Sultan Murad Saidov, Co-Founder and President @ Beamery

Hey everyone, welcome back to The Graduate Guide. Today I'm joined by Sultan, the founder of Beamery. Welcome to the show, Sultan.

Thanks, Charlie. Glad to be here.

Yeah, pleasure to have you on. I guess the perfect place to start would be to share a bit more about what Beamery is, how you came to founding the company, and kind of your journey through all of that.

It's been a 10-year journey now, and we are an AI company in the HR space and power talent decisions and experiences for a lot of the world's biggest companies. So everything from Amazon to some of the world's biggest banks. And we didn't start there, it took us a while to get there. We actually started in a world that is closer to the student side of things. We started by building a marketplace to help students get found for jobs based on their skills and their interests rather than their resumes. And that evolved into us building the first CRM, or contact relationship management, solution powered by AI in the HR space. And then after 10 years, that's become a key engine for how a lot of companies run their people programs.

Nice, nice. That's amazing. In terms of the journey into actually founding Beamery, I noticed when I had a look at your LinkedIn, you had founded a couple other companies before. Was there any lessons that you learned through those experiences that kind of you think maybe helped you not only found Beamery, not only come up with the idea, but then also make it such a success?

Yeah, I mean, there are quite a few, but somehow still managed to make all of the mistakes in the first years of building Beamery. I mean, I think the first Lesson is that it's so much more important to have the right timing and the right team and the right focus than it is to have the right idea. I think before you try building something, it feels like the most precious thing is having some amazing idea or concept, but the reality is most companies end up iterating whatever idea they started with constantly because the world changes and you learn more. And really what matters is caring about what you do and finding the right timing and focus to zoom in on how do it and the right people around you to do it. And that's one of those things that's kind of easier to say, but in practice, I think it's a good lesson to check yourself, especially if you're starting your first thing, because it can be tempting to go into trying to learn how to write a business plan and going into analysis and like getting paralyzed by all of that. And I really think the most important thing, no matter what kind of idea you have, is to make sure you care about it and then find your first customers that also care about it and can either challenge what you're trying to do or prove it. Going beyond family and friends and finding some real people. You know, one of the businesses I started while I was at university was a food and drink delivery company, but it was just before everybody had iPhones, and so I was faxing orders. And so, I mean, obviously with things like Deliveroo, etc., the idea was a good idea, but the timing wasn't right, and I probably wasn't the right person in the right place to do it. It was still great learning, and other things I'd done before I think gave me some of those insights, but I think a lot I actually ended up learning through ongoing mistakes in the early days of Beamery.

Okay, no, that makes sense. And you mentioned there about the fact that you shouldn't feel like you need to have a perfect idea to found a company, to start a company. I think that's often something that paralyzes a lot of students who are interested in entrepreneurship, and you said that you need to just be passionate about something. When you say that, do you mean You need to be passionate about kind of fixing a problem or be passionate about a certain space rather than a specific idea?

You know, I think it could be either. I think it has to be something that gives you energy and care to get up through a lot of, you know, hard mornings and work on a lot of hard days. It's unlikely, not impossible, but unlikely that it's going to be an easy journey.

Yeah.

And so there's going to be something that lets you spring back because you really care about the problem you're solving or because you really care about the work you're doing. I think that, you know, there is isn't one kind of motivation, but it's going to mean something to you, I think, for you to have the grit and perseverance to get through what you're likely to need to get through.

Yeah, no, 100%. And something else that I found actually very interesting about your, your journey so far, your experiences, was that you had founded all these companies, you clearly had an entrepreneurial passion, but you'd also spent a few years working at kind of large enterprises like Goldman Sachs and Deloitte. And I think often as a younger person you feel like you have to make a decision between the two, and you have to make a decision. Okay, I'm either the type of person that works at startup and found my own company, or I'm the type of person that works at a large enterprise. What would you say to that? Would you say that it's possible for you to do both? And is there anything you learned from those experiences that you think were invaluable?

