Chris Bakke of Laskie.co - How to fix your hiring process and more - The Michael Girdley Show Episode 33

Hey, Michael Girdley here. Welcome to the Michael Girdley Show, named because it happens to be my show. So today I had a great chat with an online buddy of mine, Chris Bakke, who is the CEO of a venture-backed company in the staffing space called Laskie, L-A-S-K-I-E.com. And we did a bunch of different stuff today, everything from how hiring is broken Great ways to hire, bad ways to hire, LinkedIn and should you be there, and then went, of course, into the discussion of Twitter because we're both very active on Twitter. So I really enjoyed this one a ton. Chris is a really smart guy and exciting for me to feel, you know, find a kindred spirit in him. So enjoy this one. Hey, Michael here. Surprise sponsor for today's episode. Today's sponsor is you, the listener. And I have a favor to ask of you. I'm trying to get this podcast out in front of more people who would find it enjoyable. And the best way you could help me is by telling other people that you enjoy it. So, whatever client you're on, so whether it's Spotify or Apple, go into their app and leave a review. The more stars you give me, the better it'll be. Put in some words in there about what you like, or maybe even what you don't like about the podcast. And that'll help us get the word out to more people. So, Give us a review, Apple, Spotify, and I'd be really grateful. Thanks a ton. Chris, thanks for being here, man. So excited to visit with you.

Yeah, I appreciate you. Good to be here.

Yeah, right on. Well, you know, I think these conversations are always so magical because like it's so cool to know somebody really well from like social media and then like you actually talk to them in person and you're like, oh, like this is a person I've never spoken to and I like know them super well.

I know when we started this, I was like, I feel like, have we spoken before? We met in person before. You spend so much time on Twitter together. It's weird. It's awesome though. Love meeting people off Twitter.

So, you know, one of the things like I'm interested in like people's voices and like why they do things the way they do on Twitter. You're like, and I don't mean this in a bad way, 'cause I'm one too. You're like half shitposter, but then like half insightful, but always wrapped in this like air of like being funny. So like, is that intentional or is that just like who you are? How do you think about it?

I think it's a bit of who I am and it's like the classic problem with Twitter, which is that a lot of people will click like, but they won't follow you off of funny shit. Like, I know like really, really funny people that have like 3,000 followers. So it's this like constant trap. It feels like for me, you have to post the insightful shit to get people to follow you, but then people like want to engage with and stick around for the funny stuff. So I don't know, that's the way that I see it. And I think in some cases I just feel like being a big brain Twitter expert on things and I want to drop some insights. And then other days I wake up and it's just like I kind of want to make fun of just everything that's happening in the world. And so I'll do that for a week and just alternate. It even seems like there's an entire week of shitposts and then I just can't think of any more shitposts. And so then it's like, Okay, here's what I learned from building my last startup, and then that'll be a week of content.

Yeah, well, like, like part of my challenge on there is like, I like being galaxy brain on stuff or like giving like advice to people. I feel kind of like a jackass doing that, like, like mostly because I don't want to tell people like how to live. So if I could put like some self-deprecating humor in there, like it totally, it totally balances that out for me. Like I don't feel like such a know-it-all if I'm like, well, you know, like Here's what I had at Chili's yesterday after I tell you how to run your hiring process better.

Yeah, I think I'm also deeply insecure and scared of people being mean to me online. And so what I've also found is like, if you were to tweet like, this is how I built this company into like a $100 million company, people would be like, that would never work today. And like, that's why this is wrong. It's like, I don't know, man. Like, it worked for me. But if you're just posting shit about what's happening in the world, people are like, haha, this is awesome. They're sharing it with their friends. It's much more lighthearted to go through Twitter kind of doing that, like poking fun at yourself, poking fun at other people in a nice way, people that can handle it, I think, or people that don't follow me and they don't care. So yeah, it's a whole different experience. Like if you start posting real truths, even if they worked for you, you definitely can feel like a jackass because it's like, well, other people are listening to this and what worked for me in my last business in 2015 probably isn't going to work for you. Or I'm not going to explain the nuance in 280 characters for you to actually recreate it. So what's the point?

Yeah, well, something you said piqued my interest because there's this definite group of people on social media that go hunting for engagement, like no matter what, like, and they're okay, like bringing out the trolls. I think, you know who I'm talking about? Like there's a bunch of these people, but like, I'm like you, like I just go on there and I'm just like, I don't care what people say to me. I don't care how mean they are. Like, I'm just going to be, I'm going to deluge them with niceness. I'm just going to be so kind to them that they eventually relent. And there's a few people that don't because they're just jerks. But like, what is it about you that kind of does the same thing, right? Like you just, you, you want to be kind to people. Like, why are you wired that way as you think about who you are as a person? Or why am I that way?

Yeah. Yeah. Why am I that way? I feel like for me, I have early on in Twitter, and I've only used Twitter really for, I think, around 2 years. Like, early on in Twitter, it was I would try to resist the urge to fight with people who were idiots and just enjoyed being idiots because it drew attention to them and they're trolls or whatever. They actually believe this thing. So I would fight with people on Twitter and just very selfishly, I would always walk away from that being like, I don't feel good about this. Maybe I won and I ratioed them and I got a bunch of likes, but I don't feel like we accomplished anything. And I would leave Twitter being like, that was shitty. And then it's like, what's the point of using Twitter if you're not there to have fun? And so yeah, people are going to say mean stuff. People are going to do rude things on Twitter. And I think if you ignore that entire crowd and you just create a pattern of saying, people are going to troll me in the comments, I'm never going to engage, I'm never going to respond, Trolls want to— they need that engagement to keep going. And so it's just like, I never felt good about it personally. And so it wasn't like, yeah, you can be pretty funny going back and forth with trolls, but it's also just— it gave me a really bad feeling and I would not want to use Twitter for the rest of the day. It's like, what's the point of having all these followers and meeting cool people on Twitter if you're going to walk away at the end of the day getting in fights with people and then feel shitty about it? The next 2 days. Like, totally not worth it.

