Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / AI Interviews, Global payroll, No borders

Transcript

AI Interviews, Global payroll, No borders · AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

0:00
Welcome back to AI for Founders. I'm your host, Ryan Estes today.
0:04
I'm definitely not AI. I'm standing up.
0:06
Today I'm joined by Jake Johnson, Co founder of Bolto, a
0:10
YC backed startup building an AI driven HR platform that helps
0:15
companies higher pay and manage global teams with ease.
0:19
In our conversation, Jake shares how Bolto scaled to 5 million in
0:23
funding in under 2 years, why building in public works and how
0:27
AI is transforming the global workforce.
0:30
We dig into the nuts and bolts of employer of record services,
0:34
why hiring globally isn't just smart, it's the future and the
0:37
surprising role philosophy plays in building an AI startup.
0:41
This episode is full of insights, heart and even a
0:44
little sports talk. Let's dive in.
0:47
This episode is brought to you by Kick Caster, the premier
0:49
podcast booking agency for highgrowth founders and
0:52
entrereneurs. If you've got a great story to
0:54
tell or a product to promote, Kitcaster gets you featured on
0:58
podcast your ideal audience already listens to.
1:02
Our Platinum services is built for founders who are ready for
1:04
the big leagues. High visibility, high impact
1:07
shows. You'll get a personal campaign
1:09
manager approval on every show before we pitch weekly updates,
1:13
expert story, craft sessions and a stunning media kit and short
1:17
form video clips to boost your reach.
1:19
We aim to get you one to three top tier interviews per month.
1:23
This is strategic firepower. Ready to amplify your voice?
1:26
Visit kickcaster.com and apply now.
1:29
That's Kickcaster by MO Burst. Thank you so much for joining
1:48
me. Yeah, I'm happy to be here.
1:52
I'm looking at that Seahawks jersey right now.
1:55
Are you already getting fired up for the NFL like me?
1:59
You know it, you know, we got Sam Darnold this year.
2:01
We stole Cooper Cup from a divisional rival.
2:03
It's going to be great. I have a huge baseball guy, but
2:06
I do love football and anything Seattle related.
2:09
So that that Holy Trinity is basically just me.
2:12
I think we can end the interview actually.
2:13
That's that's me. Nice.
2:15
Why Seattle? Why Seattle?
2:18
My family moved around a bunch and of all the places I've
2:21
lived, Seattle's the coolest one.
2:24
You know, it gets such a bad rap for being like the rainy city,
2:26
but it won't rain a day. But over the summer, every day
2:30
it's going to be 75, partly cloudy, surrounded by snow
2:32
capped mountains with beautiful lakes.
2:34
So if you like nature, you like the outdoors, it's spot B.
2:37
You like sports Spot B. It's got great restaurants, good
2:40
people, exciting tech. So I I don't think there's a
2:43
better city in. America, I love it.
2:44
I I love Seattle too. I mean, there's nothing like it.
2:47
Pacific Northwest is incredible. Now does this make you an OK C
2:51
fan or are you still holding a grudge from supersonic stays?
2:54
No, no, I got there after that. But I think trained by all of my
3:00
Seattle friends that we hate the Thunder.
3:03
So go. Pacers I know I, I, it's going
3:06
to be an incredible series. I think it's going 7 is going to
3:09
come down to the last shot. Is it going to be Tyrese
3:13
Halliburton in Game 7 as. Well, it's got to be, although
3:16
there would be a horrible irony if he bricked it, you know?
3:21
Yeah, he could do everything but the moments as the moment.
3:25
But yeah, I'm trying to figure out, somebody asked me like, who
3:27
am I going for? It's like, you know, I'm kind of
3:30
upset with OKC for knocking out the Nuggets.
3:33
But what I did like did like about that was that it actually
3:39
it let me know that we don't need to make dramatic changes on
3:41
the Nuggets. I think they're going to.
3:42
But if you look at it, it's like, man, there, there are a
3:45
couple of shots going in from being, you know, having another
3:48
championship this year. So, you know, I appreciate them
3:52
for that. But also I, I, I really like
3:53
Indy's team, Man. There, there are some shooters
3:56
over there. I've got one Nuggets game in my
4:00
life. I went to one Nuggets game, and
4:02
I'll admit I was there to see LeBron, but I was going for the
4:05
Nuggets and I got to see game two of the first time of the
4:09
playoffs last year when the Nuggets sent LeBron home with a
4:12
buzzer beater, which, yeah, Jamal Murray's buzzer beater
4:17
against LeBron, I was there in. Person that was the one where he
4:19
said like not only did he make the shot right on his bench, but
4:23
like Anthony Davis also like went sliding into the Nuggets
4:26
bench at to see their game when it.
4:29
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome.
4:31
Yeah, it was pretty. Incredible, man.
4:33
Well, I appreciate it. We I, I could, I could go on on
4:35
sports all day, but I want to get into your story, your
4:39
company and your experience with AI.
4:42
So First off, when I'm doing research on a person, I am just
4:47
so grateful when there's somebody like you who's so
4:49
active on social and everywhere you put content out everywhere.
4:53
There's just an ample of things for us to talk about.
4:55
So thanks for doing that. Yeah, by all means it.
5:00
I mean the you don't meet cool people if you don't put yourself
5:03
out there. And it's done great things for
5:04
us so far. Now you're also kind of a build
5:08
in public guy before we get into kind of like the nuts and bolts,
5:11
so to speak of your company. You, you did like a whole thing
5:16
on Twitter or X of going zero to 1,000,000 in revenue.
5:20
What what are the benefits and maybe the the the downsides of
5:24
building in public like that? Yeah, OK.
5:28
This is such an easy thing to talk about because it's it's
5:31
such like a controversial thing. A lot of people think there's
5:34
there's two main facets to it, which is the accountability you
5:37
get when everybody knows what you're doing.
5:39
If you don't do what you said you were going to do publicly,
5:42
everybody's going to look at you as the guy who misses.
5:45
And then there's a second thing, which is if I tell you my secret
5:49
sauce before I build it, what's preventing you from building it?
5:52
Especially in the day with AI agents like Cursor, who you can
5:55
give a prompt to and it'll spit out exactly what I was saying
5:58
1st. And to that I would say code has
6:04
been commoditized. OK.
6:06
Ideas are effectively commoditized.
