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Channel: K9 Ventures

What is the biggest enemy of a startup?

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In 1998–1999, when I was running my first company, one of my investors, the late Don Jones, came by to visit us at the office. Don was totally a people person and just an all around great person to talk to. In fact, I can hear the intonation of his voice in my head as I type this.

Our company was at a stage where we were recruiting, building product, and trying to find product market fit. At the end of a long discussion, Don in his typical style, asked me: “Manu, what’s the biggest enemy of a startup?” It was a rhetorical question. After a brief pause he responded with the one word answer: “Time.”

What is the biggest enemy of a startup?

Image by Nathan Bunney: https://www.pexels.com/photo/time-is-running-out-1025747/

Time is the biggest enemy of every startup. Although I got what Don said to me that day, the statement has become more profound and meaningful after having started 6+ companies and having invested in over 35+ companies. I have seen companies become successful and scale and I have seen companies that have struggled and died. Along the way there have been many many occasions when I have thought back to that day when Don asked me that question.

One of the first things every company has to do is to find product market fit. I didn’t understand this fully until I saw some of the companies I have been involved with just take off once they hit that magical square. The problems a company has change dramatically when you have product market fit. But I invest in companies generally *before* they have any product market fit. And during that phase of the company it’s a race against time to get to that magical square.

A Pre-Seed/Seed venture backed company raises a relatively small amount of capital. With that amount of capital, it needs to build the team, figure out what product to build, who to sell it to, at what price. Building the team takes time — recruiting, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area has become incredibly difficult with a high competition for talent and extraordinarily high compensation packages from some of the bigger companies.

Figuring out what product to build and for who is often a process of discovery. It is extremely rare for a company to know what to build from day zero. Most early stage companies will go through a growth/maturation process that helps to figure out the ultimate product — the one that will eventually get to product market fit.

Figuring out who you’re going to sell your product to, and building the distribution for it also takes time. Figuring out how to price your product appropriately requires several iterations and trails to test the pricing model. (I’ve written before about Revenue Development).

Every startup I have ever seen always has to experiment and try stuff. Those that do this quickly will figure things out quickly. Others that try to get everything perfect right out of the gate, or tend to over analyze will become victim to analysis paralysis. The result will be that they run out of time. They didn’t get enough shots at goal to score, because they were busy debating the merits and demerits of every approach and planning out the perfect move.

It’s my belief that the speed of decision making can have a significant impact on the overall speed with which a startup can execute. The advice I like to give (and follow) is that it is important to know which decisions are more significant than others. Of course we should always strive make the best choice for every decision given the information we have, but the other factor to consider is the time involved in making that decision.

If a choice has a small impact and can easily be reversed, then it’s okay to make a quick decision and move on. I this scenario it is likely that there will very soon be new data that can help to validate if it was the right decision or not. If it was not the right decision, then quickly reverse that decision, adjust, and change course.

There are other choices that come with a large impact and are not easily reversible. For those it behooves us to spend the time to think through the choices diligently, and make the best decision we can with the information we have. This is the scenario where it is better to stick to the adage of measure twice, cut once. In making these decisions it is still important to consider the time involved in making that decision and it is often a good idea to have a self-imposed deadline (time box the problem) to serve as a forcing function to make a call.

In the startup game, moving fast is valuable as it leads to a higher chance of finding the magic square. Speed matters. Speed of decision making matters. Speed of execution matters.

I have yet to see a single successful company that didn’t have any technical debt. The way you build product for a 1000 users is no doubt going to be different than the way you architect build product for 10,000,000 users. The architecture and technology will have to evolve over time. IMHO startups should optimize for the the immediate and the next phase of the business rather than thinking too far into the long run. Another saying I think about often is the quote by John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run, we’re all dead.” For startups that is more often true than not.

The biggest enemy of a startup is time, because time waits for no one.

The post What is the biggest enemy of a startup? appeared first on K9 Ventures.


