Paul Davenport:
Hello and welcome to What the Tech?, from Boast AI, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world.
Today, I'm thrilled to welcome onto the show, Sean Languedoc, founder and CEO of outforce.ai. Formerly known as Global Talent Accelerator, Outforce transforms outsourcing from a daunting task to a strategic asset to accelerate delivery for venture-backed companies.
Outforce filters out all the noise and quickly matches clients with the best suited engineering agencies, filtering down to agencies that can not just deliver, but also seamlessly blend with existing company culture. Sean's team at Outforce have a database of over 77,000 software agencies, from next door to offshore. They quickly get to the top 10 and do deeper due diligence from there so clients don't waste any time talking to any companies that aren't fit. Their unique approach has a remarkable 98% hit rate, enabling tech companies to ramp up their engineering capacity swiftly and confidently without a dent in quality, cost or time.
But this is just one pillar of Sean's story, as he's spent more than 25 years immersed in the tech space and has built four companies, from idea to thriving enterprises. He continues to immerse himself in the startup ecosystem as a mentor, guiding budding entrepreneurs through the complex landscape, and providing them with the resources and network to thrive. Can't wait to learn more about his experience to date, advice for founders today, and his plans for the future. So, without further ado, welcome to the show, Sean.
Sean Languedoc:
Thank you very much, Paul. Nice to be here.
Paul Davenport:
I am so happy to have you and I hope you forgive me for maybe butchering your last name at the top there, but I'm so glad that we can chat today, Sean.
Sean Languedoc:
Actually, for a Bostonian, that was an awesome accent.
Paul Davenport:
I was going to say, I warned you at the top, my accent is hard to crack sometimes, so I'm glad that I could roll with it. That is great news for a Friday. So, diving right in, Sean, for starters, tell me a bit about yourself. Where are you based and why, and how did you get into the startup space to begin with?
Sean Languedoc:
I've been in startups for about 40 years, so that puts an age on me, basically straight into university, but not all tech. And I've been in a whole variety of industries. I really look at any business more from the business that needs a solution perspective and then tech enable that solution, as opposed to build a tech and hopefully find a customer.
And yeah, so some of them have not been tech companies. You talked about four thriving enterprises. They all thrived at one point. My line is, I built four tech companies, or led four tech companies, as the case may be. They all went south, two of them went to the States. So that gives you a hint on the other. So I got a couple hits, a couple misses, and this is the fifth. So yeah, that's where I'm at. And I'm in Quebec City in Canada. I lived out in BC, in Vancouver, Whistler area for most of my adulthood, and move to Quebec for love.
Paul Davenport:
Oh, lovely. I'm so happy to hear it. I am a big fan of Quebec. Again, as a native New Englander, it's probably the part of Canada I'm most familiar with. So, happy to be speaking to somebody who knows a little bit about my turf and I know a little bit about theirs, but diving into it, too. Now, for startups before you got to Outforce. Outforce is in the outsourcing and just not traditionally staffing, but getting startups partnered with agencies that have the engineers that are the best fit for them. Now, how did you get into this industry? Was that kind of what you were working on at the previous companies that you had founded or is this a whole new kind of diving into this new venture without experience in the space necessarily to date?
Sean Languedoc:
Yeah, as usual, it was without experience in the industry prior, but saw a problem. So, in this case, if I want to go way back, I started in Calgary. I was brought in as an EIR, entrepreneur in residence, for a family office and built a company there, basically Uber meets oil field trucking.
And while I was doing that, I noticed Calgary had a fantastic ecosystem ripe for... Or environment, ripe for startups, but had no real startup community, mainly because the oil industry paid people so much, no one would want to eat craft dinner when they get paid 150 grand. So, it sort of sucked a lot of the entrepreneurial engineers out of the market. And when the oil industry crashed, it was kind of left adrift, and I worked with a lot of people to try and rebuild that ecosystem into something that worked together.
And during that time, your president changed to Trump, which had an adverse relationship with immigration. And I knew that just from experience in tech, that some of the best engineers in the world come from the Middle East because of the maths and sciences education back there, and they would feel a little uncomfortable not being able to go home and come back to the United States.
