The Secret to Hiring Top Finance Talent in Just 5 Days!

0:00Ben Murray: Greetings, everyone. Oh, greetings, everyone. I'm excited to welcome Aman Puri, co-founder and co-CEO of Mavi. Aman, welcome to the show. Ben, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Yeah, great to have you here. I think this will be really interesting to my audience, a lot of founders and CFOs, controllers, finance and FP &A. Before we dive into Mavi, tell us a little bit about your background. Yeah, no, absolutely. So my background is in finance and accounting, and that leads to ultimately starting a company in the finance space. My career started at Morgan Stanley in investment banking, cut my teeth there for a number of years across M &A and capital markets.

0:33And then from there, moved to the Bay Area, joined the SoftBank Vision Fund. I was part of the founding investing team that focused on fintech. And so I spent a lot of time in the finance and accounting world, fintech and investing space, looking at the most disruptive founders and companies in that world. And that experience, combined with my co-founder's experience at Ramp, is what led us to ultimately see the massive problem that led us to start Mali. All right.

0:56Ben Murray: Perfect. Let's talk about Mavi. Give us the 30-second pitch on Mavi. What products under services does it offer? Yeah. So Mavi is the world's first AI-powered talent engine matching U.S. companies with the top 2 % of vetted global finance talent for in-house roles. So we've ultimately developed this proprietary AI infrastructure for sourcing, vetting, and matching that services the top 2 % of finance talent in as fast as five days for finance leaders to ultimately build and scale their in-house team. So that's what we do at a high level. And that makes sense with your finance background. And curious, let's talk ICP.

1:33Ben Murray: Are you going after any industry, any, say, level of role? Tell us a little bit about who's a good fit for Mavi. Yeah. Our ICP is the in-house finance team that lives within companies of various sizes. And so it is any company that typically is from somewhere 20 to 50 employees all the way up to a thousand is the current focus because we're laser focused on the mid-market. Largely working with venture backed, private equity backed companies. We also have a few public companies that are in the mid market sphere, but really any company that has a finance team. So no industry focus to your earlier question.

2:08We have companies that we work with across SaaS, manufacturing, healthcare, e-commerce, CPG, you name it.

2:16Ben Murray: Okay. So yeah, industry agnostic. And I'm curious why the finance focus and just that I know finance background, but maybe you've got AI, you've got some secret technology behind the scenes that's doing all this magic work going after every role. So tell us a little bit about that finance focus. 100%. The finance focus starts a little bit from the problem focus. And so the problem that we ultimately, me and my co-founder, Molly, saw was the massive accounting shortage in North America, which started several years ago, has only been getting worse. And there's a number of statistics around that.

2:4775 % of CPAs are retiring in the next three to four years. Accounting graduates have dropped by 50 % in the last decade. That talent shortage has only been getting exacerbated. And so that's the central problem that my co-founder, Molly, and I saw separately, me investing in fintech, her building in fintech ramp. And that's what led to what would be the best solution. And of course, software existed already and seemed to be solving certain parts of the problem. We actually realized there was a massive talent gap that software and automation and even AI wasn't purely going to fill. So one, that's the problem side.

3:18But I think on the second part to your question is why don't you use this technology for any other spaces? Because when we looked at the sort of talent space, which is largely dominated by dinosaur companies founded in like the 1900s, 1950s. They're all horizontal. And so they're not that any vertical. And the players that we've seen really scale and be successful, sort of talent marketplaces that are technology driven have been in the engineering space, the legal space. They're vertically focused. They build their entire platform and technology around finding and vetting and sourcing the best talent in that vertical.

3:50And they've ultimately built category leading businesses as a function of that. So that's why we decided to focus on finance.

3:57Ben Murray: Yeah, interesting. And my next question is what led you to start the company, but maybe you mentioned a talent shortage, but was this a problem point in the past or did you just see, hey, there seems to be a big addressable market here that we could go solve something with technology? Yeah, it's a bit of both, Ben. So what I would say is I saw this problem from my seat as an investor working with my portfolio companies. Then my co-founder, Molly, saw it working hand-in-hand with finance leaders, building automation for them. So from my perspective, I was a fintech growth investor at the SoftBank Vision Fund, and I was working closely with my portfolio companies, one of which was taking 20 to 25 days to close their books.

