Episode #657 - Grit, Wit, And Business Acumen with Sief Khafagi, Co-Founder and CEO of Techvestor

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

I'm talking with Sif Khafogi from Los Angeles. How are you doing, Steve?

Hey, Larry.

I'm doing well and excited to have you here and find out how someone goes from the bowels of Facebook and Meta and programming to real estate success in a big way. And I kind of know some of the clues there. But anyway, how did you wind up at Meta of all places? Was that your first, second, third, or fourth stop coming up the ladder, earning your own way in the world?

Yeah, it was actually one of my first. So I was graduating college and I had built a small little business about helping people break into tech and beat the Facebook and Google interviews at the time. And I was helping computer science students get in, break into big tech. I got headhunted by Facebook asking me if I'd be willing to use my skills on the inside rather than on the outside and kind of giving away all their secrets. And, you know, it was a great offer, great time in my career to go learn from people who are much better and smarter than me in more ways than one. And it was an opportunity couldn't really pass up. So it was a great opportunity, lots to learn there and a really fantastic company as well. And, you know, I think on the notion of Facebook, we're recording this in May. I know many, many people are losing their jobs at Facebook and getting laid off over April and May, and that's deeply saddening. So I do wish those individuals luck in finding their next stop as well.

Right. Because we need talented people working and engaged one way or the other, fully engaged out here in the economy. We don't need them disengaged. And so maybe we can help give them a clue or an idea. Now, when you. How did you wind up at Meta and what school did you go to, by the way?

Yeah, so I graduated San Diego State, and when I was at San Diego State, I started a small company called Jumpstart. Jumpstart was helping computer science students break into tech and beat the interview. I was decent at interviewing back in the day, and I was sharing some of those tips and tricks of educating kind of new grads on how to break those interviews and beat them and get the offers, negotiating them, et cetera. I had gotten a message from Facebook saying, hey, we're really interested in talking with you, if you'd be open to it, flew out, met the team and really realized that day that this could be a great opportunity. The people I met were fantastic.

But now how does someone in college who hasn't gone through the product. You weren't working at Facebook yet, but somehow you figured out how to break the code and get the jobs. And so people now are going to an undergrad and, and getting information about how they're gonna get their jobs credibility as well as information things. How did you get that to where people would actually pay you any attention?

You know, I think the biggest thing for me is I was very public and transparent with what I knew and what I didn't know. We were focusing predominantly on educating new grads on the soft skill side, not actually the code. Right. Code is something that you can learn and. And then you should have learned and something that you should have learned over the four or five years that you were in school in navigating that. But most individuals at that age did not know how to corroborate and take here's how I am in real life and bring that identity into an interview where this other person sitting across from me is really excited about me. Right. Telling their story and their narrative and connecting code to personality is actually a big deal because they. I think people all the time think about a technology company like Meta where you have to be this great coder or this great engineer and that's part of it. But 80% of the interview process is not about whether you can code. They expect you to know how to code. Right. The interview process is about, is this the person that I want to work with? Can I grow this person? What are the skills of this person? Can this person bring value to my team culture? And these are things that new grads myself at the time. Right. It's really difficult to grasp, especially when you're in a mathematical environment most of your life, which is about coding.

Right? Yeah. And you know, that's always been true even before there was such a thing as coding and there was only such a thing as engineering. You'd get whether or not you got hired or not or whether or not you advanced had to do with your people skills, not your technical skills. But you don't know that. You think it's my grades. Let me show you all of that. But you can't laugh at a joke. You obviously have no self humor, no ironic view of the world. You can't take a joke either. Humor is just something that's what I didn't see that in the book, it's going to make it very hard to work with you. And that reminds me of I was out in la, believe it or not, one time and I was reading a paper, I mean, reading the paper, LA Times, I guess, and they had a thing about the Yale Alumni Club was having meetings all over the state and they were having a big time recruiter come through. And this was had to be 25 years ago. So before all of the coding, influenza was all over the country. The main point, they put this in the article, by the way. So they were having Yale alumni meetings all over California, north, middle bottom, San Diego. Number one thing they covered with them is when you go into the interview, smile.

