Latest / Do Small Business Like a Big Boss Podcast / Hiring Secrets for Startups: What Every Founder Needs to Know
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- Aisha Massengill: So after you've done all the iterating and experimenting, what are in your experience those key first couple of hires? I think for the first, if I were to look at it in terms of trades, right? And I think... I think a few traits I think are very important. One I would say is that they have to be able to deal with ambiguity. They have to be able to deal with usually extremely demanding managers. Because startup founders are, they are very different. They are entrepreneurs, their bar is very high. They have to have the people smart to work with people. who are very different from what you normally come across in a corporate environment. I would say the third is, I think they need high agency and very high ownership. And of course, ⁓ very hardworking, a lot of energy to keep up with founders who are very different, very hardworking, very high agency. So it's a very, I would say it's a very, so I would say these are the traits. Plus they need very good technical skills. They need to be very good at their job. Welcome to Do Small Business Like a Big Boss, where we explore the real stories, hard-earned lessons, and game-changing strategies of entrepreneurs who've moved beyond the side hustle and built businesses that scale with confidence. This show is proudly sponsored by Project Icon. I'm your host, Ayesha Jorge Massengill, your Small Business Legal Guide. Let's dive in. Welcome to Do Small Business Like a Big Boss. Today, I'm really excited to have Bala Vishwanath, who is the founder and CEO of Novigil. Its mission is to help venture-funded startups hire outstanding software engineering and go-to-market talent in the US and India. Welcome, Bala. Thank you, Aisha. A big thank you for having me on your show. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. So I'll start with something easy just to get us chatting. Would you tell the listeners a little bit more about what Nova Guild is all about? Yeah. So at Nova Guild, we help innovative startups hire exceptional talent in US and India. And the talent we see are one is in engineering, software engineering. And the other category I would say is in go-to-market talent and GTM talent has become very important these days. We pride ourselves on setting a very high bar for ourselves and making sure that ⁓ We are able to find candidates who exceed the expectations of the client and even for the candidates, the opportunity is beyond what they dreamt of. That's what we aspire to do and we succeed occasionally at that. I bet it's a lot more than occasionally, but just so that everyone is operating from the same foundation, could you tell us a little bit about what go-to-market means, GTM? Yeah, GTM is is like what you do to really to get your product in the hands of your customers and making sure they use it well. So I would say it's a combination of marketing, sales, and also I would say customer success. Because you the whole experience of how customers use the product and how they're supported through the journey, I think that's important. So I would say GTM outputted this broadly in this category. Thank you. Thank you for that. Just want to make sure folks understand which way we're going. But before we dig into deeply there, one of the things that I found fascinating about your past was the work that you did with United Prosperity. Can you tell us about that a little bit? Yeah, that's that, that was a very interesting part. And thanks for bringing it up. So the idea at that time was to help small businesses get loans and it's a very acute problem all over the world, know, and the problem hasn't gone away. And people won't lend to them because ⁓ they don't have collateral. And the whole idea is how do you get collateral so that a bank lends to them. They're not trying to grow a venture funded startup at 100x, but they want to grow at 25, 30, 40 % a year for a good amount of time. And these small businesses, like we have these businesses in the US, we have this small business lending. And so what I came up with the idea is that in the developing world, right, in India, Africa, many other parts, millions and there are billions of small businesses and there could be like small women doing something very simple around their house, know, like selling, having a small grocery outlet or stitching clothes or whatever. And they need loans and all of them need loans. You know, their problems are similar to what you and I face, you know, access to capital and banks don't lend to them easily. So the idea was if people around all over the world could contribute small amounts as loan guarantee, then they can get the loan. And that was the idea. And it was not only about making a loan, but also helping these people build credibility and establish credit history with the banking system. And so that's what we did. And then we were able to operationalize it in India and in Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, I couldn't scale it to the extent which I thought I might be able to scale it, but the problem still exists. In fact, three or four years ago, some German students reached out to me and they said they want to do something similar. I told them, yes, please do it. So what were some of the obstacles with scaling that you faced? Well, I think the biggest obstacle I faced was at that time was it was not a for-profit, it was a nonprofit. And even for that, we were operational in two countries, but the online guarantors were there. they were just regular people like you and me. They wanted more countries to be added. They said, we want today to do it in Vietnam. We want to do it in some part of Latam. So scaling it on the ground, they wanted choice. So scaling it on the ground was very, very intensive. You need people feet on the street who can go in and check people, ⁓ check the credit history of these institutions and stuff like that. ⁓ And that requires capital. And somehow I was not able to raise that. We were not as able to raise that. fell short on that. And so, yeah, that was the biggest problem, I would say. I think if that had been solved, we could have scaled it. Yeah, I think that to your point, it is an issue both in the US and abroad, the need for financing in the early stages. And I think for businesses maybe that are not investable, if that's word, right? especially as a nonprofit, if the