Solving Hard Problems: Traptic’s Harvesting Robots

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A little known fact about me is that my paternal grandmother was a farmer. When we would visit her I remember running along the paths surrounded by fields of rice, wheat, grape vines, and apricots. Barring one lonesome mechanical tractor, pretty much everything else on the farm was pretty manual. The wheat would be harvested with sickles and then threshed by hand to separate the grain. There was a manual grinding stone to grind the wheat into flour, but more often the grain would get sent to a mill to be ground.

It’s always interesting to me to note how simple childhood experience like this have a way of shaping things in the future. When I came to the United States, I had this vision that farming here is highly automated with massive combines. And it is, for wheat, rice, and corn. But then, I drove down through Watsonville, CA on the way to Monterrey and saw acres and acres of strawberry, lettuce, and other ground crops that were still being harvested by humans — with their hands.

Lewis Anderson,
Co-founder and CEO of Traptic

When I met Lewis Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Traptic, for the first time, I didn’t know a whole lot about agriculture in the US (I still don’t claim to know much). But Lewis came and asked me a question that got my head spinning: “Why is it that we can harvest wheat, rice, and corn, using machines that have increased our food production by so much, but when it comes to fruits and vegetables, so many of them are still harvested by humans, by hand?”

Harvesting is a very repetitive, manual labor task. For the most part it’s rare for someone to say that they enjoy harvesting. “I love picking strawberries in the hot sun, hunched over for hours at end,” said nobody. Finding labor for harvesting has become increasingly difficult in the US, often resulting in some of the fruits and vegetables being left to rot in the fields.

Vinh Phan, Traptic
Bryan Ritoper, Traptic

This is where the Traptic team led by Lewis Anderson, Vinh Phan, and Bryan Ritoper comes in. Traptic is building harvesting robots. Traptic’s mission is to save the world’s food production from a crippling labor shortage using robotic farm machines and therefore allow our society to expand food production in a sustainable and cost-effective manner.

Traptic is starting with strawberries. Why strawberries? Well, because the labor cost for harvesting strawberries in the US exceed $800 million annually. Yes, strawberry harvesting alone is soon going to be a billion dollar market in the US. It costs over $15,000 per acre to harvest strawberries, which are picked almost exclusively by human hands. And over 90% of the US strawberry production happens in California, within a short driving distance from Traptic’s headquarters in Sunnyvale.

Traptic’s approach is to augment human labor in strawberry fields. here the first pass of the picking is done by a robot. Humans may come through for a final pass. By doing this Traptic can work along-side human labor to help fill a gap in the labor market and also help to make the picking process more efficient. For example, Traptic’s robotic harvesters can work at night, when the fruit is in a better condition to be picked.

Building a robotic harvesting machines that can pick fruits and vegetables as well as a human is no trivial task and is a feat of systems engineering. Although Traptic can rely on existing robot arms, cameras, and computers, putting the whole system together and making it work smoothly is a complex engineering problem.

Traptic has built an amazing team of hardware and software engineers to help solve this problem. The company has innovated on gripping techniques to be able to pick and pull strawberries of the vine just as a human hand would while maintaining a high level of dexterity and delicacy.

I’m excited for Traptic’s launch today and am looking forward to seeing their continued progress in building solutions that help to harvest more of our fruits and vegetables.

The post Solving Hard Problems: Traptic’s Harvesting Robots appeared first on K9 Ventures.

Startups are never straight lines

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Curvy road

This is a recent tweet-storm that I wanted to cross post here as well as I feel so strongly about the lessons.

1/ So much of building a product/company is about progressive discovery. You build something, you figure out something else, then you build that, and so on. But you only figure out what to build by taking the first step, which may not always be *exactly* in the right direction.

2/ This is why it’s impossible to “accelerate” a startup. Some things you only figure out over time and only when your mind is ready to see and absorb the signals you’re getting. Sometimes these are weak signals & if you didn’t go from Point A to Point B, you wouldn’t hear them.

3/ The metaphor I use to explain this to founders is “Sometimes there is no direct flight and you have to take a connecting flight.” You can’t get there from here, unless you go in some other direction first.

