"Turpentine VC" | Venture Capital and Investing
00:39:34 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:39:34] S1: Wow. That's really exciting. And could you maybe speak to some of the work being there? I know, even at large companies are often be sort of internal tools when it comes to career planning and, you know, how to how to progress at the company. What are you guys looking at to do here? [00:39:50] S2: Yeah, so I think it's a very general thing, and that we want something that's broadly applicable to all candidates. But it's in predicting, based on all of their past experiences, what is the ideal next experience for them, or all based on all their preferences and interests? And then what things do they need to accomplish together? So it might be that they want to be an MLE at a hyper growth startup. And we can talk about all of the different attributes of their applications that a hyper growth startup would be looking for the things that they should talk about in an interview, where to really spend their time and having this general overarching solution. [00:40:37] S1: Yeah. And in terms of, you know, on the Canada side, you mentioned early on, it was working with a lot of folks out in India. How did you get embedded into that space? I take it you were living here and are still quite, you know, young, which is very impressive for all the... All that you guys have already achieved. So don't mean that as a negative point, but how did you go about even embedding into that space? I I assume that's a bit difficult.
00:40:37 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:40:37] S1: Yeah. And in terms of, you know, on the Canada side, you mentioned early on, it was working with a lot of folks out in India. How did you get embedded into that space? I take it you were living here and are still quite, you know, young, which is very impressive for all the... All that you guys have already achieved. So don't mean that as a negative point, but how did you go about even embedding into that space? I I assume that's a bit difficult. [00:41:02] S2: Yeah, I know. I told one of our clients the other day about how I was celebrating my 20 birthday party. And they didn't, they didn't. The start was working with code clubs at it. We started with the code club at it Crock poor where they were referring us candidates. And we were hiring them just to build projects out ourselves. And it was ridiculous, because there were these incredible engineers that, you know, we were like college kids at the time didn't have much money. We're getting they were getting offers from like big tech jobs in India for like $5 an hour. And so it's not difficult to be competitive from a salary standpoint. And so, you know, creating more opportunities for people that are particularly young internationally and was a big trend early on. [00:41:49] S1: Yeah, that's really powerful. And touch on that a little bit more. What were these projects that you had them doing?
00:41:49 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:41:49] S1: Yeah, that's really powerful. And touch on that a little bit more. What were these projects that you had them doing? [00:41:55] S2: I mean, that's really what Merkur grew out of is that we were hiring people to build products ourselves. Like I launched this other company, Ceros, which was a browser based virtual machine and had been working on various cloud gooey's because I launched a business that I scaled in high school. And with hiring development talent, it was a pain, it was wildly inefficient. And so we built the product for ourselves trying to make that process more efficient. And that that went pretty far. [00:42:30] S1: Oh, wow. So Merkur came out of a problem that you were personally facing.
00:42:30 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:42:30] S1: Oh, wow. So Merkur came out of a problem that you were personally facing. [00:42:35] S2: Yeah, exactly. And another interesting thing is we've used the product to hire over 20 people of our internal team. So we're and like actively hire tons of people using the product. And so we're huge believers in this just being an efficient way to build out a company. And while I still think it's good for Silicon Valley startups to have an in person product team, in particular, where leadership is having those, you know, late night conversations and bouncing ideas off of each other with super low latency. I think supplementing each person in The US with one or two contractors internationally, is extremely high leverage from a price, a performance perspective, as well as culture. And just like people we found internationally care so much and want to work so hard, that it's really unbelievable how inefficient the market is around not giving them opportunities. [00:43:29] S1: Yeah. And so a lot of the folks who you guys have on as full time or part time, I'm assuming are overseas. How how has what have been sort of the learnings and sort of getting that to work? I mean, for starters, the most obvious, like time difference, right? How do you sort of balance stuff like that?
00:43:29 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:43:29] S1: Yeah. And so a lot of the folks who you guys have on as full time or part time, I'm assuming are overseas. How how has what have been sort of the learnings and sort of getting that to work? I mean, for starters, the most obvious, like time difference, right? How do you sort of balance stuff like that? [00:43:45] S2: Yeah, so it's predominantly in India, where there is, you know, the 12.5 gap. The thing I found fascinating about the time difference point is, for sales kind of roles, this could be a problem, but we're mainly hiring engineers in India. And for engineers, it's actually a feature, not a bug to have all of this independent contributor time. So we have overlap in the mornings until about noon. And then for the rest of the day, people are able to just focus code work on the tasks and projects that are assigned. And so it allows them to actually be a lot more productive in many ways. And we've had cases, you know, where we fly engineers back and forth. And, and I think it's it's a fun experience to get to know everyone. But it's, it's funny, it's, it's oftentimes less productive, and people being at home able to really focus on the work that's happening.
00:43:45 · Brendan Foody, Usman Hanif
[00:43:45] S2: Yeah, so it's predominantly in India, where there is, you know, the 12.5 gap. The thing I found fascinating about the time difference point is, for sales kind of roles, this could be a problem, but we're mainly hiring engineers in India. And for engineers, it's actually a feature, not a bug to have all of this independent contributor time. So we have overlap in the mornings until about noon. And then for the rest of the day, people are able to just focus code work on the tasks and projects that are assigned. And so it allows them to actually be a lot more productive in many ways. And we've had cases, you know, where we fly engineers back and forth. And, and I think it's it's a fun experience to get to know everyone. But it's, it's funny, it's, it's oftentimes less productive, and people being at home able to really focus on the work that's happening. [00:44:36] S1: We've skipped over this so far, but I want to absolutely touch upon it. You guys have quite the founding team, the three of you yourself, Adarsh, Hirma. You guys went to high school together, if I if I'm remembering correctly, our policy debate champions. Touch on that background a little bit. Plus, you guys are so young. I mean, it's honestly amazing. I'd love to kinda hear about the background. How'd you guys decide to work together? I know you mentioned you were working on something. Were you working on that with them?