a friendly audience and, you know, having the team be both learning from that and also be inspired by it. Right? Because when you have a real customer, I think it sharpens you as a developer.
Speaker 1:You're like, oh, people are actually using my thing and you know I better polish it up and I care about where that pixel, you know difference is in terms of the design. And you know agency for the past four or five years where I would, I would meet with some of our closer tech partners and you know sort of help them understand how we were leveraging the tool. Uh, and even like little things like hey, this one thing, you know it's not going to make a big difference in your product, but God, it's annoying and it takes me like an extra 30 seconds in my daily workflow Like, do you think you could just make this slight tweak all the way to? You know, if we could do this with your product, it would be a game changer and so sort of the whole shebang.
Speaker 1:When it comes to feedback, but also direct feedback, I think it's really critical that you know these first companies that we do on board that they're willing to invest the time in us to be able to give us that and not, you know, sort of sugarcoat it either.
Speaker 1:You know, if something sucks, say it sucks, or if something's amazing, say it's amazing. But you know, don't tell us, oh yeah, you know it's pretty good when ultimately, you know, in three months, nobody's actually going to be using the feature. But I think it's important to take in that customer feedback and have it drive a lot of the product, but still not turn us into basically a customer request like development shop where you know all you do. And I've seen this with some features that have been released by other companies in the e-commerce vertical where they're sort of just chasing customer request after customer request. They're sort of just chasing customer request after customer request. They're not really spending any time thinking about the long-term vision of the product or even why they originally started the company to begin with. So it's a balancing act of having both.
Speaker 2:Right, right, yeah, absolutely. So a couple of points I want to make there. One is that, um, I've I've always been annoyed by surveys that get sent to people you know, saying you know, what do you think of our product? And it's not. You know, it's not like I can just click on the email and answer one question, right, I click and it takes me to a link and I've got to go through like eight pages of meaningless questions. And I've seen site tests where they do this redundant thing because you know you want to, you want to prove that somebody is actually sort of consistent. But a survey is just, like you know, when you send it to millions of people, you don't need to ask me questions. You need to ask maybe a few questions three or four, right To get kind of the pulse of where the product's at.
Speaker 2:And so I think we have to be careful with our surveys, especially when the number of users that we talk to is high, right, when you're working with a small group of white-club customers, I think it's different and also very important to let people know where their feedback's landing right. So we have to build mechanisms to hey, you asked for something. It's either going to be three months because we don't have time or your thing is being addressed and you should see some differences. It's tricky because you don't want, in the business of overpromising and making people feel like they can make you run and answer it. But at the same time, if you really care about your customers and their feedback I mean letting them know what right, what that led to, sometimes can be very positive they can be your best advocates. I mean, sometimes your worst critics can turn around and become your advocates, right, and that's always the turnaround you're looking for.
Speaker 1:I think having transparency with your customers is important too.
Speaker 1:I've been on the other side of it, working with tech vendors for a while now and nothing is more frustrating than being told something and then having it not happen Right.
Speaker 1:And then you get into this sort of habitual state of mistrust where you don't ever really believe the roadmap and I see that happening internally at some companies as well where you have a sort of a misalignment between non-development stakeholders and development stakeholders, where the non-development folks don't really believe the roadmap or the dates that are coming out. So I am a huge proponent of under-promising and over-delivering and when I first started working I was sort of the reverse. I wouldn't say I would under deliver because I would just sort of kill myself working tirelessly to make sure that I still delivered. I was thinking you know why, if I think I can do it in two days, why don't you just say four? And then if it takes three, then you look like a hero. But if you say it takes two and then you take three, then you look like a chump. So it's dealing with like human psychology too when you're putting out some of these things and putting out some of these dates.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know, another thing that you have to think about is always like interview the customer who's asking you the question right and see what they're asking for really right. You know, it's like that marketing thing about the customer wanted a tire on a rope for a swing and then it went through all these iterations and you got something completely different and you wasted a lot of time. Sometimes they're asking for stuff but there are workarounds that they can live with and you think, oh well, this is my most valuable customer, so I've got to go do it. So, looking for the intersection, that alignment with your roadmap, this is my most valuable customer, so I've got to go do it right. So looking for the intersection, that alignment right with your roadmap and the request set, is really important and it's tough In a startup.
Speaker 2:It's really tough because you have to build so much surface for the product to be valuable, right, but once you hit that point where it is valuable and they can't live without it, I think then you start being able to sort of control the game a lot better and you can, you can be. You know, even a little change has a lot of impact because it's built on top of, like you know, a large system that already does a lot. So the, the improvement is kind of, you know, almost pervasive.
Speaker 2:Right, you do it in one area, but it affects many things and uh, so that's a big win, um, but you know, like I said, that we're startups, so you know it takes time to get there, I think, knowing that that'll happen and and sort of keeping the product as bare bones but, you know, as functional as possible, uh, so there are things that they're, you know, parker, and I've had plenty of discussions about you know, and my point always is is this fluff or can they not live without it?