6:08
So I don't care if you know what I'm going to go build because my
6:12
team is going to do it in a really thorough manner.
6:14
We're really confident with our go to market strategy.
6:16
So I find that the accountability and the publicity
6:19
gained from building in public vastly outweighs the downside of
6:23
having everybody know what's coming next.
6:25
Love it. And well, it's brave, you know,
6:28
it's like, it's like, yeah, I'll tell you exactly what I'm doing,
6:31
how I'm doing it, but it's up to you.
6:32
Can you execute like me? I don't think you can.
6:36
Yeah, I mean, I'll bet on our team against anybody in the.
6:39
World it reminds me there's this famous story of the Cheyenne dog
6:42
soldiers and on particular occasions if they were
6:45
outnumbered and they were being surrounded by an enemy tribe,
6:48
you know and So what would happen is they'd surround them
6:51
with their on horseback and then they'd start like hooping and
6:54
hollering like getting them all excited and so that you run out
6:57
of like your teepee and you're like Oh no, like these guys.
7:00
And so they'll, they'll run around and just taunt them
7:02
before they like come in and attack them.
7:05
Well, the Cheyenne, the Cheyenne were notorious for like leaving
7:08
the teepee. They take a staff, bury it in
7:11
the ground, tie a rope to the staff, Pierce their chest or
7:15
their back and with bone and then tie a rope to the staff
7:19
around it, basically saying, like, I ain't going nowhere.
7:23
Let's go. And what happened on multiple
7:28
occasions is that they took off running like they didn't even
7:31
engage. And they're like, dude, these
7:32
Cheyenne are absolutely crazy. Like look at they're just going
7:35
to hold their ground and fight. We don't want none of this
7:37
smoke. But I always admired that just
7:40
because like in the in the face of certain death that you like,
7:44
you can, you can go out on your shield.
7:49
Yeah, I mean our team against yours.
7:51
I'll take mine. Let's talk about your team Sir.
7:53
So you are Co founder of boltobolto.com.
7:57
Tell me exactly. That is.
7:59
Correct what your tool does. Yeah.
8:04
So at Bolto we are bringing you an AI driven end to end HR
8:08
service. So whether you need to find
8:09
people, employ them legally, pay them, manage them, we bring you
8:13
the whole stack. That is the the Super short and
8:16
sweet. And we do it, as you mentioned,
8:19
with a pretty elite team. I'd love to throughout this,
8:23
like give shout outs to everybody on the team at some
8:25
point. But yeah, that's, that's the,
8:28
the short of it. End to end HR stack driven by
8:30
AI. Amazing.
8:31
Now it looks like you're positioned mostly for kind of
8:34
overseas near shore offshore type hiring, Is that correct?
8:40
As far as the hiring is concerned, that is correct.
8:43
That's how we got our first start and that's how we hit our
8:45
first you know 10 customers was helping people build in cheaper
8:48
markets that will allow them to grow really quickly because see
8:51
Sage companies don't have you know $100 million work desk to
8:53
go hire the ex SVP from Google. So they got to think on their
8:57
feet. That's how we got our first
8:59
customers. And then where we've really been
9:00
excited about expanding is we're going after employers of record
9:05
and, and taking on this market to allow anybody to employ
9:08
anybody everywhere. After 20, funny, the world of
9:11
international employment has just ballooned because, you
9:14
know, as good as anybody, things can be done remotely, right?
9:18
I don't need to be sitting across from you in a cubicle in
9:21
order to know that you're going to put on the best work.
9:22
So why do I have to look in my city for the best employees that
9:25
you're going to employ somebody around the world, You need an
9:28
employer record to do so. And that's where we come in.
9:30
We help you take complying, be able to pay your taxes.
9:32
We help you pay your people all legally around the world so.
9:36
This, and this isn't about contract work, this is actually
9:39
hiring. So employer of record is what
9:41
you need to hire, do you? You don't need something
9:44
equivalent for contract work, do you?
9:48
For contract work, it's a lot easier if you could generate tax
9:51
forms with a contractor of record, which we do also offer.
9:54
Plus contractor management tools are going to allow you to issue
9:56
bonuses, issue payments, keep track of who's where, take notes
9:59
on people, save files legally. So I highly recommended
10:03
contractor of record. What I was plugging was the
10:05
employer of record, but both of them are things and they both
10:07
matter. Are we doing well?
10:09
Cool. And that's it.
10:11
So the employer of record go into this a little bit further,
10:13
tell me exactly what that entails and this services you
10:16
provide. Yeah.
10:19
So to to put it simply, let's say you've got a company here in
10:24
the United States and we'll call it company.com, okuscompany.com.
10:29
uscompany.com finds a stellar developer in France and a
10:33
product designer in Japan, and you want to add them both to
10:36
your team. US company.com can't hire niggly
10:39
in France and Japan because they don't have entities set up
10:42
there. Now, you could go set up a
10:43
Japanese entity and a French entity, but that's going to take
10:46
months of your time and it's going to be wildly expensive.
10:49
Just paying the corporation fees and paying to keep a corporation
10:52
in those regions is going to be way more expensive than paying
10:56
somebody who has a corporation there to employ them legally and
10:59
lend them back to you. That's kind of the structure of
11:01
what an ER looks like. So we've set up Eors around the
11:05
world. We partner in various regions to
11:07
make sure that we are covered in every country you could want to
11:09
employ somebody in. And so if you find the next
11:12
seller candidate anywhere in the world, we can help make sure
11:15
that they can legally join the. Team and what were what are the
11:18
benefits perhaps you know that we're talking about outsourcing
11:22
work and if you're talking about virtual assistants, the
11:25
Philippines has been fantastic about talent for virtual
11:28
assistants for a very long time. You know, you have, you know,
11:32
Eastern Europe where like a lot of programmers or India, of
11:36
course a lot of programmers, people are very accustomed to,
11:39
to finding talent over there. Now Latin America really has
11:42
come on board, Mexico in particular, because it's the
11:46
same time zone. The the level of talent is
11:49
extraordinary. But what's the benefit of
11:52
actually hiring folks overseas versus contracting them out?
11:59
Yeah, great question. So it really depends on what you
12:01
want in terms of the makeup of your team.
