I remember speaking to one of my friends, who manages a large family office portfolio, about a year back. They are big Tesla bulls and while I always admired Elonâs vision, I didnât know first-hand the level of innovation Tesla was shipping & its head start over incumbents.
Earlier this year, I started driving a Model 3 as my 2nd car (my main car till then was a gasoline SUV). Post experiencing an EV for the first time, and in particular, the way Tesla has re-imagined the end-to-end software & omnichannel services stack around the car (from an eCommerce buying experience to home maintenance services), I called up my portfolio manager friend and said: âNow I know what the fuss is all about đđ˝â
With the launch of the electric Ford F-150, Rivian pickup trucks finally being seen on the roads & now the Tesla semi-truck launch, 2022 seems to be a tipping point in EV penetration across auto use cases. Helped in no small measure by tailwinds of high inflation in gasoline prices courtesy of the Russia-Ukraine war.
As a customer, I can see that once a household transitions to EV, itâs super hard to go back to gasoline. Urban commute as a use case is already solved for. Once EV cars hit critical volume, am positive the supercharger installed base along freeways will rapidly ramp up, as will the battery range itself.
EV is a space that is constrained by supply right now, not demand. Itâs pretty much inevitable. As a venture investor, am bullish on startups building software for the EV value chain. In the California gold rush, the money was made by those selling picks and shovels. As EVs (& lithium-ion batteries, in general) penetrate our lives, the market opportunity for software that powers various use cases in its ecosystem is immense.
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With the recent layoffs at Twitter, Stripe & Meta, alongside the implosion of FTX, this appears to be the decisive starting point of the tech downcycle in the US. While market leaders & institutional investors have adequate resources to ride this impending downturn, the real impact is going to be felt by tech workers, who designed their lives around the prevailing system of high cash comp, RSUs whose value kept going up (courtesy of a low interest rate fueled bull market over the last decade), fielding multiple job offers largely driven by their employer’s brand and work-from-home flexibility.
This downturn will shift the power back into the hands of employers. Many in their 20s & early-30s will discover that they are ill-equipped to operationally, financially & emotionally deal with this drastic reset in the tech job market. In most cases, the hardship they will go through will have nothing to do with their capabilities or contributions.
As we all prepare to face this downturn with little personal control over many externalities, I believe this is the right time to ask a really important question – “how do we build an anti-fragile career (& life!)?”. For those not familiar with this concept, it was coined by one of my favorite modern thinkers – Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Here’s how he defines it in his book by the same name:
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure , risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
Dealing with volatility, randomness, risk & uncertainty is an inherent part of an outlier tech career. Unlike other industries, tech is ruled by ruthless power law outcomes that are driven by tremendous leverage (software), high scalability with minimal marginal cost & top talent that creates intense competition by starting, operating & investing in new ideas. Given these dynamics, capital & talent rushes into prospective outlier companies, all of whom then execute with intensity. Ultimately, a handful of market leaders remain standing in each space, and the rest die. The cycle then resets – rinse & repeat.
While the above pattern seems obvious on reading, most tech employees remain oblivious to the “high risk-high reward” game they are playing. While early-stage founders, startup employees & venture investors understand this more than others, this downcycle is showing that even FAANG & scaled enterprise software jobs aren’t as derisked as everyone thought. This isn’t surprising, given the sheer pace & intensity of creative destruction in most tech verticals. And if we go by how things have played out since the dotcom crash in ’01, this disruption will only become more brutal in the next 2 decades.
So coming back to the anti-fragile career (& life!), I have been asking this question to myself for more than 5 years now. I started thinking on these lines much earlier than usual, probably ‘cos I have a tendency to keep disrupting myself in order to chase large opportunities & therefore, I have subjected both my professional & personal lives to significant stressors over the last decade. From leaving a lucrative VC career in India to move to the Bay Area with just 2 bags & no job in hand, to giving a shot at driving Alibaba’s global expansion pre-IPO when few knew about it, then doing my own startup through the pandemic in a very lean way, while in parallel to all these adventures, also angel investing with my own salaried money in 20+ companies, many of them at an idea stage.