4:34And it's because they, and at the end of that, the books were still inaccurate. And for someone whose career been in finance, I understood, and I'm sure you resonate with this, how powerfully strategic the finance function can be. And when it is falling far short, you see the impact of that. And so I was really trying to help them up-level their finance function. Part of that was like, they just needed more support. They put out a JD for a staff accountant. And this is a brand name VC-backed company that stayed up for six months before it ultimately got filled. And I saw this pattern across a few companies and was, hold on, what's going on?

5:04These are pretty simple junior roles. Why are they not getting filled? Took a step back and saw the macro statistics that I was referencing earlier about a lot of accountants are people not really studying the field anymore. And even if you look at a survey by the Controllers Council, where they show that 60 % of finance leaders this year still report talent shortages, which is up from 40 % last year, despite everything that's happened with AI. So this was a systemic issue. But then I'd say the other, you're pointing on why did you go after this? It is the, the just, the, the industry is a$75 billion market dominated by sort of analog companies built in the 1950s.

5:40And we just saw a massive opportunity for disruption.

5:42Ben Murray: And then as I was going to say is, so yeah, obviously recruiting has been around for a while, some, like you said, maybe around 100 years. And so I'm guessing beyond, OK, finance and we need more accounts and finance folks, it seems like you saw something a little bit different than how these staffing agencies were doing things versus, say, how you could do it. Absolutely. So I think one is the vertical focus. And the second part is being AI native and using technology to ultimately provide a better end-to-end engine from sourcing through vetting and matching. We have built a technology, an AI driven human in the loop vetting process that has been trained and refined across hundreds of thousands of finance and accounting candidates.

6:26We built probably one of the first AI interviewers specific to accounting and then specific to AFPNA. And now we have some AI interviewers for different parts of that are a part of our process. And so just going really deep in that vertical and leveraging technology to build a process that can allow us to capture as much data and signaling, which I think the legacy players are not doing, ultimately allows us to provide high quality talent at speed, at scale, which the old school players are just not being able to do.

6:54Ben Murray: And a lot of CFOs out there and founders have been hit up by their local recruiting agency, they're national and just, hey, want to pay a visit and tell you about our services. Do you think the recruiting industry is evolving fast now, or do you think it's still stuck in its ways? And then you've got new tech coming in, but is the recruiting market changing or is it still pretty slow moving? For CFOs who are thinking like, hey, I'm being hit up by all these recruiters, are they just offering the same thing that could be done a lot better today? What I see from sort of legacy players and from the traditional local recruiter, I think it's largely the same.

7:31have not seen any change. I'm sure on their end, they may be using some AI tools just for the recruiters independently, but there's no business model innovation. There's no structural innovation. We operate with a talent marketplace model where we have a sort of supply side and a demand side. And so we're building this network of talent, which allows us to essentially fill roles as fast as one to two weeks, which would take normal recruiters three to six months, right? So I think it's business model innovation. We have pricing innovation as well, because we fundamentally disagree with the placement fee structure.

8:02So there's a few differences that we have.

8:05Ben Murray: Yeah. And I was holding back on the whole pricing. We'll get to pricing a second after fundraising because that's always going to be, I think, a pain point or just not a fun discussion with CFOs. So we know your ICP in-house finance team is probably going after, say, the controller or CFO or maybe the founder signing up. But tell us a little bit about GoToMarket. What's working in GoToMarket right now to find those ICPs to sell into? Yeah. So I'm sure you know this better than me. The finance space, it's very relationship space, right? No finance leaders making a decision because they got a cold email and they're like, oh, this is a cool product.

8:36Let me just buy it. So it is very word of mouth referrals, right? So that has honestly been a large part of our growth. So initially, obviously, my co-founders networks and some of that founder led sales, but from there, it was a powerful referral engine where early customers are really happy with us, referred other customers. Those customers became happy, referred others. And a lot of our accounts have also expanded with us over time. So I'd say those have been really productive channels. We've also done in-person events and conferences, basically things that we can do to develop in-person relationships with CFOs, be face-to-face, answer their questions and help them build trust.