12:03
If you're talking contractor versus employee, everybody's got
12:06
to make this decision when they're bringing on a new team
12:08
member. And the risk of
12:11
misclassification of an employee versus a contractor is actually
12:14
a pretty sharp fiscal penalty. So basically the reason why that
12:19
is, is because if you're going to pay an employee, you have to
12:22
set aside taxes and you have to help them file in their region,
12:25
and you have to do it in a specific way.
12:26
And then also employees, sorry, employers have to pay a tax on
12:31
having people in certain regions.
12:32
Contractors aren't held to the same standards.
12:35
So governments around the world would like to see you employ
12:38
people as employees, not contractors.
12:40
So there's a motivation to make sure that you were employing
12:42
people as employees, if that is what they are.
12:46
So if they have longer term commitments to the company,
12:49
large equity stakes, if they've got products that are amorphous
12:54
and they will keep going and extending to the life of the
12:56
companies, that's an employee. And that's when you got to make
12:59
sure that you're complying and paying all those fees properly
13:01
to all the right municipalities when you have the global teams,
13:04
if you've got short term work that needs to be done contract
13:07
if you're going to be delayed. You know, and I, I, I would
13:09
encourage people to, to really take those steps depending on
13:13
the countries that you're hiring or contracting out of.
13:16
Because anecdotally, I've heard stories of particularly the
13:20
Mexican government not being pleased with folks working as
13:26
contract labor from Mexico to the states.
13:29
You know, and will actually come and kind of harass your, your
13:33
team member for back taxes, you know, so you do things above
13:37
board, you know, you, you hire them properly, you have an
13:40
employer of record. And it's like, hey, man, we're,
13:43
we're contributing to the Mexican economy.
13:45
You don't need to send your goons after my staff.
13:50
It's it's way more than just next to every government around
13:52
the world is motivated to make sure that their citizens are
13:55
employed properly. So yeah, it anecdotally you
13:59
might have heard about Mexico, but there are a lot of countries
14:01
who will who will come after you for misclassifying people and
14:04
the penalties will be far fiscally.
14:06
So this is kind of a, a political hotbed issue as well.
14:09
Let's get into that a little bit largely around, you know, Trump
14:14
was working on basically selling green cards for 5,000,000 bucks,
14:18
which is an interesting idea. And then of course, the, the
14:21
controversy around H1B visas. So both of these instances is
14:27
like, OK, you have really high talent that you want to bring
14:29
over here. And I'm sure that's, that that
14:33
would be amazing for a lot of people.
14:35
A lot of people would love to, to live in the United States.
14:37
But what is your feeling as far as like talent overseas, you
14:42
know, looking for a, a, a ticket to the states or just like being
14:48
where they are, having the same job, working remotely and living
14:52
in the place that's familiar to them?
14:56
Yeah, I mean great question and super in the news right now,
15:00
right. I think one thing that's
15:02
important that my Co founder likes to say is that that talent
15:07
isn't perhaps to a specific location.
15:10
And so the best member of your team might be extremely happy
15:14
living literally on the other side of the world for you, 12
15:16
time zones away into the different hemisphere.
15:20
And so while visa programs are great because if your team is
15:23
set up in person and you want to recruit somebody to come into
15:26
the office every day, they shouldn't preclude you for
15:28
adding the right person to your team.
15:30
Because in this post COVID world in which everything is so
15:34
virtual friendly, you can add anybody you want, no matter
15:36
where in the world they live. And so whether or not they have
15:40
access to come to the United States versus whether or not
15:41
they contribute to your team separate use, they can
15:45
contribute to your team. It's a matter of whether or not
15:47
they do it from a cubicles or from a laptop. 100%, you know,
15:51
and there's a bit of an ethical quandary here to some people
15:53
will make that like, oh, well, if you're hiring out of Mexico
15:56
and you're paying them less, is that some kind of discriminatory
16:00
thing that you're taking against a person?
16:03
But it's no more discriminatory that like you live in in San
16:07
Francisco, that if you had the same job in Dent, well, Denver's
16:11
probably a bad the cost of living in Denver's insane.
16:14
But if, let's say you were like Nevada, you know?
16:18
Chicago, Chicago's a great a great city that has a a
16:21
different pay grade than New York, San Francisco, which are
16:25
those are three great tax cities.
16:27
It's one way to look at it. Yeah, there's there's another
16:30
great way to look at it, which is like seed sage companies are
16:33
some of the greatest sources of creating jobs in the world.
16:36
But Siege sage companies don't have any money.
16:38
And so the global economy is impacted by tech companies who
16:41
create new products, who create new possibilities in the world.
16:45
And if they need to be built based on people who they can
16:48
afford, they're going to go to less cost constrained markets
16:53
and create jobs. Now there's nothing to be said
16:56
for what they will do when they have the ability to hire anybody
16:59
in the world. But creating jobs for the world,
17:02
we believe, is a very net positive no matter where you do
17:05
it. It's beautiful and, and it, it's
17:07
honestly, you get like, I mean, diversity is such kind of like
17:12
AI don't know a, a throwaway buzzword, but like it's really
17:15
important. It is.
17:16
And it's, it's amazing having from people from different
17:19
cultures, you know, I, I've worked with, or a couple of
17:22
folks that worked for me, one's from Mexico, one's from South
17:25
Africa, you know, so it's like 1's in the middle of summer
17:30
sweating, the other one's freezing to death in winter.
17:33
And it's, it's fascinating. And so you get the the benefit
17:36
of their incredible talent, but also just the rich culture
17:38
traditions that they're bringing to the workplace, which I think
17:41
is really important and very unique to this time and place.
17:47
People of all different backgrounds will have different
17:50
lived experiences that will shape their perspective and the
17:52
way that they think about problems.
17:53
And you might not think that that contributes to how they're
17:56
going about solving a payroll problem.
17:58
Like we had a currency exchange problem recently where one of
18:01
our providers who helps us change currencies in South
18:03
America had a new set of fees coming that the way they were
18:07
written was going to fundamentally change our revenue
18:10
model. And so we had three people from
18:12
three different universities, 3 different states of upbringing
18:14
come to a room and sit down and they were all thinking about
18:16
problem differently. And who knows if people would be
18:19
thinking about it the same way if they had no grown up in the
18:21
same area, been the same gender, same race or anything.
18:24
But the fact that they are all different and came with
18:27
different perspectives, it's great.
18:29
It's a great argument for having a team of people who come from
18:32
all around the world, whether that's Nevada, California,
18:34
Florida or India, Japan and Mexico, who knows?
