2247 - Solving Modern HR Challenges with AI-Powered Leave Management with Aidora's Anant Agarwal

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1:05With us right now, Anant Agarwal. Anant, you are the co-founder and CTO at Adora. Adora is on the web at getadora.com. Anant, it's great to have you. Well, thanks for inviting me on, Josh. I guess at this time, I want to, like, first of all, take a moment to compliment the name of your show. Like, you know, the thoughtful bit there is very thoughtful. I think being a startup founder, it's all about solving problems instantly as they come up. You just go for it. But then if you are able to take a moment to really put in some thought there, just like just one moment, that's what really makes a difference in a great set of process, like, you know, just going for it.

1:50Well, thank you. I agree. I like that term thoughtful. You know, I think it's a kind of a little bit of a Rorschach test. I think people can kind of read into it what they like. But I agree with you. It's contemplating what's our impact and place in the world and how we connect with others. So thank you. I appreciate that. You are among friends, Anand. And on that note, I want to start off by saying congratulations. You are a proud new papa. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that. What is life like as a parent of a newborn? Yeah, it's like, you know, So a startup during the day, that's like Aurora, and then a startup at home.

2:30That's like, you know, the new, being a new dad. And this is my first kid. We are like, you know, four months into the journey. It's a lot of learning every day, like, you know, asking TGPD, hey, this is happening to the baby. What should I do? Oh, my gosh. Is this a normal thing? Oh, my goodness. To think about new parents now having access to AI, man, well, I'll tell you what, my oldest daughter now just turned 26. So boy, let me tell you, we sure didn't have ChatGPT back then. And we're pretty much just trying to figure it out and not break her. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. I think AI has been super grateful in that fashion, instead of waiting for like experts to get in contact and ask them questions.

3:18It's like the information is right there. That's so cool. So cool. Well, Well, congratulations on being the co-founder of two startups. I love it. I love it. Well, Anant, tell us a bit about Adora. Yeah. So Adora is about streamlining leave management. So we help HR teams stand up their leave programs, administer the leaves in an employee-friendly fashion without needing armies of administrators, and just making it super simple. So let's take an example to make it super clear in terms of like, you know, what is the problem here? So let's say if I was going on a parental leave, which I was, but basically there are a bunch of regulations that are involved.

4:03So there are like federal regulations and state regulations, sometimes city ordinances and insurance policies, community policies. All of them need to be stacked together to figure out the benefits that I can get. That is how many weeks can I go out for? How many of those are job protected? that is i cannot be laid off how many of those are wage protected that is i will get my full pay and then thankfully in u.s like states also provide support so how much money is coming from state how much is coming from insurance what is the remaining amount that the company needs to pay calculating all of this is super complicated and there on layer on the state-wise complexity so every state will have a different uh regulations so that makes it insanely hard for hr teams to be on top of it and administer it accurately and correctly.

4:49And similarly for employee, it's like my baby's on the way. You're telling me to understand all these regulations, go to their websites, apply to them on time accurately. That's not the headspace I have. So making it all streamlined, both for HR and both for the employee to go out and leave peacefully and get all the benefits. You know, I never thought you're absolutely right about how complicated that can actually be. Because do you mind maybe just giving us a quick overview for those of us who don't have to, like we don't, my company primarily contractors. And so I don't necessarily have to think or worry about that so much.

5:32They just, they want to take time off. They take time off. That's pretty much it. They're not available. But do you mind just giving kind of a little bit of a 101 on on leave you know it's so funny because i i i studied family science in college that was my major and i actually did um so i did some research on and about the family medical leave act back in the day and that was back in the in the early 90s and i actually presented and uh you know made some arguments that uh you know perhaps that could be extended to uh to smaller size companies in some, you know, fair way or something like that.

6:12Anyway, yeah, I'd love a quick overview of leave in general and why that can be complicated. Yeah. So, I mean, as I was mentioning, basically, there is a federal regulation, which is the FMLA, the Family Medical Leave Act that you mentioned. And then there's, every state has their own set of regulations. Like, for example, California will have something, new york will have something else um and then sometimes cities also tend to have their own regulations as well like for example sf is a prime use case which which will have its own which requires the companies to match up a lot of the employee employee pay that the employee supposed to get when they are going on leave so all of these regulations are in place to enable employees to actually be able to go out when the life is super hard or well when there are critical movements in people's life um and still feel supported so administering this for the hrt like now let's say imagine take a quick startup like given the here most of the listeners are startup founders so let's say if we take a startup most likely they don't have any hrt and a lot of the employees or a lot of the upcoming startups have remote work culture so employees distributed in various states.

7:34So let's say one employee is in California, one employee is in New York, one employee is in Texas or somewhere else. And so now for that founder or for that half HR person, it's very hard to be on top of all of these regulations across the states. And being able to administer it properly makes it even harder. So that's the crux of the problem. And we are kind of like simplifying that using AI to make it super easy. Yeah. Well, certainly, I think as a business leader and if you have a bit of an HR department, you want to stay compliant. You don't want to break the law because there are consequences to that.