9:10Because as finance leaders are risk-averse buyers, you need to feel trust. And that's usually by built in person and also by getting referrals, right? You need another finance leader to tell you, hey, this works. And so we're grateful to our existing customers that have vowed for us with their people in our network.

9:25Ben Murray: Yeah, and definitely I'd say, yeah, the CFO role, a disconnected role from just other peers. And now obviously it's changing. I have my own tech CFO community. So it just seems like, yeah, CFOs helping each other out. Who do you like? What tech? What services? Just to cut down on that due diligence time with new vendors. But let's start pricing. And you talked about that placement fee. And who knows? The recruiter comes into your office, hey, yeah, we'll charge 30, 40 % of that placement or full year earnings or whatever. So tell us a little bit about your pricing mechanism. 100%. So we are doing several things that are disrupting the sort of legacy pricing models, which involve high upfront placement fees where once they get that fee, they honestly don't care or have incentive in terms of what happens afterwards.

10:10If the person doesn't work out in a month, too bad. There are other firms that will charge you upfront fees or deposits or have long-term contract block-ins. We don't have any of that. So the way it works is we connect high quality pre-vetted talent with our customers. And then we manage the contracting payments and compliance on behalf of our customers for that hire. And so ultimately our customers pay us the effective salary of the candidate every month. That bakes in any fees that we make. And so ultimately we only make money as long as the candidate that we place is successful long term. Because we're solely making fees more like a SaaS model every single month.

10:43And so only the person is there and is successful for a year plus does Mavi actually make money, which aligns incentives. We are fully invested in not the person just signing the offer letter and joining the company, but being there for a long time to come.

10:58Ben Murray: Okay. And then does that turn off at some point? So if you're taking like that percent of salary over time, is there a point where it's like, hey, great job. They let their two years, they're all yours, or we know they're going to stay, then the fees stop? Or how does that work? So we largely do full-time placements, so it does not turn off over time. And the reason is maybe just taking a step back. Part of the unique value pop they're providing to finance leaders is not just connecting them with high-quality pre-vetted talent, but given the massive shortage in the US, my co-founder and I found and realized is actually a very large pool of high-quality US-caliber, US-gap trained talent all over the world.

11:37And so we actually are at the moment focusing, connecting international talent with U.S. companies. And so that's why we also take care of the contracting payments and compliance piece. Our mid-market customers, they want to work with this person and bring them on board and they see their high quality, but they may not have the infrastructure to handle the contracting payments compliance wherever this person is. We abstract that all the way. For our customers, it's as simple as I interview this person, I bring them on board. They operate the same as any other remote employee on my team. And so ultimately what that means is the all-in monthly effective salary our customers are paying us is going to be at least 50 % less than an equivalent hire or any of the alternatives they would see domestically.

12:15And that's why like even over time continuously, they're happy to have us continue to manage the contracting payments compliance.

12:22Ben Murray: Okay. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Definitely a different business model, which is interesting. And I'm curious, and I don't know if you know any of the stats on hand, I'm curious that maybe in the tech market, like hiring a high level finance role or accounting role, like what kind of fill times are you seeing right now? Is it pretty competitive? Is it taking a long time, short time? Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, we definitely are tracking data around that. And typically we're seeing for most roles and even junior roles, like the average time is like around two to three months. For more senior roles, it can be longer.

12:53Obviously, for different companies, there's a sort of wide spectrum, but it's basically several months from the time that a company decides to hire. Whereas we're showing up to our customers and filling roles within two weeks, right? And it's because of our marketplace model. But the caliber of talent we're showing up with is the same as other candidates they would find at the end of that two-by-three-month process.

13:13Ben Murray: Yeah, and that's a big difference. If it takes me three months, but at the end, I'm still back to square one or square zero. Exactly. Yeah, and three months of quality candidates, yeah. So that's the other thing is, especially for people, I think the market, especially domestically, is getting increasingly competitive. And I think there is survey data that was showing a majority of finance leaders are seeing one of the biggest challenges with hiring just being cost. I don't know if you've heard this or might resonate with it, but they're finding if they really want the best and high quality folks that they would like on their team, the cost is just kind of going through the roof, especially in coastal markets.