Yeah. So the idea— and maybe this aligns with kind of the, you know, so there's with me the way I do stuff, I'm like, okay, is this because I'm insecure? Am I doing this right? Which is definitely yes is probably the answer. Uh, but then also like I'm trying to manipulate the platform like you're saying to like generate positive emotions for me. And like getting in a fight with some guy with like an apple or like a You know, or like some, some economist, you know, icon as his personal profile photo. And then that's spiraling into a mess. Like that doesn't generate any positivity for me. Like there's just nothing to it.

Yeah.

So maybe that's why I'm too nice to people.

Yeah. If somebody has like a, like a Greek god as their profile photo and a bunch of numbers after their name, like, you know, you're in for a bad time. There's something about that combo. I don't know.

You know, you're in for a bad time.

Yeah.

So you have not fallen into the, uh, Hey, here's a thread trap. And maybe, and I say it's a trap because I'm in it. Like I'm writing a thread or two a week.

Oh no, we gotta, we gotta save you. Yeah.

So what's wrong with me that I'm writing threads?

I feel like I did, I did some threads early on and that's, it's like one of the things that I mentioned earlier, it's like threads are really good for engagement and they generate a ton of followers. So I totally understand why people do it. And I think some people just have like, long-form things to say, which I don't. It's actually sad. I feel like when you use Twitter, you start to think in tweet-length things. And so I try to condense these really long rambling thoughts into one or two punchy tweets and just avoid threads. I think that there are some good thread posters there. I think the stuff that general rules of business and things that you've learned from negotiating and things that you've learned from hiring, like some of the stuff that you do, is actually super insightful. It's just not really my style anymore. My threads were early on, I think, very caught up in that summarizing Wikipedia pages, which, funny enough, that's what sort of got me from 0 followers to 5,000 followers. And then the rise from 5,000 to 50,000 was largely making fun of those types of tweets. So it's like, do as I say, not as I did 2 months ago. Just don't look at all those old tweets from a few months ago. But I think that there are very few thread writers where I actually enjoy the content and it feels unique. It does feel like it's so easy to regurgitate a book and it's like, I would rather just read, I don't know, the book or read the SparkNotes on the book or something like that. Threads, anytime I see one, I'm like, oh, this person's doing that for engagement. And so it automatically makes me go, eh, I'm going to read this in a more cautious way because I think that the person probably is just fluffing up a bunch of bullshit to make that— There was this thread that went viral hilariously from this guy who had all of these 11 management tips the other day, and then a guy who worked for him and actually a bunch of people who had worked for him in the past were commenting on it and they're like, This guy is the worst manager I've ever had. He literally did none of this stuff. Don't take this advice. He didn't take this advice. It was just like he read a management book, presumably. I don't know, maybe he's a great manager, but he might have just read a management book and then been like, here are 11 principles and I may or may not use them in my real life. But that's like that type of thing. Even though it kind of happened and went viral the other day, that type of thing, I just think all the time. It's just really hard to distill the true nuance of the world into a thread. And there are people that are very good at it, don't get me wrong. But I think it always feels phony to me and I'm not sure why.

Yeah, it's really the other thing I was reflecting on was like there's this whole group of people that talk about threads and like poop on them like they're the worst thing ever. And you know, like that's when I started to go to all— every time I saw that, I put like a, like a, a misquoted Yogi Berra quote, you know, like the Yogi Berra quote where it's like, you know, no, nobody goes that place anymore. It's too popular. Uh, that's why, that's what, that's why I thought about threads, right? When I was like, all these people are like, nobody wants these threads. And I was like, yeah, nobody reads threads anymore. They get too many likes, too many retweets. Cause you're like, exactly. You're like, yeah, I knew, I know the corner that I'm in, which is like sarcastic, dry humor, like Twitter thinks threads are boring or, you know, is tired of hearing the same 9, like, hey, if you're under 30, read this thread over and over again. But they keep going viral. Like, somebody has to be liking these things. And the parallel that I— I'm sorry, I'm going on a Girdley rant, but the parallel I put out there is like, I literally, if you ask me like, what's the last restaurant you would want to go to in the world? It would be Olive Garden. Like, like all my friends hate Olive Garden. I hate the Olive Garden. Like it's carbs, cheap, salty butter. Like it's just gross, right? Everything about it is yucky. And, and I'm like, nobody wants to go to the Olive Garden. And then you go to drive to the Olive Garden and you're like, you know, like the parking lot's full, right? It's like, so there's this, this like this, the sampling bias problem that you have with anything and threads are just like that.

I think exactly. This is where you drop the, the 30-second infomercial for Chili's, by the way. And we just pan away. Away, and then you come after the commercial break, and then we jump back in.

After the commercial break, you should consider going to Chili's.

Yeah.

Um, well, so I mean, I think, I think there's a distinction for me between Chili's and Olive Garden.

This is good. Let's dive in.

Well, okay, so at the core, at the core of Chili's is me feeling contrarian to all of these coastal elites who are like, look, if you're not listening to vinyl and canning your own, like, cucumbers in Brooklyn, you're not really living. Like, you know, thanks for trying flyover America. Like, like I resist that because at its core, like, like Chili's is like this totally American, like, meal, right? Like, it's just like this hodgepodge of stuff, everything from fajitas to like fish tacos to just random steak, right? You could get everything at a Chili's. But like, because it's that original American thing and it's so middle of the road and it's so accessible to everyone, Like, to me, there's like an immense level of beauty in that, like an equivalent level of beauty to the person who's like, you know what's delicious? You know, canning your own peaches when you live in Brooklyn. Like, that's amazing. While you're listening to vinyl records, like, so that's, that's me, right? It's just contrary in nature where I'm just like, this is beautiful in its like total lack of being special. Like it's just pure American middle of the road.

No, I get it. Olive Garden. I totally get it. I mean, if you're going to, if you're going to take, if you're going to pick like a one of those types of restaurants, I would definitely rather be in Chili's corner than anyone else's corner. So I totally get it. It makes sense. Yeah.

Olive Garden. Olive Garden is in America. That's fake Italy. Like, not interested. Isn't that cool? It's not good at all.

