Sleeping in Parking Lots to $250M+ Revenue: How Handshake Built Gen Z's Career Platform, Inside its Fast Growing AI Data Labeling Business, Scaling a Three-Sided Marketplace, How AI Changes Hiring

19:23Turner Novak:Yeah, what's sort of the current state of the business? I know you've, I've listened to some of the stuff you've done recently. It sounds like the numbers keep changing. Maybe this is going to be changed. This is going to be bigger by the time we publish. But what's kind of the current state of Handshake? The numbers keep on doubling, correct? Like this last month with the industry news, there's been an incredible amount of demands. Our team has grown from, we'll go from zero to hundreds of people that work on this business. The revenue will grow as a combined entity to be like far over 250, 27 million dollars this year.

19:56I think that that forecast will just continue to raise at a warming rate. Every month we have set out and basically said, what is the most aggressive hiring plan that we should build against? And every month we've been wrong. So we started - Like on the upside? We've been wrong and it's been far bigger. Like right now we have more demand than we can fulfill. We just turned out a$15 million project yesterday. We are turning away work. Because we want to make sure that we follow through on our brand promise in the space, which is like treating fellows super well. Never over committing to labs and producing the highest quality data and being transparent on what we can actually take on.

20:42So much of this industry, it was a little bit, it's just, you know, we think it's really important to like, do what we say we're going to do. Do a, you know, kind of under promise and over deliver. and so yeah we're extremely thrilled about the progress we're making as a business and you know this long-term opportunity is a race towards like over a billion dollars revenue human data i think what's often lost though when you think about the human data factory business is how this is connected to our actual core marketplace and so it's like the really the long-term opportunity is building the like place and platform that people turn to to upskill and reskill themselves in this new economy.

21:22It's helping higher education think through and evolve in the way that they repair their students from college to career. There's a whole, I mean, we have 70 % of the portion 100 pays for the product. So they're coming to us and saying like, how do we upskill our students? How do we upskill our young grads inside the company? How do we think about like the changing type of roles that will evolve and like how we could better prepare our students? So like there's a lot of spend going across higher education from the employer side, from the labs. And I think it's using the human data business to like advance all those efforts.

21:56Turner Novak:So if I'm building a recruiting business, like what are the KPIs that kind of matter? Is it like job listings? Is it number of interviews? Is it jobs place? Just like how do you think not from like a financial performance, but like a product and like health of the marketplace? What are the things that actually matter? Yeah, we have three like North Star Bowls inside the business. They were being very consistent over time. I mean, a lot of this really interesting because then like sequencing, right? So it's, you know, like order of what you do, what you do. Yeah. Because I signed up all the schools in the country, then it was building a big employer business and probably commoditized.

22:28And then the future is all about consumer. Right. And, but those three doors are goals are a fucked it in the company. It's like, then the number one goal is. Engagement. You know, we track DAU, we track MAU, we track, you know, D7, D30, D90. We trap all like normal consumer metric, but engagement is the number one North Star of the marketplace.

22:48Turner Novak:Do people turn though? Like you get a job and you're like, oh, I don't need handshake anymore. Like how do you keep people around? Oh, there's so many alumni that use handshake. I mean, if you, it's, story's kind of as old as time in technology. It's like, if you, if you do, if you grow up with young people, right? Like take like Apple products, like Apple is super focused on getting their products engaged in elementary middle schools. and they graduate and they go work at like a top bullish market like bank and they get handed to PC and they're like what the hell is this right like you think about like Google like really trying to have a way to like invest in Google Docs across so you go from like high school and college with Google Docs and you go into like a big bank and they're like you're sharing around version V13 of an Excel model what the hell is this right so you know this idea of you like you know capturing your heart mind and their trust early in their journey.

23:39What we see is that when students come in freshman year and we're successful in freshman year, sophomore year, junior year, senior year, is that they use Handshake out to college. So the highest level vision we have is going bottoms up against LinkedIn and taking people from 18 all the way to 30. And we're beating them at college. We're beating them with first job. And the long-term dream of Handshake is to build the global kind of career discovery, exploration, knowledge worker, like platform to find jobs. And there's like, if you think about it, like Indeed and LinkedIn, there's, you know, 20 plus billion dollars a year spent across both those platforms.

24:17Yeah. Yeah. So there's a huge economic opportunity, obviously, to build a business. But there's also a lot of like more quality that we can build in this process as well. And it's not shouldn't be so related on like who you know, or getting lucky or, you know, what school you go to, but it should be rooted in like your actual skills.

24:34Turner Novak:So I know with, we've talked a little bit about AI and just like the, the sort of like the business opportunity for handshake and like the product. But how do you think that, I don't know, is it going to be harder or easier to get jobs with AI? Like our career paths going to change? Like, I don't know how much you thought about that, but for like, for someone listening to this, they might be trying to get their first job and they've seen the headlines of like, you know ai's removing 80 of jobs or whatever the crazy number is um how do you kind of think about it at handshake or from you personally like how do you think people's careers are going to change or the job market's going to change i mean what we hear from we're at the benefit of working with you know a million plus employers we hear from our employers especially our large employers is that it's you these young people have an opportunity to almost bring themselves it's like these digitally enabled like iron man suit equates ai native so he's like super smart just like they know all the tools i was just talking to an engineer on our team yesterday an intern works on a mobile team and he had his first pr up in two days and he like put all record base in a cursor and was like you know he's a young crack software engineer right yeah like if you were trying to do this three years ago and you were coming on out ai tools like it took much longer to ramp yeah you You have to, like, I mean, even if you go back, like, 10 years, you have to, like, read the entire code base.

25:54Turner Novak:Oh, right. You have to maybe, like, learn new programming language or something. Yeah. Learn the job. Yeah. But I have a PR and how to, like, get my demo environment working, right? So, it's like, I mean, I remember at Palantir when I interned there, it was like, it was much, I had to get my first PR up in the first two days. So, I think that young people, take, like, social media market and, like, you're using Dolly, right? Like, you're building images. You're, like, experimenting with campaign analytics and uploading that all the GPT. like, you know, you really have an opportunity. And I think young people are far better at this than old people.

26:23And so that's the way you're for companies. It's like, you know, yes, certain job roles will go away over time. And I think that always happens in a technology shift and people will adapt. But the opportunity in many fields is to be like the young AI equipped, craft, you know, employee that is, has the power of five employees working for them using these AI tools. Yeah. I've been trying to immerse myself in it more, But I think it's harder when you're, I'm 34, I'm married, I have kids.

26:51Turner Novak:Like, it's just a little bit more difficult to immerse yourself in that than when you're in college, you're 19. You can spend all your time learning this stuff. So yeah, I've been trying to like, there's, I think there's this one that's called Gum Loop. It's like an automation, like you can string different tasks together and like run almost like autonomous jobs, like automatically recur and do things. That's how it's been explained. You're like, sounds pretty cool. Like, I gotta figure, I gotta figure this thing out. but it's like man i need to like have the time i need to like ask my wife it's like hey can i spend six hours on saturday and just like do this so it's i feel like it's a taller taller ask when you're when you're older yeah so young people have the advantage do you have any advice then for somebody who is like 23 22 21 trying to get their very first job it's the same advice as like I mean, quite consistent over time, which is like, you know, purse, you use handshake.

27:44Turner Novak:Great advice. I mean, for sure. There's so much to learn from like upperclassmen and alumni, like groups to join people. You can message content. You can digest like we've got so much content from like, how do I build a resume to like, how do I think about like different employers in my industry to like, what's the day in life look like to like, what is actual skills I need in my job to what classes should I had cake in or be more successful you know what cities are cool right like so i i think there's just so much out there that just demystifies this experience for students and allows them to like discover discover and explore different paths i think i think getting a bolt on campus and trying to build experiences you know professional experiences that all you tell your story effectively is huge, right?