So, I pulled some people down into the United States to check out Facebook, Google and those, 'cause we had a lot of reservoir engineers, which are really good at math, and you could plug some of those senior people into Canada, put an engineering team around them that knew maths, and away you go, you had a remote office. That was just for fun to help Calgary get a little base hits. And we got a few from Apple, Google and the likes.
And then the next thing was the H-1Bs, which is really targeting tech services companies, mostly Indian. If your H-1B was expiring, usually you would be able to get a pretty much automated renewal until you get to the green card status. But the US has an immigration policy that's based on quotas by country, and with most of the H-1Bs being Indian, that wait list is 10, 20 years in some cases.
So here you have people who have been in the country for 18 years working in technology, maybe even built their own companies, kids growing up in the country, and, "Oh, this year you're expiring, go home."
And so that started the sponsoring the visa of high-end engineers whose visa were expiring, bring them to Canada, sponsoring their visa with our really effective and fast work permit system for tech workers. Within two weeks, we could get a work permit, and I would contract those people right back to the US.
All of a sudden, I was in the recruiting business. And then people in Canada started asking me for, "Hey, you got all these engineers coming in, can you get me some?" And then it turned it into an international recruiting business.
And that worked really well for a while, and then all of a sudden, we had this little disease called COVID that wiped out anybody moving anywhere, so I had to pivot, and that's how this started. Basically, I looked at what I was going to do, and obviously remote was going to be okay. In fact, better than ever.
And honestly, moving people into the country and sponsoring their visa and getting them a job and all that stuff, it's a tough business, 'cause it's one and done and you start your business all over again, whereas recurring revenue in the contracting business is much more attractive.
So, the pivot was to look at something that I'd suffered from every time I started a company. You grow to a certain point and either you've got to build something for a trade show or build a front end for a big enterprise customer, or whatever the case is.
At one point, you need some non-core engineering work or additional at capacity that you don't have faster than you could ever do it. So you look at outsourcing. And when you're outsourcing, it's the opposite problem of hiring an engineer. When you're hiring a really senior good engineer that's a perfect fit your company, it's very slim pickings. There are oasises somewhere, some places, but not very good.
When you're looking at outsourcing, it's like water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. So, what we decided to do was leverage our understanding of international markets and then use that to start as a starting point to figure out who's good at what, in what outsourcing capacity, in what countries, and start to build a database from the bottom up, and so that we could provide that filter against all the noise that is what's hitting your inbox every day and nobody ever trusts. Right?
Paul Davenport:
Yeah.
Sean Languedoc:
So that's how it started.
Paul Davenport:
Sean, that's-
Sean Languedoc:
Long story. Sorry about that.
Paul Davenport:
It's a good story though. I'm actually, no, I'm going to call back to a few points there. First off, the timeline I could follow so closely, just because I'm like, "Oh, yep, this major world event or this major life event, it changed my career trajectory at the same time, too."
But that first point you made about it not necessarily being about tech, but it is about providing a solution, solving an actual acute problem. So, I find the founders who we have the best conversations with, at least on these shows, are the ones who aren't just trying to look at it differently. They're not looking at like, "Hey, I have this cool tech, let's find somebody who will use it. Please use it."
It's the ones who are thinking about the problem first and the solution that they can provide, and then modifying their approach from there, whether it is driving unique innovation, something that would be SR&ED qualifiable, or it's literally just melding together some pieces of other innovations to get that solution in place. It's about solving the problem, not just making something cool and shiny. So I love that. I think that's fantastic.
Breaks my heart, but I totally understand how the United States does not make it easy for a lot of workers in general. You called back to our former president, wasn't a great time in my world, at least when that had happened. But to your point about H-1B and just kind of the very, very unfriendly to immigrant environment that came about over that period, too, that's where I feel like Canada was really able to kind of capitalize on what was a very friendly environment.
And I'm thinking about it even beyond just migration and even beyond immigration, in my time here at Boast, learning about just how the government really funds new companies, funds immigration into the country, funds startups in the similar ilk to yours that are trying to get people over to Canada to help drive innovation here, but also again, just put some money in their pockets.