Well, funnily enough, that dilemma is essentially the crux of why I started Beamery in the way I did, because I didn't have the— either the savings or the opportunity to not get a job. And so after my previous startups, they had some success, but they weren't enough for me to feel like, okay, this is it, I don't need to work. And so I was at that dilemma at the point of graduating and decided to wind down the company that I was running at the time and to join one of the big banks. And I think one of the challenges is that unless you are able to have some kind of financial security for other reasons, you probably do want to need a job, and unless you've been able to run a company so successfully that you don't need to, there's also a good chance it'll be a good experience for you to really learn certain things about what working in a larger environment or in a company can— you can then bring with you to whatever you do. You know, I think the big graduate schemes that a lot of folks in the UK might join have a lot of benefits, even if you don't stay for years in those companies, to see what it's like to actually run good training programs, what company culture can look like, even if it's something that you then choose to avoid, I think those lessons can be really useful. But obviously you don't have to go through that, you can build your own experiences, but I just wouldn't necessarily see it as binary because I think some of these choices can run in parallel, especially today, there are so many experiments you can start on the side. And actually Beemery started after I joined my graduate job and I basically started an experiment to help people I knew, because it was at a time when lots of graduate schemes fell apart and lots of people lost their jobs or didn't get the jobs they wanted. I actually started by helping my friends get found for jobs, and that's basically what kind of cascaded into me deciding to then hire an engineer with some of the salary I was earning to help me build it, and it kind of went from there.

So you started that whilst in your graduate role?

Yeah, exactly.

And how long was that for, that you was kind of working on both? And then at what point did you decide, okay, I'm gonna go all in on this idea?

It was about a year that I was working on both, and I started shortly after I started in my graduate job. I mean, I'd been thinking about the kind of problem and pain even before I started because of what I mentioned around this being a dilemma for me. I was thinking, why is it that my only choices are either to make this thing I'm doing, which was the delivery app at the time, work or get a job? Is there, like, how do you even choose what kind of entrepreneurial thing to do? And to be honest, I think 10 years ago it was slightly harder to apply to other startups than it is now. There weren't as many, and so it felt even more kind of either do a small thing that's my own or join some big, big organization. So I think there's more choices now to find a middle ground, but I think in that sort of dilemma of how do you sort of buy time for yourself to figure stuff out, it then naturally fit to actually try and use that time to help people avoid the problem I had.

Now that makes sense. And how did you, how did you balance that? How did you find the time to work on both? Because I can imagine that your graduate role would have been quite, quite demanding as well.

Well, Frankly, not that well. So, I mean, that was basically the point you touched on, kind of, when did you know? I think there is a point when you have to choose to do one thing well, and I was getting up, I mean, the job I had involved getting up early already, and I was getting up even earlier to kick off the day and work on Beamery, and then would come home after work and work on it again, and there's only so many hours in the day, you can do that and actually be productive in either thing. And so I was getting increasingly excited about what I was seeing out of Beamery. I mean, once I actually placed some of my friends into jobs, that felt pretty warm and fuzzy. And I was thinking like, yeah, this is actually a thing that's working for people. And so there was kind of a trigger point of thinking, I'm either gonna commit to this. And incidentally, I then convinced one of my best friends and my brother to join it. The journey with me and it kind of really launched from there.

Nice, that's amazing. And in terms of Beamery then, as you said earlier, it's been going for 10 years now and you also mentioned that there was a lot of mistakes along the way. Are there any major mistakes that you made that you would say have kind of carved some of the biggest lessons so far in your journey?