28:33Like I was in the, you know, IT oxygen enterprise on campus, right? I was in the association of computing, you know, technology, like getting involved on campus and getting closer to alumni and employers, warning for peers is huge. Most of that content ends up like falling back into handshake. So if you're more passive, and maybe, you know, a little bit, you know, concerned about your time on campus, I can just watch them for a phone video or participate in groups and be a lurker. A lot of students are lurkers in the network, as you might imagine, in a social media platform. And then I really encourage people, I think also people don't realize how many jobs they can apply to learn to be successful.

29:10I think this idea that you're just going to apply to one or two or three jobs, we see in the numbers so that you have to apply to far more jobs in order to be successful. And that's okay. You're going to do a bad job on certain interviews. Stay confident. Get inspired. Be persistent. and like power for it.

29:29Turner Novak:I've kind of experienced this a little bit or picked up on this. Luckily, I don't have to actually apply for jobs myself right now, but it sounds pretty brutal from what I've heard. It's like there's a job that gets posted on LinkedIn and because of AI, there's just hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people that apply to it. It just makes it super easy to apply. And then it just makes it impossible on the employer side to stay on top of things. So there's just so much competition. Hence my marketplace exists on the internet. Yeah. Right? Like, you know, in the future world, like that's the definition of marketplace, right?

29:57Too much noise, right? How do you find signals to match more effectively? And that's what we're really good at at Handshake. Like if you talk to young people in America, Handshake's like the preferred platform they're using. Their time, their valuable time is more effective spent on Handshake than India or LinkedIn.

30:13Turner Novak:Really? And that's because it's higher signal. The, you know, we drag out the future. It's like, yeah, but like, you know, in this world that could possibly, you know, we'll see inevitably happen is like a job seeker has an agent and a company has an agent and there's just more delays than ever, right? It's like agents talking to other agents, right? So what is the definition of like a high quality marketplace? It's provided opportunities to, you know, use signals and data to incentivize better outcomes on both sides of the marketplace. So just beyond jobs, like how do you think AI will impact marketplaces?

30:50Turner Novak:So it just like makes the supply demand discovery happen more efficiently what you think about how broken this is right now like we just talk about indeed it's like yeah you know you should pull it up on your phone it's like i'm imagining i don't want to imagine you're like a marketing major it was like two years outside of school and you went you're from michigan so let's look at general motors right yeah you know that's like the dig three right so you're like a jet you know you want to get a job you know you're working at a tier three automotive distributor and you want to get a job at general motors right it's like, yeah, what, what experience do you actually have to share?

31:23Like you studied market, you went to Grand Valley state, right? So I was like, you studied market Grand Valley state.

31:28Turner Novak:I learned the five Ps in my marketing class. And I don't even remember what those stand for. Right. So it's like, you know, you don't know the universe of companies still apply to you. Oftentimes you're trying to figure out what does it mean to be a product marketing manager? Because you're already two years outside school. And what's it mean to be a product marketing manager? What's it mean to be a performance marketer? What's it mean to be, you know, work in marketing operations? Like what platforms did they use? Like, what type of company is cool? Should I go to big company, small company? Should I go to Michigan, right?

31:55Like, you go on to Indeed, and it's like, you tend to marketing, and you just get like, you know, I'd said it earlier, but like, tens of thousands of jobs, it's like, totally broken. And so you think, I mean, that is so different than the consumer expectations that everyone has on other platforms. So, you know, in the future on Handshake, you imagine a world where you're like, talking to an agentic, like, video AI interviewer who's collecting information and coaching through this process. It's actually performing tasks or doing work simulation to actually prove skills. I mean, it's just like you get way more into it, but I think that what Handshake is heavily invested in is making this the best use of your time when you're trying to discover, explore, or apply to jobs for your first job, second job, third job, or your first internship.

32:42And also, talk about the way the Marvel boys used to work Okay, you know, at Grand Valley, GBSU, how many companies recruited at GBSU in there? Maybe like single digit thousands, right? Fast forward today, GBSU, Handshake's a proud partner at GBSU. Like there's probably over 300 ,000 companies that recruited the network. So we're able to help people bridge across geographies. Maybe you're like a small chiropractic clinic in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It's a real customer of ours. You log into the self-service product. You don't even know what school. You don't care what school you're recruiting from.

33:14You just want to find the right power of a practice student, right? So, you know, historically, you had to like go into a list and select each one of the schools. And now we're just like, yeah, now you're able to like target students, maybe that went to school initiative and that grew up in Wyoming. Maybe students want to move to the Mountain West, right? And actually indicate interest. So this, indeed, the LinkedIn are like so far behind the ball. The matching for early careers, that's why people trust us.

33:42Turner Novak:Interesting. And it's kind of fascinating that if you and me were sitting here today talking about this and we're like, let's start a company, like we probably couldn't just do this. Like you kind of need the groundwork all laid. You kind of spent the past decade plus building this all. You basically, you're like building this startup inside of a startup. You have like some people, it's almost like it sounds like a skunk's work, skunk works type of project. How do you balance it? Like you got it all started, but like it sounds like. like how do you how do you have you approached all this well i don't know if it starts ever in balance so balance might be a tough word for us but how do we how do we figure it all out i mean a like the people on you know they worked in handshake are like you know super committed i think a really strong team that's built in our core business our core business is roughly like Like, you know, 600, 650 people globally.

34:37And we've really been successful, like, operationalized in our core business. We have probably 200 plus people in go to market, you know, 200 plus engineers. Like, people, we know the metrics that matter. We know how to plan annually, like, execute quarterly, like, balance the week. And we need to get done with the quarter. Like, have a strong goal setting process. we have strong leaders across the business. And so, you know, and there's so many things that matter in our core business. Like, you know, at some point in this year, we've had like a million dollars a week in self-service revenue. And like, there's a whole team laser focused on self-service revenue.

35:16There's a whole team laser focused on DAU. We run, you know, hundreds of events across the country with our marketing team. So I'd say like, you know, over the last 10 years, we've really figured out how to like operationalize our core business. And this new business that we started inside the handshake, Kinshiki AI really got started like completely outside of that. So I've been able to use some of my like really strong executives time and like guidance and pinch hitting. But I built a totally separate team that basically just rolls up directly to me and is able to operate in a more like zero to one capacity than our existing core business, which is, which just looks very, is a very different level of maturity.

35:57Turner Novak:So you'd recommend if I'm, if I'm trying to do something similar, it's not try to borrow people that are also working on the core business. It's actually your new dedicated thing is this new project. I don't think you can split. Uh, I think that's the general abundance from like all founders is they, they build like a seal team sex or pick your analogy, like your all-star team. Uh, they hire, they pull over people from assisting business. I mean, we have a total descent of all-stars in our core business too, but like this is everyone wakes up every in the day, they only think about Hinching AI.

36:27Over time, even right now, like the team's grown to over 50 people. Like we're now starting to think about integration points across the product and like really trying to be thoughtful around like how can we connect the student experience? How can we connect the agentic AI interviewer? How can we connect our like skills assessment or work simulation into our core product offering and launching that across hundreds of thousands of companies? So there's now becoming like, you know, kind of do working groups or task forces that are focused on how to leverage, you know, the entirety of what we built to grill all the metric of Caradot.

37:02Turner Novak:It's crazy. I think, so I think the thing we should really talk about now is going back to the early days of Handshake, because I don't, I don't think any of this would be possible without all the early work you did in the first kind of decade of the business. So going, going back, we both grew up in Michigan. Yeah. Where'd you go to school? I went to Oakland Community College. I went to Birmingham, Seaholm. Went to Covington. Went to Michigan. Corton to Covington. Covington to Seaholm. Seaholm to Oakland Community College. Oakland Community College to Michigan Tech. And then dropped out of Michigan Tech.