4/ I’ve seen this in many companies, but the experience with building @HiHello has put this progressive discovery of product at the front of my mind. The ideas start somewhere, they twist and morph, and then they eventually connect. And when they connect, it’s magical!

5/ I will say that I’ve found most VCs like ideas that are straight lines. They want to see something simple, clean, and crisp. They don’t like what I call “layer-cakes” or “connecting flights.” IMHO this was why @cartainc had such a hard time raising in the early stages.

6/ You can only draw a straight line when you have clear signal, usually in the form of product-market-fit and user/revenue traction. This is what makes early-stage investing so much more fun and exciting for me. I would be bored out of my mind if I were investing at later stages

7/ Every startup is it’s own unique puzzle. The founders job is to decipher and figure out their puzzle. And like when you’re assembling a puzzle, you sometimes get it wrong, and have to go back and try again, or try a different approach.

8/ Today I felt like I got some of the puzzle pieces for @HiHello to click together in my head. Now we have to build it to run the test and see if they fit. Exciting stuff.

9/ P.S. I cleared my day today to think. Meetings, phone calls, & emails put you in constant triage mode and make it impossible to have clear, constructive, and creative thinking. So for anyone else trying to figure out their master puzzle — create the space and the time for it.

10/ P.P.S. If you made it this far, then do me a favor and try out the @HiHello app and send me your feedback. It’s those little tiny bits of signal that help me to navigate in the right direction. 💜🙏🏽

https://hihello.me

The Story of How/Why K9 Invested in Pragli

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Pragli is a virtual office for remote teams that facilitates faster communication and increased closeness between teammates.

Here is a quick video:

It all started with this tweet by Jeff Richards of GGV Capital (@jrichlive) on Twitter:

I happened to see Jeff’s tweet on my timeline and thought to myself: “I have no idea what this company does yet, but I like how they think.” Because, to rent a U-haul, put a banner on it and park yourself in South Park is about as good as it gets for Guerilla Marketing. And obviously it was working because Jeff tweeted it, and I saw it. My inclination was that “this is a team of scrappy founders, and I like how they think.”

I went over to the Pragli website and started exploring. I immediately liked what I saw. It reminded me of something I’ve been anxiously awaiting for many years. The seeds of this were sown decades ago when I was TAing CS147: Introduction to HCI at Stanford with my Ph.D. advisor Prof. Terry Winograd. In CS147 one of the video we showed to the class was the Sun Starfire concept video that was produced in 1994. Yes, 1994!

In the Starfire video Sun envisioned not only the iPad, but an always-on communication tool that allowed teams to always have a sense of presence and also be able to communicate with each other with minimal friction. Even though this is something that has been envisioned for so long ago, none of the current tools, including Slack, or Zoom, had gotten this right. 

Those who are old enough will remember Mirabilis’ ICQ — I can still hear it’s iconic chirp in my head as I type this. Instant Messaging as it was then called had come really close to providing a sense of presence. Today we have some of that in Slack, but desktop instant messaging’s peak has passed us as we’ve moved most of our communication over to the phone.

The Sun Starfire vision was missing one piece though — it felt a little bit invasive when it came to privacy (watch the video). 

For the last two plus years, I have been running a startup, HiHello, as it’s CEO. HiHello has a remote team of engineers – in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and California. Several months ago I was having a conversation with my friend and former co-worker @ HiHello, Leith Abdulla, about how I am frustrated with Slack and want a tool that removes the friction for communication with the remote team. We’d already tried the Zoom integration in Slack, so I could simply do /zoom join me in order to escalate from Slack to a Zoom call, but it still wasn’t as frictionless as I would like. Removing friction for remote teams comes with a combination to presence awareness and instant activation. So I was telling Leith about how there can be a better solution for this. 

For years now, I’ve had a sticky note on my desk which says “MyTeam — always on video” as a reminder to myself that this is something I still want to build/invest in. In fact, the sticky is probably still on my office desk, but I’m at home because of COVID-19 and so couldn’t grab a picture of it for this post!

