S6E8: Anvisha Pai and Dover are Automating the Recruiting and Hiring Process for the Businesses of Today

Welcome to The Room Podcast. I'm Claudia Laurie, co-CEO and founder of Pryve.

And I'm Madison McIlwain, partner of seed stage investments at Defy VC. Claudia and I are friends first and and business partners second. Living in the heart of Silicon Valley, we know what it's like to be on the inside of innovation, having worked at flagship companies like Gap Inc. and Uber. Now in our roles as a founder and a funder, we're changing the face of technology through our mission to bring more people into the room where it happens.

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Cooley is a global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first institutional venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world. The firm has 60+ years working with VCs, helping form managed funds, make investments, and to handle the myriad of issues that arise through a fund's lifetime. Learn more about the firm at cooley.com and also cooleygo.com, Cooley's award-winning free legal resource for startups. Welcome back to another episode of The Room Podcast. Today's episode is our season finale of our 6th season, and we're so excited to share another inspiring conversation with this time the co-founder and CPO of Dover, Anvesha Pai. Dover is the modern recruiting engine for startups and helps find and schedule recruitment candidates and helps establish scalable repeatable hiring processes for high-growth companies. Aimed at recruiters, Dover helps them juggle and aggregate multiple candidate pools to source and outreach efficiently. Last year, Tiger Global led the Series A round, with Founders Fund, Abstract Ventures, and Y Combinator also investing. Dover was part of YC's Summer 2019 class. On this episode with Anvesha, we discuss the journey of a multi-time founder, Advice for startups and hiring, and the future of work and hiring automation. Let's open the door.

Anvesha, thank you so much for joining us today in The Room.

Thanks for having me.

We're really excited to have you here and highlight some incredible stories that you've had with founding Dover. But before we get started in what you're doing today, we like to start at the beginning. Where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

I grew up in India. I grew up in Mumbai, which is a massive city. My parents are both doctors, and so grew up in this environment environment of loving science and being really curious about STEM. I was very lucky in having kind of that environment to expose me to STEM at the outset. The other thing that I was deeply passionate about growing up in India was international development. I initially applied to college at MIT with an intention to focus on sustainability and chemical engineering. When I got there, I just loved computer science so much that I ended up switching. For me, that's always been like a through line of wanting to make an impact and help people. At this first phase of my career, I'm very focused on things where I think I can make an outsized impact, and that happens to be software, but later on in life, hoping to refocus efforts again on international development and the environment, maybe somewhere down the road.

I was just having this conversation with a friend last night, actually, about the alignment of impact and personal identity at work and what that looks like and how that evolves, aligning with the capitalist ecosystem that we all live in, but also coming to work and showing up and having that mission orientation. With that vein of identity, did you always think you were gonna become a founder?

Definitely not. I always thought I was gonna become a scientist. Space, like, really intrigued me. I read a lot of physics books, and I literally read textbooks as a kid for fun. I don't know, I was like a super nerd or something, but that's what I always thought I wanted to do. And it's actually really interesting because my parents were academic and professionals. I was not really exposed to the world of business at all. And like a lot of South Asian kids, I had this, "Oh yeah, you gotta be like a doctor or an engineer, and that's like the way to go in life," and things like that. The exposure to entrepreneurship and being a founder and what that means happened in college. A lot of what you do as a founder, especially in the early parts of product market fit and discovering a problem to go after, has these like parallels to like the scientific process of like discovery and being intellectually honest and solving puzzles and figuring things out. To this day, that's still like the most fun part of my job is that I get to solve new and unique problems and think Socratically about them. That's how I've tied it together.

Education and kind of specifically in STEM, that framework can hold no matter what discipline you end up applying it to. I know all of us here majored in STEM in some capacity and in differing degrees are applying the tactical of what we learned at work. But the thought process for me, especially now in venture, is something I think about quite often. You probably have the most STEM of all the backgrounds though, because MIT is obviously lauded for being a top technical institute and you majored in computer science and math. So deviated a little bit from the scientist origin story there and actually also ended up graduating to become a product manager. So we have a lot of product manager energy on the call today and you found yourself at Dropbox. How was being an engineer in training really helpful, or was it helpful, I should say, from a product perspective?