37:34Turner Novak:You didn't actually finish? Unfortunately not, no. And then, so what was that first kind of like job or internship that you got when you were at Michigan Tech? That first big one. First internship I got was at Los Angeles National Arts. Is that related to NASA? It is connected to, it's actually on the DOE side, Department of Energy. NASA's in different departments. Department of Energy, there's three labs, the Lawrence Livermore in Los Alamos. At the time, they ran the fastest supercomputers in the entire world. I worked in a team called HBC5, which is high performance computing team five. High performance computing was focused when we were doing like in memory, InfiniBand, like benchmarking, essentially.

38:18Turner Novak:What does that mean? The team that I worked on, I mean, think about the core goal of Los Alamos. And I think they might say it publicly differently, or there might be a bit of a spin to it, but the core of Los Alamos' job when I was there was to ensure that the nuclear stockpile was ready. And because you cannot test nuclear weapons, these large supercomputers were being used to do physics simulations around the readiness of the nuclear arsenal. The reason there's three labs is because Sandia, Los Alamos, and Mark Livermore, the president or the powers that be, wanted an independent opinion across three labs.

38:56And like consensus would win, right? So like labs were purpose built to basically encase there were spies or any type of nefarious activity. Like there were supposed to be three objective opinions and consensus would win on what the stockpile was ready.

39:09Turner Novak:So if someone had infiltrated one of them and sabotaged. This is on my pay grade. It sounds like it, yeah. I'm like, definitely, that's the core, right? And there are so many brilliant PhDs that work across many other areas of scientific research at this intersection of, like, government interests. HPC-5 was what was some, like, new computing paradigms that could improve the performance of these large supercomputed clusters. And we're talking about, like, an order of magnitude, like, hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of dollars spent on each one of the supercomputers, about one a day. One of my buddies that worked there actually ended up becoming the co-founder of ICI, the guy that ran all the clusters over there.

39:49Andre runs all their computing infrastructure. So needless to say, these people are the best in the world at running the most sophisticated compute clusters of our time. And that internship was just like radically changed my life. I mean, it was an incredible opportunity to get exposure to, we grew up in Michigan, like I'm not making fun of Michigan, but like this was working with the smartest minds from the top PhD programs at MIT and Carnegie Mellon and Princeton and Stanford. and I got exposure to people that were extraordinarily driven and hadn't had really like incredible careers and internships.

40:30And they were like, dude, you gotta, you know, I was a pretty heartbreaking guy and pretty energetic. And they're like, God, break out and suck a battle. I like got a coworker startup. So I started like researching startups and I really fell in love with Palantir. This was back when they were like, you know.

40:47Turner Novak:Was this like 2012, 2011? Yeah, I think that's right around the timeline. Yeah. So I got my internship, my sophomore year there. And I read this post by Shao Shankar, the CEO of I think it's the president of Palantir. It was talking about how software nerds equated if Lord of the Rings, you can still see the post on Quora, could make an impact on the world. And I was really attached to how can you make an impact by being a software engineer. And they said it was the hardest internship to get. Only the best of the best. Was this Palantir that would say that? that reality was like go get public that's such great marketing it's like we only hire the best like it like attracts people yeah it was epic and so i like was dead set on like working there and i was applying and like cold emailing and how'd you how'd you get through like how'd you yeah no response no response i got extraordinarily lucky one of the recruiters had worked at sandia national laboratory and he knew how elite the program was at hbc5 uh breaking to hbc5 was like from michigan tech was also like a total anomaly that i was able to break in there how'd you do that one i followed the co-founder of xii rossardine who had gotten that internship the year before and he had hustled his way in he's like he's extremely like resourceful so he'd hustle the and then I was, you know, like a superstar freshman and was able to break in there too.

42:15So I went to work at, you know, Palantir. That was extremely life-changing. Like, you know, flying out to D.C. They're like, you know, just to tell some jokes about, like, you know, they pick you up in, like, a chauffeured car. And I never forget, like, and telling my family about, like, you know, A, they're, like, fooling you out. And they pick up a chauffeur car. and you know i love this joke boy my dad's like man this like nurture you're doing is like really working out like chauffeur cart the airport is insane it's like some fbi stuff yeah i was like you like used to ground me for being on the computer and like i told you this would work man yeah and so i i flew out there i got the internship pallet here and didn't you like

42:55Turner Novak:wore a suit and tie to the interview or something like that you said oh yeah i was i i didn't know i was like right no it's okay i actually my my first went to the store in houghton and like we like bought new clothes. I was like so valid. I was so nervous. And I'm super grateful that they gave me an opportunity there. I mean, the people I work with ended up pretty cool. Like, you know, right next to our office was like Matt Grimm, co-founded Andrel. Like, you know, Trey Stevens, who's, you know, co-founded Andrel as well. And like, he's a prolific partner at Founders Fund. Like, you know, I get to work with incredibly, I mean, I didn't work directly for them.

43:29I worked on projects for Matt Grimm, but I got, keep the cool thing about Palantir is they like they took a bet on people and if you did a great job like you could take on more and more like i also got to work on team rubicon which is like a veteran organization i actually went to hurricane i think it was a hurricane sandy what it was like lived out of like a gymnasium with a bunch of like military vets oh i'm building software to help them do disaster response so like but the core thing with palantir was just learning that like young people talented people could like do anything you know you could just i got flown to hurricane sandy and like they're like figure it out and i like figured it out right and like you know that was the whole ethos of palanteering after that internship i helped a bunch of my friends get internships there and and full-time jobs so ross went to go work at palanteer a couple other friends did from Michigan Tech.

44:28And I became like super frustrated with how unfair it really was on what school you went to and what jobs you get. And how so much of that process is kind of just connected to like your family and like the net worth of your family and the connections your family or what city you grew up in or what city your school was in. And so I was like, well, maybe I could. And now all these Stanford kids starting companies at Palantir, like maybe I could start a company in Michigan attack and we started building handshake with nights and weekends in the library with a group of friends and 10 years later turns out just like calentier you know you apply yourself for a long

45:06Turner Novak:period of time like yeah you can kind of reorient the world the way you want it to be so that was kind of like the early business model then was like okay i'm realizing that i can make five grand ten grand referring friends to work at this tech company there's a business here potentially it And then I kind of like put you down this path. It's just so broken, right? Like the way that the tools that we use, the students, the funding groups and jobs, some like Facebook groups, talking to other interns. So, but now I do it. You learn more information like hackathons, different schools. You know, every campus we visited, we were trying to build this business, had like a different set of information that was helpful.

45:49You know, if you went to University of Michigan Engineering Program, you had more opportunities in Chicago than at Michigan Tech. So like, I just, I thought that we can really like build a product that makes this a lot better for all sides. And that's the story of Mark Bysick, three sides, right? You have to make your course successful, you have to make university successful, you have to make students successful.

46:08Turner Novak:So why couldn't you just go direct to students and just say like, I'll help you get jobs? Yeah. Like what was the, did you try that approach? We did try that approach. the reality is like and there's been like 50 competitors over time that have tried this as well and it all gone to zero every year BC is left to invest in one or two others and they always go to zero so I'd be excited to follow somebody that figures out how to go D to C like be amazing but it'd be you know and if you did do that we're going to copy you and figure it out faster than you will so I wouldn't raise any funding to try but the the the the tough thing about building marketplace is like there's a chicken and egg problem right like you need you need employers to recruit students and you need students to recruit employers it's a classic like normal marketplace challenge and seeing that marketplace and you need to an upscale to change behavior of both sides is like remarkably challenging in this industry we identified early on that universities were you know they're they have a whole team focused on how to help students navigate into career and like to get prepared to meet companies.

47:19And those universities were using like really intricate systems that powered that program. So I always started building products for universities as like the kind of the center of the marketplace. And in helping them, we get access to help all their students and we get access to all the employers that recruit through that campus.

47:40Turner Novak:Was there like a specific thing that they, that wasn't good about the software? Like, was it just old software? It was bad, man. It was like just, these old systems are just like, these are legacy private equity, fifth owner backed, like offshore software engineered over 10 years, like system of records. It was just like textbook garbage software. So then how did you first start getting connected to customers? Because I think for somebody who doesn't know, you talk about Michigan Tech. For somebody who doesn't know where that is, Michigan is in two peninsulas. So there's the bottom part. There's a top part.

