Episode 12 with Kai Han (Co-Founder & CEO of Pallet)

Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Building Public Podcast. And today I'm thrilled to invite one of my favorite consumer B2B guests. One of my favorite founders on Twitter is building Palette. Welcome to the show, Kai.

Thanks so much for having me, KP. I'm excited to be here.

So a little bit of a background. Before we dive into our conversation, Zakai and I connected through Twitter, which I think increasingly is the new entry point to the metaverse, right? That's where we're all forming relationships and building networks. But we had a phenomenal first chat, and I was very fascinated by what him and his team were building in the space of social versioning of a recruitment agency. And before I butcher it further, I would love for him to introduce Pallet to our audience. Tell us about

Pallet. Yeah. So Pallet was founded on and kind of created on this belief that increasingly there are these sort of like watering holes or like digital centers of gravity online where professionals or talented people are congregating. Whereas before, most of these watering holes were in person, now a large chunk of those things are actually happening online. So you have Slack communities of engineering leaders, you have newsletters that product managers read, you've got things like On Deck, obviously. And so there's all of— even like a Twitter following, right? And so there's all these places that you have sort of definable grouping of professionals hanging out for one reason or another. And we looked at those as being a very sort of exciting avenue for recruiting, like a potential recruiting. And so basically what we want to do is, you know, right, like let's say you have the Slack community, you've got 5,000 DevOps engineers in there. That's a great source of talent for any company to tap into. But the tools and the processes behind that are pretty much lacking today. They don't exist. And so basically what we do is we sort of, we define ourselves as like a recruiting infrastructure company. We provide infrastructure for anyone to set up like a recruiting business and sort of more modern version of a recruiting business, I'd say even. And so basically what that looks like is, you know, we let people easily post jobs and curate roles for their audience and monetize off of that. We let people recommend candidates to hiring companies, build out like referral networks, you name it, the works, right? Like whatever you might want to do in recruiting, we want to be that sort of tool that lets you set that up. Shopify for recruiting, basically.

I love it. I mean, the part that piqued my interest last time, it was the first time when I first heard about Pallet, was how much of a refreshing— like from the UX and UI perspective, how much of a refreshing change it was to have a job board, but that's curated and customizable by a community leader. Right. And this was almost unprecedented in many ways because traditionally, if you work in tech and if you're at a startup and you knew like, oh, there were these 7 jobs that I know that are so awesome, these 7 companies, I wish people would join these. You would have to go to their Lever or LinkedIn posts and then put them into a thread. And it was such a hassle. And with Pallet, you basically sort of can like search for the company, exactly go to that exact listing and then put it in, surface it, and then use that Pallet URL wherever you publish content like newsletter, podcast show notes, or on your Twitter threads, right? So it just skipped so many steps and it's just a neat way. The other thing that I loved was that you actually can track stuff, which you couldn't do if I was just using a bunch of Lever links or LinkedIn posts. There's no way I would assess which of my posts is doing really well.

Yeah.

You know, right. And so the clicks you show us, like, tell us a little bit more on the, on the infrastructure, like what kind of things you surface on a, on a job board.

Yeah. So, so I think like, uh, the, the way that we like to think about it is, you know, there's a lot of what you do online says something about your preferences career-wise, work-wise, and the content you consume in the communities you're part of are a big part of that. Right. spending a lot of time in no-code communities probably says that I'm interested in no-code at the very least. Right. So being able to get surfaced jobs that match the rest of your experience online was something that we really wanted to do with the job board. And then conversely, on the actual analytics side, we wanted to give the community leader or the creator insight into their audience and their audience's values. So let's say you started to notice that on average, product management roles got an outsized amount of applications and clicks. That gives you some insight into the work preferences and career preferences that your audience might display, and you might be able to tailor some content around that. make it also sort of additional value on that vector.

Right. Again, it's, there's so much potential here. I mean, you probably saw my excitement last time too. I was like, the moment I heard about it, I was like, it really got to understand what it was. I jumped in and, you know, I'm, I have a board as well. I have a Palette board. It's called Curated by KP. So thanks for setting it up. It's definitely an experimental thing, but I want to like invest more time and energy into it and grow it in the long run. So tell me a little bit about, I know, so this is Palette, right? But tell it, tell me the story of Kai. What were you doing the last 5 years? What brought you to Pallet?