My path to being a product manager was pretty random. I never actually set out to be a product manager. I did these like software internships. I was gonna do a master's in like machine learning, and I actually had a full-time offer to go to a startup as a software engineer. As a side note, the startup was Affirm, and I really wish I had taken that offer now cuz it was very early on. But anyways, the reason I ended up in this is because coming off of my software internships, and I don't wanna like badmouth Google, that's where I interned. It was a great place to learn. But I did feel a little bit like I was missing a lot of context and the bigger picture. And at this point, I really did want to actually start a company at some point. I was like really intrigued with it. Spending a summer at Google in the Bay Area, I just got exposed to a lot more like entrepreneurs and founders who were also pretty young. And I was like, it just felt like erroneously at the time that software wouldn't get me closer to that understanding. I hadn't worked at a startup. I didn't know that being an engineer at a startup is a completely different ballgame. I happened to just get in touch with someone who had studied computer science and then went on to join the business operations team at Dropbox. So there were a lot of people at Dropbox in the biz ops org that were from a technical background and were doing stuff that was pretty technical, and that seemed really cool. I talked with them, interviewed, and then I was like the last person they brought on to their biz ops class by months, cuz I just interviewed a few months before the job started. It was just not so like random. By the time I actually showed up there to start my job, the Biz Ops organization had actually somewhat gone through a restructuring. They were like, okay, you have to be a product manager now. And I was like, okay, that's fine. That's kind of what I wanted to learn more about anyway. So that's kind of how I ended up there. Since the role was again supposed to be like, they want to hire really technical people. I wrote code, like I went through the engineering onboarding when I got there. I also think, as I'm sure y'all know as fellow PMs, being able to show that you understand things technically and that you can do those things just makes it a lot easier to work with a variety of engineers, which it didn't have to be that way, but it is that way sometimes. And I think those were key parts to it. And again, I think Madison, like you mentioned earlier, being exposed to the thought processes that you develop as an engineer just helps with a broad set of problem solving across the board.

It's interesting, a lot of folks that are engineers or in product often ask me now, do you think being a PM is a good first step to becoming a founder? And I think in many ways there's no way to train to become a founder. You just need to do it and learn on the fly. But at the same time, I think having that engineering understanding and having that product experience certainly helped, especially in terms of understanding a more bird's eye view of multiple functions and what needs to be put together in order to take a product from idea to start testing product market fit. With that, I'm curious about your journey to becoming founder. Dover wasn't your first startup, so would love for you to share a little bit around how you went from PM at Dropbox to now becoming a multi-time founder.

A quick thing on the PM piece as well is I don't think it's the only way. So for the people listening, I actually do think that even if you start your career in engineering, engineering at a startup is actually like a really great way to step into it too. And so that's actually what I ended up doing right after Dropbox, because I was a PM for 2 years. I feel like I got a nice bird's eye view, but I didn't necessarily come out of it with being any better of a software engineer. Than I was going in, because it is hard to develop that skill set if you're not doing it full-time and in production. And so, I actually joined a startup called Rep.ai as a founding engineer, and that was like a pretty big risk because it's a very early-stage startup and I hadn't done a lot of like engineering at scale. But the CTO there, Ben Lieb, who's still someone I talk to quite often, he's one of our investors here at Dover, someone who supported me through my career. He was very active in mentoring me in the first couple months as I got up to speed. So I would say that was a really formative experience. I wrote some of the first lines of code across the product. We built the thing, we scaled it, we did some recruiting. I was in charge of like engineering recruiting for a while. We did a bunch of things that really set me up to be a technical founder that I didn't necessarily feel like I was ready to do just coming out of Dropbox. So that was the first step in the journey. And after that, I co-founded a company called Slab, again in the founding engineer role where I was coming in and largely focusing on coding, a little bit of growth. Was there for a little bit over a year, learned a ton, a lot more kind of on the business side of what it takes to go from zero to one and actually get customers. Both those startup experiences were very challenging in that regard. The first company was like customer support, which is a difficult space to like get people to switch over to your solution. And the second was like an internal wiki. So again, same thing. Imagine getting someone to switch from Google Docs to your thing and put all their company information in there, right? Challenge and go-to-market. And so after Slab, I did a lot of soul searching on what I wanted to do next. I almost didn't do another startup. I was like, I've come off of a string of two startups, maybe I want to take some time. But it just so happened that Max, who's now my co-founder, one of my best friends from college, was available and we started working together. We had been working on projects together for a long time from our days in undergrad, and it was just too good an opportunity to pass up to work with him. And that's how we started working together, and that eventually led to Dover.