48:24Turner Novak:Michigan Tech is like the most like remote furthest away from any other part of America in Michigan. Like it's literally almost. It's basically with Canada. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say it's like. It's in Canada, essentially. I think if you actually looked at like latitude lines or whatever, like it actually might be north. Is it north of like the. They're on in Minnesota too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like pretty much as far north as you can go without going to Alaska. 300 degrees of snowfall. Yeah. You bring your hockey skates to class. You can play like hockey. Did you ever take like a snowmobile to class?

48:55Turner Novak:I didn't take a snowmobile though. Okay. I did cross country ski class. Okay. Yeah. I don't know if I mentioned we were recording, but my brother went to Michigan Tech. So I've been up there. It's a hike. we actually drove once when my brother graduated we drove my wife was pregnant driving up and it was like us two in the very back seat of a car with like mom grandpa grandparents cousins etc like it was eight hours yeah it was about eight hours well it was in it was in December because he grew I think he was graduating in December so it was like it was snowing so I think it was like a 10-hour drive yeah it was it makes sense yeah so like how did you start talking to customers then if you're just like you're completely isolated from the rest of the country every other school we had to drive the schools like because you you sort of snuck into some career fairs right what was that whole story yeah yeah i mean i think we realized pretty early on that in just reading like on the internet how you like watch like the peter teal startup school class at stanford that might come out in like 2012 2013 so he got talked to a lot of customers because you watch every episode of that i think yeah yeah i read like every poll point blog post this is like now there's like been a democratization of like information but early y commonerity is like really ended up democratizing it i know being rejected from yc like i don't really applied like two three times got rejected every year still sad about it but that's all right and you know but we read everything on yc and all the blog posts and they just were prolific around talking to customers knowing your customers better than of your mouths yeah and so yeah we you talked about how far Michigan Tech was away like I had the year we drove down like literally I mean I heard dozens and dozens of dates I went from like a 4.0 GPA to basically almost failing that school I got to put on academic probation my freshman or my my the first semester of my senior year and then ended up dropping on second semester because we were just on the road and we used to go to like central michigan western michigan milwaukee school engineering near wisconsin madison and these are all like eight hour drive six hour drive but yeah that was just in michigan but then we drive on like wake forest we drove to princeton we drove all the way down to florida we drove up to denver like and we just visited schools is that how did you get into career fair because i've gone to a career i've actually gone as an employer once like they don't just let you in like how'd you get in you can sneak in do you what did you pretend to be a student or not for sure no first yeah you just say you like to have it like you're like a bad check-in and you just like come in or the employers are coming in and just like pretend to have some resumes like wear a suit like you're a kid and i remember like grabbing like passes you know i have a lane yard so i'll be trashy i mean you just sneak in you're not in the trash yeah but it's like it's not that hard to get a career okay fair but yeah we would talk to employers and At the career fairs, we're a huge forcing functions because you've got to learn from other students.

51:50You've got to talk to employers. Oftentimes, we talk to the university when they're actually pretty busy during career fair week. So it was hard to speak to the university after it was done off cycle. But it was through all those conversations that we really started to understand how to put together this marketplace. Because in order to launch at the first school, we had to have an entire employer product built. We had to have an entire student product built. and went to have like enough functionality to replace the system they'd used for like a decade. So it was actually, we worked on this like sophomore year, junior year, senior year.

52:21And then, you know, took us the first six months after school to sign up our first five customers.

52:26Turner Novak:And you would, so you would like go to, you'd go up to a recruiter pretending to be a student and you'd get an interview. The best was at Michigan Tech. Because I was like, I had pretty legit resume at four point on GPA. Like, so everyone wanted to talk to you. At one point, I think I still remember I know it's a little weird, but I had like 18 interviews. Like you're going around campus, like with that, you know, zero blocks in between like late to the interview. And then you just like flip the script. You got, you know, the big tongue about yourself. Actually, no, you tell me about yourself.

52:54Like how do you recruit from students? How'd you pick Michigan Tech? What systems do you use? How do you think about the cost to acquire each student? Like, how do you think about like the efficacy of events and ROI? Like, you know, how do you run your target school strategy? and would you mind talking to me again? I mean, I was built a lot more important now. Like, can I talk to you again about this? Yeah. I remember like spending money, like hosting like a cocktail hour and my first like event, you know, I don't even know if I could drink that then, but like we're at the Keweenaw Brewing Company.

53:26Keweenaw Brewing Company, you know, outside of Michigan Tech Career for inviting like recruiters to come. And I remember being super disappointed because you had to like buyout, but then you and like basically nobody showed up. So yeah. Hopefully our events are more successful now, but at one point you do everything.

53:42Turner Novak:And what were you doing? You were flying around the country, staying in fancy hotels. We didn't mind. So what'd you do? I mean, when we were driving to schools, we just stopped to have a car. We had this like, you know, salvage title, Ford Focus that my dad helped buy because my tree kept on breaking down. and we my co-founder ben and i would just drive to new jersey tried to denver drive down and we we'd sleep at the back of like you know it's pretty back then like now nowadays like starbucks is the ideal place to work from the internet's the best than starbucks but i backed that it was mcdonald's at like nationwide broadband all like the mcdonald's locations so you just like sleeping back in the parking lot and you had great wi-fi and yeah a couple couple of police knocks you You know, you get like a tap cap from a flashlight at night.

54:36Like, what the hell are you doing here? Yeah. And you're like, whoa, you know, we're students and we're like driving universities, like some of the software. You know, you never get trouble from cops when you're like, previously try and sell career service center software.

54:47Turner Novak:They're like, okay, get out of here. They're like, okay, like you'll be gone by tomorrow morning, right? Yeah. So then how did you fund all this stuff? Because you didn't have any customers, didn't sound like you had a lot of money. Were you still like referring friends to Palantir? How were you paying for everything? It was like$700 on the house. so and I think there was like by the time we left there were probably 8 or 9 people that were living in this like it would be a stretch to call a free bedroom like somebody lived underneath the staircase like there were you know 2 people in my room so like I think it was like you know 8 or 9 people that lived in this house and then all my close friends basically took like I think like 15 grand 18 grand you know 20 grand like like a year a year yeah and the way to be fun of that was my dad he was like crazy man so because he worked in construction right yeah he worked really hard for work extraordinarily hard my entire life to be off by far family he's he's a pretty risk on guy and he he just like really was like i've never seen you be such a like psycho about like visiting all these universities like i keep that takes eight hours of drive to me and you're like driving to me sleeping at my house and like on the way down like North Carolina like it emits like your you know your school work and like what's going on and you're bringing like your friend you know Ben your co-founder and we would just drive we see people like aunts my uncles are friends like friends of his houses so he just saw me become like completely fixated on like this problem and he also got to follow some success like some of the schools said they were interested in the software and employers were just in the software he was friends with people like general motors had like oh campus creating such a pain and so yeah he like basically like funded us with all of his retirement money which is um kind of insane when you really step back that he was super insane i mean this isn't like this isn't yeah Yeah, extremely insane for a working class family.