18:39
So going through just kind of the the beat by beat features of
18:42
Bolto and the website's gorgeous by the way, you know it's
18:46
source. Palate.
18:48
Schedule interviews, hire easily, pay and manage.
18:51
Let's talk about source talent. So is this a database that best
18:55
database that you curate or how are you basically finding talent
18:59
that people can hire from? Yeah, great question.
19:04
So we have two different main methods of sourcing talent.
19:07
Number one is we have a database of talent that has applied to be
19:13
on the Volta platform. So for for the last couple of
19:16
years that we've been around, we've had people around the
19:18
world taking AI driven interviews to put themselves on
19:21
the platform. Think like creating a LinkedIn
19:24
account. And then we've also, so now we
19:27
have that repository stored with a bunch of data about a bunch of
19:29
people who are really talented. And then the second thing we do
19:32
is we work with recruiters around the world in various
19:34
jurisdictions because people have unique hiring.
19:37
Almost every company I work with says, you know, we've got a
19:39
really unique hiring process and it's yeah, they're all
19:43
different, but everybody has something unique in our iron
19:46
process. Having a team of recruiters to
19:48
back us up is very helpful. 100% You know, it's interesting
19:53
because we're right on this weird precipice.
19:55
You know, we're talking about democratizing talent and
19:59
democratizing employment opportunities for people across
20:02
the world. Now, typically the, the folks
20:05
that get hired from overseas are one fluid in English, you know,
20:13
and can speak really well and the accent isn't too thick.
20:18
And, you know, 2 they probably have a good understanding of
20:21
American pop culture and how to fit in with an American
20:24
workplace. Or just any workplace.
20:28
But The thing is, is that's not necessarily the best talent.
20:32
So we have opportunity right now.
20:35
Google already has a real time translator.
20:37
We'll have a real time video filter where you can change your
20:41
appearance. So like pretty soon, like with
20:45
the ability to be filters, I could look like Oprah Winfrey
20:50
and sound just like her, you know, which would be, you know,
20:54
great for my entertainment career.
20:58
But I, I'm just wondering like how, how these kind of real time
21:02
transcriptions like how, how fundamental are the attributes
21:06
of our staff to our hiring process and how is that going to
21:10
change? It's, you know, it's a really
21:14
interesting line of thinking because one thing that it will
21:17
do is completely remove biases. And I don't mean like
21:20
subconscious biases of picking one versus the other, but rather
21:23
bias towards working in person versus remotely bias towards
21:26
working with people in the same time zone versus not same time
21:29
zone versus working from Europe versus America versus India.
21:34
So that you're online same time versus not online at the same
21:36
times because you can sterate the experience that you want for
21:42
your tea. And so what'll be really
21:45
interesting is to see the the regulation that comes into play
21:49
once, like you said, you could become Oprah.
21:52
I don't think it would be good for the creator economy if there
21:54
were 70,000 Oprahs all running podcasts.
21:58
I think it's significantly better that we have Ryan and
22:01
Oprah running two different podcasts, though.
22:03
It would be interesting to see the crossover or for you to
22:05
tweak, you know, one thing or another about your experience to
22:08
fit a certain audience. I think that will be really
22:10
powerful. But I'm excited, as far as the
22:13
tech role is concerned, to see people just be unbounded in
22:17
their search for the smartest, next best contributor.
22:20
Doesn't matter where they are, doesn't matter what language
22:22
they speak. Who's got the brain that can
22:24
fire the neurons to solve your problem?
22:27
You know, I don't know, these would be really interesting.
22:30
I was just thinking of like a dial, like a potentiometer, you
22:33
know, like when I go to a Mexican restaurant in Denver,
22:36
which there's some amazing ones here, as you well know, but I
22:41
drive my, my family crazy because I'm going to do my best
22:44
Spanish. I'm going to speak Spanish, you
22:46
know, But the problem is, is my Spanish sounds with the exact
22:50
same accent that I'm talking with now.
22:51
Like my pronunciation is awful. So like if I was speaking to my
22:56
Mexican friends on zoom or whatever, and I could just be
22:59
like, God, Ryan, just dial down the, the Colorado accent a
23:03
little bit and it made it sound better for them.
23:06
Then I would feel less insecure about my terrible Spanish
23:10
accent. Yeah, I think one of the really
23:14
cool things that we will we will see soon with AI in the way that
23:18
you're describing is not necessarily just employers
23:21
getting the type of employee that they want in terms of what
23:24
language they can speak, but people appearing more
23:25
comfortable. Like that's that's a huge win
23:28
for society. When people feel more confident
23:30
in their own body with their own capabilities, we're going to get
23:33
a happier population. We're going to get a population
23:35
who's excited to show up to work, who's creating cooler
23:37
stuff. It's going to be a domino effect
23:40
that's going to have a lot of implications on the world when
23:42
people get to show up the way that they want to show up, no
23:45
matter what that means. So cool, it's coming so soon.
23:47
OK, so I've got my startup. I'm like, you know what?
23:51
I'm all in. I'm going Bolto.
23:53
They're my employer of record. They have a, a place for me to
23:57
source talent all over the globe if I so choose.
24:00
There's recruiters out there that are like pre screening, pre
24:03
qualifying. Not only that, but like
24:05
applicants are pouring in, you know, bringing their resumes to
24:09
Bolto so that they can be easily searched and accessed when it's
24:12
time for, to for, for, for a job.
24:16
Are there particular titles, job titles that are are best or that
24:22
Bolto really is specializes in whether that's programming,
24:27
whether that's BDR sales, what's what's a a role that would go to
24:31
to hire? Great question.
24:35
We have historically lived in the tech ER system.
24:38
So whether that's product designers, product managers,
24:40
software engineers, quality experience engineers, both that
24:42
front and back end, we live on the tech side of things.
24:46
That be said, within the last 3/4, we've expanded beyond that.
24:50
We are placing salespeople, community managers, growth
24:53
managers, marketing team members.
24:55
So if you have a team need and you are struggling to find it,
24:59
come give us a shot, OK? Pretty much anyone now once
25:02
we've qualified some, we can schedule interviews through the
25:06
the platform You can hire and then actually you're going to
25:10
pay and manage them. So how does that work?
25:12
So the salary of the person I hire, you invoice me, I pay you,
25:17
you handle the taxes and payroll benefits, the whole shebang to
25:21
them. Is that kind of how it works?
25:25
Yep, in local currencies around the world.
25:27
So all you have to do is worry about one invoice every pay
25:30
period, whatever you set that to be, and we'll handle the rest,
25:34
no matter how logistically complicated it must.
25:36
Amazing. So cool.
25:38
So this company has grown really fast, really quickly from what I
25:42
saw, you guys were founded in 2023, rebranded from Cruise and
25:48
have raised about 5 million. Is that does that sound about
25:52
right? Yeah, that those numbers are.
25:55
Amazing. How did you pick up this kind of
25:58
traction and momentum coming into this company in two years?
26:03
Yeah, I I think I would be remiss to not mention that we're
26:08
AY combinator backed company. So my Co founders and I, the way
26:13
we met was pretty cool. I was college roommates with one
26:16
of them and then his middle school best friend is the other
26:18
Co founder. And so yeah, we were all working
26:22
in different jobs. I was at Microsoft working in
26:24
engineering. One of my Co founders is an AIML
26:27
developer at Palantir. And then our mutual friend who
26:30
is working on Wall Street in in New York, actually 30 Rock if
26:35
you wanted to start a company. So he had us up and he was like,
26:37
hey, let's apply to Y Combinator.
26:39
And I was like, that's ridiculous.
26:41
Nobody gets into YC not working out.
26:44
And then he was like, come on, let's do it.
26:46
And so I was like, OK, so we put the other application, we throw
26:48
up a prayer and we got in. And so then all of a sudden it
26:51
was like, OK, now we got to start a company.
26:53
And so we started a company. The the first time I actually
26:56
ever saw my other Co founder in person was in the FFO airport
26:59
when we moved in together and we caught an Uber to our new
27:01
apartment. But we, you know, we got started
27:06
with the the greatest community ever, the Y Combinator
27:09
community. We were with all other people
27:11
starting and that we just made our entire lives starting a
27:15
company. And so when we immerse ourselves
27:17
in that, we took a couple attempts at YC, at starting
27:20
different things. You know, we worked in the
27:21
fintech sphere for a little bit. We worked in cybersecurity for a
27:24
little bit. And then when we realized human
27:25
resources was something that our team was well equipped to go
27:28
build, we just ingrained ourselves in that.
27:31
And we took reps and reps and reps and we talked to as many
27:33
people as possible and problem spaces became clear and revenue
27:37
opportunities became clearer once problem spaces became
27:40
clear. And you know, we capitalized and
27:43
worked our asses off and here we.
27:44
Are it's amazing now, YC isn't necessarily a slam dunk.
27:49
I I mean, I can see why you were selected for the cohort because
27:52
all of you guys are already successful and have an amazing
27:56
pedigree. But you had to take a
27:59
significant risk to all three of you to kind of put your careers
28:02
on hold and be like, no, we're going to go all in on this thing
28:05
and see what happens. Like what inspired that kind of
28:08
like bravery? You should have heard the phone
28:13
call I gave my mom when I was like, hey, mom.
28:16
So I'm quitting my my great job at Microsoft that employs me
28:20
down the road from my family. They were living in Seattle all
28:22
the time. And I'm going to move to San
28:25
Francisco to start a company. OK, what's the company?
28:32
We don't know yet. We're going to figure that part
28:33
out. So, so that, as you can imagine,
28:38
was like a, it was a leap of faith, but the fact that YC
28:41
gives you an initial set of funding and I believe in my 2 Co
28:45
founders, you know, I had known of one of them for nine years,
28:47
I'd known the other for nine years.
28:51
I was ready to take a shot if I was ever going to do that was
28:53
the group people I was going to be with.
28:54
And so once I realized that people were going to be in the
28:56
right place, that's the most valuable piece of the equation,
29:00
yeah. What's the task distribution
29:03
from the three of you? How's that changed from when you
29:05
were in NYC? Oh man.
29:09
Well, when you're in NYC, all three of you are doing the same
29:11
job, which is problem discovery and ideation and getting to know
29:17
your customers. Once you know your customers and
29:20
you know what you need to go build, then it becomes who's
29:23
going to build it? Who's going to design it?
29:24
Who's going to sell? Who's going to talk to
29:26
customers, who's going to be hiring?
29:28
And so there's a bunch of different delineations of work
29:31
that need to happen. And so I, I stood beautifully in
29:35
the middle of engineering and in sales for at my last job, I was
29:40
a product manager in Azure and then our CEO worked at banking.
29:44
He had never been a computer scientist.
29:46
And our CTO Mellon is an AIML developer from Talentier.
29:49
Dude, it's technical. He speaks in bit code.
29:52
So, you know, in order to have somebody who sits between the
29:55
two of them and and kind of oh, love the the FaceTime effects
29:59
there. Perfect timing.
30:00
Our team's awesome. Yeah.
30:03
So in order to have somebody who sits between the two team member
30:06
between the two sides of the company to illustrate it made it
30:09
so clear that tactical work comes up, it's going to melon,
30:12
non work comes up, it's going to burn off something that bridges
30:15
the gap. It's going to me.
30:17
And so having 3 specialists in three very different lines of
30:20
work made it very easy to see who's going to do what.
30:23
Yeah, that's cool, man. And again, I'm just like really
30:27
taken aback of how fast. So you go through YCYC usually
30:32
finds what is it, 100,000, something like that, and then
30:35
you're able to raise 5. Was that based on traction you
30:39
had early on in sales or was it just truly the vision and the
30:42
team? Both and so we, we actually
30:49
didn't finish the fundraise during my C, we raised enough
30:53
capital to go out, build our initial version, start selling,
30:56
and then we finish the fundraise, which I would
30:57
actually, if you're raising the C ground right now and you're a
31:00
founder, I would not shy away from the idea of a bifurcated
31:04
fundraise. Really consider not doing it all
31:07
at once. If you can do it all at once.
31:08
I mean, by all means go sign the mega check if you can get it.
