Seed to Exit
Welcome to Seed to Exit, the ultimate podcast all about startups, scaling, and venture capital. Your host is Riece Keck: Startup veteran and recruitment entrepreneur.
Join us as we dive into the journeys of startup founders and venture capitalists who share their insights, successes, and lessons learned from seed stage to successful exit.
Each episode, we bring you candid conversations with startup founders, executives, and investors. Whether you're looking for inspiration, actionable advice, or a deeper understanding of the startup ecosystem, Seed to Exit offers invaluable knowledge and real-world experiences to help you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Tune in to Seed to Exit and get ready to be inspired, educated, and connected with the exciting and ever-changing world of startups and venture capital.
Seed to Exit
Tushar Makhija, Founder and CEO of TeamOhana | Transforming Workforce Management | The Strategic Role of AI in Financial Planning Systems
Ever wondered how to turn a spreadsheet nightmare into a seamless workforce management dream? Tushar Makhija, the founder and CEO of Team Ohana, reveals how he transformed the chaotic world of people spend management into an innovative and collaborative platform. Discover the unique journey behind Team Ohana's creation, as Tushar uncovers the potential pitfalls of relying solely on traditional HR systems and the groundbreaking solutions his company offers to address these challenges.
The conversation takes a deep dive into the intricacies of integrating disparate HR and financial systems, like Workday and Greenhouse, and how misalignment can hinder proactive decision-making. Tushar explains the importance of real-time insights and strategic alignment between operational systems and financial models in today’s fast-paced business environment. Team Ohana emerges as a critical decision-making hub, offering not just a platform but a total transformation into an agile workforce and financial planning system that prioritizes efficient, profitable growth.
As we navigate the complexities of scaling a software company in a cautious market, Tushar shares valuable lessons on the art of engaging CFOs and the strategic use of AI to enhance decision-making processes. From stealth mode beginnings to a rapidly growing enterprise, learn how Team Ohana leveraged augmented intelligence to create a dynamic organizational planning tool that not only predicts hiring timelines but also shapes the future of workforce management. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone looking to harness AI and innovation to drive business success.
All Links: linktr.ee/startup_recruiting
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/riecekeck/
Twitter/X: x.com/tech_headhunter
Recruitment: www.mindhire.ai
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@seedtoexitpod
During the 2019 to 2021 time period, I got to interact with a lot of CFOs and it's a very natural question hey, what more can we do for you? What should we be building? What are you interested in? Time and again, every CFO came back and said Dushar, you're only managing 10-15% of my spend today. That's what accounts payable is right. It's vendors, it's software, it's reimbursements, it's salespeople travel expenses great, but a large percentage of my spend is actually people. Who is doing people spend management?
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Seed to Exit. In this episode, I interviewed Tushar Makhija, the founder and CEO of Team Ohana. Team Ohana is a high-growth HR tech startup that's solving a pressing HR issue in enterprise companies. Prior to founding Team Ohana, he was a founding go-to-market hire at HelpShift as their VP of Revenue and also as the VP of Sales and Customer Success at Airbase. So in this episode, I'm talking to Tushar, both about his expertise in go-to-market as well as the people function. I really enjoyed the conversation and I hope you will too.
Speaker 3:You're listening to the Seed to Exit podcast with your host, rhys Keck. Here you'll learn from startup executives, founders, investors and industry experts. You'll learn from the best about building amazing products, scaling companies, raising capital, hiring the right people and more. Subscribe and listen in for new episodes and enjoy the show.
Speaker 2:Tushar, welcome on, excited to have you, Excited to be here. Thank you for having me Absolutely Well. I'm really excited to talk to you because the problem that you're solving over at Team Ohana is near and dear to my heart, considering some of the stuff I've been dealing in talent acquisition but it is a very at least your original plan was a fairly niche problem that you were solving. So, for those who are not coming from a finance or talent acquisition background, could you describe the problem that you're solving over at Team Ohana and, ultimately, what the problem is?