56:54Turner Novak:Did he refinance the mortgage too? Yeah, I think he sold off a piece of property that he wanted to build a home on. That was like a long-term investment of his. He refinanced his house and pulled out money. I mean, he was a definition of a scone. And, you know, he's an under-ported kid. Does your dad have equity in the business? Yeah, he's done very well. He's now a part of a country club that drives a raked rover. so okay let's see it he's uh it's good big turnaround from like a 15 year old like rusted out like f-150 in like a red f-150 and then a white f-150 and he would like a clean it on the weekends but yeah big big he's pretty bra so then how did you get these schools to actually sign up like what was the process of like convincing them to talk to you once you got to the career fairs you're in front of like like how did you convince them to even take you seriously who they didn't take us seriously for a long time uh i mean a couple of fun entrepreneurs it's like you know everyone i thought they basically just wouldn't respond to our emails and take us seriously so a couple tactics to work like a cold calling was like super effective actually calling actually calling but what was most effective was like the probably the most successful thing we ever did early on was like sending a box to each university with a mug from each career service center director's alma mater so if you went to michigan it'd be a gold blue mug then we wrote a handwritten note and the handwritten note was like you're a hockey fan like or hockey fans like you go to church on sundays like huge church goers like just anything you pull you say you love vacationing in florida on facebook like you know actually i have family in port a big board of guys you know like just ridiculous letters yeah and ben told me last night that you would actually pay people on craigslist to write these because your handwriting was so bad boy there's also so many letters we had to write okay yeah my handwriting was bad a and b we probably sent like a hundred these letters and these letters are like dense like we hired good people on craigslist they like looked really sappy it was like 12.5 cursive it was great handwritten like novels on like full page so you went over up the box and take a mug on top of it could tell us this month and they had to put underneath handwritten letter like you gotta read the email letter yeah and underneath that was like a at midnight printed out the school computers like manila envelope you remember the middle on which you would turn score for this a clear cover on cop you had like punch it in three in the three hole punches it's like turning homer products it's clear on the top and underneath was then a picture of us we have like our photographer friend like take pictures and like the media whole time media lab so it's like a max in the back we bought track jackets from palantir because we like thought that was so cool super professional like those european like adidas yeah it was ridiculous it said you know strider corp the product was called trajectory but students could consistently call it spell trajectories we remade did handshake and and these boxes were a hit people were like i will send me this crazy box like i'll deep with you yeah so we're like we're not gonna meet with them on like webex yeah and we just get the car and drive you're saying so We put like, I mean, we must have put 23 ,000 miles in this car over like a summer.

1:00:19And we signed up five schools. And that was...

1:00:24Turner Novak:Out of like how many, how many did you have to talk to? Like drive to? I don't know how many we drove to. I mean, we were definitely talking like hundreds of schools. Not hundreds, maybe like 100 to 200 schools we were talking to. We got five to sign up. And it was also like a funny dance because you built this rapport as an entrepreneur of like okay like this kid's clearly smart he's like very earnest and he's like trying really hard yeah but he's also like just graduated not graduated like he's also like you know 21 22 years like he's younger than the people that you were helping get jobs and you're trying he's trying to sell you his product that was really tough because you basically like you had this a credibility gap right like so getting the first five schools signed out was almost like a dance like who's gonna do this first because if i can like say four of those people did it like then i will get fiery if it doesn't work yeah but man you know sarah otto eastern michigan university love me and love ben my co-founder even more and she and michael i think at hillsdale university so like there were two people that were just like we're in and then three others dialing the place now benton was like central michigan eastern michigan hillsdale college i think her name was and at Aquinas and that was it uh did you ever talk to Lori Staggs of Grand Valley or Troy Farley I know Troy Farley yeah I know text Troy Farley right now yeah oh nice yeah I haven't talked to Troy in a long time but I was Troy really grinding Mike you're really grinding it's pretty good he was like he's a business guy yeah he was like a business savvy they ended up tying up here too okay cool I'm glad they did because I probably missed Oakland University I mean I know all these people yeah okay interesting i mean will you you spend eight hours during your meeting with somebody driving and you're rimming it yeah yeah exactly you're like you're visualizing the meeting like you're going to talk to him for 30 minutes maybe an hour if you're lucky it's like i gotta like know everything about this person you almost like have to visualize how the conversation is going to go and like prepare what you're going to say in every situation and like know how to kind of control it to make it go the way you want yeah in that kind of a case yeah i mean it was the software was pretty impressive demoing it right the main thing we struggled with was that credibility because higher education was there like risk averse i mean we are we are the as of our knowledge in the overall university the fastest growing higher education company in like history we you know we powered 92 of the schools in the country so in order to do that like it was really you know you build up trust in this industry like these you know these are we have a whole like 50 person team that's focused on like the relationships and executive briefings, the trust building, building tools for them based on their roadmap or what they want to see.

1:03:02But getting people to take a leap early on, I think was the hardest part.

1:03:05Turner Novak:And so I know you mentioned Eastern Michigan was the first one. I know you had an issue with them when you went live. Like what happened? Oh, yeah. Well, anybody that builds software knows that demoing something and watch the video production are two very different situations. I think my co-founder Ben told you the story, but yeah, it was like things, things demoed well from our knowledge of how it would be used. But then when you launched five schools and put like, you know, 30, 40 ,000 employers, tens of thousands of students and like, you know, a hundred plus staff members on a platform, all like launching within the same, like two weeks.

1:03:41Like there were a lot of fires.

1:03:42Turner Novak:And you'd never done a lot. So you were just going. We launched all three constituents, all of one small in like a two week period. And so we just, yeah, so grateful and thankful to those customers that believed in us and helped us. Like they opened up their offices. We basically, all of us as teammates, like went to work from their offices so we could sit over their shoulder. And then probably the lowest sleep scores. This is pretty steep score tracking, but like low. It would have been, would have been pretty close to zero. Yeah. We were just always getting sick because it was just a couple years there where it's just like, you know, you're getting sick every other month because just not sleeping and grind.

1:04:21Turner Novak:It's kind of like the Ford deployed engineer model from Palantir. That's like more popular now, but I guess not as many people were doing it back then. Yeah. I hate to go on the pride of Uniford deployed engineer. Yeah. Is that what you did? Because you did that basically when you were going to like Hurricane Sandy, you said. Boat it. Interesting. Okay. You had an embarrassing email issue that happened too. I actually had an interesting email issue on my end. I'll tell you the story after you tell yours. But yeah, I'll know. So what happened with your email issue at the hackathon? Well, prior to launching the schools, we wanted to build more reputation with employers and with students.

1:04:54So we could prove that we have done a couple of things that was like, when we went to Sarah at Eastern Michigan, we're like, we've always run this. You could trust us.

1:05:04Turner Novak:We know how to send emails. Yeah, so we went to the UC Berkeley hackathon called CalHacks. This is in like many, like probably almost a decade ago. In the earliest movement of like hackathons. It was actually, the first hackathon was called mHacks. Like Dave Fontenot started that. Yeah, Dave's like a legend. Yeah, Dave was. He said, I know Dave. Well, everyone, you know, we're like being students together. We did mHacks, which gave us so much credibility to do CalHacks. And we had an emailing issue where... Essentially, amidst the career fair, like, I don't know, 11, 12, 1 a.m. in the morning, we sent like every single student individual, like hundreds of individual emails.

1:05:45We just had like a queuing issue with our mailgun API, which was like how you send emails. And we had enough domain authority to like send 300 emails. And it would hit their main inbox. Yeah, but not like in a nice way where it's a threat, like a separate individual email where it took you like five minutes to archive. okay and i you know i didn't have to do this but you know i thought about like ducking in a role and underneath my table and just like never never leaving this is super embarrassing oh because it was in the middle of the hackathon everyone was there and everyone's like what i mean respectfully like why is handshake emailing me so much i mean there were there were obscenities or different words being used but what we were we're luckily able to learn from that issue uh and yeah so i

1:06:29Turner Novak:I didn't not maybe sit similarly. One of the things that was kind of funny for a big developer was when you hit an API, it's now on their side. I remember calling my founder, co-founder Scott, and Ben at like, I don't know, we hours in the evening be like, so how many emails were sent and how many more are coming? They're like still coming through. He's like, I actually don't know. And I was like, well, can we like pay to get an answer? and he's like, well, that would cost, we'd have to upgrade to the enterprise tier to be able to have phone support. And I was like, well, don't think we have the money to do that.

1:07:07And he's like, so if you had to ask him, I remember he was, he's like, Garrett, there could be like hundreds of thousands of more emails coming, like we don't know. We're going to like find out at like 8 a.m. ET. And so the emails like ripped all night to everyone. I mean, people that were there at Berkwood, they'll remember it. Like it must've taken you like 10 minutes to go through your inbox.

1:07:27Turner Novak:So how often were you getting emails? Just every minute? like or every second. Oh, they actually could queue them up, right? We had enough domain authority to send them out and mail up on just like, you know, we, yeah. So it was embarrassing. That's crazy. Jim, mine, maybe not quite as similar levels of embarrassing. So when I was in high school, me and my friends, I had a website that I just like learned to code on, mess around. I just like would find like a PHP script, throw it up, make it work, like experiment with it, whatever, move on. And one of the things that I got in trouble with in high school was we'd always play games in class.

1:08:01Turner Novak:And so I found this proxy that wasn't blocked by the school where you could just go to the site, type in any URL and it would take you to it. So people would use to play games. People used to do other things, other nefarious things. I ended up getting in trouble for this. I got suspended for a day. They blocked, they blocked the proxy. The whole school knew that it was kind of me who like got everyone onto this. And then, so one of the things I started doing was I just take the games that my friends liked, I'd rip them and just put them on my website, which wasn't blocked. So a lot of people started going to the website.

1:08:29Turner Novak:One of the things that I had on the website was this like a PHP anonymous email bomber where you could send anyone an email from any address and say anything you want. You could send it as many times as you want. An alias. Yeah. And it was kind of like, this is kind of funny. I pranked a friend with it once and like that was it. And it was just still on the site. And so someone used it to send an email to a teacher from the principal saying that he was fired and sent it like 70 times. and instead it came from our website so it was like sixth hour into the day one day they called me and my friend down to the office and they're just like why'd you do it we we know what you did and i actually didn't know what happened yeah because me and my friend were like what is going on i remember i remember sitting there like it did the thing where like your head kind of starts to shake almost like yeah your eyes are just kind of like vibrating like and you're just like what is going on because like they're like you're expelled like you're not coming back and they They basically expelled us for a day.

1:09:23Turner Novak:We were able to prove the next day. We figured out what happened when we got home from friends, like what was actually going on. Then my friend's dad, he like went into the logs of the website and somehow proved that we didn't do it. I actually don't know. I should probably ask, like, what did you figure out that like proved you were innocent? So he like asked us to come back. They're like, we want you to start the computer club. like they're they're trying to like like you know uh butter us up and like make us you know happy again but yeah i had so many things like that in high school or i just you'd like you know the ms dos box would pop up when you start windows at some of those like high school or like college computers you'd like type something in and like hack it and like get a little fast drive you go to the bios if you like i need a launch like you blew two off a flash drive right yeah me and my friends are always getting in trouble for that stuff well nerdy kids so i guess like so so kind of like back to your story so you had you were signing up all these different schools how were you standing out against linkedin at the time because linkedin was like kind of around were people using linkedin or they're using indeed for sure i mean linkedin and you were her were if you think about it like when we get started like it's like your first question linkedin is like what's your job i don't actually have a job You build a profile and you're like, you go to the Instagram profile.

1:10:44Back then, it's like, you look cool. And you went on LinkedIn and you look like a clown.

1:10:48Turner Novak:Like a dishwasher at the whatever. I have an experience, right? So, it was really failing to meet the audience that we were targeting. And we believe that if we could engage people and go trust with them early, that they would stick with us over time. And that's like largely played out. And you didn't have a lot of customers. I know you were, there's a point like your dad was, he gave you the money. It's kind of starting to get tapped out. but you guys were kind of running out of cash. Yep. So what did you do? The only thing an entrepreneur could do, try to ping doctors and dentists that my dad was friends with.

1:11:19Turner Novak:So you were literally pitching doctors and dentists? Doctors and dentists in Michigan. I love manager. Hey, yeah. Fuck. Meftel Network's phone sales leader. Like, you know, at least we're like, big dogs, Michigan, dude. My dad's camera is networking. We're taking a conference room and I'm like pitching Handshake. Did you get a little bit of money from kind of the Michigan or not really? I didn't. We didn't. I mean, it was like, it was brittle trying to pitch doctors and that just all like a three-sided marketplace network that wanted to help students, university, employers. This was like, yeah, it's not going very well.

1:11:58And so if we were Silicon Valley and I, the whole team, I just goes like you guys, there was two, one fun thing. it's like wait it's no shade till he raised like my co-founders said they weren't gonna shade and they all ran the business and i flew to silicon valley and like was gonna go to the land of the brave where all the startups are and raise money and how'd it go not well you know took us i don't know six seven months like plus to raise money basically went through

1:12:33Turner Novak:all the connections from Palantir. So you were like basically friends from Palantir, like, hey, I'm trying to raise money. Can you help me? Yeah. And the problem was twofold. Well, one was everyone saying no, and two, I didn't have any place to live. And Palahanta said what you do. So I just was like living on friends' couches. But it was a little awkward when you ping your intern buddies, going, you know, you'd sit in my couch for like a night, two nights, maybe three nights. Then it gets a little weird. So then you like move to the next person, and they're like three nights. And then when you start like hitting the eighth round for like the tenth rotation of like three nights and it moves like one night, right?

1:13:08So you start with like three nights at everyone because everyone's gracious. Then you overstay your welcome and you move to like two nights and you move at one night. So, you know, at some points you're, at the end, you're like, some people are just like, no, right? Like this is a little bit weird. Like, yeah. They were nice about it. But one of my buddies is like, yeah, Alex Atala, who ended up in a state at this place a bunch of times. Kind of Andrew, who was the coolest friend of mine for many years. Like, well, they stay at their house. They were running a hacker house. But yeah, you just...

1:13:41It was not easy, right? Like, I think that's a story that a lot of people, you know, they just assume everything was, like, always great in a company like N-Chick. I mean, it's even still really already N-Chick, right? Like, take four years ago when we were, like, like, kind of is one off a cliff and growth is decelerated. We had to do two layoffs. Like, in, you know, people that we trusted and liked working with at the company, like, we had to move on with them and try to do as best we could to support them, like, reduce headcount. Like, you know, it's like a total thing from the outside. Everything just looks, like, awesome always.

1:14:13And it is pretty rapid, going zero to, like, hundreds of millions of dollars for revenue. Right? It's, like, pretty cool in the company right now. But, like, at every point, there's just, like, immense hardship. and you know you just have to be like very persistent and never quit and just keep on power through and that was you know i don't say the consequences were really high like you know i had all these buddies that had turned down all these jobs and yeah my dad had they'll worked extremely hard in construction to have this money and there wasn't really a viable backup plan for him and and for us and so we just had to keep on persevering and you know how many how many people said no wipe over on probably over on or 50 and it ends up and it ends up like and it ends up be like helpful for you as to end up be you care so much about what venture papalistic I see this pattern all the time like oh my gosh you're like NBA with your

1:15:08Turner Novak:two and twenty like you're so business genius sorry to make fun of you can actually hold that click goes viral because like you know they get to make like you know dozens and dozens of bets they clip like 500 $2 million a year minimum. They keep 20 % of the profits and they just get the best in the portfolio of companies. And like most of them like have never built successful businesses. Yeah, I mean, I understand. I love our board members. I love a lot of VCs. I'm friends with a lot of VCs. But like as an entrepreneur, you're going to get no, you know, I think like the core point, you know, I mentioned is that you care so much about what they think and all their feedback.