Totally. The hedge fund report on Olive Garden years ago was super interesting, right? Where they— some, I forget who the fund was, but they were like, you guys could save $6 million per year if you salted the water because like the water boils faster and like that whole thing went viral. I have no idea if any of it's real, but all of the, uh, findings from like behind the kitchen in Olive Garden was fascinating.

It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's just those economies of scale that you get, right? Like the Amer— I'm sure you've seen the old American Airlines analysis where they realized if they took out one olive from their salad, like they saved $85 grand or something a year.

Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, just those kind of, those kind of massive economies of scale that you get from making things uniform at, at that size. It's just, it's, it's so cool. But also, like, I think the danger of those analyses, like, you end up going down these traps just because $85,000 seems like a lot of money to you, right? Like, that's, that's a brand new car, right? Um, and, and a nice one. Uh, in the reality, it like causes you to such— it's so easy to go down that trap and lose sight of what's really important to a business, which is like Wait, how do our customers feel when we give them a crappy salad? You know, as American Airlines, which, by the way, terrible example. American Airlines does not care about any of you. They hate everybody.

You mean sponsors we've lost? American Airlines, Olive Garden. Who's next on the list? Let's keep going.

Uh, we could lose Olive Garden twice as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Uh, cool. So I definitely wanted to talk to you about Lasky. Like, I think what's interesting, you know, you and I are both kind of playing in the hiring and, and talent kind of acquisition side. You know, you've decided with Lasky and I definitely, let's pitch it because I want everybody to know about it. I believe in you. I believe in, you know, the things that you talk about. You've decided to kind of go down the VC route, whereas like me and my partners are kind of going down the bootstrapping route. So, you know, love to hear kind of how you're thinking about it and why get back on, you know, the horse again for VC here.

Yeah, the core reason that we picked VC. So I guess for quick context, so I've worked with my same co-founder for close to 10 years. So we did a company where we were both early employees. That's kind of how we met 10 years ago in the commercial real estate space. Then we founded InterviewTogether, which was in the HR tech kind of hiring recruiting space. That was acquired by Indeed. We worked together at Indeed for 3 years post-acquisition. And then a year ago, we got back together and rehired a lot of our same employees from interviewed at Lasky, and we actually bootstrapped for a few months. And this is a really bad answer to this, and I don't think I've ever talked about this publicly, but the primary reason that I think we raised venture, even though we didn't really need to, was accountability. I found it very hard to be accountable to myself. And to my co-founder when like he and I like could have burned through a bunch of our own money and like it would've been fine. It would've sucked a little bit, but like there's so much money in the recruiting space. Like we could have gotten back to cashflow positive pretty easily. And I think after years of writing, you know, hopefully like somewhat thoughtful investor updates, I was like, I have nobody to write these updates to. And like we could have solved that in a lot of different ways, but I think that there was something really valuable for both of us of this feedback loop of bringing super smart people on very early in the company who had seen this movie play out dozens and dozens of other times and had all this sort of additional context and partnering with them. Obviously, the capital is great because it kind of accelerates things early on. And so it really is this tricky balance. We always intended to bootstrap Lasky, and now that I have raised a bit of venture again early on, It's like, oh, I couldn't imagine bootstrapping this business. I think it's just one of those things that I was just wired from very early on, like the start of my career, like bring on private equity, bring on VC. And that's like every company that I've ever done has done that to varying degrees. And I think without that, it's like I just don't understand how to operate. I think it's the same way of like a bootstrapper thinking about having all these partners would be such a pain in the ass, being accountable early on, giving up a sizable part of your company in the early days. The worst possible time to give up equity in the first few months when you're just figuring everything out. I can totally understand both sides, but I think for us it really was about that feedback loop of sending that email to 20 super smart people, many of whom were in the space, have invested in other companies in the space, or were early founding employees of Indeed or LinkedIn or companies that worked out well. I think we have to be careful about their advice and cautious that just because that worked with them or their companies doesn't mean it's going to work with us. But yeah, it really was purely about early accountability. I think a lot more so than, you know, capital or, you know, being in TechCrunch or any of those other things. And those things are nice. But, you know, there's obviously a pretty sizable cost of giving up, you know, 10, 15, 20, 25% of your company in those, in those first few months.

Yeah. And so like the classic kind of building in public, That you don't think that gives you— does that— what's wrong with that from an accountability kind of standpoint, right? Is it just, is it too easy to cheat on that?

I think so. And I found that that's really hard. Like, I think it's hard either way. Like, if you have a bad month, it's hard to send that investor update. It's also hard to say— I think that there's actually several people who are building in public who have had not like public failure, but I've seen a lot of— and I follow a ton of people who build in public where they will have 3 or 4 or 5 consecutive months of flatline or negative growth, or they're actually— they lost a big customer and they talk about it. That's not really my style. I like being sort of like the hype man on Twitter. And so it's very hard for me, I think, to go in front of 60,000 or 70,000 people and say, okay, we had this terrible month. And we have had bad months at Atlassian. We've had really good months that I haven't celebrated as publicly. I would consider myself sort of a very fake builder in public. I think I use Twitter and LinkedIn to hype our company and hire and get customers. I think I rarely share kind of what's truly happening behind the scenes. And I did early on and I didn't really enjoy it. I felt like I was spending a lot of time telling people what we were doing when in the beginning, what we were doing was also changing day to day. I do think now that we're a little bit more established, we have a bigger team. It would be a lot more fun. And that's sort of one of my goals for this year is to start kind of tweeting what's happening behind the scenes. But I find it's very hard to be actually honest with people about what's going on. And then I think it's also hard if you are struggling with things to talk about those things to such a massive group, whereas your investors kind of expect that they want you to come to them with hard problems and they're actually literally bought into your company to help you solve those problems. Whereas I think like a Twitter audience or LinkedIn audience or whatever platform you're on, people are there and mostly very supportive of people who are building in public. But I think you and I have both seen cases where building in public goes wrong and the sort of mob mentality turns on a company very quickly. as in with like Fast and a bunch of other companies. And so I think it's, um, I try to like really balance that and be careful, like tell our investors the truth of what's going on and what's, you know, happening. Definitely tell our team. Uh, I sort of overshare with our team, I think, um, which is good. But yeah, in terms of Twitter, it's, it's a lot of like hiding behind the facade of, of what's, uh, what's actually happening in the business.