Speaker 2:Right, we have these tough conversations already and I think that you know that we've sort of started with oh, we've got to have all of this right and we've only got two months to do it too. No, no, no, we've got phase one, which is all the stuff that really makes a difference to the workflow. Let's get that in, let's get that correct, right, and then, if they want to sort of see these additional views or this additional piece of data to help them make the decision and sort of hop into another place, well, that's kind of a P2. That's, you know, a nice to have right, but it's not like I've got to drop the ship date, you know and move it forward or something, because I can't fit that in.
Speaker 1:And those early customers, you know, they know what they're signing up for and if you're upfront and transparent about what the product does and doesn't have, it's not like you're going to be penalized because it doesn't have this one little feature. You take it out, you know, to the broader market. Sure, you know you're going to get put under a lot more scrutiny when it comes to apples to apples comparisons versus other products, which is something you know we're obviously stepping into, because we're entering into basically two markets simultaneously that already have product market fit with their given solutions, which is also why you know we couldn't, I don't think, ship like a true MVP either, because you can't really MVP a product that already exists, that's being used by businesses. It's like, well, I'm now losing like 90% for for, for what? So that's sort of a blessing and a curse, um, but I'm just really excited to get that you know that first person actually using the product, because, sure, we've done tons of feedback sessions.
Speaker 1:You know people have gone through it this and that At the end of the day, it can't replace actual engagement and interaction with what has been built and, from my standpoint from like an analytics lens, the way that they interact with it without them even telling us. You know, looking at, you know the, the heat maps, how much time they're spending on a page where they're clicking. You know are they clicking somewhere and you know little things like it doesn't even, it's not even a clickable element, but you know 50% of the customers are clicking on it. That sort of detail and information can only come from when you actually have people using it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's a game changer. When you go live, I think you know suddenly everybody goes oh crap, the stuff that I wrote is real and things depend on it, right. And so you know, you end up sort of seeing I wish I'd written it differently, I wish I'd sort of written a more efficient version of it, whatever. And that's what I'm trying to sort of get ahead of right now with letting people make sure that they not just write the code but write the test for those code bits, so that if something needs to be changed.
Speaker 2:You know they can be quote fearless about it, right? And this is all in line with, like you know, the earlier point I made about the value of tests. I think we can build a good system. It doesn't have to do everything. But, like you said, if you're getting into the market and something's already been built, then that's your baseline, right. And so either you compete on price and you take away a few things, or you basically come up with a better product and you sell them. Looks like we're going the former route, but we certainly can do a lot. You know the integration of this product is exciting. You know, the job board and the ATS together being one thing really exciting. I think we're only starting to sort of begin to think about what that means at the sort of the tech level, right, but I can already see at the data layer how we've got a lot of potential for, you know, streamlining some of the workflows. We can use components, you know, from one system to the other and so on. So you know it's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you know we would have never started. You know another job board and we would have never started. You know another ATS, because there's already a lot of those in the market. We have to, you know, build ATS because there's already a lot of those in the market. We have to, you know, build some of the features and functionality within each, because you know they're just table stakes. But the real value prop and sort of the secret sauce of the product is the unison of the two and the things that are possible because of that unison that other businesses quite literally cannot do because they simply do not have that unison. And so you know we don't.
Speaker 1:Let's say there's, you know, an ATS that is 10 out of 10 with features and functionality. We're fine with eight out of 10 because we have a whole nother value prop that's actually solving, you know, the true problem that job boards and ATSs are supposed to be solving to begin with solving the true problem that job boards and ATSs are supposed to be solving to begin with. And the thing that I hear time and time again from all the customer discovery interviews we've done over the past year and a half is that there's a whole lot of stuff in these products that exist in the market today that they never use because they're just continuing to iterate and build upon this system. But it's getting into that area that you had mentioned where it's a little bit more fluff than necessarily substance and can actually convolute and confuse the interface and the user more so than anything else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I've had HR and big companies tell me hey, we're not even using 10% of workday systems like that, because they can't figure it out. They just don't figure it out, they just run out of time. You know, yeah, you know where we're going with this. You know, right now it's exciting, right, because we think we're building this. But you know, all the theoretical sort of reasons are fine, but I can see the value already because, for scalers, for this round of interviews, we did not use the product, and so what I ended up doing was, you know, we were storing stuff in, you know, as you know, notion and Excel I mean in Google Sheets, you know just text files and trying to collate this information.
Speaker 2:And then Parker will call me two weeks later and say, hey, did you talk to that candidate? I'm like, oh crap, I forgot right. Or remind me again who that person was or what his skill set was or what we said about him. And did Leo take notes about him? We're hunting all the time for that right. So, even if we didn't build anything else, but we just have this information in one place in a way that's manageable by a small team that's, you know, typically in the business of recruiting and not focused on coding. Obviously I think that's a huge win. I can see it already. You know we don't want a big bulky system that can do everything, because configuring it is really where the you know where the challenge is right. So we want something that we can.