1:15:44And when they keep telling you, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You really, it really gets tough to have confidence. It really gets tough to maintain an independent you in the future. Like it really, you know, I was like, I don't know, 24, 23 years old. Like, and here I am, like, you know, I can't get, the doctors and dentists say this is dumb in Michigan. And then the smartest Stanford GSB, you know, that's a big deal. I'm like, you went to business school, but you're saying no. And then the entrepreneurs are saying no. it is super tough to just power through and i think every great entrepreneur almost every one of them they have that experience most of them do so it's and most of the bcs have empathy for it as well but um you know it's there was no choice but to make it work so how did how did you get through it i don't know the way i get through most things like you know 7 a.m this morning the line street steps like you know listening to gucci name and like a little lane you know like powering through three and a half hours of sleep last night like you know the way you get through most days like a work out in the morning you know some prayers like good music calls friends like yeah you know some tears you know many tears along the way like that's how you get through those

1:17:05Turner Novak:things and then i think you finally got someone to say yes what happened there uh tony schreider true ventures said yes super fast it's like amazing he like he's like this is a good idea i'm more words than that but like you should be dressed on our partners and i like met the partners like two more times now like we're in like well only around that 10 million dollar pre-money valuation and you'd like to put you know two million dollars in the company and then of course everyone else says yes right so you know that we had multiple term sheets FOMO and the NBA just love it and then we had multiple term sheets and we that went true we ended up pre and light speed as well, it would have been incredible they split the seed round and then the A was super hard as well but then after the A it was like pre-empt, pre-empt B, C, D, E, I got all multiple term sheets Was it that the spreadsheet looks good and you were like growing and if you have an MBA that looks good to you like is that kind of why it got easier I think all the many of the questions that BC's asked were all the right questions right it just you know it's just risk like and it was did sound crazy to be fair that's why I got rejected from YC so many times I mean you're gonna sign up like every school in the country no company's ever done that before you're gonna send them all fast no company's ever done that before and you have to like sign up every school in the country fast then you have to make money from companies and companies at the time there was like that total addressable market stories like a small tam right like there isn't that much money spent on campus recruiting so like i had to take an act one believe in the act one which is crazy and then like believe in the act two which you're going to make money from employers and then in order to this to be a public independent fast-growth company i have to believe that you're like you're going to grow with people from 18 to 30, right?

1:18:58So this was, you know, it was crazy. And I think that is, I mean, take all the crazy stories. You're going to build a bike that has a TV on it, and there's going to be a constructor named Alex Toussaint that like yells at you and like track watts with like Midwest ladies.

1:19:16Turner Novak:And then you're going to start, soon you're going to start like a treadmill and all these other fitness products. That sounds crazy, right? Or you're going to build like, you know, all the companies sound crazy. I think ours just sounded like it had never been done before, really. So it makes sense why they said no. What ended up starting happening is that we had de-risked, back to your question, we had de-risked these things. We had de-risked, we had signed up by schools and six in schools. We had companies that have told us how much money they would be spending on an inch. We added value for them.

1:19:41We started to have a ton of promotion from students, like in the product. So as the company got more de-risked and the revenue started to rip, the term she's bought in.

1:19:50Turner Novak:Nice. How much would a company pay? like a big corporation like a fortune 10 company like you paying like a million dollars a year for recruiting stuff yeah a million you never some companies like spend several million dollars a year we're in my people the biggest companies are low about a million dollars a year i think after you raised the seed around you moved to actually move from michigan to silicon valley right i know ben was on me last night that was sort of a debate what what did you kind of think through versus staying in michigan versus moving moving here he said it was a debate oh he said it It was a discussion.

1:20:21Turner Novak:You talked through it. I don't remember any much discussion. So it was just you have to move here. Oh, I guess you're right. We got money from a large Michigan family, prominent Michigan family. They want us to stay in the truck. This was the part of the seed round? It was part of the seed round, yeah. After I turned to the IBC, there was a large party in Michigan. Because it was the best thing that was very interested. And they wanted to build, I know, I can't poo-poo on Michigan. I'll go to Michigan. I mean, I live in Michigan, so I've stayed in Michigan. I guess I would just, to which I would respond, like, you know, yeah, it's pretty tough to build a prominent tech company in Michigan.

1:21:00Yeah. Go, Mike, I'm going to catch bullets if I go out and let you get any harder. But I thought it was evidently clear that if you wanted to really go for it and really make a huge impact on the world, that you lived in one place and one place only, and that was Silicon Valley. Okay. So what'd you do? we called my cousin who was a bartender and said dude you only like quit your job where you have like a lot of support tickets like will you drive a u-haul up to the upper peninsula michigan and like move all of our stuff and desks and stuff and so he quit his job bartending and went to the u-haul drew up the upper peninsula michigan uh we told true and light speed actually like i'm sorry i told you have a lot of money because paul graham says you're supposed to say you have a lot of money but we actually have no money and we're actually on one of our insurance card cards like would you mind before we close the docks wiring us like you know 25 grand 30 grand because we have to move across the country and we're out of money and to which life speaking true responded no problem they wired us money which is pretty awesome yeah so we bought flights my cousin packed up like you know all the fish had no i don't get taken out whisper this dish had all died and the fish wearing we had unfortunately got to feed them when people flew across the country.

1:22:14That was very depressing for my cousin. Gave him out of trouble for that. Packed up the house. He drove the U-Haul across the country and joined as our first support agent. And head of operations, we called him. His job was picking me up at airports when I landed at 1 a.m. Running all customer success. He also did all payroll. But yeah, we moved in this house in Palo Alto, which is also kind of funny because this guy, you know you think you're like sad that you're like everyone else like has hacker houses like i'm gonna have a hacker house and you like apply to live at the house and you're what do you do it's like oh it's just me in this man train you know you're like 22 like how many other people live here oh it's just me and my friend you know it was actually the co-founder of linkedin's house and he sure he sure must have known that we were going to run a hacker house out of his house but i was trying to be super like you know coy about life i promise you there's not like 25 people in your house is 24 yeah like and so yeah he he let us live at his house and then we just call up our michigan friends my sister's super social and she had like we hired out all her like social friends who are good at talking to people to like do sales and like customer service and stuff and sales like you know a lot of her friends joined the team we lived out this house now is our in los altos and then what what were some of the key product decisions that you think you've kind

1:23:40Turner Novak:of made over time like whether early early days or like as you guys scaled up like anything you think you really nailed of like this was just fundamental in the success yeah i think we what we nailed that easily could have made this business not work was like the sequencing of like focus and feel very thankful for our early capital partners and like believing in that sequencing because we moved from seed series A and series B, and we'd never really made much money from employers. It was like a laser focused on investing that capital into universities and into the student products. And now monetizing too early.

1:24:15And that took, I mean, raised three to 10 to 20, right? So it took$33 million of capital.

1:24:21Turner Novak:To get the schools, to get like the majority of schools. Yeah, and years and years and years. And we just say steadfast and focused on like just the schools and making them happy and building the best product for them. That then ended up being the conduit to then be able to have this larger network with employers and students. And schools were okay with us making money on it in a way as long as it didn't take away from student opportunities. So I would say the prioritization was super unique and many marketplaces think about that. Other maybe intentional product decisions, like it was always like students first.

1:24:54Like we always like had never compromised on making decisions that are the best interest stuff like job seekers and students at many times when it was very easy to do so like a lot of constraints run i believe state pretty like steadfast and i'm being always focused on providing value to students and employees

1:25:16we i think this like handshake ai is then like very intentional as well and like the way we're building the handshake product platform the alts platform the interview platform payments platform like very much in the lens of like how do we leverage all this all these problems to build like the best job marketplace national platform on the web and so the broader opportunity as i mentioned earlier for handshake is to be the place that people go to this new ai economy with the new evolving roles to learn skills to navigate their career and i think there's a ton of work that are putting in right now to like automating what i mean what is recruiting recruiting is sourcing it's screening it's scheduling these are like they're kind of like manual-ish tasks they're very rote tasks i think it's extremely you know the current state of reasoning models today can can can can do the vast majority of local critters do every single day and so it's building that really into a marketplace and a platform to help recruiters spend their time on better things like or to automate a lot of the recruiting efforts like you know we're really focused on that

1:26:28Turner Novak:so you're you're kind of like at this point so you kind of you mentioned a little bit earlier the different stages of the business it's like is sequence in a way you've gotten to this point now where you can build like a almost like full stack job software just like everything about it It's also about data. And then like, the more you have data around hiring outcomes, the more you have data around what interviews are good and not good, what the more you have data around like actual work simulation and being able to do really understand what like the skill taxonomy looks like and who has what skills like the more you have data, the more you can tune and improve these models and the better you can make experience for all sides.