Yeah, I totally dig it. Yeah, as you were saying that, I was like thinking about the people actually building in public I was like, how many of these people are really being real about this process? Right? And like, I was struggling to think of anybody who is, right? Like, yeah, like, like, who is actually like, hey, I didn't feel like coming to work today.

Totally.

Right? Or, yeah, or like, I signed, I signed up for VC. So like, you know, my investor's not working out, you know, in terms of there's one jerk, you know, on the board type. So like, People don't talk that way.

It's funny. So my last company went through YC and there's this chat that's now pretty famous, infamous, I guess, called YC Bookface. That's like now I think 3,000 YC founders and it's like this chat room and there's a ton of ways that I think entrepreneurs and founders have recreated this in text groups and just chatting with one another like this on podcasts or just doing random Zoom calls or Discords or Slack groups, or there's like Everything Marketplaces that Mike Williams runs. It's awesome. It has a whole community around it. So there's a lot of ways for founders to be, I think, honest and open with one another. But it's always been funny, like in the 7 years since I went through YC, you'll see a couple of these founders who are very public with their companies on Twitter. And on Twitter, even the builders in public, it is just like everything's awesome. It's always up and to the right. And then on Bookface, where people can, I think, be a lot more honest because there's a pretty strict policy of nothing gets screenshotted, nothing gets leaked. We're sort of all in this together. We want this to be a place where we can share hard times. Those same founders who are publicly crushing it are privately laying off 30% of their company or getting in a fight with their co-founder or might be quitting their own company. It's hilarious. The sort of night and day difference that I see in my own founder groups from even some of those founders who are very publicly building in public. I think Andrew Gazdecki has done a good job of this with MicroAcquire. He, I know, has shared if growth is flat, if it's declining, if it's way up, he sort of, I think, has this really solid cadence of sharing what's going on. But even I don't know of cases where he's talking about actual turmoil and things behind the scenes. But I think he's very honest and open with startups are hard and it's hard hiring your first few people. It's hard being a manager. It's hard being an IC as a CEO in the early days and then trying to hire people into these different functions and get along with them and help them grow and kind of invest in their careers. So I think people like that are doing the most honest job. But yeah, I mean, there's very few companies, I guess, like Buffer, um, you know, pretty early on, like, they were publishing all of their revenue and KPIs. That's about as open as, as it gets. I don't know that he was really doing a ton of commentary on that, but yeah, I think that those, those cases are, are pretty far and few between, um, uh, that I've seen on Twitter.

Yeah, it's super interesting. Yeah, and I totally love the idea that investors like bring a level of professionalism and seriousness to the thing. You know, it's interesting as I kind of structure stuff in my world where a lot of times I'm not operational at all, it's a situation where, as you talked about it that way, I'm kind of that person, right? I'm kind of the, okay, well we're taking this seriously. Yeah. I don't know if you guys were aware, but we can't jerk around. Like I have real money on the line. So it's interesting, you know, I do that internally. Without even really thinking about it, just, just because I don't hire myself to do real jobs.

So, right, good place to be. Highly, highly recommend that.

It's fun. I mean, I do have like a real job, right, which is I spend my days like working on companies rather than in them. And I've started to recently kind of just brand that as like a company. Like, I've— I call it Girdley Enterprises, mostly because Girdley Ventures is taken with some other real estate thing my brother and I do. Um, I was going to say, so like, that's—

now you don't want to see your brother?

Uh, he's a great person and he's in the office next door, so I can't do that.

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, that, that's the other kind of funny feedback I get about what I do. They're like, what do you do? Like, because it's just so odd. Um, but like, I'm starting to try to brand it and like talk about it in a way that's more concise, mostly because I go to CEO events and everybody's like, I'm CEO of Edward's Plumbing, and I'm like, I'm just a rando. I do a bunch of different stuff and it pays me a lot of times.

So do you, do you like the, uh, like it seems like you really enjoy the jumping between many things. Like I think it, it, I like, do you feel like the grass is always greener now that you're doing this? Like I always think, um, I always think that that seems like an amazing job, but anytime I think something is amazing, I'm like, I'll bet the person doing that job often wishes that they were like just focusing on one thing. Right? Like, is that the case with you, or do you really truly enjoy kind of jumping between like real estate and company building and services and like these coffee shops and like, you know, a million different things?

Yes. Yeah. I mean, I've done the other part and I, yeah, I'm 100% self-actualized. Million percent. And I mean, I see the appeal of like, man, look how, look how nice it would be just to like run the playbook, right, over and over again inside of one company and do that. But like, I just know my nature. Like, I'm actually not a very good operator. I'm actually pretty miserable because the, the— I have just, just innate problem where I can do anything once incredibly well. The second time will be okay. The third time I forget to do it. If it's repetitive and it's not creative.

Got it.

And, you know, it's really just this narrowing down and trying to construct an environment around myself and a role around myself that plays to what I'm good at and also compensates for where I'm broken. Right. And I'm broken if you're like, hey, this business needs to get better by getting 0.25% better every single day by just grinding away at stuff like Wrong guy for that. Wrong guy for that. Yeah, but, but if it's, you know, how do we play internal politics and relationships? I try not to play politics, but you know what I mean? Like, how do you, how do you align incentives, human dynamics, get people thinking about stuff the right way, and then just get called in when there's interesting creative problems to solve? Like, all of that is like, yeah, sign me up for that. That sounds like a ton of fun. Much, much better than Hi, I'm CEO of Joe's Plumbing.