31:12
But we, we raised enough money to go build enough traction to
31:15
prove to people, Hey, not only do we have the vision in the
31:17
team, but we also have enough initial traction to go out and
31:20
do the thing. And so that's how we were able
31:22
to pull off the the 1-2 punch to to create this seed round of $5
31:26
million. And what when you're
31:28
incorporating AI into the platform, what what LLMS, I'm
31:34
sure a part of it as far as like generative like text and things
31:37
like that. How else is like AI
31:40
incorporating the platform? Yeah, so there's a couple
31:45
different places we use it. One of the the primary places
31:49
that'll if you experience it by creating application on Volta,
31:52
you'd be like, wow, that was very AI forward is when you
31:55
apply and you get your interview, you're going to show
31:59
up and it's going to look like this.
32:00
What you and I are looking at right now, two people on the
32:02
screen, except one of them's going to be a literal AI person
32:06
who's reading your resume and asked me cracking about it,
32:09
coming up with different problems for you to solve based
32:11
on your experience. So that AI forward recruiting
32:16
process from the applicant side is very unique.
32:19
And then on the recruiter side of things, when people ask us,
32:22
hey, you know, I have a job description here, I can't fill
32:25
it. The first thing we're doing is
32:26
we're plugging it into our AI driven search across our
32:30
database of 10s thousands of candidates to see if we have any
32:34
matches like that, who we should immediately go ask to take a new
32:37
interview based on this, this match.
32:40
So there's the, the search as well as the interview.
32:43
And then as far as the payroll tool is, is concerned, payroll
32:47
is complicated, man. People are trying to understand
32:49
like when's the last time you looked at your W2?
32:52
And you're like, I know exactly what I'm looking at here.
32:56
Probably never, right? And so, you know, our idea is
33:00
can we make payroll and HR simple enough that people can
33:03
understand it? And the way to do that is
33:05
through agents. Couple of questions if I'm
33:07
looking at my W2. So you know, you have a staff.
33:11
One of the, the, the wild things for founders is that everything
33:15
that it comes along with payroll, which is like health
33:18
insurance. Now you're the healthcare
33:20
provider for your team, which is an unexpected kick in the pants.
33:24
And you know, of course you want to provide, you know, 4O1K
33:28
retirement plans, you want to be competitive.
33:30
So you have different benefits and things like that.
33:33
How is that globally? Is there is there a similar
33:37
compulsion I suppose that like for health insurance and
33:40
benefits, things like that? Yeah, it's wildly different
33:45
country to country. Most countries have a public
33:49
health care system, so they won't care about it in their
33:51
ears. Stolen countries have privatized
33:54
health care, and it's largely the same as you would experience
33:57
in the United States. But as far as saving retirement
34:01
savings and matching programs go, that's all country to
34:03
country dependent. You know, a lot of that is US
34:06
based. And I don't know if if you've
34:08
ever plugged PEO insurance options on your platform.
34:11
We it's one of the things that we're getting into.
34:13
But PEO insurance basically allows founders, if you're
34:16
worried about your benefits package, like you work at a
34:18
company who gives you great healthcare, maybe you have a
34:20
family and you're like, I can't, I can't go take the leap because
34:23
I get such a great insurance package.
34:25
PEO insurance allows you to partner with other small
34:29
companies to create the illusion of a big company to get the
34:32
insurance rate of a Microsoft and Amazon and Facebook, Right.
34:36
That's one of them really, really valuable tools that all
34:38
founders need. Yeah.
34:39
A. 100% and you can do that with you guys.
34:42
That's huge. Yeah, that's huge.
34:44
You know, and and again, like my staff, I want the best for them.
34:48
I want to pay them as much as I can and get them all the
34:51
benefits you possibly can. But man, the brass tacks as you
34:54
look at it. And that adds 40% between
34:57
payroll, insurance, health insurance, like all these
35:00
benefits. It's extremely expensive.
35:03
You know, it's extremely expensive.
35:06
OK. I'm curious about your business
35:09
model and I love the UI on your page because you can either you
35:12
can go straight to start looking at candidates like I have
35:15
somebody to hire. I want to look at candidates
35:17
first. Boom, you're right there.
35:18
You want to demo with a platform, you can book that too.
35:21
But what's the business model for Bolto?
35:23
How do you guys get paid? How do we get paid for as far as
35:29
so we've got a total different product at this point, right?
35:32
There's the HR suite of actual employers of record payroll
35:35
business. There's also the hiring
35:36
business. So in the hiring business, we
35:38
don't get paid unless we do a good job, right?
35:40
So if you ask us to go find somebody, we don't find
35:42
anybody's, you don't pay a thing.
35:44
As soon as we build your team, you started playing them.
35:46
That's where you get paid for a head hunting.
35:48
As far as EOR and payroll models based, it's on a per seat basis,
35:53
right? So let's say you want to hire 7
35:55
people in the Netherlands, there's a per head cost for you
35:58
to use our EOR in the Netherlands.
36:00
And now on the US payroll, it's going to be a base fee plus a
36:03
per head cost that's you know incremental on top of whatever
36:06
you're paying for payroll. That way we can cover any
36:09
foreign exchange fees, any insurance that we have paid for
36:13
it that are as well as take margin pair.
36:15
So you have the option now as an employer, like how many people
36:19
overseas should I, you know, when's the magic number that I
36:23
should get in an EOR? If it's like one or two, is it
36:27
like, we'll let it ride? Or if it's like, is it more than
36:30
10? So it's actually reverse at
36:36
that. You should have an EOR at the
36:37
moment you have one person overseas that you're employing.
36:40
It's once you get up to, you know, if you've got 100 people
36:44
in the same city you should trust, you should probably
36:46
create your own entity, right? Unless you have some sort of
36:49
system working where you've worked on a negotiated
36:51
enterprise rate with an EOR that's local and you've got some
36:54
sort of system where they have legal resources that you don't
36:56
have and you want to take advantage of that.
36:59
But it's when you're small, that's when you need an EOR or
37:01
you expand in a certain area. That's when you create an
37:03
entity. And unfortunately, I wish there
37:06
was a magic number. There's no.
37:07
Magic number. So breakdown the fees a little
37:09
bit. You, you guys found me a
37:10
salesperson from Mexico. I'm like, yes, it's going to be
37:14
$50,000 a year. What what am I paying you for
37:18
the fee or what ultimately what comes out of that 50,000 and
37:22
what's the additional fee for the employer of record?