1:27:05Like, I mean, at the highest level, like hiring someone is extremely imperfect. it and you know i don't know that posted a job recently but you're like you have hundreds and hundreds of applicants you're trying to find signal and most people derive signal by like but how does how does it work mentally it's like what school you went to what job you've been a part of right like turns out you'd be pretty successful if you can went to grand valley state university turns out you'd be pretty successful with the michigan tech like that wouldn't be the first two schools that come top of mind when you think about like a venture or capitalist or an entrepreneur.

1:27:36Turner Novak:Yeah. And so how do you help people understand like what signal is in the applicant pool? And I think AI like radically transforms companies' ability to find a stable and device. And I really identify employees that will not only like perform better, but stay longer. And like, that's what all companies care about. They basically want to understand what people want to perform best over time. And they do that pretty simply. It's like most companies are like a three by three. It's like potential on one side and performance on the other and performance review process. And they just want to understand like the customer acquisition or the cost for higher costs, like what channels produce the best employees from our organization over the long term.

1:28:20And if you can improve a company's ability to retain and acquire a better talent over the long term, they will pay you more money than anyone else on a per channel basis. and that is, you know, that is extremely connected to our core mission.

1:28:35Turner Novak:Yeah, I think it's kind of underrated employee retention. Like you might get this amazing, on paper looks like an incredible candidate and they leave after six months versus someone who stays 20 years and is like a contributor and does the job well, maybe they'll perform like. I don't think it needs 20 years. I mean, it's just like, I mean, she's taking like a whole top, you know, bank. It's like, they just want their employees to say like three years, right? People are leaving a year in. Take like soft range here. at the whirlpool like they just want people to stay you know so it's like these companies you know what you really care about is you know retention and performance over a shorter ratio than 20 years yeah one thing when i was talking to jeff richards on your board beforehand about this he said do you have a very intentional way that you hire kind of key hires at handshake what's kind of your process and just how do you make sure that that the whole process runs run smoothly the whole process i mean it looks so much traditional of a lot of companies i think there's a couple things we do that like some some communities do that i feel really is important for us like working sessions so like actual like some people can have a good day if you're on a bad day like you know some people are really good on their feet so they're not so good on their feet some people like you know interviews 30 minute hour-long interviews are super imperfect what is the highest signal process that that we've done and is is worked so well for me over time it has improved my hit rate is a working session we actually bring in the people that are working with this person, you give them a prompt, a case study, and they have to produce materials and lead an executive conversation or a conversation about that topic with everyone else in the room.

1:30:08And we've, we've, you know, that is the best analogy to like what it means to actually do work in a company. Not like, can you tell me about yourself? You know, like you can get some signal. And by the way, hiring's imperfect, right? I probably over all time, like maybe bat like 60, maybe generously 70 % on hires. Like I've hired a ton of these ideas that I've worked out. But I think since instrumenting this like working session kind of case study in like true half day, like onsite, people get a sense for who you are, what the culture is, what the rest of the executive team looks like. And it's really improved.

1:30:42And then I have a wonderful board. Like I really, like I really love using them as well and their areas of expertise to interview candidates.

1:30:49Turner Novak:Oh, really? Okay. And Jeff said that you, you do a ton of prep and you help the board members prep also, what do you do to help them be prepared going into those interviews? We just write up like all the pros, cons, strengths, weaknesses, like sentiment on like back channel, sentiment on forward channel references, how this candidate, oh, we just, you know, these people are extremely busy and they're generous with their time. So you just want to make sure you maximize it. I like being like, you know, describing what I want them to vet. it's like we need to figure like do you think this person like really understands how to do like product marketing in you know mid-market or enterprise or like something super specific like please vet this for me yeah totally like you know because i general we have a general good signal it's like the you know it's your yeah i like i like focusing on them but focusing them on like something that i want them to vet which i think they're uniquely capable of vetting and they're really, you know, there's been cases where they didn't want me to hire somebody.

1:31:51I did hire somebody. It turns out it didn't work, right? So I've learned to really lean on that.

1:31:58Turner Novak:Yeah. So I have one more question. One thing I noticed, all three co-founders of Handshake are still around. Oh, yeah. That's not super common. People might think that that's a normal thing, but in most startups, there is some attrition that happens with the founding team over time. like how did you guys make it work that you're all still here and the co-founder is my best man my wedding like we hang out uh we're like brothers i mean i think the story that most companies is like and also is i think goes beyond like even the co-founders like just the early employees and handshake like people put blood sweat and tears into building this business and against all the odds when it wasn't working, believed in handship together.

1:32:47What has worked with the co-founders? We've been through so much together. The highs, the lows, the rollercoaster of this company. We really treat each other with a take a lot of respect. By respect, I mean really care about each other as people.

1:33:09I think like also now when the business started to work, like allowing people to like work on what they want to work on, like you get to, by having more resources and more money and more business success, like you really can hire people to do things you don't want to do. It's like really, how do you spend your time actually enjoying your role? One of my co-founders is like one of the leading, like, you know, problem solvers in business. He took up his rotate ground, bend, like some of the hardest problems in the entire company. That's been exhausting, Brink, because he's always doing the hardest thing.

1:33:42But I think he gets a lot of affirmation. He's like, Fred Singbel was my best man, the single best person I know of my life. Just the incredible heart. I think most people at the company was able to like him more than even me. He's awesome. And Michael Furner-Scott is super brilliant as well. So we feel really proud to still work with him. I think we can probably work together for the next decade.

1:34:07Turner Novak:Yeah, that's awesome. You know, speaking of the next decade, what is the next decade at Handshake? Maybe you touched on a little bit, but maybe like succinctly kind of wrapping up the convo here. Like, what do you expect? What should we expect from you guys over the next decade? I mean, we want to take down Lincoln and Dean. We want to be the largest job search network on the internet. And there's this huge catalyst of change with AI and people need new skills and a place to jumpstart, restart their career. And we want to be from the orc platform, the internet, what people think about finding jobs it'd be the best place best match to marketplace so if you want to find that out what's what where do they go handshake.com join handshake.com we'll throw a link in the uh in the description where else can people like should people follow you like do you post online anywhere follow me on twitter gared lord follow me yeah on linkedin linkedin is there like a handshake profile like you post on handshake yeah i do books and intro okay i'm i'm maybe i should have signed up i'm literally like not actually even a member yeah you should sign up so it's kind of like linkedin yes okay so should i sign up for handshake and like like would it be helpful for me as an investor like can i like build a i think you build a huge brand you think like they're still like you know still early enough the social currency which can come like quite popular quite quickly interesting okay because yeah i always think about that because i started using tiktok back in like 2019 2020 i feel like i was one of the first vcs to start using it i mean i started making memes and stuff on twitter pretty early with the podcast it was like i feel like i can really like carve a lane here.

1:35:32Turner Novak:So I'm always thinking about that. Maybe I should start. Maybe I should be like the first VC on Handshake. I love it. Okay, cool. Well, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it. Of course. Thanks for your time. Loved it. And thank you for listening. And thanks to Ramp for supporting this episode. Upgrade your corporate card and get$250 at ramp.com slash the peel. If you missed it, check out last week's episode with Jay Cooper at Railway on solving hard problems and doing hard things. And the weeks before that with Matt Mullenweg at Automatic and how WordPress grew to power over 43 % of all websites on the internet, and with Grant Lee on how Gamma grew to over$50 million in ARR with only 30 employees.

1:36:07Turner Novak:If you like this conversation, please like, comment, subscribe, and name your next AI model after me. And if you don't want to miss a future episode, subscribe to my newsletter, The Split, linked in the description to get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox every week. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.

1:36:32We'll be right back.