No, totally. I get that. Yeah, it is so interesting. I think that that is— there's like a very small handful of people on Twitter, including yourself, who kind of have that lifestyle and talk about it or that job. But in terms of what that job is or what it's called is super unique. A lot of times I find myself trying to describe an Andrew Wilkinson type person or you to other people, and it's very challenging. It's like, well, they got a lot of stuff going on and They're sort of incubating and investing and starting and overseeing all of these different entities. But what that actually is, I think, is super appealing to a lot of founders who are running one business, and it hasn't really been defined yet. I mean, the way that everybody, at least on Twitter, is sort of running that playbook does seem very different from one another, but it's cool. I love seeing it.

Yeah, it's tough. I mean, I think that if you look at it at its core, like a reductionist way of looking at it, like, like what parallels can we draw in terms of what like we are doing versus what other people are doing? It actually is pretty consistent with what a lot of family offices do. Like, like the, there's a family office that actually owns, and I'm totally blanking on their name, but they own, I think, 2 or 3 dozen minor league baseball teams.

Oh wow.

And like, yeah, so they do a lot of very similar stuff. They've narrowed down over time to basically where they'll find, basically they'll be the money behind an independent sponsor and just be like, okay, like we're going to go do entrepreneurship through acquisition for you and we're going to be your backstop and you're going to go buy a $2 to $5 million EBITDA business and you're going to run it. Like they do that over and over again. But like, I think you see a lot of family offices, especially around me that are doing incubation of companies. They're doing lean-in type operational stuff. So almost this self-funded private equity thing. Like, I see it more common, but that's the closest parallel is like these family offices that are more hands-on than your typical allocator family offices.

Yeah, I haven't thought of that, but that makes a ton of sense. Uh, that's a very good analogy. I imagine in a lot of cases.

Yeah, who knows?

I don't know.

None of, none of us know what we're doing when it all comes down to it. Um, I mean, it's also you know, you talk about some of these people that are out like pitching that this is the life that they live for this kind of hands-on allocator type thing. That's the closest thing I can talk about it. You know, it's just like everything else, like the people building in public, like half of them are lying their ass off.

Right. Like, it's just the truth.

But I was like, I've talked to these people. I know what they're doing.

Yeah.

You're lying.

Totally.

Like, that's not true.

Yep.

So, and maybe that comes across or not on Twitter. I don't know. I try not, I try not to lie. That's my, that's my new goal. It's unintentional if I do. So I wanted to talk to you about you going into the cesspool of cesspools, the LinkedIn environment. And I've noticed your pace on posting on Twitter has gone down and increased in LinkedIn. So what do you know that I don't know? Tell me about the magic of LinkedIn and will my Chili's memes go over as well on LinkedIn as yours? Your posts seem to go.

I think, I think you should, you should carry them over. It's definitely a, I approach it differently. And I think for us, it's super unique, like for our business and for me, it's super unique because 50% of the people that buy things from Lasky and spend money are in talent acquisition and recruiting. So it's like a very simple strategy. It's like all of our buyers, 100% of our buyers and a lot of the people that we want to hire are on LinkedIn and actually only a fraction of those people are super active on Twitter. So in terms of, again, that balance of shitposting and real content, it's like I definitely do a mix on both Twitter and LinkedIn, but I think the LinkedIn strategy is just purely about trying to reach a different audience of people. And to be clear, I hate it. It's way less fun than Twitter, but I just do it. Because, you know, team Lasky. So I'm trying, I'm like, I actually, what's funny about LinkedIn is I and several other people on our team have like scheduled events like Wednesday and Monday. I will schedule actual 30-minute events to be like, do a LinkedIn post because I know that I'll overlook it if I don't. And it actually has, it's amazing for, you know, like lead gen and free acquisition and all sorts of other things and hiring as well. But if I don't force myself to time box 30 minutes a couple times a week to do it, I just spend all of my time on Twitter. So that's really it. That's what it comes down to.

One thing I love that you did was go on LinkedIn and it's got the area where you could just basically go in and be like, yeah, I went to MIT or I went to Harvard or whatever. And then you went in and you just totally made that a joke, a mockery of that where it's like, yeah, I went to this thing, rejected, visited campus for 45 minutes. Went to a Stanford football game.

2007. Yeah. And what's great is like, the best part about that is once a week, some like very bright, you know, like high school junior will reach out to me without reading between the lines there. And they'll say like, oh, I see that you have attended Harvard and Stanford and MIT. That's amazing. Those are all the schools that I'm hoping to get into. You know, would you have 30 minutes for a coffee chat with me, like on my MIT application? And I'm like, I mean, I would read what I did at MIT before you reach out to me, but it's literally like maybe once or twice a week that happens. So it's good for terrible LinkedIn DMs as well. Yeah.

Either that or would you like to buy a custom website made by the—

That's right.

The 80 bazillion companies.

Website, lead gen, offshoring, wealth management. Wealth management.

Wealth management.

Yeah.

Unbelievable.

Yeah.

Okay. So, and then with, are you, you know, there's the zeitgeist of kind of what's going on, like the common narrative of themes and topics that are going on in Twitter. Is there the same effect in LinkedIn? Like, are people talking about similar stuff or is it, are you not, you know, not playing the same game over there?