Yeah, surprisingly, it's a big deal, right. Energy is really important.

But they had all these Ivy League graduates that needed to be told there's such a big thing. We're going to devote the primary time with our alumni meeting here to get you to smile and relax and be a person.

It's a really big deal, right? The soft skills, it's not even smiling itself. It's how you smile when you smile, what you smile at. Right. The levels of in depth that goes in. And when we used to do it on college campuses, it was really a one week boot camp and everyone was shocked that not a single session that we did was around their technical skills.

Right.

Because as someone who in retrospect, in hindsight's 20 20, had the privilege of probably seeing a thousand, two, three, five thousand people interview and reading their interview feedback across every possible infrastructure team at Facebook, People with great tech skill and horrible people skills will never get hired. People with subpar tech skills and great people skills have a shot. Right? And it's because people can learn, they can navigate, and it's that grit and that attitude that you're bringing to a culture. And like as someone who runs a company today, you're going to hire the person who's a sponge, who can come in and adapt and navigate, not the person who's going to come in and destroy the culture because no one wants to be there.

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Notes. Yeah, you got to be with these people, spend large amounts of time with them and hopefully over long, many, many years, you know, and, and you don't want someone. You just dread. They make your skin crawl every time you think about them, you know what I mean? So you gotta be able to be tolerated. In fact, I remember riding on an airplane with one of the CBS News guys back in Douglas. Anyway, you wouldn't know him, but he was like behind Dan Rather when Dan Rather was the main guy. We flying out of Savannah into Atlanta and we were talking about Dan Rather and what they, you know, Dan Rather. I was talking, I told him this, I said, you know, two kind of people. You have the people that are the technically oriented and then you have the people that are people oriented. And I said the example. And we were talking about Dan Rather being the technical guy, you know, what about Mr. President? You know, it's like not really so somebody, the President looks forward to coming up and asking a question. But what they had just done is gotten Dan Rather to wear a sweater on TV.

And little things like that. Yeah.

And that like humanized him a little bit. You know, the example of the two kinds of people is you. You have one neighbor in the neighborhood goes to the mailbox. The people person goes to the mailbox to get pick up the mail. They see the neighbor out there watering the grass and hey, how you doing Carolyn? And you know how the kids and you walk over, start a conversation and two hours later you go back in the house and forgot to get the mail. That's the people. And then the technical person is somebody who goes and he winds up shooting the mailman because he's two minutes late.

An attitude and approach and half glass empty, half glass full. Right. Many times. And people are really hard on themselves, especially as young 20 somethings.

Right.

We don't know what's in the world yet.

Right. And how did you get disabused of the idea that the grades and the technical ability and everything was not the issue to the point that you started a business educating people who are ahead of you in school on this. How did you get turned on?

I was very career oriented from a very young age because I had to provide for myself from a very young age, since I think I was about 14.

Talk about that.

Yeah, I held every stint possible. And you know My parents were unfortunately disabled at a young age or when we were young. And my dad.

What kind of disabled?