It's always encouraging and interesting to hear throughout our conversations on the podcast how there are oftentimes many tries at that before you get to the startup that we're really focusing the conversation around. And so, I think it's encouraging to many people who are starting out their careers who want to become a founder that, no, maybe it's your second, third, fourth startup that you founded or worked at that really helps prime you to make it big and go through the process again. So, but thank you for sharing that. Another topic in terms of getting ready to become a startup founder is that of YC. And I know that you went through the YC experience. Would love for you to share a little bit more about any highs or lows or takeaways from your experience at Y Combinator.

It's hard to think of just like one or two notable moments because this environment that they're creating where they're saying like, hey, you have like 10 weeks or something, you gotta get something together, you gotta figure stuff out, go. They like create this world in which the only thing that matters is the one number that you're trying to grow every single day. So that's pretty cool. But yes, to answer your question, in terms of the highlight, I definitely think it was Alumni Demo. For those listening, there's the YC Demo Day where you go out and present your startup to investors. But before Demo Day, there's this thing called Alumni Demo Day where former YC alums are able to see the demos. A lot of them are angel investors, they do invest, but it's a lot more of a friendlier crowd. This was also back when YC was in person, but the coolest thing was being able to meet all these like other founders who are part of this community and were welcoming and people who turn into customers who turn into like maybe some investors. It was just really cool, like having this group of people that are like rooting for you, even though they don't know who you are. They're like listening to your presentation, they're clapping, they're like cheering you on. It just felt like this amazing moment. You don't really feel alone in it, which I think sometimes can happen when you're a founder, particularly like an underrepresented founder. Like there's not that many women in the room a lot of these times. So something like Alumni Demo Day where you get to see The community really helps make you feel like more of a part of it. Can't really think of any like particular low moments to share, but every day it was like a sprint. So that was fun actually.

Totally a sprint and a rollercoaster and a marathon all at the same time. Let's focus a little bit more on Dover specifically, the company that you were pitching at the alumni demo day, then full demo day and beyond. Dover helps startups across all stages. Scale up their recruiting by helping them automate recruiting operations ranging from sourcing to scheduling. How does Dover automate the initial candidate sourcing?

In the initial days of the company, even before we started YC, what we did was we went to a couple of our friends' companies and we asked them if we could just do recruiting for them. So we literally just did everything that they needed. I personally reached out to hundreds of candidates. I interviewed 20 candidates a day for some of these companies. I helped coordinate the debriefs, did the scheduling, like did everything, have a lot of empathy for the recruiter's job because I did it for a while. And as we were doing that, especially in the startup context, we realized that one of the things that startups were not doing is reaching out to candidates because it's so time-consuming, it's so time-intensive. They prefer to rely on referrals or marketplaces or what have you. But that was like a huge missed opportunity for them. So we started by trying to build that, and it is very hard. There have been a lot of startups that have tried to automate that kind of initial candidate evaluation. And have been a lot of failures in that space. So like, how did we approach it? So we started out by doing everything manually and took several iterations to just automate the work that we were doing. That took like maybe a year to figure out, and we were very disciplined about it. We never tried to outsource this. We never tried to hire like a remote workforce, which is what a lot of other companies do. And I think that's why we were able to figure a lot of it out. In terms of how it actually works, the other kind of like insight that we had is that we don't just like train an AI or a machine learning model and trust that to find candidates because it's a black box and it often doesn't work very well. Instead, what we do is we use machine learning to answer very scoped questions. We'll start out by asking our customers what they want. We ask them a series of business questions about what they're looking for. So if they're hiring a full-stack engineer, we might ask them like, are they going to work on web development? Are they going to work on like a mobile application? Are they going to work on data pipe?

Like, what are they going to work on?