13:47And so it's becoming harder to justify, especially at a time when I think all finance leaders are getting pressure from their boards to spend less in the context of AI on the finance function.

13:57Ben Murray: Now that is interesting. And before we move on to fundraising, one thing that will be really interesting to see if I was listening, it would be just the AI impact. And what do you see as you're talking to current clients or prospects? And we know, say, Claude is really hot in the financing with tech CFOs and trying to save labor, do things faster, better without the labor. What kind of conversations are you having around that? But yeah, that's definitely something that is coming up a lot. And so a couple of things on that. First, I'll share what we have seen as this sort of non-obvious or counterintuitive reality, which is that we're actually seeing AI exacerbate the need for scaled finance talent as opposed to replacing it.

14:40There's obviously all these clip-in articles like AI is taking all our jobs. The reality is obviously far more nuanced than that. And that's what we're ultimately seeing. I think the structure of finance teams is changing in that the interest in entry-level hires or college grads is diminishing. We're having dinners with even some of our customers. They had an interim program for college grads and they would hire them out after. And they're canceling that because they're like, Claude can now do what that entry-level person who had no training could do. But the increasing premium that we're seeing is, all right, a lot of finance leaders are trying to integrate AI.

15:13and some of them are obviously using AI native ERPs like Rillit and Campfire and some other tools, but you still need the more experienced person to then run these AI tools and ensure and provide the layer of judgment and expertise. And so we are seeing an increasing premium for those folks. And we're actually seeing both through data and through conversations with finance leaders, they're finding it harder and harder to find the right talent at that level. Partially because, and this will get worse and worse over time, And as AI automates the way the entry level jobs, there's the talent pipeline just shrinks up market too, right?

15:47There's fewer junior people going to mid-level who ultimately have the experience to run these AI tools and manage the end-to-end finance and accounting function.

15:55Ben Murray: And that's fascinating. And maybe this is more a question for an economist or something, but I was going to mention that. So is this the chicken or the egg where, all right, we need experienced finance folks. We're not hiring junior folks. And then we're not going to have any junior folks who are going to become experienced. So I'm curious, you know, this is a big macro question for you, but any thoughts or pieces around where this, how this is going to trend, where we want experienced folks, but we're not hiring juniors? Yeah. Look, I think, I actually think like we've had many large other technological shifts in the last three decades, the labor market is still tight, right?

16:31And maybe this is a slightly contrarian perspective, but the labor market today is still tight after two or three years of AI adoption increasing massively in companies. And just a fun fact for accounting, the unemployment rate is actually one or 2 % relative to overall unemployment of four to fives. I think the role of finance and accounting people will change. And that's what we are seeing. I'm sure you're seeing that as well in terms of it's moving from more execution to insider analysis. So even the senior accountants that we've placed with our customers, instead of spending a big chunk of time, especially around month end, just closing.

17:01The books get closed faster now because we're automating certain aspects. And now they just spend a bunch of that time on analysis and insights. It's things that companies of a certain scale were just not able to do earlier, right? So I think it's one, with the same people in the same skill set, we just do more and are able to analyze more or less execution. For the junior level people on your macro question, I just think they'll have to rescale and rethink how these people can enter the workforce because I don't think it's a permanent thing where college grads, we're just never going to hire them because yes, this systemic problem will go put up market and will become a real problem in the next three to five years once all the mid-level people become senior and who's doing the work now, right?

17:40I think ultimately college grads are going to, and they are getting more AI fluent. And I think learning how to manage and operate AI tools and cloud and AI agents, there will be tasks and roles within the finance function that they can step into and learn.

17:54Ben Murray: Yeah, it is fascinating. I never was a fan of my econ classes that I had to take, but it is a fascinating labor question right now. And this would be an interesting interview five years from now, 10 years from now, just to see what happens, but we'll wait on that. But yeah, let's talk fundraising. So it looks like you raised a little capital, say what, a 4 million seed? Exactly, yeah, we raised just under 4 million last year. We actually have not really spent almost any of that. So we've thankfully been operating relatively a breakeven since we raised that capital. But the main goal of that capital was to really accelerate our growth, which it certainly has grown over three and a half X in the last 12 months.