When I saw what Pragli had built, all the dots started to connect. They had figured out how to do presence without compromising privacy — by using animated avatars. They had reduced the friction to connect by making anyone literally one click away — one click and you open a voice channel to them.They can hear you, but you can’t hear them until they unmute yourself. This little UX default is brilliant, as it simulates a double opt-in, without compromising privacy.

I was so excited to see the Pragli website after Jeff’s tweet that I almost instantly went and followed the company and the founders on Twitter:

At this point I figured that maybe this is a company that has already raised capital and has a 10+ person team. But, I also know that it’s better not to assume, and so I made a mental note to check in with this team. (It was an incredibly busy and stressful time as my father was critically ill and I had to urgently leave for India).

On Tuesday, February 11th, Gabe Hayes who is on our team for HiHello, posted this to our Slack channel:

I was busy preparing for my flight to New Delhi that evening, but Gabe’s slack message reminded me that I wanted to reach out to the Pragli team and so I pinged Doug Safreno, the co-founder of Pragli on Twitter (guessing he had followed me back so that I could DM him):

For the next few days I was in India and hadn’t heard anything back from Doug. As I fought to stay awake waiting for my return flight in the wee hours of the morning at the airport in New Delhi, I figured I’d drop Doug an email:

Doug responded right away and we scheduled to chat once I was back in the US and in the office on Friday, February 21st. By this point almost everyone (with a couple of holdouts) on the HiHello team was already on Pragli and I had used it enough to know that I really liked the product. So of course, we did our first meeting over Pragli.

I was blown away to learn in my first call with Doug that they were a two person team, and had not raised any funding to date. I think the next thing I said to Doug was: “Well, then I/K9 would like to invest.”

But it wasn’t that simple! Doug and his co-founder Vivek Nair, were not planning on raising any venture capital money yet. They had already done one startup before that was venture-backed and they realized that they should only raise venture capital once they are ready.

I invited Doug and Vivek to meet in person at The Kennel the following Tuesday (Feb 25). We met, and I told Doug and Vivek about how I’ve been thinking about this problem for a long time, and I think that what they’ve built is the best solution I’ve seen to date. I also shared some ideas with them on product, pricing, and go-to-market, in the hopes that they would be intrigued enough to let me and K9 invest in the company. Alas Doug and Vivek were determined to not raise capital yet, and so we decided to just stay in touch.

Meanwhile, I continued to use Pragli on a daily basis with the HiHello team. The app had made communicating with the team much more efficient and high bandwidth for me. In fact, I often found that it was easier for me to communicate with a remote colleague on Pragli that it was to even get up and walk to the other room to talk to a co-located colleague! In my mind Pragli had nearly achieved remote-work Nirvana!

Over the next two weeks, the world changed. COVID-19 started to hit the United States and more and more companies started implementing “work-from-home.” The HiHello team went to fully work-from-home on Monday, March, 10th. The same day I sent another follow-up note to Doug and Vivek:

We re-engaged and started talking about Pragli raising capital. I won’t get into the details of our negotiations, but it suffices to say that Doug and Vivek as accomplished founders had multiple options for raising capital even under fast declining market conditions. 

I am pleased that I/K9 Ventures got to lead the Pre-Seed round of financing for Pragli. We didn’t waste any time from signing the term sheet to getting started on working on the company — even before the financing closed, which happened on Thursday, April 2nd.

Over the course of the last several weeks, I’ve had a chance to work closely with Doug and Vivek and I can attest that they are an incredible team. They operate at a pace that far exceeds that of any other companies and founding teams that I have worked with. It’s amazing to see what they have built as a small but super efficient founding team. They are always thoughtful and I am honored that they chose to work with me/K9 for Pragli.

In closing, I’ll thank Jeff Richards @ GGV for his tweet, Gabe Hayes @ HiHello for surfacing and being the first person on the HiHello team to try out Pragli, and the HiHello team for being open to trying new tools to make our communication and collaboration better.