Speaker 1:You know, I think scalers maybe you know my opinion should be like maybe two or three systems, depending on the size of company we're pushing to and I can almost see a voice of an interface for Scaleless where it says be prompt based or even voice prompts, and allowing a total, totally different like way of interaction between the, you know, the, the user and the actual software itself. Yeah, so I got one last question for you here before we wrap things up. But you know, in an ideal state for scaleless two, three, four years down the road, you know what, what do you, what do you see what? What is your sort of longterm vision of what you think this could turn into and why you're so excited about what that end result is?
Speaker 2:I think, if done right, this can be a framework and we let people build things so they customize their experience with it. So we're not building like, hey, here's the application we think we want you to use. We're saying we're hosting the tech to solve this problem, but you can use your widgets, you can use your framework. You just connect to us and we will do the kind of the engineering behind the scenes to make it possible for you. But we solve the problems that you don't want to solve, right. And so right now, essentially, this is a matching problem. Right, we're matching one set of criteria, the job description, right to the right candidate.
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously, there's enough to do in just trying to solve that problem. Right, know, take advantage of all the ai, um, but maybe we can do both. I mean, maybe we can sort of move, move on both fronts, um, and make this a modular system. I mean facebook, you know, farmville is a big example of, like, how people work with facebook and they were building plugins for facebook, um, I think. I think there's room for that sort of thing if you see it as like a marketplace of matches, right, uh, could we do a farmer's market, right, where somebody has agriculture produced and we're matching right. It's that kind of problem, right. So I don't know that we'd limit ourselves to jobs and resumes.
Speaker 2:But we could certainly stay there and still make a killing.
Speaker 1:I honestly think our biggest challenge is going to be deciding where to go and where not to go, because HR in general is just a ginormous space, whether it's payroll compliance, onboarding, benefits, hiring, recruiting, et cetera, et cetera. There's literally so many different components of it. But being able to have a long-term vision of how the product can grow while also not, you know, distracting ourselves from the core you know vision and also the core value prop, and I agree with you. I feel like you know, in three years we'll probably be very close to like achieving what that end state looks like for for us of just a solving the matching component, because there's so much that is going in to this and so much, you know, room for improvement, given the current state of the market where, you know, I'd be as blunt as saying it's a complete shit show on either end of the equation.
Speaker 1:If you're hiring or if you're looking for a job, it's basically a spray and pray volume at all costs approach to trying to get job placements, and if we can just crack that one problem, then you can layer in other things that maybe aren't even best in class, but you go for that all-in-one approach, which is something you see with a business like a HubSpot, that all-in-one approach, which is something you see with a business like a HubSpot. But I'm a big believer in building for SMBs, mid-market and ease of use and then growing up into enterprise. I've never really seen it done the other way, where you have an enterprise company and they start working their way down market.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thankfully for us, right, Because that's not our competition, right, really in some sense. No, no, I think building for a diversity of customers, right, is really what it's all about. And you know, facebook Meta realizes this and I think they've hired differently. They've, you know, they're innovating differently. They're certainly opening up shop in different countries because they want people from all around the world to participate in the development process that makes a major product right. So, yeah, I mean, like you said, in three years we may be close to solving or at least leveraging, you know, the tech that's in place at that point to really produce a decent solution. Right, because I don't know that we're inventing anything here. We should be engineering it.
Speaker 2:So the physics would lead to people doing the AI, but the actual engineering and producing products that people could touch and use and find genuinely useful, that's our mission.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, it's going to be an exciting rest of the year and I'm looking forward to getting to work closely with you, and I'm also very excited for our retreat in Brazil. I think you know doing those quarterly or biannually and being able to get the full team together. It's quite a sizable team already. I mean. I think there's going to be about 15 of us down in Brazil in May. I think those sort of team bonding moments are critical, especially when you are, you know, that hybrid or remote workforce. It's going to be just fun, aside from just the business value and benefits of it. I think it's going to be a really great time in terms of getting to hang out with the team, get to know each other on a more personal level than just on a Zoom screen. Right, right.
Speaker 2:No, no, absolutely. It's funny. I always wanted to work in Brazil. I remember like 20 years ago applying to a job in Curitiba and I didn't get it. I was pretty bummed then. Then I got caught up in other things, but I always had Brazil in my mind. I used to do the tech for a publication here called Latin Trade and they were basically like scouring markets and all South American, publishing articles about trends and stuff. I remember talking to Mike, the guy who was the editor there, and which country in South America should I go to? It should be Argentina, right, because everybody was all about Argentina.
Speaker 2:He said no, no, no, go to Brazil first. Right, Go check it out. So looking forward to that.
Speaker 1:I'm looking forward to the food as well. I love eating, so it'll be a good time to try a new cuisine. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Usually, I ask people at the end of the show where they can find you online, but everybody can find both of us online at the same place, so thank you again for coming on For everybody listening, as always. This is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom or Scalistai, and stay tuned for a bunch of exciting announcements and updates over the you know the coming months.