18:34And we raised that capital actually after first bootstrapping the business for a little over a year. So my co-founder, Molly, we took a pretty different approach. And this is also fracturing my earnings as an investor. I felt want to actually find some of the product market fit before we raise capital as opposed to the other way around. And so we bootstrapped it, saw that there was a real need. And once we got to over a million in gross ARR in eight months, and just for the two of us, and we had two kind of part-time people. Once we got to that scale and we realized we were the bottleneck and there was actually a ton of demand, we knew we had to scale.

19:06Ben Murray: Okay, and that's interesting, just the catalyst for any fundraising round. So with that seed, it seemed like you were setting your own expectations first, as we've got to show some traction here before we go out to the market. And getting that seed round, because tackling recruiting, right, industry that's been around for forever, and maybe some are like, ah, how could you be doing anything different? And in that raise, was that crucial? If you didn't have traction, do you think this seed round would not have happened? I think, I do think, especially when we were raising, like, I think, look, the market has been more challenged, at least in some sectors, since 2022, 2023.

19:46And I think the bar, and I think that narrative has definitely increased in momentum in the last 12 to 18 months since we raised. I think the bar at every stage has gone up, right? And so I do think initially when we had a budget, we were cashflow positive and growing really quickly when we raised. We didn't even need the money, so we thought we're way ahead. And to be honest, our metrics and everything was ahead of what you would typically see at the seed stage. But just the bar for what investors were looking for and are looking for, especially in certain spaces where they may have seen other players before, had certainly increased.

20:18But I think our investors, especially our lead investors who backed us and have been incredible partners, really saw how big this market is and how it is so ripe for disruption and what we were able to do with very limited resources. And if we were just given some capital to build end-to-end technology and automation, which is what we've done at a dramatic pace in the last 18 months, what we could achieve.

20:41Ben Murray: And you've lived both sides of the table here. So what was the hardest part of raising that seed realm? That's an interesting question. I think, to be honest, I think one of the more challenging things was, this is just for me. So I was a growth investor, right? And so the dynamic in growth investing is much more akin to private equity, where it is much more about metrics, fundamentals of economics and things like that. And obviously the vision matters tremendously and the story and the founders and their background. but it's a much more diligence, deep diligence, fundamental type of analysis and approach.

21:18Early stage investing is a completely different ballgame. And so I think just navigating the wild west of like seed stage, early stage, where you talk to 10 funds, they're all completely different. They have different types of teams. Some of them are like more vibes focused than product focused. So I think just navigating the sort of wild west of early stage where there, I found there was a lot less consistency in how investors think was maybe the sort of challenging, but just one sort of common theme that ended up being the case, the three investors that backed us, they ultimately all operated with a slightly more private equity-ish lens, or at least a more fundamental analysis lens.

21:53And that's why we ultimately resonated with each other pretty deeply. And they really were excited about what we were building and what we had achieved versus the sort of more nebulous sort of, I just want to look at a product demo and and want it to look nice kind of situation.

22:07Ben Murray: Yeah, no, it's a great point. Yeah, PE capital is much different than VC capital and those expectations and what they're looking for and what they're underwriting. So yeah, appreciate that insight. Now, what year did you found Mavi? We founded Mavi in late 2023. Okay, 2023. So about a year in, then raise capital, keep the skill, saw that product market fit. And I'm curious, at this stage of the business, is there a metric or maybe metrics that you look at whether operating product financial that give you just really explain what's happening with the business yeah that's a great question so one i'd say both above all which is true for all companies so that three the sort of three and a half x year over year growth that we've seen the last 12 months and we're tracking to that right now as well is one of the big things that shows just the sheer demand that we're ultimately seeing and that's before we've we just unlocked marketing as a channel at the beginning of october so we weren't doing any inbound marketing.

23:02As I told you, a lot of it was refer-word-of-mouth, some outbound events. So that's one. I'd say the other one that is more true for our business is, and as we're benchmarking across the industry, is what we call our engagement success rate or placement success rate. And that is ultimately what we're delivering to our customers. And we want that to be completely best in class, like far and above ahead of what we're seeing in the industry. And our engagement success rate or placement success rate is 93 % or just north of that, which is industry leading by a pretty, pretty high margin. And so the quality of matches we're delivering, people were placing, they are succeeding long-term and we're able to do this at, despite the growth that we're seeing and how quickly we're moving because of the technology driven talent engine that we built and that sort of caliber and quality bar that we're upholding for even our entire team.

