Julian: Hey everyone. Thankyou so much for joining Thee Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have MehulBhatt, co-founder and CEO of FloCareer. FloCareer is an initiative, or excuseme, an innovative interview as a service HR tech platform that helps companiesacross the globe, higher talent, faster and easier asell while reducinginterviewing over.

Mahu, I'm so excited to chat with you,not only to dive into your career and, and your background and yourexperiences, but also FloCareer and this interesting kind of ecosystem aroundinterviewing and, and this whole kind of actually the, probably one of thebiggest headaches for a lot of founders is building teams, and a lot of thatgoes into evaluating the type of individual and making that process efficient.

When you have all these other prioritiesat hand. And before we get into FloCareer Korea and how you've kind of createda more, faster and scalable process, what were you doing before you started thecompany?  

Mehul: Sure. Julian, thanks alot for having me here. Really glad to be part of your show before, startingFloCareer.

I have always been a techie, yeah. Ihave always, be a hardcore developer and interesting. In my previous workexperiences, I had almost, 16 years of experience before I jumped intoFloCareer. Yeah. I never become even a manager. During my entire career, I hadalways been an individual contributor, a tech lead, architect, but never apeople manager.

Yeah. So that's that's has been myhistory. I have, I have been a developer essentially.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah, and you'velooked at some pretty substantial companies. I'm curious in terms of like, onething as founders scale and build out their teams, whether it's the engineeringteam or not, I think the engineering team probably is, is a lifeblood of a lotof companies because of obviously, especially companies like SaaS companies whohave a service or product.

How do big companies structure the teamWell to create a really cohesive kind of unit and organism to be able to, notonly take objectives and build features and complete milestones, but also tokeep people kind of integrated within that team and inundated on, on theculture and everything like that.

Because it's hard once you have a fewdifferent personalities and, and things kind of become dispersed. Teams getlarger. But what do large companies do well structurally that you've. In yourexperience and that you've taken maybe even to a FloCareer, that that helpsteams run efficiently and effectively?

Mehul: Sure, yeah. I thinkpeople are the most important assets of any organization, right? I mean, it'sultimately all about people, so finding the right set of people, making surethat they are all aligned and they are all motivated, to do, a work that is,Common goal of the company, right?

That's, that's essentially critical. Iwas fortunate enough to work with, two startups, which really grew quite big.One got acquired by Cisco another, grew really big became public company. AndI've seen that journey personally, where a small team comes together, becomeseither part of a much larger ecosystem or, they grow organically to become bigand, kind of.

Much bigger purpose and much biggeraudience. Yeah. What really helps is from starting, people are really clear onthe purpose of the, and the mission, of, of the organization. Right. Why are wehere? What motivates them to come on Monday morning and come to the work and,continue applying through, the, the, the hurdles of the week and the days andthe months.

Right? Yeah. That's, that's very, veryimportant. Right? Yeah. So, so have that clarity of, of of, of the purpose you.What, why exactly we are here and, and then giving them autonomy to do. Yeah.What they are doing, yeah. Most combination really helps a lot.  

Julian: Yeah. And thinkingabout, the whole interview process and, and, and, getting talent and, andvetting talent and making sure that you, you have the right people.

In your experience on other teams beforeeven FloCareer, where did you see the interview process? I don't wanna saybroken, but maybe not necessarily hitting the objectives or hitting the goalsthat they're looking for. And, and this is not May and I think a lot of people.We should take a step back.

And it's not about the skillset somebodyhas, because that's different than somebody fitting within a certain team ororganization. When at least you're building an initial core team. And as youbuild core teams of different organizations on, what did you see in the processthat wasn't necessarily accurate or inefficient or, or just, not, not achievingthe outcomes that you want in the interview process, in your experience beforeFloCareer.

Mehul: Yeah, so I was alwayson the other side of the table before floor career in terms of, the hiring teamside. Right? Yeah. And some of the observations that we always had was Numberone, lot of resumes that comes to the table of the hiring manager, they are notrelevant, yeah. And we come to know, not while looking at the resume, becausethat's what the HR time team has already done that. And they find the resumesto be quite great. Yeah. But when you talk to the candidates, you come to knowthat, okay, that's not really a right fit. Right. People claim all sort ofthings on the resumes, but when you talk to them, you come to know that whetherthey're really a fit, fit for the, for your team or not.

Right. That wastes a lot of time ofhiring teams. Right? Yeah. The second thing we were always, facing was that,people waving, literally waving the resume and say, saying, Hey, who can takethis person's interview? The guy is already in the room and I don't have time.So you know who can do that?

That results into a lot of, unstructuredapproach towards interviewing. Right? Yeah. So that's another opportunity that,that we saw that, okay, this is something that we can add value, right? Andlast but not least, after going through so many interviews, and, and stillsometimes, people, companies have mis-hires, right?

Yeah. So all of those, clutter and allof those chaos around interviewing while recognizing that the people are mostimportant asset of any company, right? Yeah. And pretty much all companiesunderstand that, acknowledge that but there are very few tech giants.Interviewing really seriously and structured the interview, right?

Yeah. So we saw that gap and we thoughtthat there is something that we can add value here.  

Julian: Yeah. And just to givethe audience a little bit more context, describe FloCareer and how you've beenable to create a really kind of interview as a service product that allowsteams to do a lot of things.

That are say pretty standardized acrossthe interview process. Do it efficiently and effectively so they can get to thecore value of that interviewing, which is seeing if the, that there's a, thatthere's a fit within the team their skillset and their experience and, and whattheir motivations and their goals are.