And using this this business context, we build up the search parameters that Dover is then using. And that's a combination of a rule-based system, so literally stuff like, where is this person located, or how many years of experience do they have, which is more challenging than you would think, probably more easy to reason about. Heuristic, does someone work in the same industry? Are they likely to know certain things or not? One thing that we were very careful about is we didn't want to become looking at people's resumes and ruling people out that didn't have the right words in their resume, right? So we were very careful about that. And finally, machine learning to answer the problems that were fuzzier. An example of a machine learning question that we try to answer is what kind of engineer is this person? Machine learning works great for that kind of thing, but if you were to ask what is a good candidate, that's not the best question to ask.

I just have an anecdote on the hiring front around the engineering point, which is for our companies, they're always hiring engineers. Actually, Claudia knows this too. I'm sure she's always hiring engineers. If anyone's listening and wants to come work for Five or one of our portfolio companies. And we've unfortunately had a mishire or two where the engineer didn't actually code in the language that the company was primarily writing in, or they, yes, had front-end experience, but really felt more comfortable being a backend engineer. And so, these kinds of automated flags where you can be more clear and upfront from day one of these are my strengths, these are my weaknesses, I think both benefits the candidates and also benefits the companies from potentially having a mis-hire, which can be more expensive than not hiring at all.

I think in certain cases it makes sense to be very rigorous about what experience someone has, but a lot of times if you do that, you end up excluding people who actually could have been really good. An example of that is we use Python, we use Django, right? Django is like a very specific thing. Some of our best people here didn't even know Python when they came in and we took the time to teach them. This obviously doesn't apply to everything.

Would love to focus a little bit more on the fundraise, some of the incredible growth to date out of YC. And I know we chatted about Demo Day. You initially raised a seed round led by Founders Fund in April of 2020, and then The following year in '21, you and your team announced your Series A led by Tiger Global. First of all, congratulations. That's incredibly exciting. Getting to Series A is no small feat. I would love for you to walk our listeners through Dover's fundraising journey and how that experience impacted the team and just some lessons learned along the way.

We actually raised our seed right before YC Demo Day, so that was August 2019, but we just announced it later on doing the classic timing your launch You only get to do it once. So in terms of our fundraising history, we got really lucky with the timing of everything coming up. We had Demo Day in person and we were able to meet with a lot of investors just based on my time at Dropbox, which is another thing I kind of want to call out. Working at Dropbox was really great because I got to meet a lot of people, make a very large network. And so that was very helpful when fundraising because we skipped straight to like conversations with partners and it was super helpful to just know people like across the industry. Our seed round was a team bet of like, hey, we think this team is great and we like the space they're pursuing. But I think we were also very lucky in that we had quite a lot of traction. So we had a non-trivial amount of MRR coming into our seed, like we were close to actually a million in ARR at the time. That was very helpful in being like, hey, this is a real company and there's traction. So that was sort of our seed round. And then a very interesting transition point was when COVID hit. The first couple of weeks when everyone was going into lockdown, every company froze their hiring. There were a lot of layoffs. And a lot of our customers paused their hiring. So we let people out of contracts, we let them downgrade. We were like, okay, what's going to happen to the company now? We were only 5 people back then, but something really unexpected happened, which is as everyone switched remote, there's this countercyclical effect in tech companies. People actually started scaling up hiring again, but they wanted to do it in a more cost-conscious and flexible way. They also needed to be able to do remote hiring, which many of these companies weren't doing before. And obviously it's a much bigger pool. How do you even begin to hire remotely. So Dover was extremely well positioned. And then we saw an insane amount of growth at that time as those like kind of tailwinds were propelling us forward. And that's what led to our Series A. We just grew so much in a short time. The team was 5 people when the pandemic hit. We were raising our Series A, we were like 50 people, maybe less than 50, a lot of people, a lot of customers, a lot of revenue. And so that's what teed that up.

It's incredible to hear the growth over the past 2, 2 and a half years. Since that initial YC Demo Day and understanding a bit more of the ascension, the dip in COVID, and then coming back with even a greater force because the evolution of hiring happened where now people are almost always having first conversations remote. It's really changed the first point of contact. One thing I noticed about your website is this incredible resource tab where you're providing templates for many types of reachouts, including more sensitive subjects like a rejection email. It appears that this content marketing approach has been a core engine for your growth. How has this strategy and others really contributed to this incredible growth in customer base for Dover?