Speaker 1:the problem that you're solving over at Team Ohana and, ultimately, what the problem is. Thanks for having me and thanks for asking that question. So, at the core of every successful organization, you are saying whether you are in the early stages or the late stages, you're saying we need to spend money to grow, and growth means it translates into ARR, it translates into revenue. But at the core of it, in order to sell more software, you need to hire more engineers. So you've got to build, then you have to productize, and then you've got to market, and then you've got to sell at every space and then you have to manage and maintain. All of these are people-driven functions. So you cannot really achieve your company's revenue goals till you achieve your company's hiring goals. And when I talk about hiring, I talk about both the elements. You want to bring in new talent, you want to retain your existing talent and also talent, and your company's workforce is your company's largest expense. Nearly 70% of your operating expense is tied to people and it's not a one-time expense, it's a flow of expenses. When you hire someone, you expect them to be with the company for 12, 24 months, right? So when we started looking at every company, every company is trying to grow, every company is trying to manage their workforce. But when we ask this fundamental question that what is the source of truth of your company's headcount or your company's headcount plan, which is about future, and the answer was a spreadsheet. And I was like, okay, this is your largest expense. There is so much riding on this and we saw it play out in the market. Right, if you overhired, you ran out of money. You shut down as a company. If you underhired, you did not grow at the right time, oh, you're shutting down as a company. That means your survival and your success is all tied to your people. And when we lead with that question and say, why are you managing your people or your headcount in a spreadsheet? The answer is well, I don't know how else would you do it.
Speaker 1:So there has been decades of companies trying to do this in a manual way, using spreadsheets, cobbling together different data sources, and when they look at our application, when they look at what we are building, they think of us as that all right, now I have this one place which has all my data, it has all the right permissioning, it is collaborative and I can come in and I can do all the decisions that I need to take around my company's workforce. So we started with headcount planning, which was, yes, true niche, but we have expanded into what we call plan hire, promote, retain, retire the entire life cycle. Who I want to hire, when I want to hire? How I should compensate, who will they report into? Which location should we hire? Who gets a merit increase, who gets a promotion? Who gets a bonus? Who gets to stay, who gets to be let go, who needs to be backfilled, who does not?
Speaker 1:These are all people decisions and from an outside in you may say why can't Workday do this? Workday is the record keeper of all these decisions. If you ask any company today where these decisions are actually being made, they are being made in hallways, in Slack channels, in Google Sheets, and then, once the decision has been made, it gets recorded in what I call the system of record. So that was the opportunity that we saw. Three years back. We started with headcount planning, we now have launched a compensation planning product and next year we are launching our organizational planning product and that's what I call becomes your workforce operating system. So we are your company's WAS right.
Speaker 2:I haven't heard that acronym, but I like it.
Speaker 1:I'm using it for the first time. So it is for you users and listeners, for whoever's listening.
Speaker 2:All right, let's make this a thing. I'm curious when you say you realized this three years ago. How did that realization come about?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'm not a finance person, I'm not a talent person, I'm not an HR person, I'm a product person. I'm an engineer by training and I have had this unique opportunity to morph my career into going from code engineering sitting down on a computer writing code, to being on the product side of things, building new products and then getting on the sales side of things building new products and then getting on the sales side, actually taking those products to market and generating revenue right. So that has been my journey and in 2019, I joined a company called Airbiz. They recently announced that they got acquired by Paylocity. Congratulations to all my friends there.
Speaker 1:I was there for two years and when I spoke with the CEO, it was so beautiful how he explained that said, hey, people's companies spend a lot of money and they spend money on vendors, corporate cards, reimbursements, and all of this is happening in different systems. Airbase is going to bring all of this together and we are going to do spend management. I'm like great, why has nobody thought about this? Right? Great run at the company I joined, like. In the seed stage I left at CDsB. The company went from a $30 million valuation to a $600 million valuation and when I, we were selling directly to CFO.