37:27
Yeah, great question. So if you're going to use the
37:30
employer record side of things, it's just going to be 500 bucks
37:32
a month in perpetuity for you to have the ability to not have a
37:36
corporation in Mexico but stay legally compliant, do all of
37:39
your payroll. If you're going to be in the US,
37:41
it's going to be, it depends, company, company higher and
37:44
higher, but it's around 35 ahead, but an additional fee.
37:49
And then as far as recruiting goes, if you find a talent on
37:52
our platform and you're like, man, this guy's awesome.
37:54
I want to take him elsewhere though.
37:56
That's going to be a typical head hunting recruiting fee of,
37:59
you know, a, a market standard of 30%.
38:02
And so if you find anybody on our platform knows these are
38:06
already baked in. So if you see a number and
38:08
you're like, you know, this, this number, that's great for a
38:11
team. I'm worried about fees though.
38:12
No fees on. That so, so then I'm paying you
38:15
for payroll for that pay period you're pulling from that or is
38:19
the fee associated in the front side, is that 30% in the front?
38:25
I thought 30% would be if we don't end up putting somebody on
38:28
an employer record for. You OK?
38:30
And so if you take somebody and go elsewhere with it, that's how
38:33
it would be. But you do pay us.
38:35
We take fees, we distribute the money in local currency to your
38:38
people around the world. Yeah, I mean, I've, I've shopped
38:41
this whole area a lot and that's like right on point.
38:44
It's not the cheapest, but obviously you guys are are not
38:48
are not the cheapest. So it's very competitive in the
38:52
price. You get what you paid for.
38:55
Yeah, I, I, we believe that it is quite competitive.
38:58
We also believe that our team provides a service that's worth.
39:00
Thankful and ultimately like if you're if you're you're, you're,
39:04
you're working with staff, boy, especially a new company or
39:07
start up like one wrong hire can literally derail your company
39:12
for years. Yes.
39:14
What one wrong is hire, especially a full time hire here
39:18
in the United States, if there are employee protections about
39:21
when you can fire people and you know if somebody's
39:24
underperforming, you can't just day off necessarily say get out
39:28
and you also won't know if somebody's underperforming for a
39:30
while. And so if you're a seed sage
39:32
company, you've got a year of runway and somebody's going to
39:34
eat some of your runway and you're not going to get the
39:38
right thing out of them, that's a death sentence.
39:40
Dude, I I could tell you some horror stories about hiring the
39:43
wrong people early, but I don't want to talk too much about it.
39:46
Put it in the ether. That person will spawn in
39:49
somewhere, so. Hey, you know, and and people
39:55
aren't always the right fit for a role.
39:57
That doesn't mean that there is no fit for them out there,
39:59
right? So if somebody was the bad fit
40:01
at a job, doesn't mean that they're a bad employee
40:03
necessarily across the board, just means that that was the
40:06
right. Fit and, you know,
40:07
congratulations, the EOR stuff is like so important.
40:10
You you really want to do that, you know, the extra 500 bucks a
40:13
month so you just don't have to worry about IRS or some other
40:17
country's IRS equivalent knocking on your door with
40:20
annoying paperwork like just pay it and leave it alone, you know?
40:25
Yeah. And if you're, if you're
40:27
thinking about doing it yourself and starting in corporation,
40:31
starting corporation in a various country, like by all
40:34
means, look at it. It's going to be more than 500
40:36
bucks a month. It's going to be a lot more than
40:37
that. So if you're going to go spin up
40:38
a team of 30, go look at it. He's got a team of one to five.
40:41
Give me a go. OK, Are you ready for the
40:43
lightning round? Bring it on.
40:49
OK, let's say you sold Bolto for a billion dollars tomorrow.
40:54
What's the next project that you work on?
41:01
Think about that. You know, one of the things that
41:03
I've been fascinated by. So money is no longer an issue
41:07
and I get to think for as as many years as it takes to solve
41:10
a problem. So now we're talking about what
41:11
problem do I want to solve? I find our public rail system to
41:17
be so obnoxiously out, out of touch, right.
41:22
There's a a rail that's being extended from Bellevue to
41:25
Issaquah in Seattle and that is like 5 miles long.
41:29
And they announced the project a couple months ago and they said,
41:34
and it's scheduled opening in 2044.
41:37
It's a four mile long rail, an extension of a track is that
41:43
already exists and they've already budgeted in 19 years for
41:47
it. So that and it's not even high
41:49
speed rail. And so if I could get into
41:51
anything, I think it might be high speed rail and just
41:55
democratize it, make it so that you could go from Denver to San
41:58
Francisco on a three hour. Train ride, you know, I mean,
42:02
wouldn't that more like be politics, though?
42:04
I mean, this one, one of the things that China's so
42:07
impressive is they build that thing in a week with robots, and
42:11
robots would do it, you know? Oh, it's awesome.
42:15
Yeah. What what they're accomplishing
42:17
in the railway space is is beyond innovation.
42:20
It's it's. Unbelievable, like how far
42:24
advanced they are. You know, I understand that we
42:27
have certain bureaucracy that slows things down.
42:29
And some of those are in our best interest.
42:31
For me, you know, I am concerned about the archaeological
42:35
remnants of my forefathers. And you want to be careful that
42:38
if you come across a site, you're going to stop.
42:40
But at what point are you like, look, man, of course we might
42:44
just have to plow through it to get this thing done.
42:46
I mean, China is not worried about it.
42:48
You know what? I mean, yeah, the, so the where
42:52
I where I am more stuck is is less on the like the things that
42:57
pop up. We're protecting a historical
42:59
site because that that obviously is very important.
43:01
What bothers me is when the area is already paved, the whole
43:05
thing has been specked out and you still have 17 years left on
43:07
the project. That just doesn't sit right with
43:10
me. And so maybe not politics, I
43:13
wouldn't want to go public around necessarily, but building
43:15
rail that's accessible or the public by building the private
43:18
sector would be pretty cool. Totally agree.
43:20
Awesome. If you were entering college
43:22
today, looking ahead at the future, what would you study?
43:30
Philosophy with a a more well-rounded education.
43:37
Everybody's got to know how computers work, even if it like
43:40
it's never been more important to know how computers are
43:42
driven. Even though GPT can do all of
43:44
your homework for you like you got to know how it's happening.
43:47
Philosophy will allow you to, you know, create a moral compass
43:51
of right and wrong that will guide you for the rest of your
43:53
life through a market that has an ever changing set of skills
43:57
that we can't possibly predict. You think philosophy is a good
44:00
place for ethics? Actually.