A lot of this kind of came about actually from our own learnings. Like as a company, we've always kind of had this ethos of being very close to our customers and trying to help them regardless of whether or not we're like, hey, this is something our product supports right now. In the early days especially, and even now, a lot of our customers are first-time founders who don't have a recruiting team, they don't have a lot of resources, and they're trying to figure all this out on their own. That's one of the most high-leverage things we can do to help them is be like, hey, here's how you reject someone. It just turns out that this stuff is also interesting to people who are not customers of Dover, obviously. And we started a lot of this by being like, hey, we know the answers, people have the questions, and it has turned into a very good channel for us. I'll share like two things that we did that were especially helpful. So we have ebooks and templates, which are great resources and is a very tried and tested playbook in SaaS is to release like gated content or resources to get people to sign up. The thing that we've done that's also a little bit interesting is releasing free tools. You don't see a ton of these on our website right now, but one example that we had a while ago was when GPT-3, OpenAI language model came out. At first, we actually built a little tool where you could put in your job description and we would rewrite it for you. That was like a really big lead source for us, and we actually ended up having to take it down. The quality wasn't like that great, but we're hoping to bring it back with some more investment. Very similar to the HubSpot spot model there and providing people with like free tools to hopefully bring them into the ecosystem. Another quick plug, we have a website called One Soft Landing, which we actually created at the beginning of the pandemic when the layoffs and hiring freezes were happening as a way for people to submit lists of people who had been laid off. And that was a great way to help our customers have access to more talent and also help the people who were laid off find their next thing. And so we're actually going to be bringing that back and re-maintaining it again, given that there's been some recent layoffs of the market changes.

Especially in this time where those are unfortunately in headlines again, having resources and tools at the HR team's disposal like Dover can be incredibly helpful. And oftentimes I imagine when they use you in this other context, the next time they are in a space to be hiring again, Dover is top of mind. At your core, you have a proprietary algorithm that is leverageable for helping recommend and ultimately call potential hires for your customer base. Bias, and one HR dataset situation that happened a few years back was Amazon's algorithm for their resumes. Now, that's a bad PR moment for them, and Dover is in a position to help people not have that be their PR moment. How do you guys think about training your datasets whilst being cognizant of the potential bias moments that can sometimes be embedded in the data?

We only use machine learning and AI to solve very scoped problems. By doing that, we're able to limit the scope of what it's doing. We're not necessarily saying, "Hey, is this a good candidate? Is this a bad candidate?" We're saying like, "Is this a full-stack engineer?" Which is a much easier problem to audit. The other thing that we do is we try to make sure that all the algorithms we're using are not like a black box and they have some explainability associated with them. So, you can look at what it's doing and understand, okay, these are the features that we're using, make sure the features that are being used are something that we can stand behind. And so, that's how we've approached it. I think it's very important. Taking steps one step further there, actually definitely seeing a lot of companies wanting to make sure that they have underrepresented talent, especially in technical domains. One thing that Dover has been doing that I think we can do even more of is educate people that if they want to achieve this, part of the point is to make sure they're not being too biased in their own criteria that they're bringing to the table. So if you're open to hiring underrepresented engineers, but you want them to have 4 years of experience at Google, You're probably not actually going to change the industry in any meaningful way. And so we're trying to help people rethink how they're approaching some of these things so they're not just paying lip service to reducing bias in the hiring process. Like they're actually trying to make an impact.

Not only have you guys been scaling yourselves, you've been scaling your customers, and that kind of combination of growth over the past 2 and a half years has oriented your company towards having different needs from a leadership perspective. And you started as a CTO. And co-founder with Max and recently announced an exciting movement to getting to be Chief Product Officer. It's an inflection point in any company's journey to actually get to start verticalizing some of these functions where previously it's like, okay, well, I don't really know what I'm doing as a CTO, but I have a lot on my plate. I'm going to handle all of it. Now you get to say, hey, I'm going to be the product visionary for Dover. For founders who might similarly be in this stage of navigating what comes as you you scale from a leadership perspective, what advice would you give?