So many. Do you want from last week? I mean, I think mistakes are genuinely a continuous thing you never get out of and there are major ones all the time. So I think it's important to always have— find time to reflect on that, and that's actually the first thing when I look back that I got wrong about my own way of working. I think the first couple of years I was really in a constant drive to try and do things, to execute, to solve problems, and I think over time you realize that actually creating space to really think and not just constantly try to prove what you're already doing, but sometimes just take a step back and think, is this the right thing? That's actually what happened with the point when we moved from being a marketplace for students. We were trying to figure out how to be a software company. We just didn't know how do we get there. It kind of seemed like there was a leap between starting up with something simple and then providing software, and we'd never done that before. And the point at which we kind of realized that there's a way to step back and start again was after I ended up moving to the US. I lived there for 6 months, and it basically gave me the window to kind of be forced to not keep proving what I was already doing, but to rethink. If I started again today, after more than a year of everything I've learned, would I do it the same way? And the answer was actually no. It felt like I was kind of in a race to keep proving what I was already doing, but actually it was no longer the right thing. And so we ended up pivoting how we approached it. And I think that's a really hard thing to do if your mental model is to constantly kind of race and prove things, which is tempting when you're sort of in this flywheel of trying to start something up. And I think there's also a personal thing, you know, I, in retrospect, didn't take enough holidays or breaks or time even within the week to think about what's the best use of my time, what's the best way for me to learn and to really sort of apply my learnings. And so I think that element of being mindful of how to reflect on what you're doing and why you're doing it and not just keep doing it is an easy mistake to make and one that probably will keep reappearing in some way.

I think everyone has made that mistake at one point or another. Is there any way now that you avoid that? Is there any way— do you schedule, for example, reflection time? Do you just kind of have more holidays? What are the ways that you actually kind of approach that now?

Yeah, I mean, it'll be hard not to have more holidays than the early days, but, uh, no, I mean, the, the scheduling of, uh, time is definitely one thing, uh, that I am very mindful of, and creating blocks of time, you know. I do this even with, uh, meeting other people, because as you start to grow, you can easily find yourself in just lots of 30-minute meetings and just like constant conversations. And being very deliberate around, should this be a 10-minute coffee or a 2-hour work together or a 1-hour in my own space and time? I think that's obviously different for every person depending on the kind of work you do, but just creating structure. And I actually reset it every 3 months because one of the things that happens I've been doing this for 10 years now, but most things that enter your habits or calendar just stay and perpetuate, and then there's sort of like new things appear. And so giving yourself some windows, which for me is every 3 months, to just say reset, clear my calendar, rethink, is this the best way for me to structure my time? And that also applies to, you know, thinking about what am I excited about, what do I care about? You know, the world we're in, in technology, you You kind of have to check yourself about where would I do, how would I invest time and what would I do if I were doing things from scratch today? And it's kind of the old, like, how do you avoid becoming the BlackBerry story in any business, right? And nobody intentionally has hubris, but especially once you start having some success, it's easy to then not rethink, well, is this the right thing? So creating space to even intentionally challenge something that's working is part of that. Kind of scheduling and time.

No, I love that. I think it also comes back to what you said earlier, right, about how the idea you initially had for Beamery isn't what Beamery is now. And I guess if you don't ever take the time to actually reflect on that, ever think about that, you could keep banging the same drum and get nowhere with it. And then you get to a point where you burn out and realize, okay, this isn't going anywhere. But actually, by reflecting, by thinking, you can then figure out how to pivot, how to actually make it a success.

Yeah. And I think also just intentionally seeking people who can challenge you.

Yeah.

And not just sort of people who can help you do stuff. I think part of it is also creating that kind of healthy space.

No, 100% agree. And in terms of that, that 10-year journey as well, obviously that's gone from a stage where you was probably just you and the engineer, as you mentioned, then you got your brother involved, and now Beamery is a company with, with more than 200 employees, I believe. How does, how do the, the requirements of being a leader change through that process? Obviously you go from a stage where, as I can imagine, early on you're, you're all just going all the time and everyone is kind of just working non-stop, but then you get to a point where actually you need to respect boundaries, you need to make sure workers' mental health is looked after, all of that stuff. How, how did, what did you learn about being a leader throughout that throughout their journey?