Yeah, it's probably a little less interesting than the story of Pallet. But so I was in college last year. I graduated last June. I grew up in New York City. So started my sort of professional life when I was about 16. I was interning at this quantitative hedge fund, and that's sort of where I first was exposed to different technologies and stuff like that. And I remember just sort of working there and I was typing up different little— nothing actual heavy on the trading desk, just more doing research. So I was typing up these different algorithms and doing reports on those. And one of the MDs there was like, Hey, you have to learn how to build web apps fully. This is what the future is. And so I took that and I never actually really took their advice because I'm still not— I can't build web apps very well today. But I sort of dove into that world. I learned a bit. I did a bit of bootcamp stuff and I really found that I was really just interested in the space overall. So that's how I got first interested in tech. And then when I went to college, I was an econ major and I ended up specializing in labor economics.

Interesting.

So labor economics was something that I found really fascinating. Specifically because it's really the underpinning of almost every macroeconomic policy. Labor is the thing that makes everything else go. And so really was fascinated by labor economics. I was also the president of the blockchain club at my university. And so there was this aspect where, cool, increasingly as people come online, this decentralization is becoming more and more prevalent. And so I was super into decentralization. I was super into labor. And then I remember when I went to go find a job for the first time, apply online really, It ended up just being a huge letdown of an experience. It sort of felt like, hey, there's all this stuff that I do. I spend all this time looking at all these different things, and I go on LinkedIn or Indeed, and I get this search bar. It says, hey, type in what you want to know. I'm like, I can't really type in like—

7 types. Yeah.

Decentralization company, right? None of that stuff exists. And so I thought there was really a massive hole. And in addition, all of the stuff that I was participating in, in these different clubs at college and doing all these different extracurriculars, none of that was translating really into definable job search advantages. And so I thought there there was a way that you could build a better overall, not just job search, but career recruiting ecosystem that was much more driven around these principles of decentralization and matching where people were actually spending time and where people were spending effort in their life. And so that's how we got to Pallet and we wanted to build this— always we wanted to build this ecosystem of a lot of little micro recruiting businesses. And initially the way that we thought about doing that was to build a consumer product. And then sort of build off of that. And so the consumer product was like curated playlists of jobs where you could sort of follow a bunch of jobs that were, you know, top startups in NYC. We found that to be hard to virally grow and scale. And so quickly after a few months being in market, we immediately said, okay, let's sort of refocus our go-to-market and focus first on the infrastructure and going directly to these communities and then sort of taking it from there.

I definitely love the latter approach. I'm sure it came, of course, through Try trial and error, right? Like trying the other one first. But it feels to me like it's pretty poignant that you landed on this particular realization. Because if you think of what Stripe has done for payment infrastructure on the internet, right? Completely radicalized and changed the way we think about payments, you know, before Stripe and after Stripe. And of course, Stripe is not just one product. There's like several mini tools that Stripe has, including Stripe Atlas, which is a different product. I think there is a play that's similar to that for recruiting, because right now most recruiting is still in the dark ages, you know, and I work at On Deck and I've recruited a couple of people on my team. It was like blood and tears. It was so freaking hard, right? And broken and old school. And I'm like, I can't believe that this is how, like, you know, you have to go through the Lever stuff. You have to go through the LinkedIn, like, posting. And I'm like, God, it feels so stuck in the dark ages. Like, it hasn't been renovated, modernized. And so definitely huge opportunity. Really bullish on what you guys are doing. Now, in terms of the evolution of product, right, and this is something we touched on, you mentioned just before the interview, there was an evolution that you're sitting on right now, right, is going from job boards to talent curation. So what is that like and why?

So the job boards are always going to be an important part of what we do. We always knew that job boards were like the most basic level of what you could do recruiting-wise. And so always for us, the job board was like a wedge into the market. Like, hey, job boards are really easy. People can understand it. Let's go really publicly launch this job board and build up our own brand and build up our own awareness with the job board, which is easy to adopt. There's almost no reason to turn down running a job board. Right. Your audience is never going to get mad at you. You can make some good money and you're doing good for the world. So for us, that was like, cool, this is a great wedge into the market. Now that we've started to spread our roots around the ecosystem, we're really looking at building Kind of like, like with Stripe, like the further tools that are more impactful and sort of more dynamic and help really place hires more often. So for us, what that looks like in the immediate next step is going from job curation and adding a layer, which is what we're calling like talent curation. Right. And so this would be in the, like, let's take you as a canonical example. You are sort of this no-code expert. With job curation, what you're doing is you're saying, hey, to my audience, here are all the jobs in no-code that I could recommend and I could vouch for. With talent curation, you're sort of saying, hey, to all the companies who are looking to hire talent, here's a group of 20 or 50 people in the no-code space that I can vouch for either personally or I've reviewed their material or someone I trust has referred them to me. And when you get to that point, you're almost like you're getting right to the meat of the hiring process, right? Which is like businesses want to see a list of candidates who are open to conversations. Candidates want businesses to directly request introductions to them and want to see exactly who they could talk to. And so that's the sort of next step in the funnel that we're building out. But there's still a lot more stuff to do even after the talent curation, I would say.

I'm sure you won't stop at that step, but I think that itself, definitely, as I remarked at the beginning with you before we started, it's definitely a whole new spin on how recruiting is being approached right now. And I'm very excited about it because if you ask me at any point of day, like I said, KP, like, who are your top 15 no-code recommendations? I can give you that. But as a creator, as a community leader, like if I have to spend time curating my job board, I can do it. But it's like I said, it's table stakes. It's not really adding disproportionate advantage and value to the companies. And the same thing with Build in Public. I know the 7 to 8 people who are blowing up in Build in Public. So if there's Morning Brew who wants to hire the next marketer, or if there's, I don't know, Main Street who wants to hire the next growth person, I know them, but they're like, it's hard. There's no way for me to initiate the conversation today unless there's something like this talent curation opportunity. Definitely exciting. I'm really curious to see how that plays out. The other thing that I actually personally experienced, and I want to hear your thoughts on it, is Kai. So my story, I don't know how much you know about my backstory. So basically I spent 6 or 7 years in corporate and I was in the product teams at like Turner and all these Delta Airlines and all these other companies. And I was just, I hated the dead-end life. I wanted to be in startups. I always knew as a talent, right? I always knew that I had, I was a high quality. I was definitely an aspirational person. Like I always had aspirations, but I really, when the time came for me to like switch to startups and being employable and hireable and desirable by startups, it feels like there's a difference in how you market to a corporate company or like a corporate career, as opposed to marketing and being, you know, sort of signaling to a startup in the startup world. Right. And that chasm, I think now, of course, now it's like obvious to me. Like, I'm like, now I work at On Deck. I know everything inside and outside, but it was almost a mountain that I had to climb back in the day, you know? Yeah. And this is something that I see as a pattern. I have so many people on my audience on Twitter, 20,000+, and on podcasts everywhere. I know that they would make amazing startup hires if only they knew how to communicate their strengths and talents, et cetera, in the lingo, in the jargon, but also not just jargon, in the lens that the startups want you to embrace. Totally. And so when I hear startups complain, like there's a pipeline problem, there's lack of high-quality candidates, and I'm like, no, no, no, there are actually high-quality candidates out there in the world. There's so many out there. There's so many KPs from 2018 are hanging out there, right? But they haven't crossed the bridge. How do you think about this? And is this true? Like, is this just my thing or—

Yeah, no, completely true. I, I think it's sort of this, you know, I think for a long time in the recruiting space and specifically recruiting tech, and even still today, the majority of efforts are being placed towards making the sort of gatekeepers of the world more objective, right? And which sounds like really great, right? Like, so the ATS, Right. Like automated candidate matching, this type of stuff. Like, we'll build the tech and the data for your application portal to understand and be able to surface the right people. The truth of the matter, and sort of like any— with any sort of automated candidate matching type of thing, is ultimately with hiring, people don't look at statistics and data. People sort of— it's very much a signaling thing. It's very much like a, hey, do the right people say that they vouch for this person? If you work at Google, that's Google saying that they vouch for you. And so it's very much a signaling game. And when we think about it in that sense, as weird as it sounds, we're not trying to make the gatekeepers more objective. We're trying to make a million times more gatekeepers, period. Yeah. Nice. Which sounds kind of counterintuitive, but when you say, hey, now there's all of these people that are sort of quote unquote gatekeepers and you can trust KP, and KP says that this person who seems like a corporate person is actually really great, hopefully that builds enough sort of conviction on your end, especially if you trust KP, that you can make the hire. And so that's really what we're trying to do and spread that out. And the experience that we want to create, the end state is someone from anywhere in the world could join a Discord server and they participate really well and they contribute really well and they impress the right people and they just provide value. And as a result, they get added to maybe a curated talent pool on Pallet and they have a world of economic opportunity in front of them because the signal is there.

Yeah. And oh my God, with the social mobility there, right? One of the hires we made at On Deck was this ODNC1, the program I run. ODNC1 is the first cohort. Vensi. Shout out Vensi if she's listening. She lives and works in Hyderabad, you know, which is India where I came from. But that opportunity wouldn't have— that door wouldn't have been unlocked if she didn't participate in the On Deck No-Code community and like display to us, to the team, the recruiting team and everybody, her skillset, which is she's amazing at no-code, amazing at community, et cetera. And I think that's what I'm personally passionate about, you know, whether it happens through Pallet or it happens as a movement, I'm really passionate about like putting more people in business. Eric Sonnenberg has a phrase where he talks about putting more people in business, giving more people their shots. And I personally think that as someone who got the shot, right, from going— if you look at my resume before On Deck, it was just a bunch of random shit. It's definitely not startup pedigree-backed. It's no Google, no Accel VC fund or whatever. It was just a bunch of random shit that I did. And I think going from potential to pedigree, has been life-changing. And I'll tell you this because once you get the conviction, once you're in the pedigree, you do all kinds of crazy things. I have a podcast now, I have a new Twitter following, all these things, right? So I'm wondering how many millions are out there, not just in America, but across the world who are tech savvy, right? They're startup savvy, but they're in the dark because they're going through the LinkedIn portals.

Exactly.

And they're applying through the ATS system, which is rigged in one way, right? 'Cause it's like freaking algorithmic game. I have to use the right keyword Is it NoDashcode or no-code? Like one word. You know what I mean?

Exactly.

As opposed to joining a community or joining a newsletter or really displaying my contributions, my value, and then the curator or whoever recommends, say, hey, you would be a great fit for a company like this.

Yeah. And it's kind of the way that the world has almost always worked, right? Where it's just like, hey, oh, when your parents would tell you, just go to the lobby of the building and impress the right people. That used to be expected. And that used to actually be a real thing that happened, but obviously the modern world is not about that anymore. And so when you say you go from potential to pedigree, as a result of also getting a certain level of pedigree, you now have the opportunity to give back to other people.

Yeah, send the elevator down.

Yeah, exactly. And it's not anybody's fault. I don't want to say that businesses are evil or ATSs are evil. The reason that this happens is that the competition for talent is so fierce. That the opportunity cost of making the wrong hire is so great that businesses will oftentimes go and depend on, probably in order, one, do they have a trusted referral? 2, do they have a great pedigree? So on and so forth down the line. And so to your point, I think that's a feeling that you're never going to be able to get rid of. And so the best place to do it is, hey, let's oil the gears for this circle of trust and let's create a bunch of new little pipelines that anyone could tap into and anyone can join. Right. And hopefully like, you know, like the, the sort of the next version of go to the lobby and impress the right people is kind of like, you know, join a community or join a bootcamp or join a fellowship and impress the right people, like, like whatever it might be. I just think there has to be some sort of like, you know, you have to really think about how to build the right tools for other people to do this.

Right. And it's so much about this is actually even just having the right kind of platform/tool to express and like turn your aspirations into legible potential. Like for example, like Balaji talks about this all the time. He talks about how like the future is going to be in the blockchain, a proof of work. And actually, if I look back at the way I was hired at On Deck, I wrote this thread. I don't know if you've seen it, but I wrote a giant thread that basically talked about my journey and what kind of strengths I have and even weaknesses I have. And I put a link to all of my projects in my tweets. And each project had linked to how many subscribers were there and all that. So it was very legible. I turned my talents into a legible proof of work thing somebody can objectively look at and say, oh, that was impressive. Well, It's not just one project, there's like 13 projects. Wow, this person's really invested, right? Now, I think so many times when I see someone applying for— when we have jobs at On Deck or just generally, is that they're just putting in their LinkedIn resume and it's almost impossible to sift through. Like, I went to school, like I went to Vanderbilt by the way, but that doesn't matter in startups, like unless you went to Stanford, right?

Yeah.

So it's like, there's not much that is proof of work that I can actually see what you would do, the kind of work you would do at the company level. that I can learn from your resume. So to me, a resume is an artifact of the old school thinking. There has to be some way to like, you know, innovate beyond resumes. And part of it is, is I'm wondering how proof of work could be made legible.

Yeah, right.

With— let me give you an example. With developers, it's really easy. Open source.

Yeah,

GitHub, right? Go check out my GitHub profile. But how do you bring such legibility to other non-developer professions and talent? It's interesting.

And it's funny because still, even So where I think that sort of proof of work and like, definitely Balaji is definitely a million X smarter than me, so I'm not going to necessarily disagree because it's super important to be able to have verifiable proof of work. Where I think it starts to become tricky is that right now publicly sort of being able to have a dedicated stamp of the work you've done in an application sets you apart from someone else.

Yes.

Sources of alpha like that tend to dry up, right? If you have a good source of, let's say, TikTok, any sort of source of alpha will always dry up whenever it becomes more popular, right? So eventually, probably everyone will have proofs of work. And then what you'll need is people to sort of go and review that work. And then you sort of eventually— then the resume. And so we are super huge fans of proof of work, especially when that proof of work is accompanied by a vouch from someone who's trusted. Yeah. Hey, not only did this person contribute to the open source, repo, but they did a really great job. And you don't have to go through their whole entire code base because I did. And you know me and you trust me.

Right.

So like, I think that accompaniment will always be important of some sort.

I think that sort of cosine is almost like a, it's the proxy, right. Of proof of work. Like for example, like if you're a sales leader or if you're trying to recruit for, um, a hiring position, exactly. How do you recruit for a hiring position when that person can't legibly like showcase that, hey, I'm a great HR person. How do you, like, what does that mean? Right. Like it's not cool. Code. Exactly. Right. So I think in that situation, really that cosign coming from a previous manager or a coworker or even a community contributor or a co-collaborator, that is the proxy for approval work. Right. So I think what you're saying is there's a social dynamic there regardless, unless it's like code. Yeah.

Yeah. But I think even with code, right? Like if you get the application—

Is it clean code? Is it well-written, well-documented? Yeah.

Yeah. And so that being said, when you get into the cosign part, you really want to make sure that you build in the right disincentives to— you want to make sure that actually cosigning someone is at base level a negative to your experience on Pallet, which is, again, I feel like a little counterintuitive. If there's an initial— if there's a cost to cosign someone, whether that's your reputation on Pallet, anywhere else, whether that's the percentage of earnings you might earn somewhere, if there is an initial cost to cosign someone, That can be earned back if it then proves to be—

The right kind of bet.

Right. You almost want to stake a portion of your reputation, a portion of your earnings, something on the cosign. Because if you don't do that, where it becomes tricky is that—

People just dilute it. People just dilute that social capital. I think that's brilliant. I can think of my own personal example, and there's like 5 or 6 or 7 people I brought on deck. Our current head of growth, Sharad Reza, was nowhere in our radar. He was somebody that I had a podcast with just like this, and he interviewed me. The next day, I had a feeling that he was looking for something new. This is the shit that I'm talking about. When you talk to other people at the watering holes, be it a podcast, be it Twitter, you know that they're looking for the next thing.

Yeah.

I knew we had a growth opening at On Deck. I was like, oh, just a perfect opportunity. Next day, literally, I emailed him, And now he's our head of growth, got a promotion. So— That's

amazing.

So that's what I'm talking about. I think currently this behavior is not documented, right? Like only Reza and I know that this happened between us. Of course, like his boss knows, but I'm not getting any social credit as a person who's believing and betting on some early stage, like same with Vensi, same with like Janelle, who's like on my team. There's so many people like this is not just On Deck. I'm like beyond On Deck that I've taken multiple bets on people who are unproven because I see potential. because I've been in their shoes and I can correlate it to pedigree. Because to me, pedigree is not rocket science. Everybody now thinks like, I'm sure you know this too, like you're sitting on a Vell VC-funded company, but you're like the same guy 3 years ago, right? Like, it's like I didn't grow a third arm. People like think, oh my God, like, yeah, yeah, building public, yeah, great. But I'm the same guy. I was literally the same guy 3 years ago, Kai, and nobody gave a shit.

Exactly.

I feel personally offended by that. To the millions of people who are right now listening to this, and feel like they're undiscovered, it's not that it's your fault. It's the system's fault. It's the way it's set up. And so you have to navigate the labyrinth carefully. And if you get a lucky break, then you start on the other end and now you're like, oh, I have pedigree. But I think that's broken. There has to be some way. I mean, maybe it's crypto. Maybe it's— I think there has to be the— I feel our kids shouldn't have this shitty problem.

No.

Where if you're one of the first few people, to believe in CryptoPunks, right? Or, or, or, uh, whatever that is. Or if you discovered Coldplay, right? Today's version of Coldplay at a local coffee shop, there should be some way that you should be getting an upside of the, of their trajectory.

Yeah. Yeah. And similarly, I would say like, it's a better way, you know, some sort of cosine type of proof of work type of thing. It's a better way. Like you're saying, it's like a better version of a resume. Like I could really present my whole self. Right. Agreed. You should have some upside. The way that we think about that, the transaction, it's not necessarily on the pure ISA side of things. It's more so you form these different collectives of people and there's earnings that's distributed. But agreed, you should totally have an upside. And then not only that, now that you've proven to be quite good at spotting hidden talent, your word and your vouch should start to carry even more and more weight. Right. Now, if you go to someone and you say, hey, This guy's really good. I don't know of any roles for him right now, but like, you should— I know that you have a bunch of businesses that are looking, like, that should carry a lot of weight as well.

Right.

And I think that it's not too difficult to start to create records of this stuff. Like, it's just about when you set up the right sort of, uh, you set up the right system.

I mean, it's, it's, I mean, it's as simple as like having a way to go back and track and say, okay, I did, I sent this cosine, you know, between these 2 parties, right? As simple as that. And then maybe that, that person's, you know, promotional journey or whatever. I mean, but I feel like all of this is like right now nebulous, it's lost with no documentation. And I know this for a fact that there's thousands of KPs at fast-growing companies, right? Stripe or, you know, Main Street or Product Hunt who would've tripled down on what I've done with Reza and Vensi and et cetera. Right. If they got some credit for it.

Yeah.

Or if they had something that they felt like, wow, you know, it was meaningful to me. Right now it's all being run on intrinsic motivation. Which is great, but I'm like, there has to be some legibility around this.

And it's not only about the— I would say the motivation is a huge piece. And then the second piece is probably also, it's very serendipitous right now.

Yeah.

Like if you meet 5 really great people over the last 6 months, and at the end of the 6th month, the business says, hey, I'm looking for someone, you might only remember the last person that you talked to at the time. Exactly. There's no place to sort of store that and sort of keep track of that and grow that and sort of keep on tapping into it. So I think, yeah, completely like you're saying, like one, being able to get credit for it and two, being able to actually almost pacify it, right? Like it's something that you don't necessarily need to think about like in this moment right now, what would I do? But rather like, this is just a thing that I, a resource that I have.

Right. Another angle here, a part of your toolkit. I'm sure your toolkit is growing now by now, but like another thing here has been not having a legible people CRM. And I mean, there's like so many attempts at this, right? But they're coming from like a Salesforce approach. But they're trying to take something that's so clunky and massive like Salesforce and try to like shove it down the throat of a creator/community leader. And it never works because I don't wake up and I'm like, I'm not like an AE, account executive at Salesforce trying to document every interaction I have. So it's like, it doesn't work like that, right? It has to be an organic coming from like a creator-first way of a people CRM. I don't think anyone has done that yet. I mean, at least— Yeah. I mean, there's something called Clay, but I mean, I haven't. It's not in parlance, you know, in Pablo parlance. So there's probably something there, cuz to your point, like there's so many people that I run into at these watering holes, right? And I'm like, wow, that person's great. That person's growth, they're awesome. This person's awesome in design, right? David Huang probably knows like 7,000 people, right?

We are early designer from David Huang's.

There we go. So I mean, or Pablo Stanley, right? Probably knows like 30,000 people who DM him and like, he knows that they're high potential talent. but they're probably looking for a break and he doesn't know at that moment how to help. But if he can track that somehow and then suddenly Envision pings him and he's like, oh yeah, you should talk to this person. I think what

the CRM is, because I've looked at a lot of the personal CRMs as well, the trick with it is that the second the CRM, the personal CRM gets outdated versus your contact book, then it don't— So with us, it's something we keep in mind really strongly as we build. It's like, hey, this sort of Pallet talent pool, there has to be an action that you could do on it that you literally can't do anywhere else. Yeah. And so everything that you can do on Pallet is like, you can't— you couldn't do it from your contact book, right? Like that sort of— so it's not— right, like we don't even worry about like storing their information. Like we want specifically the interactions to be like recommending candidates, allowing companies to request introductions, that type of flow, such that you de-risk the potential that accidentally it moves over into someone's contact book or something like that. Yeah. I think it's— and I think the other even interesting point as well is what's happening now, and there's this sort of whole explosion of edtech and online courses and online certifications. It's also hard for those things to build credibility. And it's hard to keep those things incentive-aligned, right? If theoretically every online course had its own unique palette for its graduates, and prospective students could really easily see the results and what happened within that palette, you might be able to actually start to get some sort of like insights into these different courses. And so, hey, like, where do I want to be spending my money?

Like,

right, you know, this course doesn't even have a palette set up. Like, I don't even know what it looks like. This one places 50 people every single trimester, every single cohort, you know. So there's like, there's a bunch of stuff that goes around that. And like, obviously On Deck has sort of ascended past any of these other things because, right, such a rocket ship, you guys are killing it on so many levels. But like, you know, there might be a lot of smaller edtech things that could benefit from something like

that. Yeah, I mean, I think they're the, um, You're right about like, there's so many. First of all, CBC is like blowing up as a category, right? I mean, there's just so many. It is going to continue to attract more creators. So I mean, that's where I think positioning yourself close to this creator/community leaders, I think this is a fantastic go-to-market move. So a couple additional questions I have. We talked about your recap of the last 5 years. So I mean, just to add to the conversation around Palette, share a few if you have any top of mind Wins that you're proud of, you know, like some milestones or something that you're excited about?

Yeah, so, so we've been running this sort of talent curation tests right now. So doing it really sort of like behind the scenes, um, but we've gotten at the very least, I think, 25 people hired and tons of introductions made. So it's working as a form factor, which is really exciting. There's a lot of stuff to figure out. It's very difficult. But so, so we've been running successful tests around the sort of talent curation. The product MVP is going to be ready in a couple weeks that we're really excited about. Obviously, we'll sort of be sharing all this type of stuff online. I think we might keep the, the formal announcement of the talent product quiet for a little bit until it's slightly more developed. But other than that, it's sort of all full speed ahead right now. And yeah, I'm just excited about sort of figuring stuff out, right? Who knows if it's going to work, but I get to do it with a bunch of people that I consider my friends and hopefully take a big swing and get a big fish, basically.

Right. So I was digging into your tweets, old tweets, and I found a tweet that we both definitely agree on. Actually, 2 tweets. But the one that we both definitely agree on is that LinkedIn is screwed, broken, and there has to be a better LinkedIn. Like there has to be a modern, better LinkedIn, but it won't look like LinkedIn. So you mentioned this a couple of times on your tweets and there's a blog post there. How are you thinking about it? Like what made you— what prompted you to write about it or think about it? And why do we need a better LinkedIn?

Yeah. Also, I think LinkedIn does some things extraordinary. Like it's probably the best CRM ever built. Like, I don't think you're going to— it's going to be really tough to build a new CRM that can beat LinkedIn. At least in the immediate future. And so when you look at sort of like what the sort of negatives are about LinkedIn, I think the specific thing is that it's actually not particularly well— like any sort of thing that's— let's just take the talent recruiting side of it. One of the running things that we believe in here is that talent and recruiting is an industry where there are negative network effects. So there is, you know, if you continue to add more and more people into a sort of talent marketplace, you're actually diluting the experience of all parties involved. Right. And so in that sense, We feel that talent and recruiting as an industry is a services industry and a social industry, not a tech industry. Right. So what we always say is like, hey, we build software to power services companies. And so in that sense, like where LinkedIn starts to falter on the talent side is there's no signal built into LinkedIn anywhere. Like being on LinkedIn says nothing about you.

Right.

Even if you have a million endorsements, anyone can hand out those endorsements whenever they want. So the only thing that LinkedIn does is serve to amplify existing signals. Harvard, Stripe, Google, and so on and so forth. forth. And so I think, I think when we look at, hey, how can we sort of potentially take down LinkedIn, we really focus on that signaling aspect, right? Like, can we build a million micro-LinkdIns that having access to says a lot about you, or a little about you, or however much about you, but does say something about you? And focusing on that component, the signaling component, because I think that's what ultimately drives the success of any sort of tech business.

I think the— well, first of all, I'm aligned on that. Uh, fun story for any of my followers or anyone who's listening, uh, in 2018 I attempted it when I was like so too naive and too dumb to take down LinkedIn. And so that's why I have like an appreciation for anyone who's going into that market. One of my first projects didn't really go anywhere, but like I did like a lot of customer research, customer discovery. And I— 2 things, 2 patterns I saw, which is sort of what you touched on. One thing, it's almost impossible to unseat LinkedIn as the de facto name search, like people search.

Impossible.

You know, it's kind of like the Yellow Pages of the internet.

Yep.

People for talent. Right. And it's kind of like in the physical world, Yellow Pages were— I mean, were leaped on by LinkedIn because the internet was the revolution that kind of killed Yellow Pages, right? So unless there's another big revolution like that, that will like sort of be the next level of internet, LinkedIn's not going to go away unless they implode. That's a different case. But generally they're the Yellow Pages right now. They're prevalent. The other thing I noticed from people was there's 2 camps of people at the time who told me they were just completely happy. There was a big section of people who were happy with the way LinkedIn worked because they were using it as a social media slash publishing platform, right? Yeah. Like the people who like to go LinkedIn Viral, that's a whole different camp. It's a different— I reserve my thoughts about them because I'm like, that's just corny as shit. But yeah, they love it. They love it because it brings them eyeballs, views, et cetera.

Totally.

But the most dissatisfied customers in my conversations were the people in startups. And because they knew that these old guard signaling posts were not working for them, right? Because I'm like, I went to Vanderbilt and I'm a startup guy. I don't give a shit. I know nobody gives a shit about Vanderbilt or Harvard. I mean, Maybe Harvard, but nobody in startups is like, yeah, let's go recruit this guy because he went to Ann Arbor. And the same thing with other signaling, overtly signaling signal posts. People want subtle identity signals. Where do you belong? What kind of things you're into? Blockchain, NFTs, crypto. What are the things about the future that you take bets on? And it's impossible for that information to surface on LinkedIn in a useful, actionable way.

Yeah.

And so that was the part that I took away from it. And at the time there was no infrastructure to really act on it. And so really couldn't get it off the ground, but I always felt that that was a big gap in the market. So definitely agree on that one with you. So another question I have is you mentioned, there's a particular tweet that I loved where you mentioned that building a niche audience is extremely valuable and companies are willing to pay to recruit from it. I mean, I know this kind of goes into your early days of Pallet, but you mentioned that since launching last month, Some early pilot customers already making more money on Pallet than they're on Substack. And now we've had our first $100K earner. Why do you think building a niche audience is valuable?

I think because specifically it's definable, right? So when you have a definable audience, it lends itself to different products and monetization methods that you could use. So the main reason is that it's sort of self-selecting to an extent and it's definable. Right. And so, but if you publish niche content, that usually means that for the majority of people, it's not interesting at all. Right. Like, I think 98% of people don't really care about product management frameworks or no-code. Right. Like most of these people are sort of like, cool, great. Like, I'm gonna go watch TikTok. Right. And so by being self-selecting, it's both definable and you could make some at least sort of loose assumptions around quality and sort of judgment and stuff like that. Right. I could look at your audience and without even looking at the names of it, I could probably say a lot more or assume a lot more about your audience than Kim Kardashian's audience. There's very little I could say about that. And so for a lot of products and for a lot of monetization opportunities, that definability and that sort of self-selectability lends itself much better to the majority of these sorts of products. Right. So if I'm going to go and market a position to be head of no-code ops at a company, Sure, maybe, maybe posting to Kim Kardashian's Instagram might work, but it's a lot less certain than sort of posting to that hyper-defined audience like yourself. Um, and I think it applies to lead gen, it applies to marketing, it applies to sales. You know, obviously I care about recruiting, but yeah, that's really the main thing.

Makes it more targeted and then, you know, specific. So I know we're about to hit the mark on this. I have a fun last question. Um, okay, so what do you think Sahil Bloom is doing? First of all, shout out Sahil. Like, you're a beast, man. All right. But apart from it, what do you think? Like, seriously, what do you think he's doing that's interesting from, from Palette's perspective that you hope other creators can emulate?

Yeah. So number one, Sahil. Yeah. So like you said, shout out Sahil. He's been one of the most helpful, awesome people to work with in this entire journey. I think what Sahil has managed to do really, really well is weave the jobs and the Palette content into the regular content. And so he might sort of say like, hey, here's a thread that I've been thinking about or idea that I've been thinking about, and here's a practical way to apply these thoughts with these job posts. And so he's managed to weave that content into his normal slate and sort of blend the two together and really sort of even looking at jobs as content. Like, I found companies that match the ideals that I'm laying out here. So I think that's really the core thing that he's managed to do. And which is where we've seen all of the best performers, which is to use Pallet as an extension of your content rather than a separate piece of content altogether. So whether that's sort of including a section of jobs at the end of a newsletter, whether that's sort of including— right, like it's all blended. And I think Sahil has been a sort of master at doing that.

It's remarkable how consistent he is too, right? Because it's definitely not an afterthought that he would just add a section in his newsletter about Pallet. It feels like it flows really smoothly, really well, because it definitely was an intentional thing. Yeah. With that said, I think, you know, that's the end of my question. Actually, sorry, one last final fun question. Have you hired someone at Pallet via Pallet?

Yes.

And how did the process look like? Yeah,

it was actually from Sahil's job board.

Really? Okay.

Yeah. So that was really cool. Yeah, we just posted the job and we got inbound from it. So that was exciting.

That was fun. That was awesome. Okay, this is great. So thank you so much, Kai. It was a pleasure chatting with you and getting to learn A bit more about Pallet and also your thoughts on recruiting as an industry and like all the new developments here. Excited to continue watching you and watching your team.

Yeah, thanks so much for

having me on. Of course. Have a good one. See ya.