Really quickly, I didn't mention my other co-founder George yet in the conversations. I just wanted to throw a quick plug out. He's our COO and someone I work with quite a lot on product stuff. But in terms of the transition, I'll take a step back and say in the early days and even at the stage that we're at right now, my job is a lot of things. I do get to focus a little bit more than I did before. Earlier I was doing customer success, I was doing engineering, I was doing product, I was doing recruiting, I was doing like literally everything, taking the trash out from the office, whatever needed to be done. And this is true of both Max and George as well. Over time, we've been able to focus in on different areas. And for me, actually, this transition relating to like a couple things. Number one is our founding engineer, John, who had been such a great contribution to the company, was someone who could step up into a CTO role. So being able to have someone who had the skillset, had capability, had the promise, and was doing a lot of that job made it a lot easier for me to pass that baton onto him. So that was critical. And I think just advice to founders out there, your founding engineers or like the first couple people you hire, there's no greater joy than watching them step into that role. And then for me, the other part was realizing like what my zone of genius was, because I think that a lot of times when you're a founder, when you're working in your company, you have this mentality that you have to do the unglamorous work and you have to do the things that you hate doing because someone has to do it. And you end up in this like self-sacrificial cycle of of, yeah, I'm just gonna do a little leverage stuff. And I was in that cycle to some extent of being like, yeah, I'm gonna do the office manager, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. I was just doing too many things. And then as we got bigger, I was able to really take a step back and think about what my zone of genius was and what I wanted to focus on and what would be the most impactful to the company. So I still do a lot of things, but I try to spend like 70% of my time on like product and building out our product organization.

Becoming someone who can feel empowered to say, this is my most high leverage moment, this is going to bring the most value to the company is an awesome point to get to in a career because it is going back to what we were talking about at the beginning, aligning where you know is gonna bring you energy every day with what is gonna help grow your business. So congratulations on this exciting milestone of becoming CPO of Dover and what that means for the future of the company. Taking a step back, a question on your take on what's happening in the market, particularly around recruiting software, supporting HR practices, because as we alluded to, it has been a really interesting 2 years, both in fundamentally changing how recruiting is happening in a digital-first way, as well as high highs and low lows of letting goes, great hirings, the great resignation. What is your perspective on the future of recruiting given the context of the last 2 years?

The really interesting thing about recruiting is that it's like a very critical part of any company's strategy and their growth is like bringing in the right people, and it's essential. If you aren't doing it, you're basically failing as a company. You're not able to grow, you're not able to build the things that you wanna build or do the things you wanna do. But recruiting is this extremely unstructured practice, and it's extremely manual still. Recruiting is still early in that journey, and you're seeing these shifts happening today in recruiting with like talent leaders and hiring managers trying to be more, be more data-oriented. Obviously there's Dover, there's other companies in the space that are helping shepherd that transition. There's a new role called recruiting operations, operations, which is focused on creating that scaffolding in the recruiting world. But the way we're positioning ourselves at Dover is thinking about how do we give the people in this industry, whether or not they're full-time recruiters, be— they might be founders, hiring managers, whoever's doing recruiting at the time, how do we give them the tools to be able to effectively run their strategy in this largely chaotic and unpredictable market? Because it is very unpredictable. Like you said, the Great Resignation, and then there's suddenly like hiring freezing. It's the first thing to respond to a market shift. The thing I think that makes us really excited to build Dover is this sort of enduring company is to focus on giving our customer base the toolset to be able to adapt strategy really easily when one of these things happens. And so, we're sort of building towards that.

Thank you for sharing that. And we've spoken a little bit about the future of recruiting and what Recruiting 3.0 might look like, but I'd love to focus a little bit more on the future of Dover. What are you excited about in Dover's near future?