So it's actually one of the reasons I'm still grateful for some of what I saw in working in a graduate scheme, because there was early mistakes I saw from managers who in those companies were not really trained or ready to be managers, but were just given that sort of title because that's how a lot, a lot of corporate hierarchies work. And I think as you go through your own journey, one thing is you have to realize what are you actually good at. Not everybody is a good manager, and that requires its own time, skill set, space. If you are, then lean into that and figure out how to grow and coach yourself. If you aren't, then build teams with good managers and people who can do that. And I think that is something that evolves through each stage of the journey. There's quite common milestones for most companies in terms of when things really change, that tend to be in sort of similar stages. You know, being a 10-person company is very different to being 50 because you go from one team to teams, and being 50 is very different to 150 because you grow and you're likely going to be in multiple locations. And I think for us, there's certain things that evolved organically because from the start we were mindful of being friendly to people who are remote or people who are introvert or extrovert and kind of building a way of communicating within the company that accommodated different styles, different personalities. But you yourself have to grow and check yourself over time with that kind of element of who is my time best useful and am I actually presenting myself in the best way. And I think, you know, it's easy to not notice how Over time, not everybody interacts with you every day, not everybody knows your style or what you mean by things. You find yourself having to repeat a lot of things over and over, because without that, people won't have enough context. And so in the early days, that just isn't necessary. Everyone kind of works together, gets what you're doing. So I think at different stages, you just have to learn and adapt. What is it that gives people enough context and clarity to be good at their jobs? And do I have the right skills or time to put them in that position? Or if not, how do I build teams that can do that? And I think it's just a journey of figuring out how to, uh, how to balance that.

Yeah. And at what stage would you say you need to start considering where your strengths lie? Because early on, right, everyone's doing a bit of everything. Everyone's kind of just, yeah, doing a bit of everything. You don't really need to, I guess, put position people as much, or would you say that you should?

I think there's In the early days, it partly depends on what kind of founding or early team you have. It was actually tricky, um, in retrospect. There was a 1-year period at the beginning where both my brother and I deeply questioned our choices of starting the company together, and we had actually lots of complementary strengths, but the challenge was we hadn't worked together before and we didn't really know what our lanes were. Um, you know, every problem seemed like we should be doing it together, like, what's our What's our product vision? We look at it together. Like, what's our marketing strategy? And I think it's actually very hard to work well together if you don't have clear knowledge of each other's strengths and responsibilities, particularly for early teams. And you also might not be so busy with existing kind of customers and focus that you can just sort of wake up in the morning and already have a lot of things to do. So while you're figuring out what's the right thing to focus on, if you don't have clear ownership and knowing each other's strengths, that can be challenging. And I think a lot of early-stage teams end up breaking up or getting into conflict because of those boundaries of not trusting each other's strengths or not knowing kind of where to focus. And I think over time, you know, elements of that are still relevant to teams that grow. One of the things we started doing, and it was actually my co-founder's idea, he started making a document for new people that joined, or joined either his team or the company, to basically explain his communication style and how he works, just so that people don't react to a Slack message or an email at a certain time, assuming that he's demanding something. So he'll just clarify, I'll occasionally send something, it doesn't mean I need something. Because it's very easy to gradually start working with people who don't really know what you mean or how you say things. And so I think in the early days, you figure that out just by interacting with each other a lot, and then you have to figure out how to basically turn that into a framework and something that scales.

Yeah, no, I think that makes complete sense. It's something that I think often you maybe overlooked as well at the early stage. But as you said, that can lead to a lot of issues. I mean, in terms of Beamery then, a bit more about Beamery. Obviously you already gave the listeners a bit of an introduction into what you do. What does the next 5 to 10 years look like for Beamery? What would your ambitions be there?

In some ways we're still tackling the ambitions that we had right at the beginning. We actually still have the same mission we've always done, even though the technology and tools changed, which is to create equal access to work, which for us is about making the way that somebody finds something to work on or a company to work at based on your interests and your potential and your skills, and not just which careers fair did you have access to.

Yeah.