Yeah, I try to be, I try to like, what's funny is I tried to do a lot of hiring recruiter, kind of like bad recruiter experience content on LinkedIn. But then I realized that actually translates super well to Twitter as well and to Reddit and Instagram. I don't use Reddit or Instagram, but things get reposted from LinkedIn and Twitter on Reddit and Instagram. That's basically all Reddit and Instagram are these days. It seems like it's just screenshots of posts that came from Twitter. So I think this this narrative that most recruiters are bad, most companies are really terrible at hiring. The average candidate experience when you're applying to a job is terrible. Like that just is evergreen. It never gets old. There are people, which is fascinating. I mean, there's people with a million followers on LinkedIn that just like talk about this every day and then they get hundreds of candidates being like, yeah, like these companies do have a bad application process. And it's the same thing every day. On Twitter, there's a main character, and your job is to not be that main character because everybody hates the main character for a day. And it's often Elon or somebody, but there's a common thing that we all shit on. Like, today it's a bad day to work at CNN Plus, right? They spent $300 million on it. Everybody's piling onto CNN Plus. But tomorrow the narrative will change, right? Last week, Fast was the narrative, and then before that, a few months, it was Quibi. So it's like, There's just this thing and everybody in tech Twitter and VC Twitter and entrepreneur Twitter, SMB Twitter is piling on very similar themes, I think. But on LinkedIn, it's just like, it's a cesspool of fake content. Like the classic, I was walking to an interview and I was late because I was helping a sick dog and I showed up to the interview and the interviewer was the dog and I got the job. It's like that every day. And then like the stuff that actually I think gets engagement with candidates is, you know, that hiring is super broken. And so I like talking about that. It's like the one thing that does actually feel authentic because we run into so many bad hiring processes and so many bad hiring managers as part of like our own business that talking about those types of things anonymously. And even if like in the back of my mind, it really is about If I can get one hiring manager to read this and go, oh, we're doing that. And I didn't fully understand that people hate that. Like, I think if you spend a lot of time, which doesn't have to be a lot of time, I think if you spend, if you are thoughtful at all about your hiring process, it is very easy to be in the top, like, 5% of companies because most companies are just so bad at hiring. And so it really is about, like, hiring managers, recruiters seeing that and going, oh, I, we're doing that thing, which is like a super long drawn out hiring process that takes 6 months. And if enough people are beating that drum, then maybe some of those people will change and fight for change internally. That is one thing. People from massive companies reach out to me on LinkedIn a lot more so than they do on Twitter. It's like, hey, I work at top 5 consulting company and it takes 6 months for analysts to get hired here. Can we jump on a call and try to figure out what we can do to get that to a 60-day process? And it's absolutely happy to spend time doing that. And so there's like definitely good that comes from LinkedIn in the same way that it comes from Twitter. It's just not, it's not a very funny place. Like it's, I think hard to be funny or be sarcastic or like poo poo on things on LinkedIn because like the crowd and sort of the expectations of LinkedIn is like, oh, this is a very, this is a black tie affair here at LinkedIn under the Microsoft ownership. So I don't know, I haven't cracked like the funny code. I try to share like memes do funny stuff and everybody hates it. But then I'll talk about something a little bit more earnest and oftentimes it goes pretty well. So I don't know, I'm still learning. I'm like 2 or 3 months into the LinkedIn cesspool posting journey, so I'll keep you updated.

Yeah. Okay, well, keep me updated. It feels like I'm still kind of trying to figure out, number one, I feel like I got a formula for Twitter and I feel like You know, in the end, like, I feel like I'm trying to make people's lives better. You know, every post is, does this help somebody get better, right? Okay, yes or no. And it could be better as funnier, better as a little more entertaining, lighten their day, or like get smarter. Like, those are the things I'm trying to do. But, you know, and then I'm trying to next do the podcast stuff, but in the side of my— the side eye is like, hey, look over there at that LinkedIn thing, which is back to the shiny object thing we just talked about. So anywho.

Yeah.

Um, so you You kind of talked about something I wanted to dig into. So you see a lot of hiring processes. I'm a total hiring nerd. Like slow hiring processes are one thing that are really stupid and a common mistake. What are the other kind of mistakes that you're seeing, like being done way too much?

I think it's such a candidate market right now, obviously, like it feels like most people know that. The number of companies that have really radically changed their hiring process from like early 2020 to today in 2022, I think is actually a very few number of companies are actually like giving on things. So hiring is a lot of complaining. Oh, it's so hard to hire recruiters. It's so hard to hire engineers. It's so hard to hire good salespeople. Like, have you drastically shifted major parts of your hiring process to adapt to this change? The answer is no, I think for the vast majority of companies. So I think the slow process stuff, there's a lot behind that. I think typically what we see is that companies have really lengthy hiring processes for a lot of roles and just like there's very little time pressure between steps. So it takes like, you know, if you have 5 or 6 steps in your hiring process, I would argue that's probably 1 or 2 too many already. But, you know, so have you consolidated your 6-part, 6-interview hiring process down to 3 interviews? That's going to drastically change the number of candidates who make it through, but also the number of candidates who are going to want to proceed to the next step. And now as a team, as whether you're a founder running a small business, whether you're on a talent acquisition team, I think managing the process between 3 steps is so fundamentally different than managing the process between 5 or 6 or 8 or 10 steps. And then like, I think we're seeing companies who are smart giving on things at the top of the funnel. So Like when I started my last business in 2015, we were a non-technical assessment company. So we would like do all these bolt-on assessments. Like we were one of those evil companies where we would, you know, add an additional 5 or 10 minutes to the top of the funnel when you're applying to a job because we would ask you a bunch of these assessment questions. Taking stuff out like that, making the application process really focused on collecting the most basic details and removing a lot of those very, very lengthy screening questions. In terms of like the applicant tracking systems themselves, even I think like 40 or 45% of the market share is dominated by Oracle Taleo, which is a notoriously terrible platform. It doesn't run on mobile. Like there's just, there's so much broken with it. And so if you look at like where candidates are applying in an increasingly mobile-first way and they want kind of a streamlined application, If it takes you creating a login to create your job application, like there's no way that top candidates are even going to tolerate that. And so I look at like the length of the process, but I also look at, are you even getting top candidates to apply to begin with? And I think like changing your ATS, reducing the number of fields on the initial application, getting rid of any sort of system that requires like creating a username and password to submit a job on platforms like Indeed and LinkedIn, moving to an easy apply. So you sort of like open up the top of the funnel. And then putting screening mechanisms, whether those are assessments or interviews or asynchronous video interviews, you know, further down that funnel. Like you still want to be hiring the top 1% of people. Most companies want that. But if you've artificially shrunk your top of funnel from 1,000 applicants to 100, like, wouldn't you rather hire like the best 10 applicants out of 1,000 versus the best 10 applicants out of 100? And I think most hiring managers, most recruiters just haven't fully wrapped their head around this. And there's a ton of work to do in terms of moving more candidates to your top of funnel, making your company a more desirable application in this sea of opportunities for job seekers. Posting salary to roles works really well. Being flexible in terms of where you're hiring. So location-based hiring, are you, do you need people on site? There's huge demand for that. People who have worked remote now want to be back on site. There's also massive pressure for employers who are only hiring on-site to be more flexible and hire remote. And then if you're hiring remote, what does that actually mean? Are you remote to the US only? Are you looking at LATAM or Canada or other options? And so I think the companies that are just flexible with all this stuff, like they're looking at overseas talent, they are posting salaries to roles, they're keeping a really condensed, short interview process. Those companies are doing just fine. The real pain points are these, I think, slightly larger companies that haven't taken a hard look at their application process in the last few years. Um, and they're, they're certainly suffering, like whether they fully understand it or not, just, you know, the number of applicants that aren't applying to their companies, um, is, uh, is increasing by the day as candidates have, I think, more and more and more options in terms of that, like ease of application.