44:07
I don't know. Is there a particular vert or
44:14
segment of philosophy that you think would be important?
44:17
We talking about the classics here, the Greeks.
44:22
You know, to be fair, no, I'm not.
44:25
I'm not going to narrow it down because I think the value of
44:28
college is pretty much boiled down to learning how to
44:31
critically think. If you come away from college
44:33
with a great equation for critical thinking, you've done
44:37
college well. And I think philosophy, you got
44:39
to formulate an argument. Whether you're going with
44:41
classics, whether you're going with contemporary moral issues,
44:44
you're going to learn how to formulate an argument for
44:46
yourself to be able to apply towards whether that's
44:49
mathematics, whether that's history, whether that's any of
44:52
the social studies, you're going to be stet with an equation and
44:56
a set of skills that you can apply toward many other things.
44:59
I would totally agree with that. I think philosophy gave me the
45:01
ability to reason and to structure arguments that are
45:04
fundamentally sound mathematically.
45:07
You know, not that life's all about reasoning, but it's good
45:10
to know when you're not reasoning.
45:12
I have reason for it. Yeah, that's pretty helpful.
45:16
Besides Bolto, what's your favorite AI tools right now?
45:23
Jimmy Kerser, is there any other answer right now?
45:26
Those guys are healing it. Our our developers are our team
45:32
of two primary senior developers is out putting more than my 300
45:38
person team did at Microsoft every week.
45:41
Really. No, that's that's equally a shot
45:44
at big tech as it is at innovation.
45:45
Yeah, the the feature that I designed when I was first year
45:50
out of College in 2021 last week at Microsoft, it's 2025.
45:56
We've built an, an entire company in, you know, in the
45:59
last year and a. Half I mean that is the fun
46:00
thing about start-ups, right is there is no red tape.
46:04
You just you just like through butter.
46:09
There's. That's great.
46:11
There's postmortems. A lot more postmortems than
46:14
there there are in big points. Build.
46:19
Build fast. Break things man.
46:20
Cool. Is there anything disturbing to
46:23
you about AI? Anything scary?
46:25
Any particular category of job that you think is going to be
46:30
dismantled by becoming robot gods?
46:38
You know, I actually had the opportunity to attend a dinner
46:40
with Sam Altman recently, and the discussion was quite funny
46:45
because if you look at what the jobs are that we have right now,
46:48
almost none of them were a thing in 1750.
46:52
Like basically not of stuff. And yet there would be no reason
46:59
for all of the people in 1750 to be afraid about their job
47:01
security because everybody's always had the opportunity to
47:03
work. Now, it's never been less clear
47:06
about what the next chapter is this close to the next chapter.
47:10
However, there was a funny little tidbit that was like, if
47:15
we terraform another planet, somebody's going to have to move
47:18
the manatees there. And so we're going to have
47:20
professional manatees, movers, dude, the outer space.
47:25
Somebody's going to do that job and it's going to be important
47:27
in that society. So I'm not worried for people
47:30
about having something to do. What they do.
47:33
I have no idea. I think all industries are going
47:36
to see mass change. God I would love to be a space
47:39
manatee mover. I was bored.
47:43
Right, those guys have got it without gravity, the Nazi
47:47
delight. You can just throw them around
47:48
like a soccer throw in a little spin.
47:53
It was like amazing. If you could live in any time
47:59
except for the future, not today, what era would you live
48:04
in? I think the the creation of the
48:12
Internet, I wasn't around for it.
48:15
I think that would be a pretty cool one to live in so.
48:18
That'd be what, early 90s I. Also, I'm fascinated by flight.
48:23
Yeah, I was born in the late 90s, so to be in my prime of my
48:26
career, so to be born in maybe the early 60s, late 50s would be
48:31
pretty cool. But also I'm going to say that
48:35
the innovation of flight would have been really cool to work
48:37
on. So being born in the late 1800s
48:40
would have been pretty cool. Last question, what's your
48:45
feeling about Russell Wilson? Great, great one to end on.
48:53
I love him. I, I grew up in North Carolina
48:56
while he was the quarterback of NC State.
48:58
My family moved to Seattle and I got to watch him at, you know,
49:02
pretty early in his career. And then my parents moved to
49:05
Denver this same month. He moved to Denver.
49:08
So I, I feel like Russell and I, he doesn't know it, but we're
49:10
friends. And so, yeah, so I've been a big
49:14
fan of his for a very long time. And, you know, nothing but the
49:17
best for him. And I, I hope he has, you know,
49:19
another late surgery success. Amazing Jake, where can people
49:23
connect with you online? Yeah, follow me on LinkedIn.
49:28
Jake Johnson is a little bit of a common name, but Jake Johnson
49:30
Bolto will yield me. That's the one that's followed.
49:34
And then on Twitter, it's Jake's main crew at Jake's main crew.
49:38
You'll be part of my main crew if you're on with me on Twitter.
49:40
Amazing. Jake, I really appreciate the
49:42
time. This has been awesome.
49:43
Thank you so much. Yeah.
49:47
Thank you so much, Ryan. That's right, this episode is
49:53
brought to you by Moburst, the AI first growth engine trusted
49:57
by iconic startups like Calm, Robin Hood, Reddit, Uber and
50:01
Google. Moburst is a digital, full
50:04
service, mobile first marketing agency that helps companies to
50:07
scale and become category leaders.
50:10
Whether you're finding product market fit or ready to
50:12
accelerate growth, Mobers delivers creative, data-driven
50:16
solutions that help with scale and efficiency and impact.
50:20
At Moburst, we're not just guessing what works, we're
50:23
predicting it. As an AI first agency, Moburst
50:26
uses cutting edge tools to analyze user behavior, adapt
50:30
creative in real time, and uncover hidden growth
50:33
opportunities. The result?
50:35
Marketing that's faster, smarter, and built to convert
50:38
from early stage startups to global brands.
50:41
We've helped hundreds of companies overcome complex
50:44
challenges, unlock new audiences, and optimize every
50:47
metric that matters. At Moeburst, we believe that
50:50
creative thinking, advanced technology, and data are the
50:54
core drivers of success at scale.
50:56
If you're serious about scaling your business with precision and
50:59
purpose, it's time to talk to Moeburst.
51:02
Visit moeburst.com and let's build something category
51:05
defining together.