8:12And so is and I'm sorry, you were saying something about so each state and I'm going to sound like a complete moron here. So is so each state has their own policies or it can vary from state to state? That is 100 % accurate. And these laws keep changing with time. So I think Oregon had some updates just like middle of last year. So it's very hard for one person to actually be on top of all the changes that are going on in this space and continue to stay compliant and run the business. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we want to stay compliant because we want to stay in business. So, Anant, would you mind maybe just is the platform and to our friend that's listening, my recommendation would be to go to the website.

9:00It's called getadora.com. But what size company is this a solution for and who really, I'm just thinking of our friend that's listening, they might want to let their colleagues know, you know, who really needs to pay attention to this and who should be like who's, I guess, who's your ideal client? Yeah, great question. So anybody, well, any company that has employees that are distributed. So if there are some employees in California, some employees in New York, some employees in Oregon, some employees in Massachusetts, then that's where the complexity skyrockets. If you have, let's say, just in California or like a single state employer, then the complexity is still manageable to a great extent.

9:49So any company with multi-state employees, those are our ideal customers. For the listeners of the part, basically, we also have a startup program in case if you are an early stage company. We help you set up your own parental leave policy if you don't have it right now. and quickly onboard you that if in case there's a leaf that is coming up, you know, they can quickly get the ball rolling without spending a lot of time. Yeah. I want to highlight something that you are doing. And I think that this is quite brilliant. And I suspect, I mean, even if just, you know, for our friend that's a business leader listening to this, you might want to take a page at something I think quite clever you did on your website.

10:38And that is your free AI leave plan generator. So here's all describe it from my visibility. And I'd like your behind the scenes. I think this is great. So what you've done is on the website right now, you have a free AI tool. So when you go to the website, you click on this. And I think this is such a great idea, is providing AI-enabled tools at no cost to people that they can at least kind of get their feet wet and start using or getting value cost in terms of like a quote unquote lead magnet. This is great. So like when I pulled up the AI leave plan generator, I'm now basically in an AI platform here with some suggested prompts saying, create my parental leave plan.

11:27I'm having a baby in California. What leave am I eligible for? I'm having surgery. What are my leave options? I'm adopting a baby in New York. Can you help me plan, a leave plan. This is great. So now I could just kind of go through here and it's an AI platform. It's going to help me co-create this. This is way better because I suspect what you did in the background, like a custom GPT, is this is going to be way more effective than if someone just goes into their own AI and tries to create this from scratch. Yeah, 100%. That's 100 % accurate so if you if somebody tries to do this with tgpt it will or like for that matter any general purpose ai uh they will get uh general purpose answers like hey you know these regulations may apply to you you may get these kind of benefits uh it will not give you dates it will not you know give you certainty that okay you know these are the things that you can get for sure so So as I think we are a very heart driven company, we understand that, you know, not every employee in the U.S.

12:37can have access to great leave solutions or have that kind of awesome HR team support. So even for those employees who are not, let's say, Adora customers, they can come to our website, they can describe their leave scenario. The AI will ask them probing questions to fully understand their leave scenario. and then generate a personalized plan for them so that everybody can actually get the benefits that they are entitled to by law. Yeah. And I'm just kind of playing around with it right now. And it asked if I was expecting a child and I said, yes, expecting. When does he expect a due date for the baby?

13:14I said, tomorrow. Just to see how it would respond. This is so cool. What a brilliant idea. And I think, listen, I believe this is how websites, it's going to be mandatory in the future that we have an AI-enabled interface because that is what consumers are going to just simply be expecting. So great lesson, Anand, for all of us in this kind of little insight here. So Anant, you know, for our friend that's listening, and maybe they found this website because they're researching you and they wanted to hear a good conversation between us to kind of get a feel for you and Adora. Aside from the free AI-powered leave plan generator, do you mind maybe kind of sharing next steps?

14:05I know you have some other resources here as well. Yeah. I guess in terms of next steps for the company, basically in the short term we are focused on uh league management league management is uh insanely complex and there are a lot of nuanced edge cases so we want to make sure we want to make this as streamlined as possible that you know you just click a couple of buttons or just maybe even pick up a phone call the ai and you know it takes care of everything you don't have to worry about navigating various interfaces or understanding all these regulations the your AI partner is there guiding you through this whole experience.

14:44And then in the long term, expanding into more areas where, you know, we can better support employees during critical moments in their lives. Yeah. And I was going to ask too, kind of final question, is there a human support element to this as well? We like to provide support in the sense that we want to make sure that any of our customers are having the best possible experience with our platform. So if anybody has problems, we have prompt support teams to kind of help them out. But the software on its own is kind of like built to scale that you don't really need to interact with anybody to make this work.

15:25It is fully confidential. You find your private time, take a look, plan the leave, because these are very sensitive topics. You plan your own leave. You discuss it maybe with your partner or spouse. And once you feel confident, then you submit it. So then only anybody like any of your HR teams or your company gets to know. Yeah. The website, getadora.com. Anant Agarwal, co-founder and CTO, which means you were there in the early days, making sure that this thing got built. So congratulations. It's nice to see two babies enter to the world. Anant, it's a great conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you.

16:08Thank you, Josh. Thank you.

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