Um, or who did you know? And, and so the root of that is how can we help people go beyond looking at job descriptions and beyond quantifying themselves as resumes? And the ambition is to continue to look at both the data or AI or intelligence side of how to surface that. So if you think about like using something like Google Maps, you take for granted that there's some satellites that are giving you a geolocation and telling you, hey, you want to get to this location, it's raining, take a bike, and all of these routes and options. We've been trying to build the equivalent for careers, like what's the geolocation or GPS for saying, hey, look at this opportunity, you might not have thought about it. So you need different types of data and different types of like interfaces to say, hey, don't just go on a job board, here's some things that you might want to consider. And if you want to be an entrepreneur in 5 years, here's the kind of roles that might give you the right experience and all of that kind of, you know, pathing of different choices. But the other side of what we're trying to do over the next 5 years is give companies and people who are hiring people better ways of treating people choices as the most important decision. You know, if you look at what's currently happening in the world with AI, the consumer side we see is like ChatGPT, but actually some of the biggest changes and disruptions are happening at the level of how some very traditional businesses operate. You know, we have some of the biggest clients in healthcare like AstraZeneca or construction, and those companies have over just the last couple of years completely changed what their business is. You know, construction firms are like reinventing materials for the first time in 100 years. And so there's a problem with that, which is you can end up in a world where people suddenly all lose their jobs because it's AI and robots doing work, or you can end up in a world where actually, just like with every past industrial revolution, all of that technology change enables people to do different work. And I think one of our responsibilities in some ways as a company in what we do is to help it be the latter and help people adapt and companies adapt to how humans can now do work differently, rather than just people losing their jobs and then becoming a different world for a period of time. You know, eventually people will find jobs again, but you don't want to have 50 years where lots of people are struggling. And so I think that's one of the things over the next 5 to 10 years that we can help reduce the risk of and help, you know, more, more people and companies actually find ways to adapt.

Yeah, no, I think that's a, that's an amazing mission, and I love to hear that as well, that your mission hasn't changed from the beginning. That's great. In terms of, you mentioned about how you, you want to help students, kind of students or also professionals, I guess, later in their career, but kind of going on to the student angle, you want to help them kind of get hired initially as well, not just from their CV but the skills they have, the interest they have. Are there any skills that you've seen that you think translate across all industries or career paths that are always valuable to have that students should focus on developing?

I think that there's a There's a few different schools of thought on this. There was an interesting observation on this topic by one of the co-founders of a tech company called HubSpot, who said, 10 years ago, we would have advised everyone to be computer scientists and get tech skills. Now I'd say do the exact opposite because you don't need tech skills. Robots will do that. You need empathy. I don't think it's that simple because it does depend on what you want to do. And if you want to be in a technical world, there's certain skill sets that are necessary. But I do think there are certain things that are more universally helpful. One thing is having and figuring out how to have, if you can, more empathy, because I think we're increasingly working in environments and with people in a— whether it's remote or not— in a capacity where being more mindful of other people and yourself and how to be empathetic can be very powerful, particularly as you grow within teams and companies. Being a person who leans into learning and curiosity, I think we're increasingly living in a world where whatever skill you have is going to be redundant or change quite quickly anyway. And that's part of, you know, what we look at, like job titles don't mean anything anymore. And what means something is what does the work look like, and you have to kind of adapt and learn. And so I think that the mindset of continuously trying to improve and learn in an area that you care about is almost more important than being good at one thing. And I think that there is an element of also in many companies and roles being a little bit more focused on how to be critical of information. You know, we live in a world with digital twins and deepfakes, and so the old adage of, you know, figure out how to process information more thoughtfully and how to fact-check is becoming a little bit more important. Yeah, in a lot of, in a lot of the ways we work.

No, I think that's amazing advice, especially about kind of the continuous learning and, and not just feeling like you're an expert, which can often be, be tempting as a younger person. Um, I, I've learned so much from this episode. I'm sure the listeners would have. But is there a final piece of advice that you'd like to share to students? Maybe something that you— some advice you would give to your own 18-year-old self?

I think the biggest thing I'd advise my 18-year-old self is to seek coaching and help more. I didn't have a network of people, and I think I instinctively retreated to trying to figure stuff out. And in retrospect, I could have done with a mentor, and I could have reached out to people and asked for one. I think that there's probably a fear of either rejection or not knowing how to seek advice that, at least for me, was something I regret. I now have and at every stage you can have people who are much better at anything that I might want to do or have a lot more experience, and I try to surround myself not just with colleagues but people in my network that I can come to with for advice and help, and I think the sooner you can build your own support network for whatever that might be, I think the, the faster you'll be able to confidently have people around you who can, who can give you either sounding boards or guidance that will make a big difference.

And it's just a case of asking, right? Just reaching out.

Exactly.

That's a great action step for the listeners then. But yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thanks so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.