Yeah, totally dig it. So the top of the funnel stuff is really interesting. And one of the things that I'm curious your opinion on this, it drives me nuts when I see companies letting HR own the hiring process. Like, like, I feel like, I feel like people are choosing which bosses they should go work with. And like, if your first phone call is with somebody who doesn't know anything about the area that you're going into, if it's a, you know, a programming job, you're not even technical. Like, like, it blows my mind that companies let somebody from HR who is probably the population of people that are least reflective of the culture of your company be the first thing a candidate talks to. And like, yeah, I'm curious your thoughts on this. Like, every time I run a hiring process myself, it goes great. Every time HR gets in the way, it goes terrible. And like, like, I want to get in there, hustle and make stuff happen. So, I mean, maybe there's a reason this has to be done this way, but I just don't understand it at all. Like, I don't understand why companies do it.

Yeah, it's a great point. I definitely agree. I think in many cases, I think the only thing worse than that that we see a lot is high growth startups will say left and right, it's so hard to hire engineers. We say, okay, what is your process? And it goes something like, well, we've refined the process and we have this really slick workable or Jazz or Lever, whatever kind of hot ATS greenhouse application. And we cut all the fields down. And then after that, like the candidate moves into a 2-hour HackerRank exercise. And then if that goes, it's like, wait, you know, it's hard to hire, but you put candidates into like a multi-hour technical automated assessment. Like it's shocking the number of companies that still do that for technical roles or for like a sales role. They're looking for a VP of sales and it's like, record this like async video before you talk to somebody. Like, why would a candidate You know, why would most candidates want to do that? And then I totally agree. I think giving the actual hiring manager, if hiring is the biggest pain point in your business, dedicating a lot more time from hiring managers and the managers themselves to be talking to candidates, especially if it's a unicorn role, which everybody wants, like some special, amazing candidate. It's funny that, you know, ultimately everybody pretty much gets a job anywhere, but like every company believes that they're hiring the top 1% of people. And so, you know, if that's what you truly want, then you need to invest people who understand the role to take those initial calls and like, think of it as building a relationship. This is, this job search is now in the candidate's hands. That changes every, you know, 5 to 10 years, but this is a very pro-candidate time if you are, you know, most, most, most companies right now. And so understanding that and like the employer or the hiring manager really selling the candidate through the process versus vetting the candidate upfront, I think is a super smart thing to do. And to your point, I think for especially slightly larger companies, it's a massive differentiator. Like if you're, if you're a SWE and you're applying to, you know, mid-level or enterprise companies, the number of people in recruiting or HR or, you know, right now even like really junior schedulers or, you know, coordinators that you're talking to is sort of the first touchpoint for a software engineer who is allegedly going to drive all this crazy impact, but the hiring manager can't take 15 minutes and chat with that person is pretty crazy. So if you are in that mindset of a software engineer and you're applying to 10 or 15 companies and 14 of those 15 are HR people who have no idea about the job, and at that one company you get a good talent acquisition person who knows the job deeply, or better yet, the hiring manager jumps on, I think it's a totally great way to differentiate in this, in this age.

Yeah. Well, and I think it ties to one of the things I wanted to quote here because I thought it— I— you tweeted it and it was like one of the smartest things I'd seen is you said CEOs should go out and apply to the jobs open at their company and see what the process is like. And they'll understand very quickly why talent like is a, is a huge strategic problem for them. It's because You know, these CEOs are most likely spending a ton of time with their product management team and their sales team and their marketing team to like figure out how their sales funnel can work better and sell faster, easier, optimize for click-throughs, whatever. But then if you want to work at their company, like, welcome to 1976, like at NCR, it's that hiring process. Like that's what's going on. So anyway, I just, that's not really a question or anything. It was just like, man, that was one of the smartest things I've read in a long time.

Yeah, I do it regularly. I started doing it in 2013 when I became the COO of a startup and it was the same mentality. It was like at that point we were hiring for all of these super specialized roles and yeah, to your point, we spent a lot of time focused on other funnels and we only had one like people person who was doing a lot of this top of funnel. And so I just wanted to see We want great engineers. So if I fake my resume and I apply as a great engineer, if it takes 7 days to get back to me, or in many cases, nobody gets back to me, you have a problem. Like you are out there spending money on job boards. You are out there spending money on your talent acquisition, HR team. You are paying people, you are paying services. You're probably paying third-party recruiters to send, you know, great people in some cases into the top of your funnel. But if you're not actioning those people in a day or two, like literally in this environment, in a day or two, You're not going to hire them. And so I think even if you're only jumping into the very top of the funnel as the founder or as the CEO, it's a great way to get visibility on like, does my application even get actioned in 24 hours? And if it doesn't, you have a big problem and you're probably wasting in a sizable company, many, many millions of dollars driving people to the top of the funnel who you have zero chance of actually hiring.

Yeah, dig it. So I, I am curious, you started your career not in like, uh, staffing, right? Not in the employment side of stuff. You started like, y'all were a startup for commercial real estate. So like, but then you gravitated to that and now you keep going back to the well. So I'm curious, like, why do you, why do you keep going back to this well? Because it's like, you know, it's to some extent it's the LinkedIn of like startups, right? I'm in it too, so, you know, there's some self-deprecation going on there. But like, why do you keep coming back to employment and staffing? Recruiting?

Why?