Having been on every side of the table over the last 15 years (founder, startup operator, big tech operator, angel, VC), one thing I internalized very soon was that chasing large outcomes in tech is a high failure rate, multiple-shots-at-the-goal kind of game. It’s hard to know with high certainty what product/ company/ investment will become an outlier & when, so staying power becomes super-important. In this context, another mental model from Taleb (originated from his days as a public markets trader) really resonated with me:
I combined the 2 models of creating an anti-fragile career and avoiding risk of ruin, to design & practice my life in a very specific way. Sharing some of my key life rules for the benefit of anyone with similar goals & context:
Embrace risk – rather than ignoring or avoiding it. ‘Cos risk will find you anyway. The best starting point for managing risk is to acknowledge its perpetual presence in your life.
Regularly practice adapting to change – over a long lifetime, change will creep up on you whether you like it or not. It’s important to keep your muscles trained during peacetime, to deal with big changes during wartime. Going out of your comfort zone & routinely taking up low-risk, micro changes go a long way in building muscle memory. Eg. take up the mini-project at work that you don’t feel ready for, overcome your inertia & go to the networking event, or push yourself to have that tough conversation you have been avoiding.
No complacency – remember the best-seller ‘Only the Paranoid Survive‘ by the legendary Intel Founder & CEO Andy Grove? Oh man, it’s so true! The key to thriving across cycles in tech is to never be complacent in your success. It only takes one black swan event, one war, one economic crisis, or one new competitor to take it away.
Acquire & continuously improve real-world skills – whatever is the space, stage or timing in the economic cycle, core operating skills are always going to be valuable for building any business. In tech, the 2 core “L1” skills are a) ability to build a software product and b) ability to sell a software product. These are then surrounded by other “L2” skills such as operations, finance, human resources etc. Whether you are 25 yrs old or 45 yrs old, acquiring & improving these L1 skills (backed by specific L2 skills you are good at) should always be your North Star.
Execute your skills with hustle – an armory of relevant skills is irrelevant unless it’s backed by strong execution. Be it a tech startup or a publicly-listed Big Tech, superior execution is key to winning & retaining market share. In this context, the word I really like to use is “hustle”. In my book, hustle means “doing whatever it takes to get the job done”. Unfortunately, everyone’s hustle-quotient goes down in bull runs, as returns become increasingly uncorrelated with effort & more correlated with (rising) macros.
Hone your specific “competitive edge” – as with companies, talent gets rewarded the most when it figures out its specific edge & brings its skills+hustle to a team that needs that edge the most. Like the way any good founder or leader evaluates their product, view yourself as a ‘product’ too. Keep asking yourself the question – “where do I have the strongest product-market-fit?” to figure out what your edge is.
Nourish a high-quality network – to start the go-to-market of your ‘product’ (skills+hustle+edge), you will need the support of your network to do lead-gen of relevant opportunities. The best opportunities are almost always behind the firewalls of relationships & cliques. And it’s difficult to break into it cold when you really need it. Important to keep investing in & nourishing a wide-enough network, especially as loose connections typically give the best access.
Play repeated games with the most-valuable relationships – while building a wide network, it’s also important to identify a small set of people you have the most professional synergy & personal resonance with at any point in time. Once you know who they are (<10 people in most cases), consciously make an effort to reach out, help them achieve their goals & look for ways to collaborate with them. Behind every game-changing opportunity is prior trust & reputations at play. The best way to build real trust is to play repeated games with a small set of high-quality people & show up with consistency in them.
Minimize leverage – history shows that the most frequent reason behind the ruin of both companies & individuals is leverage (debt). And interestingly, the propensity to take on more debt rapidly increases during bull markets. Of course, home mortgages are an important source of cheaper, long-term debt but even that needs to be done with discipline wherein your monthly cash flows should line up well even if the going gets tough. I grew up in a middle-class Indian household and as every Indian of this background will tell you, we are taught to be wary of debt since childhood. Now I know why!
Maintain low household burn – even the highest salaries cannot sustain a lifestyle that goes beyond means, leave alone the scenario of tough times wherein the salary itself goes away for an extended period of time. To keep playing the game during both good and bad times, I always like to remember Benjamin Franklin’s age-old virtue of “frugality”. Living below your means is key to avoiding ruin & getting your freedom back.