investor doesn't see the opportunity for the immediate return, how do some of those organizations solve that kind of problem? But you didn't give up. You still continued as an entrepreneur. tell me what motivated your interest in the first place to become an entrepreneur. I think I've always wanted to become an entrepreneur. And in fact, I was discussing that with my wife the other day and she said, And we were just talking about that. And so I think that interest was there in me right from college. I actually, right out of college, and this is long back, I tried to create a software company. Me and a few of my friends, we got together and tried to create a whole ERP in those days. It was amazingly foolish, but yes, we did try. So I think that desire was always there. just, you you keep trying different things and finally you stumble on something which is right. So then let's talk about Nova Guild in 2021, you made a decision to say, this is the problem that I want to solve. What kind of started your thought process on leaning into recruiting and for the startups? Yeah. So when we started, know, that was really not, it was not like, now we are more as a recruiting as a service, but that was not the goal. The idea when I started was to create a platform where companies could hire people who can work on a longer duration projects and more sophisticated projects and pay them fairly and they can have a very efficient platform. So it was a little bit like Upwork, but a lot more sophisticated. And Upwork does do that for software engineers. It was a little bit like Turing and Turing is there, Turing was there even at that time. It was a little bit like that. But then when I started it, most of our clients were startups and it was the whole COVID thing where, the demand for engineers was just skyrocketing. And they came back and they said that, you know, we really don't need the platform. You just find us people who will do the work. And that's where the platform fell by the wayside. And we focused on just helping people find engineers, you know, to build the product. So it was, I would say a partial accident. was, this was not the original plan with which we started. So it, kind of merged into this plan, I would say, or something like that. Was there anything that surprised you in the your early stages as you try to build the organization? Well, the biggest surprise was I learned that I had never really done recruiting or hiring anytime in my career. I suddenly figured out this is extremely difficult. The sheer difficulty of hiring, it is so hard. It is so hard. Nobody talks about it because people think it is. I don't know why people don't talk about it, but hiring is extremely hard. And that's when I realized how hard this is. And I was clueless to speak at that point in time. I had no idea how to do something like this. This was incredibly difficult. It's not repeatable. It's like, it's not like a software which performs predictably once you build it. It's the unpredictability never goes away. what do you find difficult and unpredictable about hiring? I would say pretty much everything is. So right from, you can, the first part is even getting in touch with people is very hard. And society and culture is changing. It's like, if you ask me, 2021, it was a lot easier to get in touch with people. 2026, it's a lot harder because if you look at your Apple iPhone, all notifications get silenced. Email goes into spam. LinkedIn messages goes into the other folder. So that's the first part. And you can't call people. Maybe you probably were 10, 15 years back, you could call someone because there was no, but now you can't call anyone. So the first part is getting time with people is itself hard. The next part is, know, whether you can assess them reasonably well in a short amount of time, whether are they the right fit for the company? Do they have the skills? Do they have the will to succeed in that given environment? Then you do that. And the next part is the third part is setting up the interviews and going through all the blocking and tackling, you know, the interviewers conducting an interview is just one part of an activity for an interviewer. It's, it's, it's like something way down on the list of priorities. They show up for a meeting and then they do an interview and then they quickly give feedback. but, but for the candidate, it's super important. And, and then, you know, sometimes meetings get slipped, so you have to reschedule and then like that. And then finally, when people get the offer, they have to join. And I've seen that a lot of times, and I don't know the percentage. lot of times candidate makes the wrong choice because they have no habit of changing jobs. so, yeah, so there are two parts to it. Again, the hiring decisions itself are, there's a lot of error in hiring decisions. And on top of that, the error made by candidates in joining the wrong organization is also extremely high. So it's pretty much the chances of success are very, very low. And then if you get into a business like that, your customers don't trust you unless they have a couple of placements. and there are people working and delivering. And that whole cycle could be seven to eight months. So you get the word of mouth working for you only after eight or nine months. So it's incredibly difficult. And and talent for running this business is also hard. So it's a very difficult business. So I don't know if I explain what all is difficult about this. Yeah. I'm curious about a couple things. One, What are the steps that you actively take to develop credibility with your existing clients or prospective clients? So I'll pause there. What are some of the steps that you, because you had just said, you know, they need to believe in your abilities to get source good clients or good candidates. So how do you go about that work? Yeah. So, so with existing clients. We are, we work very hard. Number one, I think it's not, not only me, the entire team works very hard. Everybody is motivated, dedicated. And we have our own systems which we follow very rigorously and we try to go above and beyond all the time. Like I always say 80 % is going to give you 50 % of the rhythms. If you're doing 120 % plus that's when you actually start seeing good rhythms. So we, so we do, we go above and beyond and then we try to keep our clients happy. Fortunately, that's worked out because a lot of our clients are, ⁓ come through word of mouth and sometimes through on some common for our