Paraform CEO John Kim says good engineers now get 1,000 recruiting messages a week, up from 100, because communication costs have collapsed. He built his startup with a co-founder pact to survive sleepless nights, and advises new graduates to develop skills AI can't do: product sense, design, sales.
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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. It's very true.
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, things becomes a lot easier.
I absolutely agree. And I think there's actually a lot of parallels. 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. And not only that, you spend most of your waking hours working, right? I also think it's one of the most inefficient markets similar to real estate where there's information asymmetry. 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. 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.
The, the cost of recruiting is huge.
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 gets 1,000 messages a week, and a good company that used to get 1,000 applications now gets 100,000 applications. The noise is getting even worse.
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.
I remember there was this one time where I think we must have done like 8 AM to 3 AM for like maybe 4 months straight, so close to making a hire, like our first, or so close to like maybe making like hires on a weekly basis. And the 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 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, This is like such a hard problem. Like, what if like you combine TikTok? We were delirious. This was like 3:00 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. 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.
You mentioned about your co-founder Jeffrey, right? I think co-founding teams really needs tremendous trust. How did you know that he was the right person?
Jeff and I, 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 the 3.5 years we spent, that might as well be 30 years, right? In terms of just the level of difficulties we went through together. I mean, we still live together. You have to be sufficiently different but similar at the same time. Jeff and I are very different people fundamentally. Like, even if we look at the same problem, his answer and my answer, very different. Or being more on the optimistic end versus the more— like more pragmatic and how idealistic they are versus how pragmatic they are, 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. I actually found that over time we became more similar, which is interesting.
Mm-hmm.
Like, I think he became like more like optimistic idealistic than he used to be. I became more pragmatic than I used to be and sort of like blended, but at the core, like, people don't really change, right? Like, 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.
I would like to, you know, ask you a question on behalf of everyone who's kind of lost right now with new grads, the people who just got laid off. How should we get prepared? How do we make ourselves more valuable in the AI era?
AI or not, I think it's actually always the same, which is, 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 valuable for that society at that current time aligning is truly a huge blessing. 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. I was there not too long ago. I didn't graduate high school that too long ago, right? What other people thought were cool or like what pays the most, 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 go the latter, like go deep on the latter category. Sales roles are having a surge right now. Who knew? Who knew that sales roles might be actually more valuable than software engineers? 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.