Speaker 1:So during the 2019 to 2021 time period, I got to interact with a lot of CFOs. And when I it time period, I got to interact with a lot of CFOs and it's a very natural question hey, what more can we do for you? What should we be building? What are you interested in? Time and again, every CFO came back and said Dushar, you're only managing 10, 15% of my spend today. That's what accounts payable is right, it's vendors, it's software software, it's reimbursements, it's sales, people, travel expenses great, but a large percentage of my spend is actually people. Who is doing people spend management? And you know what?
Speaker 1:At the beginning of it, I saw that, hey, we are not going to do people spend management, we are. We are different. So, great, awesome, let's write this down, let's nod, let's smile so that the CFO thinks I'm listening to them. But when you keep hearing it again and again and if you have some semblance of what it's, the market is literally telling you that there is a need for something, and all I did was, you know, slow down and started asking the next 10 questions around, and started asking the next 10 questions around how are you doing it today. Why don't you have a system? Well, you just spend a million dollars to install Workday. What the hell are you doing there? Don't you have a planning system? You're a CFO, you have adaptive planning or Anaplan. That's another million dollars and they're like yeah, I'm $2 million in, but it's still not working.
Speaker 1:And I was like, okay, why is it not working? And it really helped us come to this point, which was like, hey, even though this is a spend management problem, at the crux of it it is a data problem. Imagine this Workday is the source of truth of all the existing employees, existing employees, people. If someone is changing a department, if someone is leaving, if someone is getting promoted, all these actions around that people are recorded in Workday. So if you want to know how many people are button seat, who they are, that all information is in Workday, then there is an applicant tracking system, right Like a greenhouse, which has all the information of the jobs that you are hiring for right now. It gives you a clear idea that in the next three to six months, who are the people that you expect to bring on, what are their titles, which departments are they going to report into and how much expected salary do you want to give the range right Now, we all have to publish that.
Speaker 2:And even then not to interrupt. But even then, that's only the roles you're actively working on. It's not the stuff that's in.
Speaker 1:Exactly. There is this whole idea behind, which is only sitting in a financial model somewhere what am I allowed to hire? What have you already budgeted for? So there was a complete because of these data this being disconnected that the financial model has information about total approved headcount, starting and ending, based on every department. They run the numbers and they want to stick to those numbers. They have also run the numbers of how much money you should be spending, but that's the operational plan. The operational execution is happening in Workday and Greenhouse and, at any given point in time, because those two systems don't talk to back to the model at a regular interval, finance is now only looking at backward-looking data. So instead of looking at leading indicators, they're looking at lagging indicators of what has already happened.
Speaker 1:Now, fast forward, going back four years. It was not a big problem because I know where my next check is going to come from. I just have to go hopping from one VC office to the other and someone's going to get me a check. So this problem really became exaggerated post-COVID, post-2021, early 2022, after SVB came down like okay, look, we've raised all this money, we need to grow, but we need to now grow efficiently. What does that even mean All publications Wall Street Journal, techcrunch wrote about efficient growth, profitable growth. I'm asking this question what, how? Tell me how you're going to get there. What do you need to change in your operations? You don't need to throw away Workday. You don't need to throw away Greenhouse. What you now need is a new system of execution, system of decision-making that becomes the hub where you come together, you collaborate. It has all the right information, sucking in information in real time, and it's giving you these insights on how you should hire, how you should promote, what you should do with these people, so that you can answer or you can deliver on three things. First, you're delivering on your company's goals. I want to hire the right people, I want to promote the right people. I want to retain the right people.
Speaker 1:Second, you're looking at it from a budgetary angle. This was never. Before Timoana, this was not happening at all. Someone gets hired, someone shows up at the door, then payroll gets updated, then finance is notified Like, look, I just hired someone for 200K and finance is like sorry, how the hell did you hire this person in Q2? I now I'm holding the bag of three extra month of spend. Where is this money going to come from.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, if sales is supposed to hit some revenue targets and hiring is going slow and you only get to know about this at the end of the quarter finances, like okay, now I have extra dollars left, I could have given it to marketing. So it becomes a capital allocation problem, right? So when you think about all of these things together, spend management for people is really tied to your revenue. And because I came from Airbase, I was just uniquely opportunistic, right place, right time, because I never attacked this problem from an HR angle. That is very, that was very like well, they can do that.