23:49Ben Murray: Okay. Yeah. No, interesting. Yeah. And with that growth and I think, yeah, obviously your pricing models resonating with CFOs and founders and real quick back to fundraising. So with that, you've got the seed round. Are there thoughts? What are your thoughts on that next round or your philosophy on that and just managing capital and getting out of that usual cycle of continuing to raise? But of course, if you've got great growth, let's keep going. Any philosophy on that next round or even are you thinking about it? Yeah, that's a great question. At the moment, we're super heads down. Like I said, we've honestly barely spent any of the money that we raised last year, and we're still growing through now effects.

24:27And at the moment, we are focused on building and continuing to maintain a really high pace of growth. But what I would say is we definitely expect to raise capital in the future. And similar to our first round, we want to view capital more as an accelerant as we think about new business lines and verticals that we want to expand into, raising capital to ultimately go after it and grow into our broader vision, as opposed to primarily thinking about capital as a means for survival, which is the case for most. So that is one big difference in philosophy that I've taken, especially as an investor, is I think that you don't want to be in a position where you're constantly raising to survive.

24:59You want to be raising to ultimately build an empire.

25:03Ben Murray: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And one last question here, a few stats and figures before we wrap up, but do you have a headquarters location? Yeah, we're based in San Francisco. We're fully remote. My co-founder's in San Francisco. I'm in New York, but yeah, we're headquartered in SF. Okay, and what's your current team size? we're just at 40 to 45 people right now. That's our internal team. Okay, okay, yeah, decent size. And one last kind of maybe difficult question, hot seat question, but fast forward three years, any thoughts on where the recruiting market will be? Will it be all AI tech driven? What's happening with these legacy companies?

25:41Ben Murray: Do you think three years it will look a lot different? I definitely do. I think a lot of these sort of old school dinosaur players that have been around since the 1950s, 1960s are, you're already seeing a bunch of AI recruiting tools come up and things like that, but that's more tools that are used by recruiters. But I think we will see, in the last 10 to 15 years, we've seen a lot of tech-driven talent marketplaces come up that are vertical specific and engineering legal where doing this in finance. I think we will see more of that. I think the legacy players will get fully disrupted. Also, because I think what teams and companies are looking for in roles are all transforming as a result of AI.

26:19So, for example, within finance, the one thing that we've seen really change dramatically in the last three years and we think will really accelerate three years from now is asking about AI proficiency of talent in any hire they make. That's coming up in almost every conversation. And we've actually built AI proficiency into our vetting process. So we are vetting for AI proficiency. We have a way to evaluate and create it. And we're ultimately building Mavi to become the leading platform to find AI proficient finance talent. And I think in other verticals, the same thing will need to happen. And I do not think the legacy players are best positioned to figure out how to do that, how to attract the talent, how to best evaluate that.

26:54And so I do think the space will need to change massively and will get disrupted.

26:58Ben Murray: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, because I think even CFOs who are definitely using AI, but I don't know, how would I assess AI readiness in their skill set? So, yeah, I think that'll be a big help for CFOs out there. I really appreciate your time sharing your journey today. if listers, especially the CFOs out there, would like to learn more, where should we send them online? Yeah, thanks so much, Ben. So if you're a CFO, you have a lean team, you're looking funny and hard to find the next person in your team, anywhere from a junior staff account all the way up to a controller or on the FP &A side, junior analyst all the way up to a FP &A manager, please would ask everyone to go to www.maviwork.com.

27:38That's our website and there's a link to book a call. So we'd encourage all finance users to go there. We'd love to have a conversation. we often speak to financiers months before they have a need. So hoping to meet more folks. And thank you so much for having me, Ben. I really appreciate it.

27:51Ben Murray: Yeah, great to have you on. And always good to get ahead of the curve with budget season happening now. So I appreciate you coming on the show today. Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks.