Funding Is an Outcome of Building a Good Business - Porter Braswell of Jopwell
Maybe the best place to start would be, let's explain what job well is, and then we can kind of go back in time and get to where we are now. Cool, cool. So also thanks for coming in. Absolutely my pleasure, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
Yeah, so Joppa was a career advancement platform built specifically for black, Latinas, and Native American students and professionals. We basically allow companies to diversify their applicant funnels before they hire the best people for the job. We got really frustrated when companies would say, you know, we can't find this talent, it doesn't exist. And for us, me being a part of the community, it was like writing like BS. It definitely exists, I'm here.
And there are 44 million black, Latino, Hispanic, and Native American students and professionals in the workforce. That exists as well. And so we wanted to create a platform so companies can no longer say, oh this is like a pipeline issue, we can't find this talent. It exists, and their own job well.
What made this problem obvious to you when you were at Goldman?
So it starts actually before Goldman and actually goes back to kind of where I'm from and kind of how I grew up. It's doing so. My dad's from the Bronx originally, and he was the first person in his family to go to college and work in corporate America. He became a general counsel for a publicly traded utility company. And so I grew up in the type of household where to be successful—and I put air quotes around that—you have to be a doctor, you have to be a lawyer, you can go into finance, and that's it.
I felt this large responsibility to kind of move the family forward as my dad did. I was kind of like this thing that I grew up in this, you know, middle-class family where that was like a responsibility that my sister and I both felt. Yeah, and so when I was in high school, Morgan Stanley was offering a diversity internship program. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey, this is like that finance industry, you should pay attention to it.
I got lucky, I applied, got the internship, and I started working there my junior and senior summers in high school. Went on to college, went to Yale, played basketball there. And it's playing basketball in the summers, I continued in a really early access pipeline focused around diversity recruiting, and I spent three summers interning at Goldman Sachs. I started my career there, and I was there for three years buying and selling currencies.
So while my background was getting early access, you know, really starting when I was about 15 or 16 years old, I found my way into buying and selling currencies. I recognized how unusual my path was, how fortunate my path was. It struck me that, you know, despite me finding my way to my seat, I knew that a lot of other people weren't finding their way to a similar seat. I kind of looked around and realized that it wasn't just a finance challenge when it comes to recruitment of people of color; it was really all industries.
At that time, the summer of 2014, right before I left, all the tech companies came out with these stats of the lack of diversity, which is something we all knew, right? But it was the first time it became really a national conversation. So my co-founder and I decided that we can make a solution for this. We can build a platform of people of color, and we can leverage technology to directly connect them with opportunities that historically we haven't been exposed to and create that authentic connection between the employers and potential employees.
So that was really how we started it. We wanted to make an impact, and as a result of that impact, we also wanted to be able to build a profitable, successful business on top of it. So we set out from the start to build it as a for-profit entity and not a non-profit. There are many amazing nonprofits that focus on diversity recruitment. Uh-huh, but we just took their approach to leverage technology, do it at scale, and solve a problem.
Going back to the whole YC mantra where you guys, engineers, like, you know, so you're trading currency. What gives you the idea that you're gonna build this recruiting pie?
I again, to this day, still probably the least technical person at Jobwell. I was a political science major in college, zero, zero tech bums in my body. But I lived through this. I'm passionate about diversity recruiting. I'm very intimately interwoven within all of the stuff that kind of goes on within recruiting. From experience, I knew that this was like a major problem. I knew that technology can help solve it.
And even though I didn't know—I wasn't thinking through the code of what that would look like—I had a platform in mind of what it could be.
So how did you test it out in the beginning, or did you wait until you had something built before you started?
Yeah, so basically what ended up happening for me is that after my second year at Goldman, my cousin passed away. For me, when that happened, it was kind of like the first—I've had plenty of people that I've known that have passed in different settings, whether it's my parents' friends or neighbors or whatever the case may be. But this was the first time that somebody that I would consider not only family but a close friend passed. Given that he wasn't much older than me, it dawned on me that you can die at any time.
It was a true awakening for me to really figure out what the hell I want to do with my life. So after my second year, I decided that I'm gonna go on this journey to figure out what do I want to do. I felt that given that I had an opportunity to play basketball at Yale and had this amazing network at Goldman Sachs, I had a responsibility to leverage that for impact.
Yeah, and I didn't know what that impact was gonna come in the form of or the shape of. But when I took a step back after a year of kind of going through this thought exercise around challenges I see in the world, what I'm passionate about, what my experiences have been, it all kind of tied to diversity recruiting and providing opportunities for others through leveraging my personal networks.
I told my parents at the time that I'm gonna quit and build this company, and they said okay, get this straight. You're non-technical, you've never built a business, you've never done recruiting, and that's going to be the company you start? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm going to do.
And you're saying this to fairly conservative parents who are like you have three options?
Yeah, they did not—they were not feeling it.
You're like you're literally going to die if you try to do that. And that was a really frightening thing to have my parents say that to me. You know, it's a really awkward thing. If you really look up to your parents and you respect them and you view them as like your role models, it’s really not a natural thing to go against what they're telling you is a really bad idea.
But in terms of, you know, testing this out, I'd never really tested it out because I lived through it. I was so convicted with it, and I intimately understood what the pain points were.
So, you know, ignorant to some degree, I had this vision of like, of course this is going to work. I didn’t really have to test it, and I was so focused on doing my job really well when I was at Goldman that I didn't have the time to try to build a business on the side. I wanted to give a hundred and ten percent to what I was doing, and when the time was right to leave than to give 110% to that.
So, you know, it wasn't probably a wise thing to do, but I definitely took a leap of faith and said this has to work. Why wouldn't it work?
Yeah, I mean just being in a large company—now it's more obvious but even a few years ago it was obvious that these companies really care and people like yourself want those jobs. So like why not match them together?
So did you start with a demand? Did you start with one partnership? How did that work?
Going back to me being non-technical, it actually really helped because when you're building this two-sided thing— I didn't come to find this out until probably when we're going through funding for our seed round during demo day—that you have to pick a side first. At the time, there was no choice because we couldn't build a platform for users because I couldn't build anything.
So all I could do is make a pitch deck because that's what I was really good at being an analyst at Goldman Sachs. I just set out to make this deck, along with Ryan, my co-founder, and we just showed it to companies and said, this is what we're going to build, and if we build this, will you be a customer?
We got really fortunate that when we made these phone calls, people answered, they took our meetings, and took the deck seriously. They said sure, if you build this, like we'll definitely be a customer because what you're trying to solve for is a real pain point of ours. We took a couple of very flimsy yeses—yes, we have customers.
And then from that, we were able to raise a little bit of money, hire some people who built the platform, got the other side okay.
And did you wait?
Yeah, there's a—who I see in the timeline of this show—July 3rd, 2014 was my last day at Goldman Sachs. All right, September—let’s call it September 1st—was when we kind of set out to make this pitch deck to show to companies. Let's say by the end of September we had about three or four soft yeses. Sure, when you build that, let us know, man, we'll be a customer.
But for us, that was like okay, they're gonna be a customer. We had them sign this one-page letter of intent that says if you build it, we'll partner with you. And then once we had that by October, we decided okay, we have customers, we need a platform, we have to raise money, and we need to hire people who can build it.
So we got very fortunate that people invested in Ryan and me, and we raised $500,000 with family, friends, networks within the course of about a month and a half.
Wow, yeah, and it was like shocking to us. It's something that we didn't foresee happening. We thought it was gonna take a year, but what ended up happening is that going back to, you know, like the networks that we were able to build, people invested in Ryan and me.
And it was great to kind of go back to places and tell them what we were doing with people that had known us in the past, and they were so supportive. Then it started, kind of, as we all know, when you don't need capital—you start to get the capital. So once we started getting our first few checks, it was downhill from there.
And then so now, in November, we hired our first engineer—a person I went to high school with—and so now we had a team of three. We also hired another individual who I went to high school with, and so we had a team of four with one engineer, one engineer over three non-technical.
Alright guys, and now this is in, call it November/December.
Yeah, so side note, were you in any way experienced vetting engineers?
Zero.
Okay, so you're saying they seem nice?
Slim buyers of my high school fiftieth reunion for their first black student—and there's this amazing gathering.
And we were kind of, you know, networking with one another. Yeah, and Randy Brown was standing next to me, a person who was a couple years younger than me in high school.
Okay, Randy, how's it going? Like, what are you up to? He's like, well, I just graduated college and I'm still working on my thesis. I was a computer science major in college, and so I'm kind of playing out my thesis full-time now, but it's not really going that well and just trying to figure out what I want to do.
Well, we just raised a little bit of money, we're looking for an engineer, so Randy became our first engineer. And so, you know, I think that's the story of a lot of people where you just hire your closest friends, and yeah, that's pretty common in common.
And so that's that was our story, and it also ties into our first four people were African-American. And the reason why I even bring that up is because you have a lot of small companies that their first four employees are white males, and it grows from there.
In our DNA, we started out as an incredibly diverse—actually, not diverse, because we were all the same—similar backgrounds and ethnicities. We have to grow out of that, and yet to be—you have to be really intentional about growing out of that.
But as you hire your friends and your friends' friends, and that's how companies scale. So when we think about like the difficulties of how companies come to get to where they are, where there's a lack of diversity, we experience it from a very extreme other side of things. But it's the same thing, right? It's just like hire a friend and go from there.
Could you have to be intentional about it? You have to be aware of it.
And so, so then you applied to, I see for the winter?
No, so we then actually applied it to New York Techstars.
Okay, and did not get in?
Was in December, made it to the final round. They basically said, I don't understand, diversity recruiting is not a big challenge. And you guys don't have anything, like I don't know why you think this would be a good idea.
And so really? Okay, alright, well appreciate the feedback. We then launched the platform in January, users came onto the platform rather seamlessly, and it was kind of like a no-brainer, why wouldn't you sign up? We had those companies that said that they would be there—they were there—they were actual employers, starting getting a lot of traction, a lot of users, a lot more companies, and it kicked off really quickly.
And then, so around March or so, we applied to YC for the summer session. Gotcha and got it. And, so yeah good thing they did against in the rest of sister.
So a good thing that, you know, you have these setbacks, and you get so excited about like these accelerator programs, and it becomes this distraction. It was so fortunate that we didn't get in, and it was so devastating at the time, but then six months later, four million dollars later, we were in YC.
So you're still here, so live there, company exists?
Yeah, yeah.
So just so I understand from the supply side, these people—these underrepresented employees in tech and finance, it's all across industries, right?
Yeah, they're still applying to these companies, right? So why are they looking for a platform like job well at first to just apply on LinkedIn or what?
Absolutely, so the way that we'd like to think about it is that many people, when they are applying for roles or opportunities, generally know somebody. Okay? There's some attraction to that organization, there's some connection to that company.
And for people of color, if you look at the numbers in tech, for instance, right, if two percent of your workforce is black and three percent are Latino or Hispanic, odds are you don't know anybody that works there, right? And odds are you're not gonna have that champion that kind of says, hey guys, this is, I'm looking out for this person, make sure you screen this candidate.
And so what we want to do and what we want to be is the referral at scale for our community. So job well partners with these organizations, we want to be your foot in the door, and that entity that becomes your referral, if you will.
And so when users are at Jobwell or saying, you know, why don’t I just apply? You can and you should, but you're gonna go into a black box unless you know somebody. When you apply on Jobwell, really what that means is that you're applying to companies that truly value diversity, as they're partnering and paying Jobwell to have access to this community.
And when you apply through our technology, we can flag candidates to companies, and so we can ensure that they have a more diversified pipeline. Now we can't ensure you want to get a job—we can't, we don't know the candidates on our platform on that one-to-one level.
We have the fortune that we have a large community, anyone to sign up if I can sign up, but we're very direct in who the platform is built for. It's built for black, Latino, Hispanic, Native Americans, and so that's what the community has grown to be just that.
And so when candidates are applying and when we let the companies that work with Jobwell know, hey, you know, you had a thousand people apply for this one role, or you had 30 people apply for this one role, now they can ensure that they have a more diversified pipeline because they have jockle candidates in their funnel along with other candidates.
Okay, and now we can at least make sure that before they hire the best person for the job that they have a diverse applicant pool, and that's where we come in.
So, yeah, a couple questions. So we had one question from Twitter about the pipeline in particular, where are people coming from?
They're just signing up for job well?
Yeah, so we, you know, we've been incredibly fortunate that the community has really accepted what we're trying to achieve. We fundamentally believe and truly understand that we can't be successful unless we have the support of the community.
Yeah, we're a product of the community, we're building this for the community and so they've grown our community, and it's largely been through word-of-mouth. Jobwell has been incredibly involved with various activations, clubs, and organizations, informing really strategic partnerships, and really being the solution at scale that a lot of smaller organizations haven't been able to really focus on.
They focus on a lot of, you know, coaching, training, mentoring, which is so important. For us, we just took a different approach that we wanted to do it at scale and leverage technology to connect people to opportunities but formalize relationships with all these amazing organizations that are doing such amazing work.