When we started the company, we focused a lot on bringing candidates into people's processes. So like sourcing is where we started, and then we've expanded to helping people post across a bunch of different job boards and helping people go through their referrals and things all in service of bringing candidates into your process and like making sure the right people are entering the pipeline. One thing that we noticed is a lot of times the hard part is like making sure that someone that's good gets all the way to the offer stage, cuz there's so many different drop-off points in the middle. And we found that a lot of companies were just not following up, not getting back to candidates. And it's not cuz they're bad people or something. It's really hard to stay on top of everything. So I'm really excited that we've been investing a lot in this process management. We call it candidate process management, and we work— working towards new features in helping schedule like interviews and on-sites and making sure the ball doesn't get dropped on candidates. It's some like pretty cool technology that we've built. So it's a completely like different use case than what we had before. We already have a large part of our customer base already using this, and we might be spinning it out as like maybe even an independent product line that people can sign up for. And I'm super excited about that. Just viewing again, the recruiting process is this kind of like holistic thing, cuz it is. There's so many things that go into hiring someone. It's not just, did you find the right profile? It's, did you move them through the process smoothly? Did you make sure they're talking to the right people, et cetera, et cetera. That's just a second step in a long journey for helping tie this entire process together and giving people the tools to to be able to orchestrate it in the way that they need and want.

And what about for yourself, Anwesha?

What's next for you?

The interesting sort of stage that we're in is we have a growing product organization, so we have 4 awesome PMs here at Dover, and helping set that up, figure out the right approach to doing product. Every company ends up at something different, as I'm sure y'all know, in terms of what works for them. And so I'm really excited to figure that out for us. As someone who has been used to making fast decisions and moving fast, That's something that's really important to me to like preserve, being able to give everyone the autonomy and preserve our velocity. That's an interesting and fun challenge to keep that going.

We're really excited to continue paying attention to the future of Dover and all of the incredible things that you're doing in the space. And I'm personally taking a mental note because I think we might need some help on the recruiting side as well. So thank you so much for sharing the story of founding Dover and all the exciting things on the horizon. As we come up on our final question of the podcast, this is our hero question that we ask all of our guests. That question is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

I have maybe a weird answer to this because it's not like necessarily a role model. It's actually one of my friends, Morgan. She is someone I went to college with and she actually founded a startup and now went on to be a VC at Foundation, now has her own fund. But the reason she had a profound impact on me is because we were actually roommates mates for a lot of the time that I was sort of leaving Dropbox, going through the startup journey, and she was also starting a company at the same time. Being able to have someone, again, as I mentioned, there's not a lot of female-identifying founders out there. And so having someone that really, like, I could talk to, who understood a lot of the insecurities, the challenges, and being able to see her push through and try to make it work was really inspiring to me and really propelled me towards telling myself like, hey, it's okay to not have all the answers. Like, you can just go and figure this out. Like, you don't have to have everything figured out. And that's been very inspiring to me because if she wasn't in my life, would I even have started a company? Like, I didn't see anyone around me who was like a woman doing it. So I think now I'm definitely trying to connect with more people, especially as they're considering entrepreneurship. Hopefully I can show them that even though it's scary and hard, it's something that they can do because it's totally worth the We hope all of our listeners find their Morgan in their life.

I think Madison's mine. So thank you, Anwesha, for sharing your journey. It's been incredible having you on the podcast today. And we will certainly plug Dover for all of our listeners who are maybe startup founders who are looking to hire a little bit more effectively. So thank you.

Thank you both for having me.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Room Podcast, our incredible Season 6 finale. It's been awesome having you listen to another season, but we'll be back soon in just a few weeks with our next season. In the meantime, catch up on all our incredible conversations on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, as well as theroompodcast.com. Please reach out to us.

We'd love to hear from you and hear what you're excited for in season 7.

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Support for The Room comes from Silicon Valley Bank. Silicon Valley Bank understands these questions can keep founders up at night like Claudia. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped high-growth companies through scalable financial solutions, plus insights and expertise that many other banks just can't, which could be why 50% of US-based venture In fact, tech and life science companies bank with SVB. Learn more at svb.com/next. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next.

Cooley is a global law firm built around startups and venture capital. The firm has been devoted to entrepreneurs and investors, partnering with both to transform breakthrough ideas into successful companies. Cooley works with thousands of entrepreneurs and newly formed companies to ensure that they are structured for growth and long-term success. Since 2005, Cooley has been ranked the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Learn more at cooley.com and cooleygo.com, Cooley's award-winning free legal resource for startups.

All opinions expressed by Claudia Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of DefyVC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.