Bonus point: to lead a quality life even while staying frugal, I have found “focusing on value-for-money (ROI) over penny-pinching” as a good framing to achieve goals that are important to you while minimizing personal conflict.
Create multiple sources of income – as the current layoffs are showing, even if you are the most talented & hardworking employee, your salary can go away in an instant & due to reasons that are completely outside your control. I strongly believe that a monthly salary as the single source of family income is a major personal finance risk. Whatever your life stage might be, it’s important to continuously work towards creating other sources of income. These could be dividend income from public market investments, rental income from real estate, side-hustles like operating an Amazon store, weekend consulting or contracting work in your area of expertise etc. Though it might take several years of focus & discipline to put these non-salary cash flows together, once this system gets set, it will compound without much effort and give you freedom & flexibility when you call on it.
Bonus point: while setting up these supplemental income streams, it’s equally important to do the basics of personal finance & money management well. These include 1) paying off high-cost/ short-term debt (eg. credit card, auto, personal loans etc.), 2) saving x% of income every month & investing it in your desired asset classes, 3) taking full advantage of relevant tax benefits including maxing out retirement contributions (401k, Roth, IRA, 529 etc.), 4) avoiding large-ticket, cash-flow-foolish decisions at every life stage.
These are some core rules I have discovered while attempting to create my own anti-fragile career (& life!). The virtues behind them are all from grandma’s wisdom – discipline, humility, less ego & more sacrifice. As it turns out, grandma’s wisdom is more relevant than ever in this age of AI & Crypto đđ˝
Sending you my very best wishes, as you navigate these turbulent times. This too shall pass, and when it does, I hope to see you stronger (& anti-fragile) on the other side âď¸
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My 2 cents on the Zuck-Metaverse bet: I would think many times before betting against Zuck. Even with his iffy moral compass, he is one of the great founders of our generation.
Having said that, history tells us that truly disruptive innovation rarely comes out of big corps. Most big companies operate under the classic Innovators Dilemma. Creating absolutely new markets requires entrepreneurial passion, backed by a different set of incentives. Big corp. teams are typically not set up for it.
Of course, we have the whole Steve Jobs-iPod/iPhone counter-example, but that was driven by a cathartic chapter in his life (getting kicked out of Apple, restarting from scratch with NeXT & Pixar). In a way, that fueled Jobs with the hunger & passion of a noob founder.
Am not seeing those Jobs 2.0-type motivations & incentives with Zuck. His bet seems driven by a commercial need to pivot the company into the next post-FB/ post-IG era. Combine that with all the big corp baggage & public markets pressure, and itâs hard to build in a truly startup way.
Personally, like with all new technologies & markets (eg. Web 3), I believe there is definitely a kernel of truth (& opportunity) in Metaverse. I would bet a â2004-Zuckâ like 0-to-1 founder is more likely to crack it than a Big Tech like Meta. In my mind, the Eigen Question for this whole episode is – can Zuck pull off a Jobs 2.0 act with Metaverse? It has been done only once before in Consumer Internet (as far as I can remember). Would you bet on it?
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Was talking to a really early stage startup recently. The founders have been building the product as a side-hustle, have a few initial users but are now facing a decision fork. They need to raise capital to be able to leave their full-time jobs and focus on the startup BUT investors typically want founders who are already full-time before they commit capital. How does one resolve this?
I have personally faced several such forks, especially since starting-up 2 years back. I call them “but” decisions – they are irritatingly hard because both sides of outcomes have similar chances of actually happening.
Despite many iterations, the product isn’t hitting the expected metrics. On one hand, you had decided that if the desired metrics aren’t achieved, you will seriously evaluate the company’s future. BUT, you also hear stories of perseverance where an extra 12 months ended up changing the growth trajectory of many startups.
You are close to hiring someone for a super-critical role but aren’t fully convinced yet on the candidate. On one hand, it could be just the person you were looking for, who ends up contributing really well. BUT, it could also blow up in your face, end up eating valuable runway and adversely impact the rest of the team.
You are feeling stressed about various challenges facing the company, and are contemplating discussing it with an investor in the company. On one hand, the investor’s interests are perfectly aligned with yours and advising founders is one of their core roles. BUT, you have seen/ heard of several cases where these interactions have blown up in the founder’s face in more ways than one.
“But” decisions also have other added complexities like not having prior experience to turn to & existential impact in case of an unfavorable outcome. A common advice would be to talk to people who have dealt with similar situations. Again, what I have seen is that you get very divided opinions wherein people in the past have ended up on either side of the equation.
I haven’t yet been able to figure out a perfect framework to make these “but” decisions. Typically, I try and go by first-principles, following a method very similar to what Annie Duke frequently talks about:
Map out various outcome scenarios
Do a macro-filtering based on a) values and b) goals I have set for the particular context
Figure out the upside & downside quantums for each scenario (qualitative and/ or quantitative)
In my head, assign some kind of (even qualitative) “probability” to each scenario, based on what I know at that time
See what the expected payoff is looking like for each scenario
While speaking to relevant experts/ mentors, rather than accepting any binary advice on face value, I adjust the above variables based on their inputs. Also, I try and adjust for few specific biases I know I have been prone to in the past (eg. optimism bias in my case). My better half plays an awesome role in calling my biases out :).
I know these decisions can’t be taken mathematically but the above process at least makes sure I am thinking 3600 about the problem. But even with all this prep & analysis, frequent screw-ups happen đ It’s part of the game – I believe the idea is to get a little bit better at these “but” decisions each time…and avoid risk of total ruin to be able to keep playing the game.
To everyone who has been following Workomoâs (and my) journey over the last 2 years, apologies for the hiatus â our entire team took a break from writing to channel our energies towards building Workomo 2.0.
Since the beginning, our vision behind Workomo has been to build an intelligent hub where a professionalâs entire network lives, including valuable context around these people. So what is Workomo 2.0 and how did it come about, you might ask? Read on to find outâŚ
1. Workomo 1.0 journey â tiny steps with mighty pivots
The driving force behind our vision, as I had articulated in my original blogpost in June 2019, was my own frustration with the limitations of LinkedIn esp. its lack of relevance, noisy feeds, extremely weak search, and no workflow capabilities.
First landing page
Starting from launching the first landing page and opening the waitlist in mid-2019, over the next 1 year, we actively iterated on whatâs the most burning problem we should be solving first, and whatâs the easiest solution we can build for it. After about 15 MVP iterations, we got the most traction from users for the simple use case of displaying a distilled professional profile of a person before you meet them and doing so with minimal typing or manual work from users.
While the use-case sounds simple, achieving this simplicity required creating a highly automated people-intelligence API even for the first cut. We created the v1 of this platform & built a Chrome extension that delivered this people-info directly in workflows like calendar, Meet & Zoom in a âzero-typingâ experience. We launched Workomo 1.0 on Product Hunt in Augâ20, trended #1 for several hours, ended in the top 10 products of the day, and got featured in their newsletter.
Product Hunt launch
2. Learnings from active users
Between Oct-Decâ20, the Workomo Chrome extension got tons of user love. People used it for everything from Lunchclub meetings to interviewing over video. We also started receiving active feedback on what users want Workomo to be, in order for them to use it more deeply & eventually pay for it. The most important of these being:
#1 A more holistic network management experience that has utility even outside of âmeeting a new personâ, and where users can do many contact-management actions (eg. add a contact, search etc.)
#2 Ability to bring your own insights into Workomo (a.k.a note-taking)
#3 Significantly better profile-matching accuracy
#4 Even deeper integrations into a userâs workflows, to make the UX more intuitive
#5 Multi-calendar, multi-address book & multi-platform support
Sounds familiar? Our users had themselves defined the product manifestation of Workomoâs original vision â creating a smart & simple professional relationships management hub.
3. Alpha launch of Workomo 2.0
Perhaps for the first time, we knew exactly what we needed to build to effectively solve a burning pain point for our users. And this time, our goal wasnât just to get users; we wanted paying customers. It was time to turn on monetization.
During Jan-Marâ21, we built our entire web app from the ground up to include all the above capabilities. In parallel, we created a significantly upgraded v2 of our people-intelligence API with improved identity-mapping accuracy, shorter data-display times for real-time workflows, and higher profile processing capacity. Powered by a herculean effort from Team Workomo, we soft-launched Workomo 2.0 alpha in Aprâ21 to existing users.
Workomo 2.0 is your âone-stop-shopâ smart Rolodex that deeply integrates into calendars & address books, aggregating contacts as well as important info about them in one place.
Whatâs even cooler? Your Workomo Rolodex actually interacts with your life, showing you profiles of people you are about to meet, enabling you to take people or meeting notes when and where you prefer, sending you smart pre and post-meeting reminders, and making everything about your network contextually searchable. Basically, everything you wished LinkedIn could do for you!
Workomo is now an end-to-end product suite :
Supports multi-calendar and multi-address book integrations (both Gsuite and Office 365)
Can be accessed by a progressive web app on both desktop and mobile browsers as well as a Chrome extension
Displays people-info across calendars, browser Meet & Zoom PLUSâŚ
A super-cool, on-demand âassistantâ experience coming soon on your favorite messaging app
Even before starting the company, I had always imagined the following 3 elements as being integral to my vision:
#1 Effective aggregation â auto-capture any important person I interact with on any platform
#2 Minimize manual workâ drastically reduce the inertia of managing my network
#3 âFabricâ user experienceâ be present everywhere in my life but show up only when I need you the most
As a founder, it gives me immense satisfaction to see that Workomo 2.0, as it stands today, is perhaps the closest manifestation of my original vision and the way I had imagined the product to be.
Given the depth of the product now, we gradually turned on monetization over the last quarter with our âPremiumâ ($8.99 per month) and âProâ ($14.99 per month) plans. Super-stoked to share that we now have paying customers across multiple countries including the US, UK, and India. Overall, Workomo has touched users in more than 20 countries since our first launch.
5. Whatâs next?
We are about to soft-launch a game-changing integration into a top mobile messaging platformâ a one-of-its-kind experience wherein a customer can interact with its Workomo Rolodex entirely in an on-demand âassistantâ experience to add contacts, fetch contact profiles (what we call âcue cardsâ), add people/ meeting notes & get smart reminders.
Stay tuned for more updates on it!
We keep marching onâŚ
Workomo 2.0 is a result of the courage, conviction & hard work of Team Workomo â Swaraj, Nidhi, Pankaj, Harsh, Sujith, Rhythm, and Stas. Super-proud of this team for overcoming all kinds of challenges thrown at it, from the pandemic and delivering in a fully-remote & distributed team, to solving extremely hard data problems & cracking an intuitive design language.
This journey from 0 âĄ1.0 âĄ2.0 has been intense, gut-wrenching yet full of learning & transformational at a personal level for each of us.
We would love to have you try out Workomo 2.0 (sign-up here) and get your feedback. Till next time âđ˝
Since opening up our beta in Aug-end, we have been seeing job-seekers successfully leverage Workomo to prep on their interviewer before jumping on a Zoom call. Am sure two questions are crossing your mind as you read thisâââWhy is getting to know your interviewer before the call important? And why should I use Workomo to do my prep, instead of looking up the person on LinkedIn or Google Search? Let me answer both these through what we are hearing from our users.
Q1. Why is getting to know your interviewer before the Zoom call important?
Because the majority of interviews are happening over Zoom & Meet, and itâs that much harder to leave an impression over video compared to in-person. Because you canât use your body language & energy to âcharmâ someone over software. Because economic uncertainty driven by the pandemic has made competition for the same jobs that much more intense. Because unlike 15 years back, itâs likely that your interviewer is a digital âcreatorâ of some sort and extremely passionate about itâââsomething that you can use to your advantage.
Gone are the days when âreading up a company’s websiteâ and âasking intelligent questions in the endâ itself differentiated a candidateâââthese are now table-stakes. One positive to come out of the present video interviews paradigm is that as a candidate, you know beforehand who you are interviewing with. I remember my days of interviewing for major consulting firms and Investment Banks as a young Associateâââsitting in their offices for a whole day, with people coming in one-after-another for roundsđ There was NO way I could know each of them beforehand.
Now itâs different. Details of every interviewer is present on your Zoom meeting calendar. Powerful software like Workomo can automatically identify & pull in relevant insights you need to know about them, all accessible to you with 1-click. Imagine opening the conversation by bringing up the fact that your interviewer worked at Google in 2012, which is when you also interned there. Or that you noticed his Twitter handle mentioning âidolize Maradonaâ, and that you feel todayâs Messi is betterđđ˝ââď¸
Q2. Why should I use Workomo to do my prep, instead of looking up the person on LinkedIn or Google Search?
Because you probably donât have more than 1â2 mins to prep before rushing into your Zoom interview. Because you are cognitively overloaded with working-from-home, taking meetings all day from your messy living room, and not having the bandwidth to even remember the last name of each interviewer, let alone doing 5â7 clicks and jumping through many hoops to get to someoneâs profile. Let me not even go into running a comprehensive cross-platform search on LinkedIn & Twitter, & trying to distill all this info into key insights that you can then use. Even a 10x salesperson who does this day-in-day-out for a job struggles with this.
We have designed Workomo grounds-up to solve these pain points & make it a âremote-firstâ people insights product:
No typing or remembering namesâââWorkomo integrates into the calendar and automatically identifies people in your meetings.
Aggregates data from multiple sourcesâââthrough the Chrome extension, a contactâs âCue Cardâ is available at 1-click. This Cue Card combines data from multiple public sources, so you donât need extensive search.
Designed to be digested in <60 secsâââpeople insights in the Cue Card are distilled so you can skim them quickly and access all the right talking points.
We remind you to do people-prep at the right time & placesâââwith the goal of making interview-prep more productive, we use a combination of smart triggers (a timer on the extension icon, a meeting card auto pop-up on the calendar, within the meeting invite card in Google Calendar, pop-up right as you enter a Zoom or Meet call) so you donât forget to prep but also, donât waste precious time doing it.
Utilize pockets of time during a Zoom or Meet callâââthere are often waiting-room scenarios in video calls. Now you can use these to continue your prep, as Cue Cards are seamlessly accessible WITHIN the Meet window and RIGHT NEXT to Zoom windows. So prep & plan your talking points without leaving your Zoom or Meet context.
Viewing Workomo Cue Cards within Meet
As a job seeker, you are presently wading through unchartered territories of virtual interviews. There are no playbooks to succeed at it. As tribal beings, evolution has wired us to respond to and judge based on in-person energy & cues (thatâs what conferences, coffee shops & bars were for). I mean, how do you beat evolution & still leave a solid impression in a Zoom interview?
The answer isâââdo your people-prep before the meeting. You are living in the age of the creator economy, where professionals are increasingly voicing their passions, interests & expertise digitally. Finding common connections & areas of interest can help you break the ice in even a drab Zoom call. And with software like Workomo, you can do this in 1â2 mins, without eating into your packed schedule or taxing yourself mentally.
During work-from-home, all hiring is now taking place over Meet & Zoom. Be it founders, big company execs, or recruiting managers in startups, interviewing candidates over video is the norm now globally.
During our conversations with Workomo users, several hiring managers have highlighted inadequate prep-time due to back-to-backs, as a key challenge đ§đ˝ââď¸ Pre-WFH, offline interviews happened in structured environments (eg. office spaces, on-campus etc.) with a scheduled cadence that let hiring managers plan their day and get breathing room. Now, interviews happen from messy living rooms & home-offices, squeezed between home-schooling kids, putting toddlers to sleep & doing personal chores. What makes it worse is an ever-increasing number of video meetings throughout the day, both internal & external. End-result: not enough time to prep on candidates, leading to ineffective interviews & anxiety.
Even under this time pressure, hiring managers still recognize getting a holistic perspective on a candidateâs persona as a critical needđĄ In todayâs knowledge economy, getting that one key hire right (or wrong!) can disproportionately impact team outcomes.
In a nutshell, in this working environment of back-to-back Zoom/ Meet interviews, skimming PDF resumes or LinkedIn profiles to do prep on candidates at high scale & velocity has become cumbersome. This is exactly where innovator users are using Workomo.
As a hiring manager, even if you donât have enough time to prep before a video interview, Workomo automatically pops-up a candidatesâs professional profile in your meeting workflow at the right access points (browser, calendar, Meet, Zoom) a few minutes before the meeting.
Via a meeting timer on the browserOne-click access on the calendarDuring the video call
Do you feel the mental-overload of quickly making sense of a cluttered PDF resume (unfortunately, candidates donât build resumes keeping your user experience in mindđĽ)? Donât worryâââWorkomo presents people info in the form of Cue Cards. These are distilled professional insights about the candidate, designed to be consumed in a 1â2 mins âlast-minute-prepâ scenario.
Distilled insights into the person, including commonalities
As a founder hiring for my own startup, I now consciously look beyond static resumes, to understand the holistic persona of someone I am about to interviewđ What are the thematic interests of this person? What does the person tweet about? Are there any commonalities that I can find & subsequently utilize to ice-break and create a more comfortable interviewing environment? Workomo Cue Cards are a great way to access these insights in a byte-sized way.
1-click Twitter personas
As we introduce more powerful product features over the next quarter, we are super excited to see how the usage of Workomo by hiring managers evolves further. If you are in the midst of hiring over Zoom or Meet today, try Workomo & see if it works for youđđ˝ââď¸
PS: this post is part of the âHow Innovators use Workomoâ series, in which we share how our most retained users are using the product. Check out the previous post on using Workomo for meeting someone new on Lunchclub here!
Itâs been almost 3 months since we launched Workomo on Product Hunt. Since then, we have seen double-digits week-on-week growth in new users, with Innovator users from all over the world using the product and giving active feedback on how to make it more useful for themđđ˝ We are also starting to notice interesting patterns emerge from how retained users are using the product.
Given Workomoâs core value proposition of âone-click people insights for virtual meetingsâ applies to many different kinds of professional personas and scenarios, I have been getting this question a lot from usersââââwhat are the kinds of meetings & situations where Workomo will provide the most value to me?âđĄ
Am starting this âHow Innovators use Workomoâ series of posts, essentially to share how our most retained users are using the product. Hopefully, this will help better explain Workomoâs potential benefit to you as a professional, and illustrate ways it can help make your video meetings over Zoom/ Meet more productive.
To begin with, let me talk about LunchClub meetings as one of the main scenarios where users are finding Workomo extremely useful. During our Product Hunt launch itself, the community highlighted how LunchClub & Workomo could potentially be used together in a powerful way.
LunchClub is a global platform that does curated 1:1 introductions, helping professionals connect with other like-minded people. Itâs HQ in the Bay Area and rapidly growing in traction across key markets.
In its current form, Workomo has immense value when meeting a new person & hence, is being used by LunchClub users to prep before meeting a new person they got matched with on the platform.
Typically in this scenario, users pre-Workomo looked up people on LinkedIn or via Google search, each meeting-prep requiring multiple clicks & significant mental bandwidth. If one wanted to go deeper and also lookup people on platforms like Twitter, this took even more time. In fact, trying to fit this people-prep effort within a userâs crammed professional life led to most just giving up on prepping, despite fully understanding the value it creates.
Workomo solves this problem really well:
â With one click in the browser, Workomo âCue Cardsâ show you summarized professional insights aggregated from multiple platforms, all in one place. This eliminates the need to go to multiple platforms, saving mental energy, time (& clicks!)âł
â Because Workomo integrates into the calendarđ , itâs able to auto-identify meeting schedule & attendees, thus popping up the Cue Card at exactly the right time with exactly the right info. One-click, zero-typing experience đ˛
2. Especially strong benefits for video meetings during WFH
With the prevailing WFH environment, LunchClub meetings also went fully virtual over the last few months. This has helped unlock Workomoâs video meeting value proposition. Today, LunchClub users, via the browser, view info about the person they are meeting with, without leaving their Zoom/ Meet/ other meeting screensđŠđ˝âđť
3. âT-60 to T+60â secs
Specifically in the video meeting workflow, we have noticed an interesting pattern from how users are leveraging Workomo. Most use it in the time window of 60 secs before+60 secs after meeting start timeⲠBecause networking meetings typically get crammed in the middle of hectic job tasks & personal errands, prep-time at disposal is really less, and therefore, time-saved in people-prep is extremely important.
Given Workomo Cue Cards have been designed to make the info skimmable & easy to digest in <60 secs, they perfectly solve this problem. Carefully-timed pop-up reminders embedded without friction in the userâs workflow, combined with the ability to view people-info directly within Meet & Zoom via the browser, further drives the 3P benefit (Productive People Prep) for users.
T-60 secs (on the calendar)
T=0 (entering the video call)
T+60 secs (beginning of the video call: waiting room scenario, round-the-table intros etc.)
So next time you are meeting someone new, especially on a virtual networking platform like LunchClub, do give Workomo a shot and see if you find it usefulđđ˝ââď¸
Recently, David Sacks shared about having a product-first approach to building companies, drawing on how Square & PayPal used similar strategies to identify market gaps & solve for them. Here are the key takeaways:
#1 Make a simple product with a clear âhookâ to grab users. Typically, this hook is a high-frequency task that users can do in the product to engage with it and subsequently, can then be enticed to engage with other features in the stack. Square -> Swipe, PayPal ->Email Money.
#2 Couple the product hook with a distribution trick that can create viral adoption of the product. Square ->distinctive hardware design & branding. PayPal -> email virality via sending money.
#3 Hook+Distribution trick together hopefully drive enough early users to start learning from. Unique market insight doesnât appear via a brain wave from founders. Itâs identified via observing who is using the product & why. Eg. Square -> merchants not having a credit history.
#4 Build the operating capabilities necessary to execute on this insight. For instance, both Square and PayPal had to build new types of fraud detection systems to solve the lack of credit history & processes. These operating capabilities & IP, turn, become long term moats.
#5 Finally, in this process of operationalizing the market insight, an overarching business theme will emerge. Eg. for Square, it became âaccessâ. Start building out your product roadmap around this theme, and keep adding more offerings but all centered around this âNorth Starâ.
To summarize, getting a unique market insight to build a startup on, first requires launching a simple product that gets user-adoption, observing who they are and why they are using it, and then extrapolating that to re-frame the true pain point of the user.
Building a product to solve for this âreframedâ user problem will automatically result in a truly differentiated product that is filling a key gap in the market that few others are seeing in the way you are seeing.
You can read the complete article on Davidâs substack here.
Note: this post first appeared on the Workomo blog here.
Heard an excellent conversation between Michael Seibel (CEO of YC) and Patrick OâShaughnessy (top asset manager, also moonlighting as an amazing podcaster). It had many fundamental insights that would help any founderâ Sharing my top takeaways here:
#1 Donât be too âsmartâ for your own good: there is nothing like that one breakthrough idea that is guaranteed to work 100%. Teams need to be willing to iterate, pivot & execute in new directions all the time đś
#2 Launch!!! At the 0-to-1 stage, the most important thing is the ability of a team to build & launch a working product, as fast as possible. You canât build a company if you donât launch in the first place đ
#3 Startups are all about momentum: teams need to demonstrate forward momentum in whatever time they have spent building the product. The best teams generate rapid momentum to acquire users & fundraise with this tailwind đ
#4 What kind of problem is worth solving? a) high frequencyâ°, b) high intensityđŚ, c) high willingness to payđľ. Overall, founders need to have some special insight into the problem they are setting out to solveđĄ
#5 Founders essentially take 2 kinds of risk: a) product riskđ , not sure if people need this product (typically taken by relatively younger founders) and b) execution riskđ¨, I know this product is needed but not sure of execution (usually taken by more experienced founders).
#6 Be ârealâ when coaching founders: be upfront in presenting facts about high failure rates. And that to win, you have to reach out for extraordinary (be 2 standard deviations from average). Also, emphasize the importance of developing tools to manage their emotions & healthâď¸
#7 Best way to create leverage during your fundraising process? Acquire users & grow m-o-m. Pitch with real users & data. Itâs possible to raise money just on ideas/prototypes, but you will have zero leverage in these discussions. Your goal should be to fundraise with leverageđŞđź
#8 What is Product-Market Fit? Itâs like a sledgehammer to your jaw. Itâs that month or quarter where you get so many users that it breaks your systems. When the sheer market traction bypasses all your spreadsheet plans & projections. When you have PMF, you WILL know itđ°
To conclude, what I found most intriguing was the importance of âbraveryâ in foundersđ§đ˝ââď¸ 2020 has shoved in our faces a plethora of issues we are facing as a species. The need of the hour is a generation of founders that take on problems that are intimidating to solveâď¸
Note: this post first appeared on the Workomo blog here.
