A Recruiting CEO Explains Why Getting Hired Is Almost Impossible in 2026 | John Kim, CEO@Paraform

I think one of us was like, what if we combine TikTok and DoorDash? We were delirious. This was like 3 AM. We just lost a revenue opportunity.

What happened in the 10 minutes when you were almost giving up?

My co-founder and I made a pact. One of our values is you either win or lose and there's nothing in between. There were days where I would just wake up just throwing up. It was just so hard and I didn't know how to solve it. What really helped was being sort of empathetic to the challenges. Like, companies only die when founders give up or you run out of money. Very true.

Today I have John Kim. He's the founder and CEO of Paraform. He's building the recruiting marketplace that companies like Palantir, Cursor, Rippling use to fill their hardest roles. And as far as I know, you have people on your platform making 7 figures, right? Welcome, John.

Thanks for having me.

I'd like to start with this question to understand your product a little bit better. Can you explain what Paraform does maybe at two levels, let's say to an elementary schooler and maybe to a startup founder who are struggling to hire their, you know, engineer team.

Yeah, that's a good question. I would say to an elementary school student, I will tell them, hey, you know, your parents, like, let's say like your dad, you know, works, like has a job, right? You know, there are actually people in the world called recruiters that essentially They, their job is to connect people like your dad with companies that are looking for people, looking for people like your dad, essentially. So there are these people called recruiters, and essentially they are very important people. Are in many ways you can think of them as they drive the world and they move the world forward. You know, things that happen in the world, I like to look at the world like a museum of all these, like, doing museum of passion projects of people doing things that they really like, and they're all done by people. And so these recruiters are actually doing something really important where, you know, they place the right people, they get the right people, like your dad, to the right opportunity. And, you know, they make things happen. They build the school that you're in, they build the swimming pool you go to, all that stuff. So yeah, I think that's how I would explain the recruiters and essentially these recruiters, so we are a internet website, I guess I'll say that to the elementary school student where essentially we sign up a lot of those recruiters and tell them we help them do their job much better. So we give them companies to work with, we give them tools. Like, um, things that they can use to do their job easier. Um, um, and, and so that's one side where you can sign up. Uh, and the other side is companies that are hiring, and we basically connect them. So companies can say, hey, I'm looking to hire an engineer, and then we match them with, you know, the best recruiters who can, uh, help them. And once that happens, the recruiters, you know, contact people like your dad or anyone, and then we, as the platform who made the connection, get paid when the hire is made. And most of that payment actually goes to the recruiter and we take a small cut for introducing them. So yeah, that's how I would explain it to the elementary school student. Yeah.

Cool. Getting my dad, uh, their, uh, his dream job, right?

Yes. Yes, exactly. That's a much more concise way to put it. Yeah.

What about, what about, uh, like a startup you're, you're gonna be working with?

Yeah, I mean, if they're a startup founder, let's say they're just starting out, like, look, like the first 5, 10 people you hire are, you know, make or break for a company. And the thing is, you, you need to hire the best people to even have a shot at building something that works. And it's really difficult, right? Um, you're not a Google or a Netflix where you have people knocking on your door applying. So you want to go attract them, but you have a million other things to do. You have to build your products, you have to sell. And then maybe at 3:00 AM you start recruiting. Um, and it's, it's very difficult. You have to reach out to probably hundreds of people for even one person to even take the call with you. And then OpenAI just beat you on comp. Like it's just, it's just a very difficult process. And we make that as easy as pressing a button. Essentially what we do is we're a, we're a recruiting platform where we match you with, uh, expert recruiters that could fill your roles faster and better than anyone else. So let's say you post a founding engineer role. We match you with the best recruiters, they reach out to people in their network, um, and, and send them your way, and you only pay us when you make the hire. So our incentives are aligned with yours. We're only successful when you're successful. And, uh, yeah, we also helped, um, build the founding teams of some of the fastest-growing companies right now. So one example of this is Decagon. They're AI customer, uh, uh, concierge, uh, customer support company, and, uh, their very first engineer and their very first AE, we helped them hire. And now we are helping them hire product, security, design, engineering, of course. So we're still helping them hire. So if you want to build a great company, your first 5, 10 people are super important, and there's no other sort of platform that can do that better than us.

What is exactly the edge that, you know, working with Paraform is going to give me as a founder who's, you know, hard to compete with OpenAI of the world?