We were in a pretty bad car accident that disabled both my parents. And you know, my dad went from working his main job to now finding three jobs around the city where he had to just kind of make ends meet. And my mom was soon to be nurse, which was unfortunately handicapped and couldn't go down that path at the time. And you know, she became an incredible stay at home mom. And you know, at 14, it was. I wanted to do anything or needed money for anything. It was like supporting yourself, right? So I held every job you can think of. Everything from like working, you know, at a pizza restaurant to working at the high school and a lot of jobs in between. But the point is, like, I always looked to progress and improve myself over time. And a lot of the times it meant interviewing for the next job, right? The next opportunity, right? It was. And I learned very early that most employers don't value you enough long term. You'll make more money simply by going to the next employer, right? And I picked up on that early. And so I'd stay somewhere maybe for like a year or a year and a half and then like, figure out what I wanted to do next and build my skill set. I think I had probably a little under two dozen interviews from between like 6:14 and 21:22. And I got the job every single time except once, right? And so I was really good at interviewing. That's what I learned by the end. And I was in college and I was like, I keep getting these jobs, not necessarily taking them, right? Every single time. But I was like, my friends are struggling even getting noticed on the interview, right? And like, why aren't they making it through this process? And to me, it came very naturally to better understand that the interview process in many ways is both art and science. But a lot of people forget about the art piece, right? The science piece is like, you got to know your stuff, you're interviewing for X role, you got to know xyz, that's obvious. But how do we improve the art side? Because that's the side that people remember and we're human beings at the end of the day, right? And as someone who is in management at a young age, you remember the artful side of people, not the scientific side, right? I expect you to be able to get the answer right on a question or whatever as an interviewer. But what I gravitate and attach to is the story of the individual. When I'm reviewing the interview feedback as to whether or not I want to hire this person. And if I can't remember you based on our conversation and what we did and did you affect my emotional side of an interviewer right then it's unlikely I'm going to fight for you. So those are the types of things that I picked up on very young, both as an interviewer and an interviewee over time. And what I realized is a lot of young people just did not understand that or grasp that, or perhaps for most of them, they just haven't been through enough interviews to really see those patterns. Right. And so that's really where I recognized an opportunity to help educate around the topic. And I started writing online and you know, helping other people and it naturally gravitated into that. I didn't actually seek out to start a business in that sense. And I wouldn't even call it a full blown business. I was probably working with two to three dozen people a year, but each one was a great check for me and a great opportunity for them.

Well, first of all, an accident like that can happen to any of us. Unfortunately, it happened to you and your family. And when these things happen, a lot of how people have prepared or lived their life or built values into their kids and all that comes into play. And your parents must have done a whole lot right with you growing up for you to say, okay, I've got to take care of myself and see what I can do to help out at home here. And that had to be, had to be a tough decision or had to be tough adjustment where now your free time is going to be working and you don't really have a choice on it. And it happens suddenly like that. How'd you make that adjustment?

You know, it happened when I was nine. Nine or ten is when it actually happened. And I saw like we moved in with family because my parents were in the hospital for about a year, just kind of like recovering. And we were kids. So my sister and I told me just to kind of go to school and do those types of things that kids do. But what I recognized is it's really easy to feel bad for yourself in certain situations, but most times you can do something about it. We just choose not to. And it's, and it's the difficult path, the path less chosen right to where you're headed. And I was privileged enough to have parents who even from their hospital bed continued to motivate, educate and take care of us the best of their ability from what they could do from there. Right. Checking in on us. And I remember every Friday, actually after school, my uncle would take me to go visit my parents in the hospital. And it was my favorite part of the week and show up. And my mom would give me two bucks to go to the vending machine and get a Dr. Pepper. It was kind of my treat for the week. But she would, she never stopped being a parent, even though she was going through an incredibly painful time in her life. Same for my dad.

Right.

And they instilled this. Even though we have these obstacles, we still have responsibilities. And I just happened to, I was forced to in a sense. But you know, obviously in retrospect, it was a great skill set to pick up on. I picked up on those responsibilities a lot earlier. So navigating them weren't easy. Right. And I can't sit here and say that I didn't have tough days in doing so, but I definitely think it molds your, your perspective on things, especially when things do get tough. And I think a lot of that grit is probably what I would look to as a reason as why we're, we're successful in starting a company. You know, starting a company is similar, you know, pains, you know, you here know 9 million, right. Compared to that one. Yes. And finding a fit is really hard. So that grit I'm really empathetic for.

Yeah. That's the time I tell my son, you go through where you tell yourself, they can't all be stupid. They can't all be stubborn. They can't.

No.

They can't all be too busy. Sooner or later I just gotta, you know, it's kind of like having an injury in your body. You just gotta do the exercise, make the movements to force blood into the area that needs repair, you know, because until the blood gets in there, no repair is going to happen. No matter. No amount of shots is going to make a difference. You just have to move things, you know, get that blood circulating and same thing in your business. You got to get the blood circulating with prospecting to get it, especially to get it started, but then keeping it going and you hear a lot of no's along the way.

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