Speaker 1:I can look at a nice org chart. I can look at span of control. I can look at gender, ethnicity. All of that is important, but that is not tied to revenue. If your diversity metrics are off, you have to go fix them to become a better company, but it doesn't really translate into revenue. And when we got into the new world of efficient growth, profitable growth, not grow at all costs T-Mohana just became a very important piece of the financial and people infrastructure that companies wanted to adopt. So Docker is a customer, postman is a customer, right, seedgeek is a customer. There are a few companies who have raised a lot of money, but I'm not going to say their names. Are customers, so it's now a thing.
Speaker 2:I love that and so it seems so obvious when you say it. But were there any solutions before this, or are you essentially first to market on this?
Speaker 1:From a first principles basis, trying to think about headcount spend management and having the vision of building this workforce OS we are the first to market. People have tried to do this in isolation and there are so many compensation planning tools out there. But imagine compensation is once or twice a year. You are giving people merit raises. You're giving people bonuses. It doesn't tie to the agile nature of the business. Right, with Team Ohana, you can start with a budget which says this is what I need to spend Great. Hey, vp of engineering, you want to hire new people Same bucket. You want to promote existing people Same bucket and one system of workflow. So Team Ohana allows you to do this. I'm the VP of engineering. I look at my total budget and I say you know what? I have this $10 million, but I need to retain my existing staff. They are more important to me. Instead of giving the 5% raises, I'll give people 10% raises and the money that is left over from that.
Speaker 1:I'm going to augment and hire new people. Some people may say well, I don't care about attrition, right, I just want to hire new people so I can let go of the others. Finance is happy. All the people who need to make people decisions are happy. Hr is happy because they are getting the full visibility. They are not being told after the fact, and that's how the company's vision should operate. You have to look at workforce holistically. You can't say that this is how I'm hiring, this is how I'm promoting, this is how much money I'll save through attrition. No, it all comes together. Why are you making isolated decisions? And that's what got us into trouble, because every system was siloed and we were just operating in our own world. Right and NetSuite, workday are all systems of record where decisions after they have been made are just gone to record for compliance purposes. So it was already too late by the time the information hit Workday or NetSuite. It was not real time.
Speaker 2:You mentioned earlier that you got the inkling of this when you were talking to various CFOs over at Airbase. So you had the light bulb idea. You founded the company you started building. When did you feel like you'd found product market fit? Like what were those conversations with early customers?
Speaker 1:So you know, we were fortunate that even before we had written a line of code, we had five CFOs who had given us a letter of intent saying if you're able to raise money and if you're able to ever build this software, we will be your design partners. Right, so it's the difference between starting a company at 42 than 22,. Right, so few extra people know you. Right, so that's the benefit. It's just being around too long in this world, right? So we already knew from our vision what we were going and for the first year we just operated in stealth mode and worked with just those five companies. Luckily, those five companies in that one year went from 200 to 400, like someone went from 300 to 1,000. There was hyper growth that was happening in those companies. A couple of companies shut down as well, so we got to understand the full range of what growth looks like, what flatline looks like, what attrition looks like. So that gave us the opportunity to fully understand what is the real market looking like and what are the features that they care about. And we boiled down to three things. First, I need a unified roster of current and future employees. How do I do headcount forecasting? How do I make it accurate? How do I make it real time and not something that is only happening once a quarter, right? The second thing was hiring plan management. If you're a hyper growth company, you really care about the fact that who is coming in, how long it is going to take to hire, how much it is going to cost, and you need constant updating. And good companies were throwing bodies at the problem that there's a talent ops person, there's a rec ops person, there is a fin ops person trying to do this manually, creating a dashboard for a Monday morning exec meeting. But not all companies had that, I would say, resources to do this. So the second thing was okay, let's enable a hiring tracker which is basically a real-time, updated company's headcount plan. And then the third thing that we quickly understood was there is a lot of downstream manual work what we call headcount reconciliation that is done by the talent team, which is finance. Said you could hire a software engineer at level three in this quarter for this price point.
Speaker 1:There has to be a job that is open in greenhouse and opening candidates apply to that opening. One of those candidates gets an offer. The offer needs to be approved A lot of places where things can start breaking down. Hiring can be delayed, hiring can be moved faster. You can up-level a role, down-level a role. At the end of it, what really happens is that once an offer is accepted, someone shows up on the start date and their payroll system gets updated. So now the talent leader or the talent ops and the fin-off person together will come. We had said we wanted to do something. Did we do that or did we do something totally different? What was the budget ID? What was the job ID? What was the employee ID? Three different IDs, all alphanumeric shit that nobody understands. We said we will go and completely automate this, that whatever you're saying you want to hire, we will connect to the right job in Greenhouse.
Speaker 1:When an offer goes out, we will capture those offer and candidate details when the candidate actually joins and becomes an employee and payroll gets updated. We're going to reconcile everything right. So the market was very clear that solve these three problems forecasting, hiring, tracking and reconciliation. That was the first product and we launched the product in October of 2022. And then that was basically. We went from five customers to 35 customers in one year Wow.
Speaker 2:So I'm curious between finance and HR, who does the buck ultimately stop with in terms of responsibility for what you just described?
Speaker 1:You know, this is a challenge that we are still evaluating because every company is slightly different. Now the lazy Tushar wants to go sell to the CFO Hard to impress, but has money in the pocket. It's the person who's going to make the decision, is going to sign the contract. You keep the CFO happy. The company is okay. Right, they will not fire you if you're doing their job, if you're doing your job right.
Speaker 1:The HR team, actually, we believe there is a lot of opportunity for them because HRBPs are hard to find their expenses and all HRBPs are overworked, right. I mean, these are absolute truths. Nobody can sit here and debate both of us on this. Three words, three sentences that I just said. But I think there are some HR leaders like the CHRO of New Zealand. She was one of my first customers, right. She fought with her CFO and said you got to allocate budget to this because you're not giving me new headcount. Right, if you're not giving me new headcount, headcount is 150,000, t-mall is 50. Like, I just still saved you money, but you got to give me something so I can operate and I can scale.
Speaker 1:Like Invoka, another fairly large SaaS company. Their head of finance said I just lost the person who was managing headcount in the spreadsheet and I said you know what? Let's take a guess how much you're paying that person. What if I charge you one third of that person? Would you buy software? Prove it to me in two months, can you do it? We proved it. They've been customer for three years.
Speaker 1:Right, so we had we were what we like from the fact that we are looking for more future minded leaders. They can come from the CFO, they can come from the CHRO. We prefer the CFO because direct line of sight into budget and expenses right and selling headcount spend management resonates better. Because everybody now has been told that do more with less and don't hire new people for support functions like GMA and make sure you don't overrun the budget right. Missing the set budget now or keeping the budget is a no-miss KPI. People can be fired if you break through their budget right. So everyone is very diligent on that and, if you can, when we prove it to them that we help you do this, they're very happy that they found the solution, which costs, as I said, one third of a fully loaded cost of an employee.
Speaker 2:You mentioned. You started or you launched in October of 2022, went from five to 35 really fast. And October of 2022, that is a painful memory for me because that's right when all the layoffs started. That's when Google, apple started jettisoning tens of thousands of employees, and it's right when the purse strings tightened. So the fact that you were able to go from 5 to 35 and in that environment, in such short order is is impressive. Why were you able to do that?
Speaker 1:I? I don't think it's I. I think let me try and answer it from a different angle of how were we able to do that right? I think this has less to do with the idea. It is more to do with company building. And how did we approach the whole strategy behind how we go to market the new world of buying software? There has been like a fundamental difference. People are not buying software because they have fear of missing out. There's no FOMO buying anymore. I mean, definitely not happening in the GNA space between HR and finance. They are doubly cautious or triply cautious because they have full moon fear of messing up.
Speaker 3:They don't want to mess up right.
Speaker 1:So what we did in that first year of actually building the product, being very open and direct to the network of people that we had and telling them so I was not posting on LinkedIn what I'm doing we were operating in stock, but more with direct email, phone, zoom conversations. We were keeping a set of 100 CFOs informed about what we are doing and each of the time that we gave them an update, they came back to us and they gave us feedback and some set some targets for us and say, oh, this is good, but I also want to see that this is good. Set some targets for us and say, oh, this is good, but I also want to see that this is good. I want to see this right and it was. You know, I'm very thankful to the community of CFOs because they were so forthcoming and generous with their feedback, because I was not telling whether you should buy or not. I was just saying, if you have, if 1% of your body feels, if your mind feels this is a problem worthwhile solving, and if you have another 1%, trust that I am someone who you believe is capable of solving this problem, give us your feedback right and when the feedback flywheel starts. They see how feedback is getting implemented, they get more excited. Then comes look what we've done for Docker, look what we've done for Postman, look what we did for Invoka some of our earliest customers Message starts going up, right.
Speaker 1:Then I came from a sales background, so we also had a what I call is blog engine with, like good data interviews right, we had already feeded a lot of content and then we started doing outbound where we said look, customer, real ROI, here is our mindset. Are you interested? So it just. It was not something that happened overnight. We had started putting these building blocks from the very beginning say from October of 2021 to October of 2022, we had already made a plan that every month, what do we want to execute?
Speaker 1:We were a team of 10 smart, dedicated people working close-knit together saying all right, here's what we want to do. Right, and that really helped when we actually went to market and people said show me what you got. And they're like what? This doesn't seem like an MVP and you're already supporting these companies that are doing like at least 100 million ARR plus. They're all you know. I don't know if we should say unicorn is still a good word or a bad word, but you know these are smart people, right? So that really helped us get to you know revenue and accelerated close faster, right? It was all the work that we did in the beginning of the year, right.
Speaker 2:Yep. So set yourself up for success. Set the goal, goal and then just relentless execution until you get relentless execution right.
Speaker 1:I tell people that you know, uh, there is. In order to control your destiny, you must have relentless is also a kinder word, I would say maniacal. Focus is like, basically like my cto. I've known him, for he's my co-founder and cto. He's a. He's a very good friend of mine. He had hired me in his startup right back in 2012, so we've known each other for at least, you know, 12 plus years. And he told me, like tushar, if you have great ideas, you also also have a very good notebook. I'll buy you a nice fountain pen.
Speaker 1:Write it down. You don't have to always come and blurt it out in a meeting. No, that's distraction. Shut up, write it down, unless you have believed that this new information either augments our existing plan or it is so disruptive that you should stop what you're doing and pivot, then open your mouth. And if that is not the case, then let's just have this conversation of hey, here's what I'm hearing. Write it down. Right, be a good CEO and stop distracting us and write shit down. So he forced me to write shit down and he did not deviate from the plan.
Speaker 2:I love that.
Speaker 1:So you know you, really, it's not just the stars have to align, Like some people say. Like I have a great idea, I want to start a company. You know, I think even raising funding is easier right now. What is hard is finding a very good co-founder and a technical co-founder. What is hard is recruiting smart engineers. What is hard is actually building scalable software Because, as I said, fomo the bar is so high that you cannot mess up, because you messing up will lead to the buyer getting in trouble with their boss, who said you fought for this money. I'm not getting ROI, it's your damn fault, right? So the world of software has changed. I remember when HubSpot had just launched and inbound marketing was a thing. That's how old I am. Now there are so many companies and everybody's raising around the funding. When we raised $4 million back in 2021, there were like 100 other companies who had raised more than us.
Speaker 1:Sure so why would there be? No, you can't be. Suddenly you can't call TechCrunch and say oh, I raised $4 million, get in line. Somebody just raised 40.
Speaker 2:Well, right.
Speaker 3:It was so funny.
Speaker 2:You know, those were during the days when everyone was raising money, and I would have calls with firms back then and I would tell them you know, one of the key questions that I always ask when I'm doing a recruitment search is you know, what sets you apart, what's exciting about your company, why someone would want to come work here. And I said, well, we just raised our series B. Okay, you and everyone else.
Speaker 1:Right. So it is like the some of our angel investors were like we, you know, october of 2021, we closed around in February of 2022. We launched our MVP and took our first customer live. And they were like are you stupid? Like what is this going on? Are you serious? And like it takes companies five months, four months, to just hire three engineers. Like we built a team from one to 10 product engineering design and we took the MVP out to the company right. Again you know, it's like we've only hired from our network.
Speaker 1:We knew the people even before we started the company. We I left Airbase in March of 2021. In June of 2021, I convinced my co-founder that hey, you should, we should do this and let's commit for the next 10 years. And at that time we had no money in the bank. We seeded our own personal funds so that we can get some initial couple of engineers to start tinkering on. Like what should we be even thinking about? And that helped, right? I already told him like let's operate from the mindset that come October, either we have money in the bank and we are executing or we are taking a long queue for off and going to Lexington and relaxing.
Speaker 1:It's like it's a very binary option. If you can't raise money, then let's not go build a company. It's like great, you know, because it's this is not like. This is not like a developer product or something. Selling into the CFO or even the CHRO is hard. They don't buy half-baked software. So even when I was talking to VCs, they're like why do you want to raise? Why don't you raise a million bucks? I'm like that's going to do nothing for me.
Speaker 1:My CFOs, these five companies, have letters of intent. They want to see a platform. They want to solve hiring tracking, headcount forecasting, headcount reconciliation. They are not just looking for a pretty chart or graph or like, hey, this is your diversity metrics and this is gender distribution. That's like it's. This is your diversity metrics and this is gender distribution. It's not an analytics product that someone logs into once a day or once a week. This is a workflow product. This is where people come in and do work. So user management, permissioning, access control, data integrity these are all table stakes. I cannot go and say I will integrate with your software tomorrow. No, I have to do it all today. I have to get it right and then you will be able to use it. And that also gives you the edge right. Once you've done all this work, you've basically, you truly have first mover advantage.
Speaker 2:And that velocity that you had was so important to doing. That I mean to be able to start getting customers hire your first 10 in such a short period of time is so critical. And those first 10, not only are they the most important hires because they formed the foundation of so much of the rest of your company, but it's also the hardest, because you're convincing people to come to something that, frankly, barely exists. So I'm just curious how did you hire that first 10? What did that look like?
Speaker 1:So in the first 10, that includes us so we hired it. Sure, right, six of them came through of engineers. That came through direct the network of my co-founder. My co-founder has been in the previous startups. He had built teams from scratch. He's known as a mentor in the industry. People want to work with him.
Speaker 1:So I would not say it was easy, but I would say it wasn't something that kept me up at night. It was more like BG. His name is BG. Bg is going to go and pick the best people within the right budget. We were doing our own headcount planning, right? Bg was like tell me how much money you want to spend and also set me the goals that you want to hit and based on that, I'll give you plan A cost this much, we hire these people. Plan B maybe cost less or more, we hire the other people. Right, we found a good mojo and then he went and was very convincing. And then we found a recruiter that we had worked with in the past for the product manager role and the designer role. So those were the two roles that came through recruiters, but the rest the engineering talent came through my co-founder's network.
Speaker 2:That network is so critical. And yeah, I was going to say you know spoilers Usually. I think that's the best way to hire your first 10, if you can.
Speaker 1:Next 10 also came through. You know at least 60% came through network and only 40% came through a recruiter.
Speaker 2:Nice. I don't want to over AI everything, but obviously AI is a huge conversation right now, both in terms of how is it going to affect the workforce at large, which of course to an extent affects headcount planning, and then also the role of AI in the actual head count planning itself. How are you thinking about both of those things?
Speaker 1:The first part you mentioned right. How does it impact the workforce? I think that there is a lot of promise talking about the productivity gains and elimination of certain jobs, but at the core of it, we are not there yet. Right of certain jobs, but at the core of it, we are not there yet, right. It is more about augmented intelligence, augmented productivity, being able to do more things at the same time, being able to do them better, faster, right, more accurately, with the help of an assistant, right, and I have a lot.
Speaker 1:I believe that that is the true potential of what AI has to offer today, and on those lines, we are now building AI directly into our workflows. So imagine, today Team Ohana is built for someone. If you know what you want to do, we will help you execute right. You know what you want to do. We will help you execute right. Inform yourself, execute, run a workflow, get people to collaborate with you. We help you fast, pace your execution and get to the desired end state and the outcome that you are looking for. But it starts with I know what I want to do as we grow as a company and as AI now becomes more accessible, what our customers are telling us and where our vision is going, is that allow AI to help me make two things Help me make an even better decision that I alone, with the workflow, was not able to make. It's augmenting my intelligence. Then the other part, which is one step more than part, which is like one step more than intelligence.
Speaker 3:It is like literally I say it's you call it super intelligence, or it's looking into the future.
Speaker 1:Well, what do I mean by that? Let's say you are. You are a company that wants to hire five AI engineers. You have you're a very well buttoned company. You've got salary bands. You have your applicant tracking system. You know what your time to fill is time to hire all of those cool things, right. You come in, you start making a plan, right? Team Ohana can immediately give you two suggestions. The first suggestion is that, hey, the last two engineers you hired, you actually paid 20% more than what was allocated in your budget. I'm just telling you that you may go over budget.
Speaker 1:The next thing is that, hey, you want to hire this person in 45 days. You think it's in 45 days. You have five other jobs that you have queued up before this. Because we have the full picture, you need to adjust the priority, what something gives, because you only have limited or set amount of recruiter capacity. This is impossible to do today. It's all. It is so different that the talent ops person will come in and look and say, well, I can do this, and you're a very persuasive VP of engineering Like you got to do this for me.
Speaker 1:How the hell will we bloody, survive if you do this? It's going to be Armageddon. And they're like, oh shit, I'm going to try and do it. You're just signing up for failure, right? But a human telling you this. You will try to overcome the human and try to apply pressure. A machine telling you this. You will say, oh, intelligence, I need to make sure I take a look at this. Right, I'm a VP of engineering. Of course, this AI is right. Right, it's just that perception. All I'm doing is we are taking the intelligence of the human what a human was crunching numbers and coming to you after the fact or maybe they never come to you to complain? The AI will complain to you and give you feedback in real time, right? So that is what is the immediate output.
Speaker 1:You come into Team Ohana next quarter. You have this feature turned on for you, right? The future where we are going is a people. When they especially think about planning, they have a lot going on in their head. What if I promote to Shah the three people that report into this person? I move it to them. Then I hire four new people, but instead of hiring in San Francisco, I'm going to hire in Mexico or in India. I'm going through all of these ideas.
Speaker 1:Imagine you just rattling this off into a voice assistant in Timo Hanna, right, I'm just capturing this. And then you say, what would it look like? And I just design an org chart for you. Then you say, how much would it cost? I show you the cost, because I have all of this information. How long would it take you to take me to hire these people? I have that information and I can show you two levels of information. One is based on your homogeneous data of you as a company, based on yours, and the other is data from the market, or data from all the heterogeneous data that is coming from all the other customers of T Mohana anonymized, cleaned up. You never know anything, but this becomes the collective intelligence of the community, helping all of us make better decisions. Right, that, what I call is super intelligence. That's a little far away, but augmented intelligence is very near. You can.
Speaker 1:We'll talk in three months and I can give you a demo.
Speaker 2:Well, I might have to take you up on that. That is probably a good place to stop. This has been such a cool conversation, really excited for what you're doing and looking forward to your continued success. Thank you for coming on.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:Thanks for listening to See to Exit. If you enjoyed the episode, don't forget to subscribe and we'll see you next time.