That's something that is so foreign to me as an American. We do have our R&D tax credits over here. We do have, I think state by state, some really good funding programs, but at the federal level, nothing that even comes close to the SR&ED program from the CRA or any of the, even just my tax, partnering with companies and individuals coming right out of school.
So personally, I'm learning so much about Canada and it's been very impressive, and I love talking with founders, again, who have taken what's on offer here and made the most out of it. I'd love to know, how has it been going? What are some of the bona fides, since we've gotten to kind of the end of your story of how Outforce came to be, but now that you guys are actually out here today, again, those 77,000 agencies, what's it look like over the past year or so and what are your plans going forward?
Sean Languedoc:
Ah, interesting question. Well, I can answer that from a variety of perspectives, and let me know if you want to switch gears on which perspective. But I guess from a market perspective, the biggest challenge for a company like ours is not sounding like a recruiter or a dev shop when you go out in a outbound, because even an accountant is getting 10 emails a day and LinkedIn requests from dev shops, add along AI and generated emails. My gosh, it's just insane.
You can imagine what it's like when you're the CTO of a recently venture-backed announcement, you're just like ambulance chasing. So I feel I pity those guys, and that's exactly how I feel. That's why I want to do this so that there are good companies out there, really good at specifically one thing or two things. We extract that in our questioning of those companies, in our first level due diligence.
We don't ask like, "Hey, can you do this?" Which is what most people do when they're asking an outsourced agency, "Can you do this?" Of course they're going to say yes. So, "I represent American and Canadian companies that are looking to outsource, if I brought you the perfect client, what business would it be in?" That's a very different question.
And they will immediately jump to what they have the most domain knowledge on. And domain knowledge is really critical for onboarding for anybody who's going to outsource, because table stakes is they've got good engineers, and hopefully they do, but if they don't know your business, you spend a lot of time teaching them the business logic and user experience, which can really slow down your onboarding until they're ramped up. So that's stake one.
And then stake two, obviously, is how deep is their bench in various tech stacks? So you can measure up if my client needs to expand from say 3 to 15, have they got enough bench strength that they can support it and not skip a beat? Or if they want to replace one engineer with another, 'cause maybe on paper they were really good, and in an interview, they were kind of quiet, but you figured you'd give them a try and they're just not vocally strong enough in a scrum to manage the culture of my company, then away we go.
So that's learning number one, is how to make our own way through the noise. And it's really just been through referral more than anything else. We use a lot of VCs to access clients, because it is all about trust. Right? Because there's no trust in that marketplace, there's just too much noise, you got to go to who somebody's referred you to.
The second is really interesting geographic patterns and what's happened with the war in Ukraine, what the impact on that was and pricing in markets, what the impact of the cutback in funding has happened on other markets.
So, two things. The war basically wiped out 250,000 contractors on both sides of the border. Belorussian, Russian, Ukrainian. You can't do business with Russia or Belorussian anymore in Canada and the United States, and Ukrainians were tucked down.
Now, fortunately, a lot of them have relocated into other Eastern European markets and set up shop, more or less, Western Ukraine. But we had a situation where there was literally a standup on video and the building got hit. Talk about bringing it home, how traumatic that is for everybody, especially those people there. Fortunately, no one was killed, but broken limbs and just the trauma of that event for everybody who knew everybody else is pretty devastating.
And similarly, as you know, as everyone's going on, Israel and Gaza. So that impact, by the way, really ramped up pricing in Eastern Europe because all the adjacent countries became super popular, [inaudible 00:15:25] having already been there. And so people started to move a little bit further into the home cut hemisphere, it was sort of headed south.
And so prices went up there and then the market crashed for funding, and everybody started to look at, "How do I extend my runway but still have engineers?" And they started to hire like crazy in Brazil and Argentina and the usual suspects, and that pricing has gone up a bit, too. So that's kind of what I've seen.
Paul Davenport:
Again, it's really funny. Well, it's not funny at all, but it's really interesting to see how nothing that's happening on the other side of the globe isn't going to come back around to home, even if you're thinking... And I think, sure, you think about your teams at your own company too, and I'm talking to folks in Canada daily, but also on the other side of the globe.
