- Duration: 54 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JJT2N636VYXRW00GEN3B1M5A (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JJT2N636VYXRW00GEN3B1M5A)
Transcript
[Joe Walsh]: bit more targeted with who we’re actually reaching out to and then like what we’re selling. Right now we’re kind of selling like, hey, we’ll do kind of anything. Like we’ll do RPO services or retain search or fractional consulting. And if we just kind of narrow in on like contract recruiters, like we know recruiters really well. We know how to find the best recruiters. We can put them in your start and allow them to execute fast. And then the other part of that would be retained search. If we focus on those two areas, and then if we go after the right companies, I think we can do a really good job. And then kind of a multi-channeled approach, like email, but don’t just stop at email. Let’s hit LinkedIn, let’s do cold calls, all that stuff. [Michael Houck]: Thought about a newsletter at all? [Joe Walsh]: Thought about doing something like, I think something that could be cool is if we had really, really good candidates that we didn’t have jobs for that we could put into a newsletter like every month or something like that as like a kind of a free thing for folks. Um, I think that could be kind of cool. To figure out what that looks like, [Michael Houck]: Good way to build trust before you’re asking people to become clients. Yeah, exactly. [Joe Walsh]: And then maybe at a certain point, we could figure out a way to allow people to pay for it or something. If you want 10 really curated candidates in your inbox every month, would you be willing to pay $2.99 for that? I don't know. [Michael Houck]: I would. Yeah. If I was actively hiring growing fast and looking to bring a variety of people onto the team. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that's definitely something we thought about, but probably like a later in the year thing. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it makes sense. Well, let us know. We do that for a bunch of startups at this point. So happy to help if it's something that you guys end up prioritizing. Yeah, for sure. OK, so I'm super excited to do this piece. And sort of get the word out and sort of put the brand in front of all these founders. I think that the angle we had talked about was sort of why search firms are broken and in particular why early stage recruiting is basically being disrupted right now by you guys and right forward in general. Are we still good with that angle? [Joe Walsh]: Yeah, I think that's a cool angle. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cool, yeah, I think it'll be compelling. I think it'll get people to read through. We'll make the case, we'll highlight you guys and it'll do well. So basically what we'll do is I have some questions. I kind of want it to be free form conversation. Like let's just take it kind of where it goes. We're gonna record it, but the video and audio will never be shared anywhere. It's just for my benefit when I go to write the piece in like a week or two. Yeah. So just as long as you're cool with that, we can, we can dive in. Yeah, that's cool. Okay, cool. So yeah, I guess like, well, okay, let's start high level. Why are search firms broken and why is early stage recruiting ripe for disruption? [Joe Walsh]: And we'll, we'll dive in from there. Yeah, I think, um, there's a couple of things that have happened recently that are can making for a really interesting recruiting market. And has allowed some of these boutique firms like our firm, for example, to kind of emerge. One of that, one of those things is a lot of really great recruiters got laid off in the last couple of years and weren't able to find jobs. And so what do they do? The really good ones go and start their own companies. And so you're getting a lot of, there's a ton of like, really great recruiting leaders from early stage companies who have gone and gone that route. And they're, I don't know if they'll ever go back in house. [Michael Houck]: Um, hopefully not one, right? [Joe Walsh]: Um, so that's one thing. Um, I think that sort of market is like a little bit fragmented, but does pose some really interesting challenges for like, let's say, uh, A true search or like a diverse of partners or something like that you're going to Spend a lot of money on a on a search with with those folks Or you can work with somebody who has hired those same people Has a very like carved out niche has a great network in a certain industry for a certain type of talent And probably pay a lot less money. Those for, for working with that type of firm, because you're not paying, um, you know, a partner to work on the search, a researcher sourcer, you know what I mean? You have a bunch of people that you're basically paying to work on your search and you're paying for kind of their network typically when you're like working with them. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. Yeah. [Joe Walsh]: So, I'll pause there in case you have any things that you want to expand on. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, so what I'm hearing basically is that these firms have become, maybe we don't say bloated, but they've become large enough to the point where they have highly specialized jobs within the firm. And so therefore, you're not working with a hustler, a generalist who's going to go out and make things happen for you. You're working with a team of people who all have different skill sets is to contribute to the search. And therefore, you need to pay to support all their salaries, essentially. Is that fair to say? [Joe Walsh]: Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say, like, just like, look at their business model, like, if you're paying $150,000 for a search, and you have four people working on the search, it’s like, that’s, that’s what you’re paying for. If you work with like somebody like us, like you’re not gonna pay like 150,000, like, we would never charge anybody $150,000 for a search. We would love to, but I just don't think in good conscience we would even do it. And we don't have to either because we don't need $150,000 to make our unit economics work. [Michael Houck]: OK, so two questions. I’ll start with the first one, which is, who is paying $150,000 search? [Joe Walsh]: And what is the role that they're paying that much Yeah, it would be like usually your kind of series a still might be like slightly too early, but like probably around like the series B, like just raised 50 million or something like that. Sure. And then, and then you're hiring your, your, like your COO or your commercial officer, something like that. [Michael Houck]: I mean, that's a pretty good chunk of change, even for an exec hire and even for a, you know, a meaningfully funded series B company. That's, that's a lot. That's another engineer that you could add right to the team. What is like, I guess, explain to me, obviously the headcount part makes sense, but explain to me how you guys structure it in a way that's different than, than them. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. So, The, the first thing that we would do is, um, we usually, uh, don't charge like a percentage or like a retained search. Um, like a percentage of the base salary. We typically fix the rate based on like market data, like what a compensation, uh, for like that executive would be. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. [Joe Walsh]: That's not maybe necessarily different though, from like what some of those firms would do. They usually just charge like flat fees. But there are a lot of firms out there that charge the percentage of the base salary. And I think that that's like a huge misaligned incentive because you're, as a firm, we're incentivized to like get the most money for the candidate. Up the salary as much as possible because our fee is bigger. So if you fix the fee and you just anchor it to whatever the bottom of your range is, then that kind of takes that off the table. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I feel like it would feel shitty if I was working with a search firm and they were trying to, let's say I get in an negotiation with some guy and there, you know, I find out that they're sort of coaching the guy on how to get a higher salary for me. Or even if it's more subtle, if it's like, you know, I'm going to, they tell me I'm in a bidding war with some other company or something like that. Like I imagine that stuff goes on. Um, and, uh, yeah, I'd be pretty, pretty annoyed as a, as a business owner, if I found that out. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. And I would not be surprised if that stuff happens. They probably keep it pretty tight behind them. But you can pretty much guarantee like what these search firms are doing are they have a proprietary database of candidates that they've probably interviewed and shopped around a bunch of times. And they just go back to those same kind of folks when they have an opportunity that makes sense for them. And I would guarantee you that they're putting them forward for like multiple opportunities if it makes sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So even if it's not like, even if it is honest that someone's in a bidding war with two other companies for the same candidate, it's, it's sort of of the doing if you're, it's, there's probably like an art to it, right? If you're one of these search firms, like you are better off strategically putting these people in different interview processes at the same time, rather than like one after the other. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. Yeah, you probably see that more with like you're You're like you're robert half or like ron ronstadt or something like that. I wouldn't be surprised if like a Diversa partners or like true search did that kind of stuff because they're they're like a little bit more buttoned up and Like your typical like agency Um Let's see here. Yeah, there's no, I would also say there's like no real stake in the game. Okay. A lot of these firms. So, you know, it's really like, Hey, like we need to get the placement and Sure. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: They just want to, they just want to get, get both parties to sign on the dotted line and then they're like, all right, see you later. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Joe Walsh]: And there's some things in. In a contract that usually is like there's a guarantee or something like that. But it's still a different approach to recruiting than your in-house recruiter who has equity in the company. And I think like taking someone who has a bunch of in-house experience at a startup and operates with like an extreme sense of ownership and then now they just so happen to be kind of like a hired gun, like they're going to have that same set sort of like mentality versus like, like an agency recruiter who's like, they don't, they don't care about as much of the, like the business outcomes that result from like a hire. [Michael Houck]: Do you think if you guys were ever, I don't know what, under what, maybe you can tell me under what circumstances, but do you think you guys would ever take equity in companies? [Joe Walsh]: Yeah, we would definitely do that. [Michael Houck]: You already do that or are you just, what is you guys grow? [Joe Walsh]: I mean, we would love to do that. We've pitched that to a couple of our, our clients, but they were, they're like, no, we're not, not doing that, but we would definitely do that. And then we would definitely do that for like earlier stage, uh, companies too, who really, who really didn't have the cash. [Michael Houck]: Right. So you're basically making a bet on them too. At that point. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah, absolutely. Like, what are like Stripe and a bunch of companies, they offer you a bunch of discounts or like free services, right? Yeah, like, like, why can't there be like a recruiting firm that does kind of something similar? Hmm. That's cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, when I signed up for a Stripe Atlas, originally, I remember I got like, all these perks and discounts and Mercury Bank was the same way. And you know, they, you can use them for a ton of different things. [Joe Walsh]: Probably save a startup thousands of dollars when they're just getting started. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, like we would, if we were in position to do it and we felt like the client was the right client, we would definitely take like a hundred percent equity or even maybe like a low, uh, uh, cash fee if we could sign like a longer term in So hey, when you do raise your seed round or your Series A, we're your exclusive agency partner. Oh, that's a cool idea. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that's a cool idea. As you guys get bigger, you guys can even structure it. We did this at Launch House with our lawyer. We really liked working with our lawyer. We knew he was going to be our guy long term. And so we actually let him put a little bit of money into the company as an investor. Had like investor shares, you know, first preference on the cap table and all that stuff. Uh, and he says he does that for a bunch of companies. Now we were one of the first they did it with, but it isn't for a bunch down. Um, it's not like a crazy amount of money or anything, but when the company gets big enough, he's probably have the capital do that. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. And the thing is, I guess like the bottom line is like, if you work with a big firm, they, they don't really have that type of flexibility to make deals like that. But if you're just working with like me, like we'll sit down and we'll figure out like, okay, what makes sense? And, and we can be way more flexible on like how we structure a deal. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Cause you have, you have total and complete authority to do whatever you want basically. Yeah, exactly. Um, I guess, how does this differ? Well, actually, no, you mentioned business So yeah, I guess like, like I understand it from a sort of financial incentives perspective, but why, tell me about the business outcomes. Like why, why would a Robert half or even a diverse of partners, which research not like what makes you guys different to care more about the business outcomes? Why are they not caring about the business outcomes? [Joe Walsh]: Why is that not a priority for them? I think, well, there's maybe there's two angles here. One is, Um, that if you're on the agency side of the house and that's like been your experience and you've never been an in-house recruiter, um, you, you've always operated under this mentality of get the placement, not make the best hire for the company. If you, if you're an in-house recruiter, it's, it's a very different like mentality. Like you're, you're very much focused on finding the right person who's of lead the thing or build the thing and make everyone, make the business run faster. The other angle here is if you've never been in-house, you can't really understand how can it really impacts the business outcomes because you don't have a front row seat to actually see it. [Michael Houck]: That's fair. I guess as somebody who was very successful at a hyperscaling company, doing this in-house and now is on the outside running an agency. Do you feel the pull of the traditional agency model of just prioritizing placement, get it done? And how do you ensure that you guys stay on the other side of that? [Joe Walsh]: I never feel the pull. And I think I think maybe the reason why is because I want to work with our clients for as long as we can work with them, and I would never try to push them to make a hire that I thought was bad. I mean, I oftentimes talk them out of making hires. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, because I guess the the easy thought would be that if you give them a hire that sort of as an early stage company, you know, every person matters so much, it could put them at risk to hire the wrong person as a, as a company. And so it's like, obviously you want them to trust you number one, but number two, if you really are a believer in the company and see yourself as a long-term partner for them, you want them to be around and they need the right people to be around first and foremost. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Joe Walsh]: We want them to be around. And I think the other thing to it is like, there's no, there's no, like, big logo that like, we can hide behind, you know, like, it's, you know, you can't go find another partner here to work with, who's gonna act with more integrity. It's like, you know, like, yeah. So there's more stake in the game, I think, for us, like being the only and the operators of the company versus like somebody who just works at a big agency. You know, it's like, you don't care about the agency reputation as much, you know, you just care about like your commission check. [Michael Houck]: And it's just you and Kyle, right? [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. We have two other people too, but yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: But you guys are leading every engagement and everything for the most part. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. We, we had re-engagement. Um, there's one person on the team who, Leads engagements. And then there's another person who does like is dev stuff. Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: But you guys, I mean, I, when I'm thinking about the piece, I can say that, you know, you guys will be involved. One of you at least will be involved in every, everyone who worked with you guys. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. We would be involved in the search or the engagement in some capacity. Okay. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I want to make you guys look good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay. So another question I had when I was sort of thinking about this the other day was, you know, we've obviously both been through hyper growth. We've seen what that's like, We've seen how you just need to find the right people, like as quickly as possible for that. Are there differences with your guys' model when, or is it, is the traditional model broken in different ways when you're thinking about hyperscaling venture backed company versus a sort of very profitable heavily cash flowing bootstrap business? [Joe Walsh]: Um, well, we always talk about how you have to identify what good looks like in the context of the business that we're, that we're working with. And I imagine that those two scenarios are probably in influence what good looks like, Um, the, the, um, But, you know, the talent that you would place in each of those companies might not be like the person who's great in the like hyper growth startup might not actually be very good in the other company and vice versa. Um, so what, could you like repeat your original question back real quick? I just want to make sure I'm like hitting the point. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I'm just, I mean, you know, when, when I think about our readers, we have two different types of readers, right? Reader type. Number one is my network from Silicon Valley and New York. And they're these venture-backed companies that are all they care about is fundraising and growth. That's all they care about. And then bringing the right people on to support that growth. And then we have this other contingent, which is maybe outside of Silicon Valley, but they're bootstrapping their businesses. And some of them are quite successful. They have seven, eight figures of cash free cash flow per year. And I'm trying to think about like, obviously, I want to get the right people in front of you guys. So I'm trying to think about, okay, are there differences with how these two different types of very different businesses are currently being underserved by search firms? [Joe Walsh]: Yeah, that's a, that's a good one. Um, I haven't, we have not worked with enough, like bootstrapped high cashflow profitable businesses, but my, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the way you would have every single hire you probably make, because you're probably very conservative with your headcount strategy. Mm-hmm. Every single hire that you make really needs to be like a generalist and first principles, problem solver, like first, whereas I think you can probably get away with, if you have a larger headcount, you probably can get away with people who are a little bit more specialized, um, because you're just going to add more headcount and like fill in those gaps. Um, so there are different, they're, they're very like different searches. And I think you, you have to have like a good network of, of people or you have to identify the talent who like understands like what they're actually signing up for. [Michael Houck]: That makes sense. Yeah. I would imagine that's true that the bootstrap folks, because they're probably going to be more conservative. They're going to focus more on like almost hedging their hire by making the person more of a generalist just in case business needs change and the person can kind of scale up or scale down as they need to. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. And I mean, that's true in like early stage startups too, but like, yeah. [Michael Houck]: No, I've noticed it even with my own company, you know, we were building Launch House. We were, we hired, I think at one point, like, yeah, 25 people in a pretty short amount of time. And we were looking for like, all right, this person is gonna have this exact job and we just need them to be the best at that one particular thing. And we weren't even, you know, series B, we were series A And then now I've built a personal kind of holding company over the last two years or so. And when I'm hiring people, the first thing I'm looking for is like, are they adaptable? Can they do what I need them to do regardless of what that is as the business evolves. So yeah, I even see it myself. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Joe Walsh]: I mean, that's, we're, we're thinking about that too. Like when we bring on recruiters, like you have a good recruiter, but you have to be like a process builder. Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, when you guys, when it's a small team, you can't afford somebody who's going to be like, that's not my job or I don't know how to do that. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, okay. [Michael Houck]: So another thing that I was thinking about and maybe I'm, I'm off base here, but another thing I was thinking about was, you know, how does this differ between different types? Types of like placement, like engagements, right? So executive search versus more like comprehensive team building versus, you know, you're just focusing on hiring certain ICs. [Joe Walsh]: How does this differ between them? Well, we usually only do retained or like continued searches if it's like an executive search or like a really hard to fill role or if the company just that type of engagement. Usually what we'll do is we will, they'll, companies will have like a handful of roles that they need to hire and they could be at like various levels. And we actually just operate like in-house recruiters for that during that engagement. And we bake in like everything into our fee. And we usually do like a flat monthly fee, or maybe we'll do like an hourly fee. But it's like, we'll not only provide the sourcing support, which, you know, I would say that's like where a lot of agencies are, it's really kind of all they offer is like top of funnel kind of activity. And we really just go in and operate like an in-house recruiter and that you can like turn up or turn down in like a pretty easy way. And, you know, we'll build your interview materials or interview process, compensation ranges, like all that stuff, if you need it. And we'll just, you know, lock it in on like a monthly fee or sometimes what we'll do is like a monthly retainer with like a, like a incentive, like some sort of like performance incentive. So for every hire we make, we'll get like a small fee. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. [Michael Houck]: That makes sense. Interesting. I think you guys sort of have the ability to do that, whereas a traditional firm wouldn't, because you guys have been those people working in those companies. Like you said earlier, you've sort of seen what actually leads to success in long-term employment and helping the company the most. Whereas someone like a traditional agency, they haven't been focused on that. So if you put them in that situation that you guys sort of offer, they'd probably fall on their face. [Joe Walsh]: I think they would have a hard time. I also don't think that they would even want to do that type of work because they're working on so many different engagements at a time But like with most of our engagements we have emails At the companies that we work with we're in their slack. We're in like all their systems and tools so Yeah, it's like It's very different. I think the experience of working with an agency like a traditional agency is you get candidates in your inbox, then it's like, okay, great, thanks. [Michael Houck]: I'm drawing like a mental parallel right now. So this sounds very similar to what we love about two of the agencies that we work with. So we work with an engineering agency and we work with a design agency. And they both do basically the same thing, You know, these engineers are embedded on our team. They're in all our systems. I have, you know, daily, weekly meetings with them. And I basically just pay like a SAS subscription fee, monthly subscription fee to the agency for however much work they're doing. Right. I mean, it's like an agreed upon about the beginning of the, of the contract and same thing for, for design. I actually don't know anyone who's doing this for recruiting and it's a very scalable agency model relative to traditional traditional models. Because from your perspective, you know, right now, first year, first two years of business, maybe you're, you're sort of setting that foundation like you have. But if you wanted to, you could just basically be a vetting process for these recruiters, you find great recruiters who fit your system, you match them with companies, you embed them, and then you sort of let them run the show. And it's more scalable position for you than it would be a traditional agency. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. And there's that like, uh, like RPO. I mean, it's like recruitment process outsourcing, but the big problem is like the quality is hit or miss. And it's usually those companies are really good at putting people into like a Google where it's like, here's the, you know, go watch these 10 videos on how we operate and then just, you know, push these buttons. Like we get into some of these companies and they're like, they don't know how to hire at all and they don't have any systems or any tools and they've never interviewed before. So it's a lot of like, it's definitely not plug and play. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Interesting. How much do you think like lack of expertise about like knowing the roles You work at Uber, you see, you work around engineers, you can get more context about what makes a good engineer, what makes a bad engineer, what tech the company is using, what the company's priorities are, versus an outsourced agency. If you haven't had that experience working at a company like that, you know that they tick a couple boxes on a resume, the buzzwords are in their LinkedIn profile, and they talk well on the phone about it. It's, it's not the same thing. [Joe Walsh]: It's yeah. It's, it's not the same thing. I just, you're not the thing that helped me become a chance. Oh, product ops meetings. Oh, did I break up? You broke up right after the thing that made me. Yeah. The thing that made me, I think, a much better recruiter was when I was at Uber, I got to work with the product ops teams. And I would just sit with them and then just ask them questions about how the business worked. And they would spend hours and hours of time with me. I had somebody teach me how to write SQL queries. Like, you don't get those experiences when you're just working at an agency as a recruiter. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, of course, because you're just, you're working a ton of opportunities, just trying to play Tetris and connect the dots, basically. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah, yeah, you're good at like, the candidate management, the like, you can probably source and like, kind of generally getting the right, like arena of like the right people that you're looking for. And then you probably negotiate offers and stuff like that. But as far as taking somebody's business challenges or business objectives and translating them into a talent strategy, I think that's going to be a very, very hard thing for somebody to do if they haven't been inside of the business. [Michael Houck]: So as somebody who was inside of the business, how, when did you notice that this was as an issue and also then obviously an opportunity. [Joe Walsh]: What I really noticed it was when I went to Veho as the first recruiter, and then we raised our series A and then our series B, and then we had to hire like, I don't know, like 1500 people or like 2000 people. And we had to go and like lean on agencies. And like every agency that I talked to, I was like, Oh my God, get me off the phone. This is, this is like my nightmare. And I was, that's like where I really noticed there was a huge gap in, like, I would have just loved to work with an agency who had been there before and who was really capable of offering what they were selling us. Like, um, there was a company, uh, called talentful and their whole thing was like, we can plug in recruits. Who will like hit the ground running, who have like startup experience and everything. And the first person I've ever had to like fire in my career was like one of those people. I couldn't figure it out. And they were up against like a really tall task. They just like had never had that experience before. So yeah, but that's when I really realized like, okay, there's a huge gap because there's gonna be these like hiring surges. Core recruiting team. But as you're thinking through recruiting capacity, there's going to be moments where you need to augment that capacity. And you don't want to sign up for a really long contract or pay a crazy fee just to hire four or five people to get yourself ahead. You just want to be able to bring on a recruiter who can just go and do it and turn them up and turn them down. And that just didn't like really exist. Hmm. Excuse me. [Michael Houck]: Um, that makes sense. I, uh, I've had my, I've had my, uh, my own share of, uh, experiences there, so I can empathize. Um, okay. So it makes sense. I guess just so I'm super clear on it. Can you walk me through the business model differences? I want to communicate as clearly as possible. [Joe Walsh]: I think that's a very key point for them to understand. Yeah. Okay. Big differences in the business model. All right. On the right side, let's say agency recruiters, it's exclusively fee-based. It's primarily a sourcing or top of funnel support. It's a fluctuating fee tied to a base salary. Yeah, I would say those are the big things. And then with our model, it's flexibility and full stack. Talent advisory, basically. Makes sense. Flexible contracts and full suite of services. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So are, would the case that we would make be that the reason that founders have sort of made this mistake of hiring this kind of old way of doing things just because the new way of doing things didn't exist, or is it more so that, you know, founders are sort of, consciously making a decision that doesn't benefit them, or trying to kind of show them the light. [Joe Walsh]: Man, I feel, I have a hard time, like, putting a stake in the ground without, like, really doing the research and, like, knowing. But I I think like up until the last couple of years there just hasn't been this big of a market of like boutique agencies who offer these kinds of services. Right. Yeah. I also think a lot of founder they get like, so the big firms have done a great job of getting partnerships with like big VCs. So, They'll get some incentive. Instead of paying $150,000 for a search, you can pay $125,000 for a search because we’re part of the general catalyst. The one thing that Andreessen did that was not good for us, they were great. [Michael Houck]: They helped out with absolutely everything. The one thing that they did badly was they connected us with a hiring agency that was Yeah. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. I mean, a hundred percent. Hey, I was, I tried to make a case like that. We should bring in, like, we should just bring in our own like executive recruiter in house and, uh, stuff like pay all the fees and stuff. But I think another thing is like founders oftentimes, especially like first time founders or founders who haven’t done like a ton of hiring don’t know that much about like recruiting or it’s a little bit of a scary area. They’re really afraid to make like the wrong hires. And so they’re like, Hey, if general, if my guy who just took a board seat at general catalyst is telling you to use this company, like, I’m just going to go with them. [Michael Houck]: If, if, if, if Nico Bonatus is telling you use these guys, you’re probably going to use those guys. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. Yeah. So, Yeah. I don’t know if that gets the question, but hopefully it kind of answers. [Michael Houck]: No, I mean, it’s, it’s fair. It’s like, what is the, I mean, I guess the question under the question was what is the reason for these bad pairings and partnerships, like embedded partnerships, uh, long-term partnerships, things like that. That makes sense. And I guess that the, the sort of challenge for you guys is proving out the that you’re working with in a way that allows you to sort of usurp those partnerships in the long run and becoming the preferred partner for, you know, for these companies that are getting funded. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah, I think the thing that’s kind of scary for us or that I think about like all the time is like, how do we, right now it’s like, people work with us because they like working with like Kyle and Joe and then we have another guy on the team, Randy, who’s really great. But how do we make it to where they like working with mural group and they know like, they work with that mural group, they’re going to work with like somebody awesome. So how do we scale and maintain quality? That’s the thing that like, freaks me out. So I don’t know what to figure that out. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I don’t know, Kyle, obviously, but I know you and I know that you have a network of people who, you know, probably if you can convince them to come join a fledgling growing agency, rather than and some big, safe, pushy tech company, you know, they’d be great and anyone would sort of love to work with them. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s like building out the playbooks and like stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: I hate to ask this, but have to ask it, which is just AI, right? Everyone’s talking about AI. I got to mention it in some way. How is AI changing recruiting? How is AI changing recruiting agencies, where do you see that going over the next couple of years? [Joe Walsh]: Um, you know, there’s a guy who pops up on my, my ex feed, like all the time. I’m sure you probably see him too. He’s like, we energy, we just interviewed 40,000 engineers and like, I don’t know if I’ve seen this. Okay. He’s like, yeah, we use AI to interview 40,000 engineers. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we, We use his his engineers like that’s the company I was talking about micro one Yeah I haven’t had enough time to like Dig this dig that up, but i’ve seen him pop up on my feed like a [Joe Walsh]: million times and I’m like That dude’s killing it. Like if it’s if it’s like what he says it is like that dude is like the future um I think So we would love to do something in the future with like software if we can make it happen. But I think there’s probably a way where you can totally automate the assessment process and probably net better results. Because I’m willing to bet that AI may be better at interviewing candidates than people are. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think that’s probably true. As long as the the outputs that people are getting and then able to review are sort of standardized and actually useful. [Joe Walsh]: Yes. And so I think that there’s probably, I think that’s going to be where recruiting goes is like the company who can build a SAS product that totally automates your assessment process and puts forward, you know, four or five, like really high quality candidates in front of you. Um, that’s going to save the business, like millions of dollars, like in the long run. And, um, you’ll still need probably somebody who can, um, just kind of make that process move and maybe get the right people into the funnel. Yeah. But, um, but yeah, I think that’s something that’s going to happen probably pretty soon. [Michael Houck]: And how do you think it’ll also change, like, you know, the way that you run the agency, right. In terms of internal processes, operations, uh, playbooks to work with, uh, clients, like how, how does that change things for you guys? [Joe Walsh]: Man. I mean, I mean, hopefully we’re the ones who build the build it. That’d be awesome. But, uh, um, then I think there becomes like a really big focus uh, making sure that you, uh, like, like the way you’re carving out your head count budget is, is like really aligned with, with, with your, your business objectives. Cause one thing that we still see all the time is you go through the budgeting process. You’ve worked with all these different departments, they have a hundred head count across the company that we’re going to hire a couple of weeks in something changes. Roles need to be deprioritized. You need to shift this head count to this. And, um, if you’re able to make really, really fast hiring decisions before all that stuff plays out, then may make like a lot of hires that you don’t need. [Michael Houck]: Hmm. Interesting. That makes sense. That makes sense. I think that was most of my questions. Is there anything that you want to share? You want to make sure that we get in front of the audience, either framing or any specific highlights or framework? People love frameworks in these Anything like that you want to share that might be useful to founders? [Joe Walsh]: Man, frameworks, useful for founders. I might have a think and send something over to you later. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, hopefully. [Joe Walsh]: But no, I think I’m excited to see kind of how it turns out. And I really like the angle. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: When we do these, I think that a lot of companies, I don’t know if you guys have done things like this before, but a lot of companies are expecting basically an ad for the company or whatever. And we sort of intentionally don’t do that. We sort of make it like, oh, I’m catching up with my friend Joe, who I haven’t talked to in a while. We’re together at Uber. And he sort of gave me these crazy insights about why the recruiting world is changing and why startups are getting scammed or, you know, I’m not going to say that, but like whatever it would be. Right. Um, and that way we’re leading with value, we’re adding value and they actually read the whole thing and they actually get a sense of you and the company. Um, and maybe they click through to one of the multiple places that will link to your website and your LinkedIn as well. Um, so it tends to work out better that way. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Joe Walsh]: Yeah, yeah, I’m pretty excited. If I have any other things that like come to mind, I’ll, I’ll shoot a note over to you. But yeah, let me know if you have any other questions or anything, like in the meantime, and I think we said the week of like the Valentine’s Day week. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, let me look at our let me look at our calendar here to make sure that we’re on the same page. I think I think that’s right, though. Yeah, we have the fifth Does that still work? Yeah, I think that’s it. [Joe Walsh]: So that’s like a, that’s Saturday. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: We always send our deep dives on Saturday, the sort of like, you know, no one’s checking the email on Saturday except for founders. And so we actually get the highest open rates on Saturday. [Joe Walsh]: I was going to ask, cause like, hold on, are we, is this getting buried? [Michael Houck]: No, no, it’s funny. Cause beehive just put out their like a annual newsletter report and Saturday has like the lowest open rates. Open rate of any day. But the thing is, again, because of who our audience is, and because they’re not getting as many emails on that day, and they’re not getting as many slack messages, it actually ends up being the highest for us are sort [Joe Walsh]: of an anomaly in that way. Yeah. Okay, cool. Cool. Well, yeah, thanks, man. I really appreciate the time. It was great seeing you again. Yeah, just let me know if you have any questions or anything. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I will. I’m gonna do a draft of this. Probably within the next like week or so. I’ll shoot it over to you I might have some more questions that come up as a result of that to finish it off. But yeah, if you have anything else that you think of that you want to throw in there, or after you see it that you want us to include, just let me know. We want to make this look as good as possible for you guys. [Joe Walsh]: So very open to tweaking it in any way that you see fit. Cool. Sounds good. Bye, man. [Michael Houck]: All right. Talk soon. Bye.