The future of work is remote. I used to rail against remote work, and now I am a convert — because we’re finally getting the tools to make remote collaboration better, sometimes even better than being in the same office.

I hope you all get to try out Pragli — remember that you need to onboard your team that you collaborate with on a daily basis to get the most out of the product. 

I Believe

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Today was K9 Ventures’ annual meeting. Each year that I do this, I’m amazed at what K9 founders and K9 portfolio companies have accomplished and I’m grateful to the K9 LPs for the ability to do what I do at K9.

We’re NOT in normal times. At least in my lifetime, I’ve never seen anything like the recent years. And so I felt it is important for me to go on the record with K9 founders, K9 LPs and everyone in the extended #FriendsOfK9 family on what I believe. So here is a transcript of my comments to all K9 founders, and K9 LPs at the close of today’s meeting…

It’s a rare occasion for me to have K9 LPs and Founders together, so I want to take this opportunity to make a statement that’s been on my mind for a while. I wrote this down to make sure I didn’t forget any of the points so here goes:

I am an immigrant, a US citizen, a founder, an investor, and a builder. I came to the United States because of everything this country stands for and what it has to offer. And it pains me to see it be dismantled and ripped apart over the last four years. Granted some of the problems we face have been rooted in long term systemic problems but the political, social, economic conditions in the US today are particularly alarming. We’re boiling the frog, where the frog is democracy, the health of our fellow humans, justice and equality for people of different races and genders, and most importantly the health of our planet—remember that we only have one.

So I want all K9 LPs and K9 founders to know that:

  • I believe in Global Warming and that human actions are destroying the delicate balance of our planet. If you haven’t already, please watch David Attenborough’s documentary on Netflix: A Life on our Planet.
  • I believe in using renewable energy sources and eliminating fossil fuels — it is possible.
  • I believe in Science, and Scientists, and not in politicians who make up and spread lies and misinformation.
  • I believe in having healthcare for everyone — because as COVID-19 has shown in a way like we’ve never experienced before, that we’re all connected.
  • I believe that women should have equal rights and most importantly have the right to make their own decisions about their own bodies.
  • I believe that love is equal and any adult should have the right to marry whoever they want.
  • I believe that Black Lives Matter — and that the law enforcement system has a clear and demonstrated issue of different treatment based on the color of your skin.
  • I believe that no civil society needs to have guns, and especially not assault weapons. And if we did that, then our local law enforcement would not need to be equipped as if they are going to war with a nation state on every call. And if we did that my kids wouldn’t be practicing “Code Red” drills on how to hide quietly in their school closet.
  • I believe that diversity leads to creativity and I support and encourage people of all races, all genders, all ages, all origins, all cultures, all sexual orientations to coexist and not only tolerate each other, but learn from each other and thrive together.
  • I believe that the rule of law has to apply equally to everyone, from the person on a street to the President of the United States.
  • I believe in free speech, facts, and truth.
  • I believe that TV media and social media have broken business models that lead to the propagation of biased and misleading information in self-reinforcing echo chambers. If you haven’t already, please watch The Social Dilemma, also available on Netflix.
  • I believe that it is important for us to realize that at the core of it all, most humans want the same things. So we need to live and let live, and as Sting said “We share the same biology, regardless of ideology.”

I know my superpower. My superpower is to create something from nothing. To take an idea, to bring people and resources to it, and make it grow. And I believe that a startup is the most efficient agent of change. So I want all K9 LPs and K9 founders to know that my time, my energy, my money, and YOUR money will go to supporting these causes through the companies K9 invests in, or that I start.

And in case this wasn’t clear enough, I’ll say it clearly for everyone to hear that I believe that Donald Trump is a vile human being who has destroyed the fabric of democracy and civility in the United States and beyond. He is a racist, misogynist, narcissist, corrupt con-artist with no redeeming qualities. I earned my right to vote in this country the hard way—it took me 15 years to earn that right. I am not a Democrat, and I am not a Republican. I am fiercely independent. I am an American. And I will be voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And I sincerely hope that all of you make the same choice.

That’s the end of my rant. Thank you for indulging me and enduring me. Vote!

This brings the 2020 K9 LP meeting to a close. I appreciate all of you being here and being part of K9. And a special thanks to all the K9 founders for all that they do to make the world a better place.

The First Close Podcast w/Manu Kumar

Introducing Avoma: Meeting Intelligence

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https://www.avoma.com

I’m pleased to announce and support the launch of Avoma, a K9 Ventures’ portfolio company that is making all of us who spend time in meetings more productive by utilizing AI. One of the big changes that has happened in business today is that an increasing amount of it is now conducted on the phone or on video calls. The most common form of interaction with customers whether it is in pre-sales, closing, post-sales, customer success, and customer support, all happen on the phone or on video calls. However, when those calls end, there is no record of that call or interaction, unless someone does the meticulous work of note-taking. Enter Avoma. A little known fact is that A-V-O-M-A, stands for A Very Organized Meeting Assistant. 

As a user of Avoma’s Meeting Intelligence Platform, I can get a full recording and transcription of call, and also get an analysis and summary of the call generated using natural language processing. The intent of the analysis and the summary is to serve as a way for me to quickly remember what was talked about on the call. Avoma has also integrated in note-taking into their platform so that if I take any notes while I’m on a call, those noted get synchronized directly into the transcript and the audio/video of the call. So now, I can easily mark the more important sections of a call simply by making a note to myself and then I can just as easily share just that section of the call with the rest of my team! 

That last feature is my favorite as it’s like having a super power for anyone in a customer facing role. Allowing members of the extended team to hear the customer’s comments, in their own voice is incredibly powerful and motivating for the whole team.

Avoma is co-founded by Aditya Kothadiya (@AdityaKothadiya), Devendra Laulkar (@swargalok), and Albert Lai (@albertlai). All three founders have either co-founded or worked in startups before. Aditya was the founder of Shopalize that was acquired by [24]7, Devendra was the co-founder of Vessel.io that was acquired by Marketo, and Albert was one of the early team members at Pulse that was acquired by LinkedIn. Aditya, Devendra, and Albert come together as an incredibly strong team that can build a best of breed product in a space that they are incredibly passionate about.

Compared to some of its competitors Avoma has raised a relatively small amount of capital, but their product speaks for itself. In a short span of two years, these founders have assembled a high caliber team and delivered on a product that the other startups in this space have been building for years with an order of magnitude more capital!

If you’re a company that has sales people, account managers, customer success, and customer support teams you have to give Avoma’s product a try and see if it can help boost productivity in your organization. Check out Avoma’s website at https://avoma.com

Hit Start Media – Enabling Enterprise Companies to Own Their Narrative

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Hit Start Media is my latest investment for K9. Historically, I have avoided content companies. In fact, if you look at my investment criteria you’ll notice that media is filtered out. But Hit Start isn’t just a media company; it’s an enterprise services company. Media just happens to be its product. 

Hit Start Media is a startup that helps enterprise companies “Own your narrative.” My thesis here is that there is a transition happening in media, where more and more media and corporate communications are going to be direct from the company to its audience rather than being intermediated by the traditional press and media sources. The audience can be either external (customers, partners, developers) or internal (employees). The idea is that the company can very easily and quickly create high-quality podcasts for distributing to these audiences as first-party content.

Theo Miller, the founder of Hit Start Media was an early Carta employee. He has a background in theater and storytelling and left Carta to start his own podcasting operation. He has already done a series of such first-party content podcasts with Carta. They have one series that is targeting new fund managers (helps Carta bring in new fund administration customers) and one called Execute which tells the backstory of Carta. You can find all of these and more on the Hit Start Media website.

Through tech-enabled services, Hit Start helps companies of all sizes build their own first-party media networks. And to that end, their own podcast Tech Tmrw launches in early 2022. Above is a clip of me and Theo Miller, founder and CEO of Hit Start Media, having a lively discussion about the role of data and instinct in product development.