something. And so overall, I would say for the last year and a half, maybe two years, I don't recollect now. We've been packed with work. There has been no shortage of work. So if you ask us at any point in time, we have more work than what we can have. So yes. So I don't do much of marketing or sales. So we do a little bit, but not too much, but yes, but we do realize we need to do that. And you also operate out of the Bay area. And I would imagine being in the tech industry and startups in particular, it's incredibly competitive. You use lean principles to engage in the hiring process. Tell us what that means. I mean, I've heard of like Lead and Six Sigma. only enough to just say the words. tell us kind of in plain English, what that means and how you actually leverage it in your business. Yeah. So this is a very good question. So how we use lean is we use it in a lot of ways. In fact, and I will try to explain it in a very simple way and that itself is a little complicated. So lean is a whole philosophy and what people try to do and rather than trying, I will try to invert it and try to explain it. And so there is no one single principle you can use in Lean and say that that will work. So Lean says continuous improvement and yes, we try to improve continuously and we take it very, very seriously. We are always trying to improve at any point in time and that you will see that. Then Lean talks about having high standards and yes, we do have high standards for pretty much everything we do. And Lean also talks about things like using checklists. They use it very indirectly. But yes, you do have checklists. So we have checklists for everything we do, pretty much everything we do. So if you are talking to a candidate, we have a checklist of these other things we want to cover. But we are not reading off a checklist. We have that at the back of our mind, but then we cover all of that. It's like, I don't know if you know, airline pilots have checklists. And in fact, the way... when the whole airline industry started, there were a lot of crashes and people thought it was mechanical failure. It was not really mechanical failure. It was human failure. And the way the airline industry tackled the safety problem was through checklists. So if you look, in fact, I Googled the Boeing checklist, it runs into 700 pages. And right now our checklists run into about 150 pages. So we have 150 pages of checklists and we go through all of that for hiring. And so this is what we use. We use checklists. This is one more principle. And the other more subtle thing, which Toyota really talks about is respect for people. And that's a very complicated concept because respect means different things to different people and different people interpret respect in different ways. so we do try to, as a company, we do try to have that respect for people within our company. ⁓ And we'd also try to create an environment of very high psychological safety where people come up with problems so that we can solve them. So this is one more thing which is there in Lean. The other aspect of Lean is, which we've only now started, is applying the scientific method. So we started on our Lean journey about four years back. And in fact, if you look at the Toyota literature, they talk about conducting experiments all the time. So what they really figured out, and which is amazing, is they figured out that you can apply the scientific method to management. And what the scientific method is, is very simple. You have a hypothesis and then you conduct small experiments to test out your hypothesis. And then you look at what happened and then you conduct next experiment. And Toyota does this at scale. So they have a hundred thousand employees applying the scientific method at scale. And we've started doing that as well. And it doesn't come very intuitively to people. And it comes very intuitively to a certain people in ⁓ certain roles. For example, scientists do it very intuitively because they're doing experiments all the time. And I think marketers do it very easily, but it's not across the board. And so we are now doing that. We've started doing that in hiring, but it was not an easy journey. this is again applying the scientific method. having high standards and all of these are kind of tied together. And the other thing which we realized and this was not, this Toyota does not talk about that very, very explicitly, but the human element is very huge in this. And what I mean by that is that when you have a system that sets very high standards, and then you want to continuously improve the standards, you can either do it through a very high pressure system. And which is what Elon Musk does, know, it is, it's very, very high pressure and it's only the total type A who are like the brightest and the best want to work there. So that's one approach and that's high stress. But Toyota does that in the low stress way. And that is what we are trying to do and train our team members to continuously learn. it's an, and I think somebody observed that it's creating a learning organization. So that's one more thing what we are doing. And that, that just happened as a by-product, but I think that's equally important. So that's what is lean. So, and I've tried to explain that in a, it is simple, but it's not simple either. It's pretty complex. how does that, you you first started explaining lean and then you started talking about the scientific method, the idea of experimentation, iterating and changing. How does that play out in the hiring environment? I think what I heard you talk about was maybe how it plays out in your work environment, but how does it play out? as you're trying to make placements in organizations? Yeah, so it's applicable in a lot of ways, okay? So one experiment is, let's say that you're trying to find a candidate for a given role. So you have a hypothesis that this person of this profile might work. And then you look for people of all those who are of those profiles. And that's an experiment you conduct and that doesn't work. And then you come up with a new hypothesis and then you test that. So this is just one aspect of where you're applying the scientific method. So it's the scientific method. It's like you're trying to see if this works. But actually this is an experiment within a bigger experiment. This person might get actually hired and so that fulfills the short-term experiment. But then that doesn't ensure or guarantee that this person will do an outstanding job. So the bigger experiment which is running is what kind of people really actually deliver an outstanding, do an outstanding job. What is it about then? And that experiment you can know only the results over the course of a year. And so it's a series of experiments. there's a small experiment. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, no, no. I was just going to shift gears a little bit to say, ask what you think are. one or two of the most critical first hires for a startup. So after you've done all the iterating and experimenting, what are in your experience, those key first couple of hires? I think for the first, if I were to look at in terms of traits, right? And I think, I think a few traits I think are very important. One I would say is that they have to be able to deal with ambiguity. They have to be able to deal with usually extremely demanding managers because startup founders are, they are very different. They are entrepreneurs, their bar is very high. So they have to be able to deal with, they have to have the people smart to work with people who are very different from what you normally come across in a corporate environment. I would say the third is the, think they need high agency and very high ownership. And of course, very hardworking, lot of energy to keep up with the founders who are who are very different, very hardworking, very high agency people. So it's a very, I would say it's a very, so I would say these are the traits. Plus they need very good technical skills. They need to be very good at their job. So it could be technical or sales or whatever, but they need to be very good at their job. So you gave me some great traits, but are there particular positions? that routinely your clients come to you and say, hey, Bala, we need X, we need Y as they are starting to grow their organization. Yeah. I think what's a big need across the board as I see is full stack engineers. People who can do everything, which is like they can do what is that in the front end, like a good interface. They can do the backend. They can do AI nowadays. Yeah. So I think that's the biggest thing need which we are seeing. Full stack engineers is what is. really in big demand who can do pretty much everything under the sun. are you feeling, given some of the changes in our immigration posture, are you feeling any pressure or experiencing challenges in your business with respect to recruiting engineers to staff ⁓ these customers? ⁓ absolutely. That's been a, it's been a huge thing. I think this has The immigration challenges have, I think they have shrunk the pool of people. I think engineers are becoming ultra cautious. They are, they don't want to jump unless they feel all the immigration issues are going to line up. And I think the demand has been higher than never before because especially with, especially for these early engineers, I wouldn't say it's across the board, but these early engineers who have these very unique traits, which we spoke about earlier. I think those people are very few. think so. And I think the immigration is adding a huge bottleneck to that. So I think the supply has fallen dramatically, but I think the demand has remained the same. I think with AI, there are a lot of AI startups who are trying to apply AI, but the supply has dropped dramatically. That's what I feel. That's really fascinating. When you think about your work now with the challenges of trying to find the expertise when the demand is still there. What are some of the things that excite you right now about your business and working with startups? I think what is most exciting is we get an opportunity to work with some of the most driven and most brilliant people, both as clients and as candidates. It's an exceptional pool of people. It's like they are among the smartest, brightest, driven, most optimistic. So it's a very rare pool. It's not the pool which we come across on a day-to-day basis. is the ⁓ pool which is creating tomorrow. This is the pool of people which is creating the future. Very interesting. Very interesting. As you think back on your entrepreneurial journey, how have you balanced building your business versus, you your personal goals. You mentioned, you know, you've been married for a good period of time. How have you managed to keep all of those balls in the air while you build? No, I think I've by and large failed at it in the sense that I don't think I give, I don't think I'm able to give enough time to my family and you know, I think it's just the time goes in work. I think, I don't think there is any work-life balance in that sense. I'm working most of the time. So that's the reality. So in fact, it's a lot of work. I don't think there is any work-life balance. but yeah, I do work, but I do also participate in larger debates. So I think I don't balance my time that well. In that sense, I think it's a personal failing, but yeah, that's what it is. Well, you could say it's a personal opportunity. Maybe not a failing, but a personal opportunity, there's still a chance for it to recover. Yeah, maybe. Yes. Yeah. So just a couple more questions for you. And it's one that I ask all of my guests. When you hear do small business like a big boss, what does that mean to you? What it sounds to me is like, it's something like getting ideas from big business, which are used by big business and applying that to a small business. That's what I read it as, I understood it as. That's my understanding of it. Fair enough. Fair enough. Now, where, if people wanted to get in touch with you or with the company, where can they find you? Yeah, it's novogil.com. That's a website. N-O-V-O-G-U-I-L-D.com. My name is bala at novogil.com. My email is bala at novogil.com. They can also find me on LinkedIn. Bala Vishwanath or Balachander Vishwanath. Either way they can find me. yeah. They can find you. Although there, I think that there is another Bala, because when I was just trying to do some research. Yeah, yeah, With a similar last name. So when you're out there researching and looking for Bala, make sure you get the right one. But Bala, I want to thank you so much for your time today and your openness in sharing your journey with both of your organizations. And for my bosses out there, you know the deal. Build that dream messy, build a dream scared, just don't build it small. If you liked this episode, please support our growth by liking and subscribing. and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you so much Aisha for having me. Thank you.