And it's very easy to get complacent when you're sitting in that position, but hearing a story like you just shared, that really drives home how important that cultural fit is too, because I don't really notice that. Again, like Elana on our team, other side of the globe, I talk to her very regularly. I consider her my like neighbor or like she's at desk Canada at this point.
And I think it would be very difficult if we just went for somebody in that realm who just wasn't necessarily a cultural fit, but they did check some boxes. If there wasn't that first layer of due diligence that you were explaining about, "What industry do you want to work in? What actual products do you want to work on? What actual solutions do you want to drive?"
So I think that really hits home on the differentiators that outforce.ai has compared to, like you had said, your standard recruiters who are going to be spamming more or less, for lack of a better word, those CFOs and CTOs getting into their inboxes.
Now, I had said in the previous kind of chat, it's not always about the shiny tech and it's not always about the deep, deep innovation if you're just getting to the heart of the problem. But what is some of the innovation that is built in here? I think that differentiator around the due diligence that you do to make sure that these agencies and these engineering offices are the best fit. And that they're coming from markets that make sense for the companies that want to partner with them, based on politics, geopolitics, or even just, again, cultural fit. What's some of the unique R&D that's gone into outforced.ai?
Sean Languedoc:
So yeah, first cut of due diligence, we do not have, just to be clear, deep dive due diligence on every one of those 77,000 companies, of course not. But we do do deeper dives when we get closer to the finalists based on our client's preferences, and most importantly based on who's available at the time that we're asking. So it's the typical motion for somebody going for, they suddenly go, "Hey, we got to get this product ready for the show. We got to bring in some hardcore engineers. Let's go find an outsourcing agent."
So, first thing I do is, "Paul, do you know anybody? Right? Well, Paul, you may know somebody from Healthtech 'cause that's your background. Mine is Fintech and I'm looking for..." So that's a dud. Or, even if they are Fintech, they might not have anybody available. That's the key part. Right? So then you go online and you look online.
So nobody really has the time to go through all the data points that you need to figure out who's good and then have a good process of actually filtering them out. So that's where we try and take over for everybody. And what we've really leveraged the powers of AI, and like I said, we're not an AI company, we're enabled, the ability to send out as many requests as possible based on the first cut criteria to as many of the agencies that on paper make sense.
And then really to figure out, who in their organization is available that week or in the next two weeks to do this job? And then assessing those and really almost commoditizing those resumes into a numeric account. So we give them basically a Moneyball report. And whenever you're doing this, you're not really looking... If you're looking for just one person, you may as well just go Upwork or something like that. But if you're looking for a team, we're B2B, and then we figure out who's got the best teams available at the time.
And so that is really a mix of who's on that team and what their skills are. And obviously, communication skills are key, but even more important, how that company works culturally with its engineers and how they mix with your culture as engineers. Right? So those are our differentiators, I guess, in how we assess.
Paul Davenport:
I love that. Now, you had mentioned earlier, too, that you do partner with VCs in the community, and probably folks across industries. Could you talk to me a little bit about how you maybe scope out partners that would be the best fit for outforce.AI, or just how you even work with customers to make sure that you're partnering them with the right partners for their needs? It goes a little bit into, I think, that qualifying that you were discussing in that last response. But especially with the VC community, I think our listeners would be interested in knowing just what those relationships look like and how you navigate them.
Sean Languedoc:
Yeah, a good question, great question. So, at first, I have a good network of VCs 'cause I've been in the business for a while and have got some venture capital in my past. I'm also a member of an organization called the C100, which is a great organization, mostly of expats down south of the border and mostly huddled around California, who help Canadian companies figure out what to do in the Valley and how to talk to VCs.
So I'm a big, in terms of go-to-market strategy, I'm always a channel-focused person, so affiliate partners, venture capital, PE. 'Cause in my case, it's the venture capital company that's given the check to the company saying, "Go grow fast." Especially now, because it's go-to-market strategies that are key. Your technology can be duplicated pretty fast, so you got to build that tech fast to get out there if your products not ready or you need to add products.