Yeah. Um, that's a really good question. I think, I think great candidates that are interested in working with you, they're out there. It's not a problem. It's a discovery problem. It's a matching problem. Great candidates that want to work with you and are interested in your mission are out there. So let's say you're building a legal tech startup in Tampa, like, you know, maybe there are people who grew up there who wants to move back, all the way to people who are interested in legal, went to law school but actually want to transition to tech, who happen to get a CS degree. Like, there are people out there that are interested in what you do and want to work with you. The problem is actually finding them, uh, and, and, and, and sort of matching and really hiring them. You know, like you mentioned, uh, Angelina Yang, like, uh, people aren't going to come knocking on your door. They don't even know you exist, right? You have to outbound, right? You have to outbound. Uh, and we as, as a platform helped build hundreds of founding teams. I think basically the default after raising the seed round at this point is to come to Paraform and build, you know, hire with us, at least for our startup segment of our business. And so we've actually, as a result of that, been able to attract, you know, the best recruiters in the United States and the world actually, who have strongest networks of people who are interested in joining an early-stage company and being a founding engineer. So we built that network. So you basically can save so much time and difficulty and headaches, you know, by coming to our platform and working with these recruiters. And you'll be able to interview a great founding engineer you like in a matter of a couple days. And we have this interesting stat we track. Called found time, which is how long did it take us to sort of surface the candidate, send you the candidate that you end up hiring. And across the platform average from startup all the way to enterprise is 11 days. So within 11 days of posting your role on the platform, you would've already met the candidate you were gonna hire. Of course, some people have longer interview processes, so that's slightly out of our control, but you know, we, we can do that faster and better than anyone else.

How does that compare with posting my job on LinkedIn? LinkedIn, is LinkedIn enough?

No, not, not enough. I mean, again, I think there's like two, a few different ways to look at it, right? I think firstly, if you're doing like outbound versus inbound, even if you do post your job on LinkedIn, you know, like again, like you're competing with basically companies with like much larger brands and, and better sort of inbound funnels. And so likely. You won't, like the people you wanna hire aren't gonna sort of apply and come to you. And again, this is especially we're talking about startups. The other thing is the quality. So with inbound, you know, unfortunately recruiting is a power law where, you know, there are a lot more not so great people and a very few good people. And, um, yeah, like you have to filter through thousands of applications to even find one that might be a good fit. And most likely the people you wanna hire are probably not gonna apply. Yeah.

Even for a startup who raised the money, it's still gonna be competitive because their brand is yet to be built, right?

Yeah. And also like, I mean, you know, and then there's like 50 other startups that raise the same amount from equally good VCs every week popping up, right? What's important is finding the right fit, you know, like it's, it's not about I raise this much. Of course, all those things matter, right? Right, baseline. But, you know, if you want to differentiate and hire, you want to make sure you find the right fit. And that, that is a very challenging problem. And through building the world's largest best expert recruiter network, we, we've solved that problem.

Why network though? You mentioned network many times already. Like, why network?

I mean, the, the honest answer is we, we were, we had one goal. Which was help our customers make hires. That's how we started our company. And so we had our, our first few customers who were struggling to hire, and then they said they would pay us this much to make a hire. So that was our only goal. And we went through a ton of different ideas and pivoted. None of them got us even close to making a hire. And it didn't really make hiring easier. It made it, it didn't really make hiring easy. It made it like slightly easier, but it was still incredibly difficult. And as we went through the pivoting, we sort of landed where, what Paraform is today, our first product, our recruiter marketplace. And it was, you know, truthfully the sort of only way to make hires well and fast at scale. So that's how we decided to build a network. But then if I sort of work backwards from where we are today, I think, I think that access is really important. For example, if I wanna If I wanna hire a great engineer, I can find the best engineers at Anthropic right now within less than a minute on LinkedIn. That doesn't actually mean you have access. That doesn't actually mean they're interested or you know that they're open to it. Like there's a whole lot of problems with down the funnel, uh, and I think by building a network, like an actual network with real access to candidates and recruiters and by extension information about them, I think you can actually make hiring easy. As opposed to like, let's say building like a SaaS tool that you can use to maybe process your inbound applications or reach out outbound more easily or search candidates more easily. Those things are important too, but I think that doesn't actually solve the problem.

It's so interesting. Are you in San Francisco? Are you in North Cal?

Yep. Yep.

You know what you're describing to me, it's almost like, you know, real estate, like finding real estate in the Bay Area. Like if you know information about like what houses are coming onto the market and even sooner, or the intent to sell, you know, things becomes a lot easier rather than like you just go to open house everywhere. I, I heard that when you go to open house, it's already the, the latest, right?

Yeah, I, I absolutely agree. And I think there's actually a lot of parallels. Yeah, I mean, that's why it's a, it's a cool market, marketplace problem, right? Real estate recruiting. There's a few others, right? I actually think the cool parallel with real estate, there's not that many important life decisions you make. I mean, there, there are a lot, but like if you really boil it down, like, you know, getting a house, getting a car, getting married, but getting a job is one of them. Like you, depending on how, I guess, job hoppy you are, all the way from, you know, my dad worked at the same company for 25, 30 years. All the way to there are people who maybe like move around, but still like maybe like on average, what, 4 jobs your life, 4 or 5. And not only that, you spend most of your waking hours working, right? Like you spend probably like whatever, like minimum 8 hours all the way to if you're working at a startup, much more. And so it's one of the most important decisions humans make. Um, and so there's that piece, but I also think it's one of the most inefficient markets. Similar to real estate where there's information asymmetry, you know, there's all these sort of different problems. But I actually think what's really cool about recruiting is that it's the most consequential matchmaking problem if, if solved. I think that, I think that similar to how I explained this to the elementary school sort of audience, as you asked, it's like humanity's progress and innovation is made by people. Even AI is made by people for people, and getting the right person to work on the right problem, I think, is the most important problem that all the smart people in the world should be obsessed about. Because, you know, I think great talent exists, and how do you get them to the right opportunity? Even, you know, as our company scales, we went from, you know, 10, 20 people to 100 plus, not, not like, and we're not too long ago, and I think like I actually found that when there's like a lot of difficult problems that the companies are— the company is facing, we bang our head against the wall, try all these different things to solve it, but what I found is actually that putting the right person on that right problem is the fastest— solve the problem. So I, I, I think like that it is the most consequential matchmaking problem in the world, and we're solving that.

I, I grew up with like learning things about the Confucius, right? You educate people depend depending on their own strengths and weaknesses, right? It's like mass production education. Now, can we be educated in a way that, you know, can bring out our strengths? And can we be placed in a role that can bring out our strengths and we can shine, right? So it's the same thing in a sense.

Totally. I, I actually think, for what it's worth, the close to second most important problem to solve is the upskilling and the education of, of, of people. Uh, because, you know, we can always, you know, humanity can benefit from more skilled people and educated and smart people, right? But the reason why I think the matching problem is actually number one is I think that there's like a rate limit to how many, you know, people are even born every day. Like, like you, there's only, like, I, I thought about this when I heard that, like, I know the YC batches became bigger and then someone said like, there's only so many great entrepreneurs every year and like you and like all that sort of analogy, I think sort of similarly, like, I think there's a rate limit to how many talents, sort of like people, how many talent is sort of, I guess, born and productionized and sort of released to the world, if you will. And I think that we're like not even close to actually making the right match. But I do think education and upskilling actually is very close to very much right after the second most important problem. Yeah.

Let's step back a little bit. You know that Oracle— did you hear the news? Oracle just laid off up to like 30,000 people. And I read that tech roles are down roughly 36% from pre-pandemic peaks. But startups, as we just discussed, are fighting for these top talents, right? What do you think, who should be expert in this space, what do you think is actually happening in the job market right now?

Yeah, yeah, that's a Sad to hear. I mean, I also, I know Block did something similar. I think there are rumors that Meta is gonna, or maybe that already happened. And I bet actually a lot of the people affected were recruiters. If I had to bet money on it, I think a lot of it would be like the talent HR because like, again, if you don't need people and then the first ones to go, all that stuff. Yeah, I guess I think what's happening, firstly, I wanna start off by saying I am incredibly optimistic about the future of humans. I think there's a lot of, like, I think very understandably so, like the paranoia and like of like, oh, like AI is going to take my job. And, um, and it's, it's like a real concern. Like we shouldn't ignore it, but also why, like, I think there's every time there was like new technology introduced to, to people, there was like sort of massive job loss. Assembly line, um, you know, like cars, like internet, like, you know, even like I think the phone, right? Like, so there's always this sort of adaptation that humanity's— humans went through, uh, with new technology. Uh, and I think, you know, AI is no different. And if not, maybe the highest consequential impact because like it's like sort of now knowledge work territory. But again, I'm very bullish on humanity's ability to upscale, adapt. And because fundamentally the world's economy, the GDP is not a zero-sum game. It's an abundance game. It increases over time. Like, you know, one day we'll be on Mars, one day we'll conquer the whole universe. Like, I think it's just making us better over time, but there is a real adjustment period that comes with it, such as these layoffs, such as companies sort of, like, I'm sure CFOs have a very hard time right now modeling, like, how many people do I need? Like, how do I actually calculate the revenue per employee? Like, or a head of product or head of engineering. Like, how do I actually know if, should my engineers be using like Cursor or Cloud Code to like, you know, it's a real adjustment. Or even like accounting now with AI ERPs or like, you know, all that stuff.

Have you talked with any of those leaders in companies and do you know how they're running the math in their head? Did anybody review it?

I mean, not only have I talked to them, but also just like sort of, I think the word is out there that they expect more. I think, you know, I think Canva had a moment as well where I think one of the leaders sort of said like, hey guys, like, you know, we saw Anthropic do 72 releases in 52 days. Like, what are we doing? And I think like that's— and maybe there's like a better way to communicate it and all that. And I have a ton of respect for Canva, actually. You know, they're investors of us, and I think they're a really great company. But I think what that actually means is like, I think all of us are expected to do more with AI. The good news is it's not like we don't expect you to do anything. We expect you to do more, right? Does that mean you work more hours? Does that mean you more stressed or something like that? No, it's, you're just expected to do more with it. So I really, again, optimistic about where the world is going. It's just, there's going to be a little bit of a tough adjustment period, but I think again, what's happening is AI is getting better at a pace, unprecedented pace. It is causing a lot of disruption. I think also with public companies, there's a little bit of like the investor optimization of like, you know, if you cut costs, like your stock goes up. I think like, I think after the Block layoffs, their stock price surged as well. So there's probably a little bit of that. And I think what's gonna happen to the people affected is they have to like sort of go through this adjustment period, become AI native, really sort of become, you know, like upskilled, upskilled, and they will be able to do more. And I think once we go through this adjustment period, I actually think there's gonna be another sort of golden age of like abundance. And I think, you know, I think the age of like the average salary being 7 figures, I think that will come. I think that the type of work we do will be less like grunt work or sort of like repetitive labor. It would be more like very, a lot of thinking, a lot of strategic thinking. So, so yeah, I think, I think, um, that's what's happening. And just to comment on the layoff trend, I kind of mentioned, I think a lot of them are recruiters. Yeah, I just think that there's this vicious cycle for recruiters where again, like hiring is inherently like, there's like peaks and troughs, right? There's like demand sometimes surge and sometimes you don't hire, but the way we staff against that goal is super antiquated. You basically just like hire a ton of recruiters when you need to, and then when you don't, you just lay them all off. So if you, if you grab a beer with a recruiter, like they'll probably tell you like 2 beers in, like, I'm actually worried when my next when I'm gonna next get laid off. Like, that's actually a real concern. And I don't think that's a good thing to do to people, right? I think what really needs to happen is rethink how, you know, we should, we should sort of think about the industry. And I think what Paraform is doing is exactly solving that at the macro level, right? I think we're basically telling recruiters, hey, like, sort of control your own destiny, start your own, like, basically business or go independent. We have clients you can work with. We have tools to support you. We have all these different incentive programs to make you really, I guess, like actually probably long-term a lot more stable than hopping between or, or uncontrollably hopping between kind of jobs because of the macro conditions. And on the companies, I think we're saying, hey, like, you know, you don't, you, you don't really know where your headcount needs are gonna be and you need a flexible solution, like on demand. Imagine whenever you have a hiring surge, you can match with specialized recruiters who filled that role many times over with a proven track record. So, I think sort of like creating this win-win situation. Yeah, I'm worried. I'm worried for recruiters. It's one of the highest annual attrition white-collar jobs. Like, it's like 35% year over year. I don't think that's a good thing to do to people.

Yeah. That's almost a mind shift in, you know, the business model of being a recruiter. Like if you're a recruiter, you should think of your career differently. Instead of working, you know, for one of those companies, there are only so many big companies and big companies are laying off half of their people, right? So might as well like work with a company like Paraform where you are exposed to multiple opportunities and you're not, you know, stuck with any one of them.

Totally. And the recruiters, Yeah. And like we have a lot of recruiters who, you know, you know, left their maybe agency or their job to like start their own, I guess, be an independent recruiter or like maybe scale that to being an agency or something like a firm. They work whenever they want, uh, wherever, like wherever they want. They earn actually more than they did before. Uh, they get to spend more time with their family, their kids, like, and like, I actually think even structurally speaking, a recruiter is at the end of the day, a matchmaker, right? And I think our model makes you a better matchmaker. Like if you work at, let's say Facebook, every candidate you meet, it's binary. You go to Facebook or not. So it's a very inefficient funnel where they're kind of like not interested, right? Whereas on Paraform, we have like 1,000+ companies, like, you know, and that number is rapidly growing, soon tens of thousands, and I think even more and imagine being a just better matchmaker. And you can actually be really candidate-centric as opposed to being like company-centric. Both are very important. You should be company-centric with the, with the clients you're working with and helping. But if you wanna make the best match for your candidates, that's also very important, right? So I think just in so many ways, better, better way to be a recruiter. And I think that like, This is something that I also think is a little unfortunate, but not many people like recruiters because maybe the current macro condition and infrastructure makes them a not so great of a matchmaker, right? Like you have to reach out to thousands of people to get even one person interested. Like, and I actually think AI is like making that worse. The cost of sending a message to someone or email to someone is plummeting to zero. And the cost of applying to a role is also plummeting to zero. So a good engineer who used to get 100 messages a week now get 1,000 messages a week. And a good company that used to get 1,000 applications now get 100,000 applications. The noise is getting even worse. And then there's like tools to then like help that. It's just like slapping stuff on top of each other. But I think, I don't think it's the recruiter's fault. I think it's, it's, it's more of a macro thing. And I think what Paraform is doing is actually Making recruiters one of the most important professions. I think recruiters are one of the most important professions. They deserve to be. And in the future, I'm very bullish that they will be one of the most important, like, jobs in the future. And, um, why do I think that? It's because I think the value of each person goes up over time. So, uh, the person who brokers that, I think also the value goes up.

If I'm a recruiter, what is my most valuable asset that I should carry from one company to the next, or for all my clients, is actually the candidates I work with. It's my network, it's my knowledge about the space, and how do I spot great candidates for a specific type of role. If, if my pool is, is bigger than one company and I'm equipped with good tools to help me access to the, the network, basically you're 10x or 100x my asset, which is more valuable. And that, that makes— that, that kind of helps position recruiters in a role that they're not just a call center, they have true value adds based on what they have, right?

Exactly. Yeah, again, much, much better put and concise than what I explained. But yeah, like, I think that's totally right. And I think Yeah. And then just on your last comment, I actually think even the nature of their day-to-day will change, right? I think, you know, we're building a lot of, and we can get into this, we're building a lot of tools to make recruiters more effective at what they do, you know, powered by our AI agents. But I think, yeah, I think recruit, like you really need to think about like, what are, what is, what are humans good at and what is like AI good at and like The faster you realize what they are, the, you know, whether it's someone you're trying, a person trying to upskill themselves all the way to a company trying to build something, the faster you realize that, I think the better. But I think recruiters right now do a ton of manual work and unnecessary stuff like, you know, moving candidates from this interview to that interview, to like reaching out mindlessly, to like doing all the ops. If you're running a, if you're an independent recruiter, all the back office stuff as well. Just, there's just like a ton of things that weigh you down. But truly, what is your number one job? Your number one job is to place find great candidates and place them to the right opportunity. And so I think what Paraform is doing is basically taking care of everything else. You don't have to, you know, constantly do sales. Like you have clients lined up for you. You don't have to do all this manual work. Like you have all the tools for you. We're take— we even have the back office. Like you, you just get paid. You don't have to like invoice people. We take care of all of that. All you have to do is just be a good recruiter, a great recruiter., and you can spend most of your time building stronger relationships, building trust, building your network, like you said. And I think that's the best way to spend time as a human recruiter.

Okay. We talked about your product. Let me try something. If I want to, let's say if I want to build Paraform for recruiters, uh, as an AI engineer, and for example, from scratch, and here's what I think I would do, and maybe you can tell me if I missed anything, just generically, I'm thinking about a product. So, so my understanding is a recruiter will log in and it will see open roles from different companies. And then so they go out and find candidates and submit them to the platform, right? This is a high-level workflow. So, so what I'm thinking I can do is let's say I have to provide these roles available to my recruiters. So I, I maybe scrape job boards for open roles and let recruiters browse them. And let them submit candidates. I can, with today's AI, I think I can enrich candidate data with maybe research like LinkedIn, social media, GitHub information, things like that. And I can use LLM because it's all unstructured data. LLM is so powerful today. I can use one to run an evaluation of candidates, like let's evaluate skill level, experience, personality to match maybe with open roles.. And of course we can rank order them by role for roles and send some top matches to the recruiter I'm working with and let them do whatever they do, like convince the candidate to apply or things like that. And as you said, I would build automated workflow. For instance, Connect, maybe I have, I don't, I don't have access to your platform, so I don't know what it looks like, but I imagine like you have maybe a chat box, uh, like ChatGPT for recruiters to do things like, can you send this email to my candidate? Connect with your Gmail. Your inbox, your calendar. Yeah, that's my approach. What do you think? What, what did I miss anything?

No, that's very impressive. I think, I think that's like, you know, especially you only learned about us so recently. I think that's a good way to think about it for sure. Yeah, I mean, of course, like the devil's in the details, right? Like I think each part of that workflow you, you described, there's like a very specific way, like different recruiters do it, like Then there's like the marketplace level, like incentives and quality control and all that stuff that you need to do. I guess like in many ways our founding journey and like how we got to where we are today was like sort of approaching it that way, iterating, changing things. I will say on the tooling part to make recruiters more effective at what they do, you know, we, we have our Recruiter OS, which basically is like a suite of tools that they can use to be more effective. But we have much bigger ambitions., you know, uh, than what we have today. I think the tools can be so much better. Recruiters every day, like recruiters build product with us, right? Like we actually have like this, it's not a rule or anything, but actually ends up happening is like there's a recruiter at our office every week at all times. Like they visit, like our engineers work with them, like they tell us like product stuff. Like, so we really wanna make the suite of tools better. And, uh, obviously it's also a matter of how do you utilize the data that the recruiters, you know, have, uh, like how do you help recruiters understand the value of their network and the matchmaking opportunities, uh, on both sides and how do you do that? And obviously our, uh, AI agents, um, you know, and building them well and improving them, I think is like a very important, uh, task ahead as well. And of course, like the distribution, right? Like at the end of the day, we build all that, but if we don't have the demand and supply, then can't really do anything there. So I think there's a lot of fun problems, you know, building a marketplace and much more, and having this AI problem to solve. I think it's a playground of opportunities for people looking to join a startup.

Yeah, I'm definitely cheating, right? I look at what you're doing and what's the product and just jumping ahead with zero pivoting, right? So I know it must be very hard to get to this point. I'm curious, what do you think is, was, was the hardest thing about actually building this? Hmm.

Hardest thing. Yeah. I think like the thing that I, maybe perhaps like the most valuable lesson is that it actually gets harder over time. I think that, maybe I had this thought that it gets easier over time because like, oh, like the, the real difficulty is at the beginning. It starts hard. And then once you build something and it works, you kind of I sit back and enjoy. Absolutely not. It actually is completely the opposite. It actually gets harder over time. And I actually think that learning that I actually enjoy that, I think was like a huge unlock for me. It was, I was like, wow, I actually kind of like that. I actually look at the barrel of challenges and go, that sounds fun. But actually I think it gets harder over time. So I would say like, what was the hardest, what was the hardest moment as a founder building Paraform or a CEO? Running this company is actually like most recent, like it's very much most recent.

What happened?

Well, I mean like nothing like crazy, but I just think over time, right? I think, and my answer will probably be like, if you ask me a year later, it'll probably be that time as well. And I think like, you know, I had a small like, you know, exit and like this is actually my second startup. By no means I will consider myself a second-time founder, but I did have like a small exit before, uh, but you know, I, I very much feel like a first-time founder. Like I, I think like every problem that comes my way, it's most likely I never solved that problem before. And I think that's what kind of what I mean by it gets harder over time. But I actually think, you know, learning that I actually enjoy that so much, I think was like a really, a big unlock. But I think like maybe a couple things that I can point to that are like memorable. I mean, the Coldstar problem for the marketplace was very difficult. We didn't make any revenue for like a year or maybe even more. And like, that's pretty tough. Like, fortunately we had the right like support systems and obviously with me and my co-founder, we, one, if one is having a bad day, one's having a good day. So that's obviously huge. But I think, yeah. The cold start problem was really difficult. Like when you thought you had enough roles, you don't have enough recruiters. You thought you have enough recruiters, you don't have enough roles. And really getting that flywheel going was really tough. I remember there was this one time where I think we must have done like 8:00 AM to 3:00 AM for like maybe 4 months straight. Yeah, something like that. And like we used to like bike back from like Marina, that's where our first office was, to mission where my co-founder's apartment was and just like every day. And then one time we came back and it was just like, it was so close to making a hire, like our first, or so close to like maybe making like hires on a weekly basis. And like the like offer fell through and you know, as you know, our model, like we only get paid when you make a hire or we only make revenue when you make a hire. And I just remember going, man, this is so hard. Like this is actually so hard. And I think there was one point where, and then we were hungry, so we were on DoorDash. One of us were like, and we were like picking for like 20 minutes talking about how hard it is. And I think one of us was like, hey, like, you know, this is like such a hard problem. Like, you know, what if like you combine TikTok? We were delirious. This is like 3 AM, really difficult. We just lost like so much, like a revenue opportunity. And we were like, oh, this is taking so long, maybe we should solve this problem. And, and I remember we were like, what if we combine TikTok and DoorDash? So, you know, you, you have like a feed where restaurants could post like photos. And my, my co-founder has like a filming— like he's like, that's his hobby, one of his hobbies in the past. So we were like, oh, you could do the filming, I'll go get the restaurants, all that. And then like 10 minutes later we're like, what are we talking about? But Actually, they actually released that feature recently. I think you can—

on TikTok?

Yeah. No, no, DoorDash. There's a short form way to actually— but anyway, the point being, it was so hard to a point where, you know, it was just like that. But obviously, like, um, you know, that— so that was really difficult. I think the other thing that was really difficult is like scaling the company. So going from 5 to 10, is like completely different to like 10 to 100, uh, especially when you cross the 50-person mark and 70-person mark. And, you know, again, back to that like first-time founder thing, like it's, it's a problem that I've never faced before, but I have to solve it anyways. And so I think that was really difficult. And I think, um, you know, there were days where I would just like wake up like just throwing up, um, and, and just sort of like, it was just so hard and I didn't know how to solve it. But if I had to go back and think about how I could have solved it faster and better is one, like that mindset of just like, actually it does get harder. So if anything, what you're dealing with now compared to what you'll deal with 2 years later is nothing. I think that's one. And the other thing is like actually like getting advice and sort of like, you know, talking to people who already went through before. Like all of our customers are, you know, startups like Series C companies, Series D companies, or public companies, whatever. And we have a lot of investors, advisors, and people around us that went through that before. And I think that was— but when you're in the moment and trying to really solve it, it's really hard to seek that help. So I think that's probably what I would do. But yeah, I think there were a lot of hard moments.

You made it sound like it's a video game you're playing, like a video game, and then it's just like one big boss after another. And then you know that more, it's going to be harder to beat. And so one should be okay, right? As long as you don't give up.

Yeah, totally. I think, I think the companies only die when kind of like founders give up or you run out of money. Like, very true. You know, I, I, I think that's— yeah, I think another thing is like, actually what really helped, I think, was, uh, almost like being sort of empathetic to the challenges. Like, I actually think I'm empathetic to the public company CEOs too. Imagine what they're dealing with. Like, like, I don't know, like earnings calls, like, you know, uh, retail investor. Like, like, there's so many things that just problems you have to deal with, lawsuits. I'm empathetic to them. And I think also hearing, like, you know, from different customers, like, sometimes I meet other founders and they're like, yeah, you'll go through that too, like, same. And it's just kind of like— and I think every company has their battle. Like you think your battle is the hardest, but actually like some companies have to, you know, go to RFP, like hell and basically have to give away your product for free just to make the sale. Like that's another challenge. And then there's like, maybe your competitor is actually like a big time tech person who has all the resources and all that stuff. Like that's pretty scary. Uh, I don't know, maybe like hardware companies. You have to like build something for like 4 years to even like make your first dollar. You know, pharmaceutical companies, like, you know, FDA approval. Like, I just think every company has their own battle, and actually thinking that your battle is the hardest is probably not the right way to think about it. It's just like, oh, like it's just one of many and it's just different. I think that mindset also helped a lot.

Yeah. That's so, that's, uh, that's so fascinating that you're going through all these things step by step. But then you're being persistent in a way. Like, I wonder what happened in the 10 minutes when you were almost giving up with your co-founder at DoorDash.

My co-founder and I sort of made a pact, right? Both individually and together and through this mentally, like, you know, one of our values at Paraform is binary outcome, which is basically you either win or lose and there's nothing in between. I think a lot of people go like, oh, actually, like, you can kind of 70% win or 50% win, and there's still— I actually think, you know, I don't know, maybe, maybe people, a lot of people disagree, but I firmly believe that it's a binary outcome. You either win or lose, and you obviously want the former. And I think that's a value that, you know, we have at Paraform. And I think like, yeah, I mean, I, day one, I, I think, uh, you know, um, there was— it didn't even enter our sort of stream of thought or consciousness to like, you know, it wasn't an option, right? I think we were just a little hungry and delirious at 3 AM. We have like all these ideas popping up, so, but I don't think we did anything to talk ourselves out of it. I think what probably happened is like one of our recruiters in the UK emailed us saying something is broken and we're like, yeah, let's get back to work. That's probably what happened.

You mentioned about your co-founder, Jeffrey, right? I think co-founding teams really need tremendous trust. How did you know that he was the right person?

Yeah, that's, uh, honestly, honestly, with Jeff, like, I— it's this obviously this like hard to explain like vibe, right? Like, but I try my best to explain. Jeff and I actually aren't like, I don't know, we went to college together or like went to high school together, like, or— I actually only met him 4 years ago, 3 and a half years ago. So I was on a business trip to New York and You know, he was there too, and like we kind of serendipitously met. But I think the 3.5 years we spent were very like, like that might as well be 30 years, right? In terms of just the level of difficulties we went through together. I mean, we, we still live together, so like, you know, the obviously 24/7 like that, like it's, it's, it's, it's short amount of time compared to maybe other co-founders, or I don't know what the average is, but it was a very intensely spent time. So I feel like I knew him for like 30 years, but I think what made it work between him and I, despite that, I think is like, I think what's really important is you have to be, you have to be sufficiently different but similar at the same time. Actually, one of my, one of our leaders at the company, he was my co-founder for my first company back in Australia, and I actually think we're very similar. In terms of skill set, like personality, all that stuff. And that worked. I mean, it— the outcome was obviously— I thought we could take it to, you know, all the way. But anyways, I think being sufficiently different and similar at the same time is really important. I think Geoff and I are very different people fundamentally. Like, even if we like look at the same problem, like his answer and my answer, very different. Or, you know, being more on the optimistic end versus the more like more pragmatic and how idealistic they are versus how pragmatic they are. Just like personality too, like just in normal social settings, like we're very different people, but at the same time, sufficiently similar where we, um, like share the same values. We have like the same moral compass of like what's right or wrong, work ethic. There's like sufficient ambition, like goals. So I think that's key. And I think a lot of people rush into these co-founder relationships, and I can't really give advice on that. I mean, Jeff was the first person I met, and we worked, and it just worked out. So by no means I'm saying, like, you know, but I think you have to be really thoughtful about it. And I think my advice would be sufficiently different but also sufficiently similar. And I actually found that over time we became more similar, which is interesting. I think he became more optimistic, idealistic than he used to be. I became more pragmatic than I used to be and sort of blended. But at the core, people don't really change, right? So at the core, we're very different, but becoming more similar, sharing that bond. But yeah, I think that's why it worked out.

Yeah. I have to say, you're really, really lucky.

Yeah.

I'll ask you more questions around that when we have maybe a coffee chat next time or something like that. Um, but I would, before, uh, we end the podcast, uh, I would like to, you know, ask you a question on behalf of everyone who's kind of lost right now. We kind of touched on the, the thesis multiple times, right? The new grads, the people who just got laid off. How should we get prepared? How do we make ourselves more valuable in a job market of the AI era?

AI or not, I think it's actually always the same. Which is, and maybe I think of it this way because I wasn't in that position not too long ago in the sense that I didn't like that whole— basically, I think you have to be valuable. You have to be valuable. And I think that in order to do that, you have to understand what I think they call it, like professional ikigai or something, where basically it's like what you like doing, what you're good at, and whether it's like valuable for that society or whatever at that current time aligning is truly a huge blessing, right? And I think that you should find that as soon as possible. And I think for every single person in the world that exists, and that should be the mindset. If you believe that that's not true, it's only going to be even harder to even— ultimately you have to get there. There's no other way. And I think on the first part of like what you like, it's a deep, deep introspection, but you probably already know. But I think like being sort of very intellectually honest to yourself and saying like what it is, I think is very, very important. What other people thought were cool or like what pays the most or like that stuff, I think was even though didn't really, I knew I didn't really like it. I just sort of, right? So I think getting out of— making sure you find that, and you probably already know. So that's one. I think the second part in terms of what you're good at, I think again, you probably already know. You probably growing up heard that you're like, oh, wow, you're always so good with your words, or, wow, you're really good at spotting really nice looking furniture, or whatever that is. You probably already heard that before from people around you. So again, deep introspection. But for this, I think you can actually, you know, like, it's like in your control. And I think if you then apply, like, AI era of, like, what is useful to the society, I think deeply think about what AI is very, very good at and what humans are very, very good at and distinguish them and, you know, go the latter, like, go deep on the latter category. And, you know, a few things I can think of is relationships and trust. Actually, like, sales roles are having a surge right now. Like, who knew? Who knew that sales roles might be actually more valuable than software engineers? I don't think anyone would've predicted that, right? And so, and I'm not saying software engineers is not valuable. I think they, there's like a way that they're gonna evolve too. But, um, I think for, for them it's really, I think about product sense, design sense, being able to understand what users want, knowing how to write like TypeScript is no longer valuable. It's free. So you have to like think about that. But I think if you really deeply— so the answer is not with me or anyone else. I think it's, it's with the person like you. And I think doing the deep, deep introspection with these three like pillars in mind, I think is like probably the right way to think about it.

Yeah, I love it. Do you have a doomsday prediction for recruiting?

Doomsday prediction? Well, I'm optimistic and I'm an abundance— like, I believe in the abundance. Yeah, yeah. But, um, doomsday? Yeah, like, I think there's gonna be a lot of jobs and people change. And like, probably if you think that change is happening in like 5 years, it's actually probably 2 and a half. Or 2 or 1. So the change is gonna happen faster than anyone thinks. So that's like scary, but I think again, like whoever gets ahead of it and whoever, eventually everyone will get ahead of it, but whoever gets ahead of it first, you know, you get a head start. And I think doing that, applying that framework, I think is really important. Doomsday prediction for recruiting is probably like, there are gonna be jobs that won't exist anymore. Yeah, there are definitely going to be jobs that won't exist anymore. So yeah, that's probably my only doomsday prediction.

Our conversation really reminds me that this could happen to any job. Like you could be an engineer that you're on demand, you could be a designer on demand, right? In a sense. Do you see that?

I need to think about whether it has the same exact characteristics as recruiting because the recruiting is, again, it's more like in waves. I think so. I mean, I think there's going to be like a task-based or like project-based workforce for any profession. I think there was actually like a trend, like freelancer economy. I remember gig economy was like a thing. And I think, I think so. I totally think so. I do think that there will be more businesses than there are employees. Like the ratio of employees to business owners will probably be skewing more to business owners. Like I'm really big fan of what Shopify is doing, Harley. Their president is a great advisor and investor in us, and I think I'm very bullish on what they're doing. Like, I think like this sort of entrepreneurship economy across every industry is happening. Totally. That's probably another way you can take control of what, um, you know, you know, the, your destiny. And, you know, with AI, uh, and, and, and, and, um, hopefully like, you know, the way we similar to how we think about it for recruiting, you know, with AI and with like all these sort of manual work and stuff and being able to do more with one person, the, I guess the entry barrier to becoming an entrepreneur is, yeah, definitely lower, right? There are more people in the YC batch than ever before. I think now they are more bullish on the solo founders now. Like, so I definitely think so.

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, John, for today. This is a really fun conversation and I feel like You know, I've talked with a lot of founders who's, you know, talking about building AI to replace people. And I really like that your frame of thinking at a macro level and solving this hard fundamental human, you know, existential problem, you know, at the foundation. And if you make this work, maybe you're just going to be the meta platform, meta agency for not just recruiters, but maybe for engineers and other professions too, because we need clients as well, right? So I'm looking forward to, like, you go to the next step. And please do come back if you have new announcement. I'm happy to have you back and chat with me, like, what's going on and what's the scary stuff that's happening and what do we do? Love those topics. Thanks for your generosity.