Right, and to figure out a way to both help them and for them to help us. A large part of our growth on the community side of the platform has been a result of the community really leveraging Jobwell.
And regionally, you said they're East Coast, West Coast for the most part?
The major metropolitan areas is really where we do the best. We tend to focus most of our employers to be within like major metropolitan areas. A lot of our user base comes from those similar surrounding areas.
Gotcha. And so, we stay kind of focused in that. And then on the second part of the question from Twitter was about are there certain roles that maybe differ from the average in terms of job well candidates getting and doing well in?
Or do you have that?
Yeah, I would say all across the board, the candidates do really well in terms of the types of roles, whether it's in finance or tech or consulting or sports. What I would say is that we do really well in it, call it people within their 20s or 30s, within their age range.
Really, that entry-level to mid-level talent is where we thrive the most. We do have people that we would consider executives on the platform, but it's less of a sweet spot for what we do.
If you are typically, you know, in college or call it sub 12 years or so in the workforce, that's kind of where we operate the most.
Okay, got you. And so in terms of the industry as a whole, you guys are—I mean, obviously this diversity conversation is super important and only more talked about in the past couple of years since you guys have been around and you—ten years—what have you noticed in terms of changes in the industry and where do you see it going?
Yeah, so the first thing is whatever frustration, but when I hear the word diversity and I hear people describe diversity challenges, I think that one when I hear that, I don't really hear much because that diversity is kind of—it could be, yeah, it could be anything.
You can make an argument that anybody is diverse, and that really inhibits companies from actually moving the needle when it comes to what their actual challenges are. So if you're looking at across corporate America, and the reason why Joppa is built for black, Latino, Hispanic, and Native Americans—it’s because it's the most underrepresented groups within corporate America.
And so companies that have a really difficult time connecting with this audience, they should just say that and not just say we have a diversity challenge. They need to be able to truly identify what diversity challenge—like what vertical of diversity are you kind of focusing on?
Then you can find solutions for that particular thing. And so I think the companies that are the most intentional and are willing to have the most uncomfortable conversations are the ones that do the best.
They need to be able to clearly articulate to their entire organization about why diversity or a particular subset of people within the diversity umbrella is so important to that organization.
It's been proven time and time again now through multiple studies McKinsey has come out with a couple of studies, BCG around having a more diverse workforce leads to bottom line, and it just makes sense.
If you're trying to build a world-class organization and you're trying to invent products that are going to change the world, how can you do that without people at the table who have differing backgrounds and experiences and opinions?
By the nature of being a person of color, I'm going to experience the world differently, right, than maybe my white peer. So even using me as an example where, yes, I had a fabulous opportunity to go to Yale, I'm so fortunate for that but at the end of the day, I'm a black male in this country.
When I'm outside and I'm engaging with people, I don't have the Yale tattoos slapped on my forehead. People first identify me as I first identify as a black male, and therefore I am seeing the world through a different lens.
I'm experiencing the world through a different lens, even if I had a white counterpart that also went to Yale. Yeah, we're still gonna experience the world in a different lens.
So when I come to the table and I'm giving you my experiences and my background and my opinions, just being a person of color in America, I'm gonna have a different thought than what you might come to the table with. And that's important, and that leads to innovation.
And so it's so important that companies have a mixture of people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, sexual orientations, you name it. You need that tension, those conversations to occur because that's where innovation happens.
So I agree with you, but what I'm trying to figure out is you say, okay, diversity is saying broad, like we want a diverse workplace. Like to you, is just like noise for the most part, but you want to be specific, right?
So how do you be specific and inclusive of those people without being by default exclusive of other people?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's something that a lot of companies feel that they, again, it's going back to like that uncomfortable conversation.
Yeah, totally because people are scared, right? They're like a little like, I didn’t want to offend that person by trying to include this person or whatever.
Absolutely I think so long as companies frame it within the organization itself as we're doing this because it makes business sense and stick to like this leads to bottom line success for this company.
If we diversify and we really start to attract candidates from different backgrounds that we haven't recruited from in the past, we need that in order to stay relevant. The demographics of America is shifting. By 2040, the people of color in this country are gonna be the majority for the first time.
If you can’t build for the future, you’re gonna get passed. It's such a business imperative conversation that if you keep it at the business level, then I think it becomes less of an awkward conversation and less so of, oh we can't bring this group of people in, we can only focus on this.
It’s like, no, we're trying to be the best organization possible. We don't have a lot of representation; we need more representation from these groups within America.
We don’t look like what the broader American society looks like and what it's shifting to be. So we need to double down and triple down on those efforts.
And I think that if you can have that conversation and keep it at the business level, then it becomes less uncomfortable.
I guess the question that I’m asking is like on the positioning side, so like outwardly facing, how do you best deal with that to attract the most different kinds of candidates to make your company better?
So you know, working with job all right—obviously that's the obvious thing—but I think the more important thing is recognizing that you're struggling in a particular area.
Yeah.
And as a result, you should ask for help and I don't care if it's through Joppa or somebody else, but I feel that a lot of tech companies want to build a way out of it or they want to solve it themselves.
Okay, so yeah what?
And so I think that a lot of organizations, again going back to kind of—there's Joppa—will start at hiring a couple of friends and how many organizations start where you hire a couple of friends? You have to get outside of your comfort zone; you have to find different pipelines to attract different types of talent, and you need to be vocal about that, and publicly facing about that, because companies like Joppa and other organizations will come to the call.
By being so out there and being so public about what you're lacking, you more authentically present yourself in a favorable light to a community of people that you’re calling out to try to attract. You're saying we’re looking for you, we need you, because we’re trying to out-innovate our competitors.
So I think raising your hand and just saying publicly, like we need assistance with a particular challenge is the way that you kind of get out your own way and you start to unlock other pipelines of talent.
Right, and so does just Facebook—Simon—not Facebook, but like tech in general—the breakdown of, you know, these types of employees, does that match the computer science enrollment in terms of percentages or is there a drop-off?
Like what I'm wondering is about if we're gonna increase the number overall, does it start when people are seven years old and you get them into CS, or how does that work?
So what also kind of frustrates me about when we hear the reasons as to why they can't find this telling, it all goes back to why we started Jobwell.
Yeah, with people saying, oh, we can't find this talent. And when companies say, oh, you know, there’s not even like the pipeline of black, blue team, Hispanic, or Native American engineers, one, that's not true, and the data does not suggest that at all.
What is laughable is that let’s say that is even the case—okay, let's just say that is even the case, which it's not, but let's just concede that and say, okay, sure—what about everything else? What about every other non-technical non-trivial within your company?
If your company is two percent black or three percent, you know, Spanish or Latino, you can't say that you can't find enough people who are people of color in non-technical roles—sales, consulting, finance, HR, you name it.
And so if your organization is still not a representation of what America is broadly, you can't point to the pipeline thing. That just doesn’t hold up.
Do you just kind of not have that conversation with companies?
What we're really fortunate about, and again from like a business perspective, I fundamentally believe that if you're making two pitches to a company, you're making two different sells.
Yeah, hey, this concept is a really good concept and you should use us too for this particular, yeah. That's a lot of convincing in a conversation.
We're incredibly fortunate now that we can call it, we're fortunate, but we are very strategic about the companies we work with because we're only making one sell.
We don't choose companies to work with that don't believe in the value of diversity, sure? So the only sell we make is why you should use Jobwell.
Okay, so we never get into the conversations around why diversity is important to your organization because they understand it. They've reached out to us.
We're very transparent, I'm very vocal about what Jobwell stands for, so as a company, if you're reaching out to work with Jobwell, we shouldn't have to educate you on the value that a diverse workforce can bring.
And so we just talk about why you should be leveraging Jobwell and our technology and how we can diversify your applicant funnels.
Okay, so that's it.
Let's talk about that actually because there are a bunch of companies that have gone through YC or just are interested in listening to the podcast or whatever that are doing recruiting right.
So zooming out a little bit from Joppa’s specific focus, what is your advice for running a recruiting platform for entrepreneurs?
I would say that if you're trying to build a hiring platform, you have to be known for something, okay? You have to have a particular focus. You can't just claim to have quality talent.
You have to be providing a real solution to a real problem that companies face, you should probably associate with that problem. You should probably have experienced that in some capacity or have empathy as to why that challenge exists.
You should be very passionate about whatever group of individuals you're trying to serve to unlock that opportunity, and you should be doing it because it's making impact, not because you think it's a company that can make a lot of money.
And if you can kind of stick to those things, you can build something that becomes sticky and everything else happens as a result of that, then great, happy days for everybody.
But to start the company, you really have to isolate a particular challenge in pain point that employers face and just work on that one thing.
Okay, and can you talk about that specifically in the context of your product?
Like what are some things that you guys have worked on that have been meaningful increases in like, you know, whether it's people getting jobs or onboarding new companies or whatever?
So going back to kind of like my story, how when I was gone growing up and you know, again, like as my parents told me with air quotes now, you know, you got to be—you got to go into finance if you're gonna be successful, you have to be a doctor or a lawyer.
There are a lot of people of color, particularly in America, where you grow up thinking, I can only work for these particular industries or these particular companies. And so you go through life thinking, that's really all I'm qualified for.
What we've been able to do is through technology—which has been so awesome to be able to do this—is that when you create a profile and you give us all this information that's proprietary to Jobwell from, yes, your background and, you know, your work experience, but more importantly what your interests are, yeah?
What types of working environment do you want to work in? Where do you want to live and work within the country?
What words describe yourself, right? A leadership moment? Write a personal bio about yourself? What are your dream companies?
When we collect all of that information and we can take into account what you've done and what you're currently doing now, we can expose you to opportunities that you didn't even realize you were qualified for.
And so we are showing candidates that, you know, what, you were pre-med in college? Do you know how incredibly qualified you are to work in tech or to work in finance or to work in a variety of different other industries?
Or that political science major like I was, but I was very operational in my mindset, which enabled me to kind of, you know, build a tech company.
How qualified I am to work in particular industries, and so what we're now able to do is expose our community to opportunities that historically they haven't been exposed to and really start to truly diversify industries that didn't know how to connect with this audience.
But we've only been able to do that through a product in leveraging technology.
And do you—is it common for these people on Jobwell to be getting their first job here, or do you have people coming back to Jobwell—they like trade up or switch out or whatever?
That's worth three and a half years old, and we're just starting to see candidates that got their first job and now they're getting their second job through Jobwell. And that's been awesome to kind of go through for the first time.
But again, like our sweet spot is typically that entry to mid-level, so sometimes it's candidates looking for like their third job, their first job and everything in between.
Oh yeah, because I'm just curious because you mentioned showing people the path, and I totally agree. I think that's like basically how every person goes through life, and they're like, oh, you know, a friend of a friend started a tech company, so I know them, I'm the smartest em I can do a tech company.
But if you don't have that, it's really difficult.
So, yeah, I mean, what you're talking about—this is your sweet spot. Will that evolve over time, or do you think this is the area that'll always?
Absolutely, so going back to kind like the YC mantra of like doing things that don't scale. Yeah, when we first started we were very campus-focused. It was just university, and then by, you know, the brand of Joppa just being in the world, people just started signing up from all different age ranges.
So we kind of took a step back and examined the community and we decided okay, Jobwell needs to be more than just internships. It needs to be professional opportunities as well.
But as a result, we should speak to you very differently depending on the stage of your career. So what we've now done with our platform is that based on certain tags and triggers and whatnot, we speak to you in a different tone.
So people when they interact with Jobwell—they have different personas that Jobwell—that they're interacting with. Not everybody has the same experience on the platform, and the more experienced you are, the more personalized it feels, and that’s a really important thing for us.
Mmm-hmm, it's kind of a random question, but I know certain people that are fairly vocal in, for example, like women in tech, but then sometimes they're just like, I want to just talk about product.
Do you ever feel that way?
I do. I have a responsibility to speak about being a black founder. Yep, you know, it really is painful to see the lack of black funding that occurs.
And again, when VC said, oh, well there just aren't black founders, that is so—it's like scratching on a chalkboard.
It's and it's so frustrating. And so I feel like I do have a responsibility to speak a lot about diversity, speak a lot about the funding paths that Jobwell went down, speak about my experiences going through Y Combinator.
Yeah, I recognize that with this position of being the CEO of the company, that’s part of the—that's part of the role.
Yeah, and so yes, I would love to just speak about product and what we're working on, but our entire ethos as a business is to unlock opportunity.
If I'm not talking about those things that can help others become entrepreneurial entrepreneurs and hear my story about my parents telling me I’m crazy but still kind of taking that leap, then I'm not living up to what I'm supposed to be doing as a CEO of this particular company.
Right, well it's also just, I mean, it's kind of part of you, so you can't not talk about it. It's impossible not to.
Did you find, again, again, it's like, you're so it's hard to compare and contrast an experience raising money as a black founder. Do you find it to be different?
It is very different, and it can feel very intimidating.
Okay, until what ended up happening for me is that during one of our pitches with a really prominent, very prominent VC, the conversation started with a lot of associates and a lot of partners around this table following Y Combinator, and the question to basically start the meeting before ever going through the first slide was, I don't think this is a good idea.
This is not a publicly traded company.
When you start out the conversation like that without even going through slide one, something happens in you. And for me, that something happened was where I fully recognized for the—not for the first time—I've always had the confidence in whatever.
Being an athlete and having that athletic mindset, but it was really the first time where I kind of came back and was like you know, to be honest, I don't know what you're talking about.
Like I'm from this community, I know the pain points, I know what the opportunity is, I know how much money our community spends in this country, I know how much of a challenge it is for these organizations to hire people of color.
I’m the expert in this, and you’re not. And so all of a sudden flip the conversation on, let me teach you something, I’m the teacher and you're the student now.
That gave me all the leverage in the conversation. And once a senior partner at a firm feels like he's being taught in a very respectful way, the leverage changes, right?
So in other words, like having deep knowledge of some things, use that confidence to enter any room and have a compass tab, absolutely.
So now after that experience, yeah, and it turned out that we had a fabulous conversation following that, and they are an investor in Jobwell, and they’re a VC that we work closely with.
But after that experience, every time I enter a room, it's, I'm gonna explain to you and share with you why this is an amazing opportunity, and by the way, we don't need your money, and that's always like a very powerful position to be in.
Right, so—so yes, being a black founder and going into a room where there's literally nobody that looks like you is a very intimidating thing until you flip it on its head, and you recognize that you’re coming with a very unique experience and an opportunity that they have never thought through.
So it's so rare to be the expert in that room, but you are the expert in that room when you're talking about a challenge that's uniquely that you've faced.
Would you buy the same learnings to going through YC, or were there different?
Yeah, so I think what the most powerful thing for me going through YC has been is that we know so intimately well what we're trying to do, and our vision, our vision is so locked in on what we're trying to achieve.
Yeah, but I'm a first-time entrepreneur, I'm a first-time CEO, and no matter what it is you’re trying to solve, there are certain things that like YC can just tell you you’re gonna step in this area and yep, you should think about that thing that’s going to happen six months from now.
All these things, these war stories that you get access to, yeah, they all happen.
So combining the knowledge of YC for like what's about to happen and what you need to think through, combined with having a really set vision, has made all the difference in the world.
Now being, you know, eighteen million dollars in the funding and being a series A company and having thirty-five employees, what I'm most excited about for YC is this new initiative where I think it's if you get to 50 employees or something you can kind of come back to YC as a real alum to speak to other alums that are now going from 50 to 100 and what's that process like.
So that's just ahead of us and I'm excited to kind of, you know, jump into that now.
Right on. Broadly speaking, what were your learnings and lessons from YC?
Because we are like the majority of people listening to this or maybe thinking about starting a company or in the process, could you condense what you learned?
Absolutely. So the number one thing that I took out of YC, because it has a lot of implications, is that funding is an outcome of building a good business.
And it sounds so simple, and I didn't fully appreciate it when everybody was kind of preaching that when we were there.
Like guys, stop focusing on demo day. Just make traction, and everything else will kind of, you know, happen.
Again, it sounds so simple, but when people ask me like okay, like how do I go and get VC funding? I'm like, well, build a good business.
And by having that concept of just building a good business, it truly eliminates so many distractions.
And it helps prioritize your day where you're just focusing on making a good business and focusing on your customers and building something that they want.
Yeah, that when you lift your head after a year, VCs are calling you and the process isn't difficult to raise money at that point because you're just talking about your business and your traction.
And that was the number one thing because, you know, as I mentioned, like without a company or a product, we applied to Techstars. We had no business applying to anything.
We should have just built a good business, and by the time we applied to YC, we had built a business that was getting traction.
In ten weeks later, we raised three and a half million dollars on demo day, and it was just because we built a good business.
And you know, that's something that you read a lot of blogs and you follow all these famous VCs, and you're like, oh, I would love to raise their capital.
And you're so focused on the wrong stuff; it's unbelievably distracting.
I think people get in their heads that, like, that's what winning the game is, and they also lose sight of the fact that these investors have LPs. In other words, they have their own investors, so all this like content marketing that they're doing has an interest.
Yeah.
And their interest is like you are in this VC game, and so I think it's great if you want to do a start-up and raise VC, but a lot of people are like basically taught that that's the only way to build a business, and that's also not fulfilling the business.
So, yeah, and then it's like you realize, wait a minute, why am I diluting myself? Why don’t I just make money from customers and not have to raise money? Great.
Yeah, too. So, yeah, you can just do it your own way.
Yeah, I don't have—you don't really don't have to. And if you could build us, what I tell people is that if you can build a small business, like try to try to build a small business first. Worry about the big business down the road.
But just try to make a hundred thousand dollars with your company. Like, try to make five hundred thousand dollars with your company and then see what happens.
But people get so caught up, and I was in it. You get so caught up on raising capital and trying to get to certain milestones of ARR and all this stuff.
Just like, go out and make a hundred thousand dollars.
Yeah, it's not easy, but it's so simple.
And it's such a weird thing because going through YC, what I take out most of YC is not about the demo day and the funding; it's about building a good business.
And it's so something you wouldn't, you know, associate—you would think that like from the outside it's like, raise as much capital as you can, and that's just not what gets preached at YC.
It's just build a good business, and that's by far what I take the most out of the program.
And what have you learned since? Have you made any—I don't know—any mistakes or any counterintuitive learnings, even a couple years now?
Focusing on the culture—it's the number one thing that like, you know, when you're four people, you don't really have to focus on it. It's just, you know, it is what it is.
When you're ten people, you really don't have to focus on it. At some point, when you're fifteen, when you're twenty—you, as a CEO, that’s your job, and it’s your job to make sure that the vision is clear.
Everybody can talk about what that vision is. Everybody understands what their KPIs are, what their should be focused on.
You're the captain of this boat, and there's land out there, and you have to tell people which island you're going to.
You have to be very set on that path but be flexible enough to adjust. Meanwhile, you have to keep the crew happy.
And it’s a balancing act, an innocent juggling act. It's something that I was really good with until we were twelve people. I was always the captain of my basketball team, I was always a captain of my baseball teams and all that stuff.
So managing and coaching and leading anything under 12-13 people came naturally. Once we hit the 15 number, I started losing my own way because I was friends with people, but I was their boss.
You know, I wanted to like hang out with them, but I had to like give them critical feedback.
And it was really when we had 15 people that I would say I had the most difficult kind of like reflection on, like who do I want to be as a CEO?
Being a CEO is like a real thing, and I thought like being a CEO, it’s all you—you do sales, and that’s all you do, you just have a cool title.
Yeah, but it’s not like you have—being CEO is keeping everything together and having a clear vision and constantly driving that home.
And so for me, I would say 15-20 people was definitely my largest learning experience where I had to recognize that I'm not your friend first, I'm the CEO of Joppa first, and I can be a colleague second.
Yeah, and that—or a friend's second, if you will. And that really helped me find my voice again.
Mmm-hmm. And now, thirty-five people, I've—it's around structuring my day so I have like, very intentional about my schedule and my calendar now.
Like, you can't just pull me into a meeting. Like, you have to give me an agenda about what the meetings gonna be on.
I have particular blocks of time you can—we can have meetings. I just have to be really protective over my time.
And so, like that's like the next phase of learning, and I'm going through that—like, it's okay to give yourself a four-hour block where you're just thinking about the business.
You're not being pulled into meetings to be busy.
Like, if I don't need to be in the meeting, I shouldn't be in the meeting.
I think that's a lesson for everyone.
Yeah, it just is. But, yeah, absolutely.
Did you have a coach, or did you just read books or blogs or what did you do?
Um, a little bit of everything. I don't know, a coach—mostly books, a lot of just speaking with people.
Yeah, and I would say just most of it was getting feedback from people who work at Jobwell and just being very intentional.
Now, I have a coffee session where every morning I get coffee with a different employee for about 45 minutes because I go get coffee anyway, so I might as well go with somebody and just sit down and just have a conversation.
And it’s in those one-on-one settings that I can get real feedback, and it’s just listening.
And I don’t have a big enough ego to think that I know everything. Again, as I said, I'm not the most technical person in the company, I'm not the best product person in the company, I'm not the best marketer in the cup, I'm not the best of anything in the company, but I have a real clear vision on what I want Jobwell to be.
Mmm, and so I want to hire people who have the expertise, and I want to learn from them.
And so it’s a constant learning, it’s constant feedback, and it’s just being humble enough to recognize that you, like, you know, you got to bring people into the fold to help you through stuff.
Yeah dude, that’s great. Well, I think we should wrap it up there. Thanks for coming in.
Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you.