So, that's why I go to VCs. They're the ones who are motivated. Now, my biggest learning in the whole VC community is that they, yes, A16Z and Sequoia and all these guys have brands, but really, they're more like a real estate brokerage house, in that they are each partners in a firm and they're really only fighting for their portfolio co. Right?
The greater sense of the whole, of course, adds to the value of what they're selling, that they've got a talent acquisition person, they've got all these other things. But I've gone to so many VCs where one partner's been a great partner and I think, "Oh, this is great. They're going to tell everybody and I can go to the Monday morning meeting and tell everybody, and everyone's going to do this." Not a chance.
Some VCs, some individuals, or even in the VC culture, they just are hands-off, "You guys do what you need to do." And that's their sell pitch, "We're not going to get involved in your business, we're not going to tell you what to do." And VCs are competing for the deals. Right?
So, notwithstanding everybody as an entrepreneur thinks that you're pitching to a VC, the partner then has to pitch against his partners for use of that fund. Right? So they're pitching you in their own meetings and maybe getting rejected by the rest of the partners. So, it's a really little seesaw between selling and buying.
And as a result, some VCs advocate that, "I'm not going to get anywhere. I'm just going to give you money and connect you to whatever you want. More importantly, if you are in my fund and you're one of my portfolio companies, I'm not going to tell you anything unless I guarantee it's going to work."
So they are hugely risk-averse in making recommendations, unless it's been proven multiple points within the portfolio companies of the VC itself. So I'm taking get lucky with a few of the partners and get the word spread out, but prove by execution from the bottom-up. So I'll look at a portfolio company, the portfolio, see who hires the most engineers that they need, and then try and work on that portfolio company before going upstream to the VC itself. And that's been successful.
Paul Davenport:
Sean, I feel like something clicked when you said, "View them as a brokerage." That really probably should have clicked a long time ago for me, but I think that's such a great point and something that maybe founders themselves aren't thinking about when they're trying to partner with that brand. Like you were saying, there's the big ones, there's the huge established ones, but even I think that is advice that you should consider when you're looking at to accelerators, when you're looking at incubators, the individuals going to be partnering with who will really kind of get in there and fight for you on your behalf.
It's about those individuals, it's about those partnerships, and it's about just, again, having that understanding of your network, too. Where are you going to reach out to get value for someone in this industry, or somebody with this goal, or somebody with this timeline for the project that they need to get off the ground? So that's really, really interesting, and thank you for bringing up that point, Sean.
I know we're coming up on time, but I'd love to ask, what are some parting words or advice you'd love to share with founders who are looking to start up today in 2024 with all the market headwinds that we hear about daily when we're reading our headlines, what is your advice as a founder who's been through it?
Sean Languedoc:
Well, number one is that the headwinds are starting to get a little bit softer. Things are starting to move in the Valley, which will have a ripple effect eventually. Number two, is it's great that we're back to business fundamentals. A path towards profitability makes tons of sense, as opposed to growth at any cost. WeWork is a great example of how that can happen even to the biggest companies.
But going back to the VCs, look at who in the partnership has personally invested, who is managing that portfolio that is most likely to want to invest in you. It's not going to be one that is the same in your business, but has a complimentary that might be a nice clamp into the rest of his or her portfolio.
And number four is really, if you are looking at outsourcing, you should do it with caution. And whether you use our service or not, I have a playbook that I would love to share with your audience, which if you have show notes, I'll put it in the show notes, but it's also on our website, outforce.ai, where it is the exact playbook.
I would rather everybody be successful than to have to use our service to go be successful. There's still a lot of heavy lifting to do in that process, but it's all the secret questions to ask, all the things to look out for in interviewing, how to interview these outsourcing agencies to get rid of the BS and avoid the mistakes that a lot of people make. So, I'm happy to give... People say I should sell it. It's too important. It has to go out for free. And there you go.
Paul Davenport:
Absolutely, Sean, I will make sure that is in the show notes. And I'll just repeat it again, folks. Outforce.ai. Again, check the show notes for that playbook. I think that's going to be invaluable. Sean, everything you shared here has been invaluable. I cannot thank you enough for hopping on the show today. And listeners, again, visit outforce.AI, and stay tuned for more interviews with [inaudible 00:27:15].