Beware of Fake / Scam Engineering Candidates

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It has been a while since I posted to the K9 Ventures blog. I’ve been heads down working with K9 portfolio companies and spending my time running HiHello as the co-founder and CEO of that company. Along the way, I’ve learned and am learning a LOT. Like a lot, a lot. After 10 years of building K9, my knowledge and advice to founders were becoming dated. To continue learning the best approach was to learn by doing – actually run a company so that you have first-hand knowledge and experience of what it is like to build a company today. HiHello has helped me do just that.

I’m hoping that over the next few months, I will be able to find more time to write and document some of this learning so that it is available not only to K9 founders but also to founders elsewhere whom I do not have the time or the privilege to engage with.

One of the lessons we’ve learned in building HiHello is to recognize and filter out fake / scam engineering candidates from our recruiting pipeline. Yes, you read that correctly. The demand for software engineers continues to exceed the supply by several orders of magnitude. If you look back at the number of degrees awarded in computer science over the last 10 years, and the number of open software engineering positions, it is clear that as Software is eating the World the demand for software engineers is dramatically outpacing the supply. Software Engineers also tend to command a much higher salary. So if you follow the demand and you follow the money, it’s no surprise that scammers have figured out a way to scam people in a new “high-tech” way. 

Recruiting engineers is hard enough, but having to deal with fake/scam candidates makes it that much harder.

I haven’t gone deep enough down the rabbit hole to provide detailed evidence, but all the indications are that this has now become an organized crime activity, most likely focused out of Asia (China in particular). COVID, the transition to most tech jobs now being remote, and working from home has been an accelerator for this trend.

Here is the pattern that we’ve observed:

  • We post a job description for a software engineering role on LinkedIn and or AngelList (now WellFound).
  • We receive several inbound applications for this position who all have incredible resumes. The resume is not only well written in fluent English but also often has a much better visual design than you see from real candidates!
  • The resume will often focus on mentioning technologies rather than projects. It will be a keyword soup – mentioning all the cool technologies that are being used in companies today. There will be little to no mention of the project or what was being built, but more focus on identifying what technologies were used in a position.
  • The name of the candidate will often be very American-sounding. This is true not only of the first name but also the last name of the candidate. So names like David Smith are not unlikely. We’ve also seen some of the common Hispanic names in our candidate pool.
  • The email address will often include the works dev, pro, soft, etc in their email addresses or the domain of the email address.
  • They will claim to have attended a US university/college typically in Computer Science. We’ve seen lots of resumes that show universities in Texas, Florida, and Arizona. Some of them will be less well-known universities, but others will be legit universities like UT Austin, Texas A&M, etc.
  • The real tell appears when you reach out to the candidate and start scheduling. Their written communication will be poor (in stark contrast to what you would guess from the quality of the resume and the claimed level of education)—with poor grammar, and poor attention to detail.
  • When you get on Zoom with the candidates there are several other interesting tells. First, the person that had a very American-sounding name will be speaking with a thick accent.
  • They will claim that their camera isn’t working or in some other way try to avoid turning on their camera. If you insist that they have to run on their camera, they will eventually turn it on, and you’ll see someone where there is a very clear disconnect between the name and the appearance of the person. To put it bluntly, the very American name doesn’t match up with the appearance of someone who is clearly of Asian origin. (Note: it is common for a lot of first and second-generation immigrants to have an American-sounding name, but the disconnect here is usually with the last name, the accent, and the speaking ability of someone who claims to have spent several years studying in the United States)
  • They will often use a virtual background or be up against a blank wall so that you have no clear indication of the rest of their surroundings.
  • If you’re alert you will also sometimes be able to hear that there are other people in the room with them. Initially, it may feel like roommates but in other cases, it’s been clear that it’s probably a call center.
  • If you ask them to describe their background or tell their story, you’ll get a “click-whirr” response – a rather well-practiced and sometimes even eloquent response. But if you try to probe deeper into what did the company do, and what was the project they worked on, the responses will be very superficial, and the candidate will be unable to provide sufficient details.
  • The fun part comes when you start to ask questions about their personal story. Something as simple as where did they grow up? Where did they go to school? I distinctly remember one candidate saying that he grew up in Texas, but the whole time he pronounced Texas as Tex-ASS. I’m pretty sure that if you grew up in Texas, went to school and college in Texas, no matter what background you come from in that many years of living in a state, you learn to pronounce the name of the state better than Tex-ASS.
  • At times when you ask a technical question, you may also notice a pause or a delay in their response. We speculate that this is because they may have another audio channel open Concurrently with someone listening in to the call and then feeding/prompting them the answers/responses. 