What's, what's, what's, what's similarly messed up about you? I know why I'm messed up, but I'm curious. I'm curious why you keep coming back to the well here.

I got into hiring and recruiting tech in a very accidental way. And I've stayed in it in a very purposeful way. So what happened was I always thought I would do real estate tech for like forever or for a very, for much longer than the 7 years that I did it. And then in 2015, I entered a hackathon with two friends who became my co-founders at Interviewed. We won the hackathon. It was one of those things with like, we built this internal tool that we were using to screen our own salespeople, customer support reps, things like that. And it was like, everybody's doing these case study style interviews with management hires and people are using HackerRank and Caliber and like all these like decent tools for the technical roles, but the process is so unstructured to hire an entry-level financial analyst or an entry-level salesperson or customer support rep. And so we just built this as like, we want to add more structure to our own real estate tech company. We built this, won the hackathon, uh, Cyan Bannister from Founders Fund and Jason Calacanis and a bunch of other like legit investors ended up investing in us. But we were like, we don't have a company here. We all work at this real estate startup. So they're like, well, you should form a company because this is a good idea. So very accidental. Our founder and CEO at that company was super cool with it. He became one of our advisors. He's still a mentor to me. He's one of our investors then, is an investor at Lasky. So it just sort of worked out at that time that we dove into it. And then, yeah, I think to your point, it's a bit of like sucker for pain, but I think if I'm only going to work on one thing, I truly and deeply do believe that for me, helping people get jobs, helping people earn more in their careers, helping people level up, helping people buy homes, buy cars, put their kids through good colleges, all of those things kind of are centered around employment. So that is the more, I think, serious side of me. And that's one of the reasons that we sold our last company to Indeed. I think Indeed has their own set of problems as a massive job board. But I think the management there deeply cares about helping people find jobs and doing some pretty crazy things behind the scenes to make that happen. And so I think when Daniel and I, after that whole Round 1 experience, were looking at all the things that we can do, we really had no part of us that thought we would, I think, jump back into recruiting tech or HR tech. And we ended up here because I think we had built like the one, you know, kind of early success. And I think we really wanted an opportunity to like go big or go home with this company. And we already knew the space. We love the space. It was hard for us to find another space that I think we, knowing that we could have worked on anything this time around that we actually cared about as much as hiring. And like, there are just so many broken pieces about it. I think the thing I like about recruiting, despite all of its flaws, are that We could fix 0.5% of this industry and still be like this massively successful, very valuable company. And so it's not this sort of like winner-take-all mentality, whether you approach it from a tech perspective or a job board perspective or a staffing perspective or traditional recruiting or exec recruiting, like outplacement. There's just so many angles that you can take a very basic concept and sort of like meander in. And so I really like that. Like, I think we were looking at starting a venture studio or doing something that was more like family office based. And so it's like, all right, if I'm going to dedicate another 5, 10, 15 years plus to a single company, it better have a mission that I actually give a shit about and can help recruit other people to join me on that mission. And so that's sort of like the lame but true answer of very accidental, but I think they were very purposeful after we had looked at a lot of other industries. It was just like, Yeah, like helping people buy and sell homes. That was cool at Zillow. I think Zillow is like a game-changing company, but it wasn't like the thing that, you know, I could wake up every morning and get super stoked about.

Yeah, if it's any consolation, the reason I get involved in it, and I've gotten involved in it from like all different facets, everything from like starting a coding bootcamp to like helping people that own companies like get out of them, like fundamentally, like, that's our, our software holding company does that, like, um, to, like, now having a hiring platform. Like, it all comes back to that idea that you can always find joy and, and happiness, like, helping other people be their best selves. And, like, whether it's, you know, everything I do, like, that's, that's the core of it, right? And so I took—

I—

it's cool to hear you say that because I'm like, that's the conclusion I came to as well. Like, that's everything circle— circles around that.

Yeah, for sure.

Well, dude, this is awesome. I definitely want to get the commercial for Lasky. So like, let's please, we've danced around it. I think the world of you and also like when I get the message out about the business. So can we do that now and go from there?

Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. So Lasky is kind of our approach. What we think the entire world of hiring is pretty bifurcated in these two different camps. If you're looking to hire someone Most of the world thinks about sort of like job boards and job platforms, which is generally an ideally low-cost, high-volume. And then the rest of the world uses staffing, traditional recruiting, which kind of by its definition is a lot more curated than a job board. So there's going to be this like human element involved. As a result, the cost is extremely high. And so we were curious with this company to figure out what actually exists in the middle. Um, and so we think that there is this like curated, but not as expensive as a traditional recruiter approach that you can use if you take the role of a recruiter and you invest a bunch of time into helping them source and screen candidates in a much more effective way. Um, so that's really what we do. We try to be lower cost and affordable for companies, um, while still giving them like a curated experience. So 100% of the candidates that go through Lasky they speak to a senior talent partner on our side. And then we just invest in a lot of tools to help those senior talent partners be 3 to 5x more effective than they would be if they're coming from sort of a large staffing or recruiting company like a Robert Half or a Randstad or something like that. And so yeah, the business is about a year old, venture-backed, about 45 people now, and we primarily focus on software engineers, product managers, designers, and executives in the Americas. So we work in sort of— our team is based throughout, um, LatAm, US, and Canada. And then we're also opening a sort of Asia presence as well, um, over the next few months.

That's awesome. And it's L-A-S-K-I-E.com, right?

Yep. Yep. L-A-S-K-I-E.com.

Perfect. All right, man. Thanks for being here. This has been the best hour I've spent all day. Uh, And it's nothing about you.

The other part was important. I didn't barbecue earlier, hopefully. Oh man, I hope now the barbecue owner isn't listening to this and they're like, what is he saying about my barbecue?

The barbecue place, the barbecue place next door to my office, it's the most Texas place ever. They have a big sign out front that says you get 10% off if you show your concealed handgun license when you walk in the door. It's like, okay, that's— That's puro Texas, man. Puro Texas, no doubt about it. Awesome, man. Well, thanks again for being here, and, uh, we'll talk soon.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.