None of these candidates have made it through our screening process at HiHello. In the beginning, maybe some of them made it through an initial screen by us giving them the benefit of the doubt, but none of them made it through a second round. But these candidates are a massive time-suck. Recruiting engineers is hard enough, but having to deal with fake/scam candidates makes it that much harder.

You may be wondering how this whole scheme works. I certainly was, until one of our engineers at HiHello received an inbound from someone offering him $60-$80/hr just to attend a couple of Zoom meetings and pretend to be someone else on those calls. Here is the full text of their proposal (phone number redacted):

The proposal above suggests that this isn’t just a case of a few bad apples/lone wolves. This is an organized group that is doing this on an ongoing basis. If you have several low-quality programmers in China/Vietnam working in a sweatshop being fronted by a native language speaker – it can sometimes take months for someone to realize that they are being scammed. In the meanwhile given what engineers cost, the scammers would easily have pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in the process. If executed well this scheme could be more effective than peddling drugs!

At HiHello, we’ve become very attuned to identifying these scam candidates. We’ve developed new ways of identifying when not to engage with candidates. Some of the techniques we’ve adopted are:

  • Looking at resumes more closely to ensure that people are talking about the projects in sufficient detail and not just throwing technical jargon and buzzwords around.
  • Checking the timeline on resumes closely to ensure that it makes sense.
  • Having a high bar for communication – both written and verbal. As a remote team, how people communicate is critical and so while we don’t have a preference on where someone is from, their ability to communicate with our team in fluent English is critical. (Note, our emphasis is on the ability to communicate, not accents).
  • Asking more questions to dig deeper into a candidate’s personal story, journey, and location.
  • Several of us (this happened organically without coordinating with each other) also started to take screenshots during Zoom calls to make sure that we could show other members of the team who we communicated with to verify that all of us talked to the same person!

I’m sure there are lots of other good stories about recruiting engineers that are not getting shared. My purpose behind this post was to help bring more attention to this issue which is a real and growing issue in engineering recruiting. If you have some good stories, please feel free to share them in the comments.

And of course, HiHello is hiring amazing high-quality engineers. We have a super fun team. We have a high bar on who gets to be part of that team. If you think you’re an awesome engineer, then you can check out our open positions at https://jobs.lever.co/hihello.

State of Venture in Fall 2023

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Earlier this week, I held the annual meeting for K9 Ventures. As I mentioned in the meeting, I am grateful to the K9 Founders for allowing me to be along for the ride in the companies, and I am also thankful to the K9 LPs for allowing me to do what I love to do: build companies.

I present my view of the startup ecosystem in each annual meeting to the LPs. Unlike other funds that may have teams to crunch numbers and data and look at micro and macro trends, my view is simply that: my view. I describe this to K9 LPs as this is my opinion and feelings based on what I see from my vantage point as a pre-seed/seed stage investor.

Here are the five slides I’ve excerpted from the 2023 K9 Ventures LP Zoom deck that cover this:

Early stage venture, particularly Pre-Seed and Seed stage venture, is a different game today than it used to be 10 years ago. LPs and GPs should be aware of this dynamic as they make investment decisions.

For founders, my advice is consistent: ‘The best time to start a company is when you have an idea that won’t leave you alone.‘ You have to be a little bit crazy and naive to start a company. It’s never going to be easy. Even though the “venture market” might be in a tough spot, there are still incredible opportunities to innovate and create value. That will never stop. And the company you build today will be healthier. Ad astra 🚀.





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