Describe FloCareer a little bit more andhow you've been able to kind of standardize and give companies kind of a, ahack to doing it efficiently and, and sometimes asynchronous and not having tohave so much manual labor on that and, and what that really means tocompanies.  

Mehul: True, true. You can,you, you can think of us as, as Uber of interviewing literally.

So we have gig workers, we havefreelancers across the globe, in fact. So that's another beauty that, that wehave, that we can. Into the resources across the globe. Right. So, these gigworkers are the one who would take the interviews on behalf of the hiring team,right? Yeah. And as soon as you have that element that, a, a third party, afreelancer is taking the interview yeah.

Immediately the concerns from the hiringteam is that, well, will those people be able to take the interviews? In thesame fashion that we are taking these interviews. Right? Yeah. That led us toan essential element of our journey, which was structuring these interviews.Right? Yeah. So we, we, we developed, a very specific structure aroundinterviewing.

Which when we present it to the hiringteam, they realize that they themselves don't have such structure in place fortheir own interviewers. So, so, many times they take the same structure andapply to their own internal interviewing also, because we are not the final,interviewers for, for any candidate.

We take first couple of round ofinterviews, and then final call is always with the hiring team. Right? Right.So you think of us as an Uber, instead of hiring team, taking the, first fewround of interviews, the freelancers across the globe, take these interviews.Yeah. Interviews are structured.

That also helps the companies from deand I perspective, because now it's not that, okay, I'm favoring some kind ofpeople because I have certain affinity with that group, or not sure. Right noweverybody goes through some standardized process and Companies get a muchconsistent output because of that.

Yeah. So that helps them a lot, right?Yeah. So that in a nutshell is what we do. We kind of uberize it, standardizeit, and that helps companies conduct interviews faster because now you aretapping into a much bigger resource pool across the globe, right? Yeah. Weconduct at times almost 2000 interviews.

Right. So, so if, if there is a, let's,let's assume a team of 10 people who want to hire three more people, right?That would result roughly 45 to 16 through, yeah. We can do that in a day,right? Which, which a team of 10 within the organization, it would be a bigchallenge for them to kind of take the time away from their, primary job andjust conduct interviews.

They're not gonna do that ever. Right?Yeah. So, so that's how we bring the velocity to the companies.  

Julian: Yeah, it's sofascinating thinking about, companies like yourself who take, say a core jobfunction, I don't wanna say away, but they, they essentially create a system orproduct or service around, that job function, particular, this is interviewing.

But adopt having a company adopted orhaving a team adopted that is that core responsibility. Obviously it's met witha lot of friction sometimes as people think that, they have that ownership andit's hard to relinquish it. How have you been able to communicate the valuethat it does add to teams that have that core responsibility and the, the factthat it'll give them back that time?

To say do other more important or highlevel tasks, strategic tasks, or even more detail-oriented tasks back to theirschedule. How do you communicate the value and, and kind of, ease into thoseteams to who are, are seeing it as, as friction in relinquishing some of thatownership. How, what, what is the challenge there and how have you been able toovercome it?

Mehul: That's a greatquestion, Julian, because when we started, I have always worked in startups inthe product companies, so to speak, right. In the, in the, in the high techdomain. So, I was, when I started FloCareer, I was always under impression thatokay, it would be the product companies who would value the time of theirengineers the most at.

To this, this process. Yeah. Butsurprisingly, lot of services, industries, companies were the first to jump on,using our services and our platform. Yeah. Because, For services companies orthe contract companies who, who, who build their customers on an hourly basisfor their leaderships.

They had this Excel spreadsheet in frontof them that how many hours of my engineers are billable? Yeah. We are chargingour customers for, for, our own engineers. Right. And and they saw thatinterviewing is a big overhead. Yeah. And we did not hire these, our, our ownengineers to interview other engineers, but we hired them to.

Delivered the products to our endcustomers, right? Mm-hmm. So they were the first one to jump to use our, our,our, our platform and our services. But later, we were able to convince lot ofproduct companies also after, after seeing the success with this, with theservices industry, that, hey, you also value your engineer's type, but theirapprehension usually.

Will you guys be able to do theinterviews the same way we are doing the interviews? Because, most productcompanies, think that Okay, our style is very unique, right? Sure. And when weshow them our processes, when we show them the entire structuring of theinterviews and, and so on and so forth, right?

They really get, really impressed and,they're willing to try it out. Once they try it and then they realize that,okay, this helps me a lot. Now instead of conducting 15 interviews to close oneposition, I just have to do three or four interviews, and the hiring team canengage with those people in a deeper way because now they have more time towork with them so they can engage with good leads in a better way, which yieldsthem better results.

Yeah. So, yes, you are right. It isdefinitely a journey we need. With their confidence to help them realize thatyes, we can do as good of a job as, as their team for better. Right. And, andthen they are still, in control to make the final decision. Right. Right. Soyes, that has been a journey.

And it's, it's, it's a matter of workingwith the engineering leadership, explaining them our processes. And making surethat, they're on the same page.  

Julian: Yeah. One thing thatyou just mentioned that I think is particularly, really interesting is, productteams or, or product companies who have say a unique, I use air quotes therebecause a lot of times the uniqueness of the interview process is, the testthat they, give developers for instance, and have them go through, right.

That are related to their product insome way that they, some way or degree, but, It's not only, it's not alwayssuccessful, right? Like we've seen testing kind of come in, there's, there'stwo camps on that, whether you should say, give a test to a developer or not.Or if you do a code pairing session, how much time to allocate to it?

There's all these variables thatcompanies kind of think about when hiring talent, but in my experience, theydon't always do it. Right. And I guess I'm curious, if you were to justgeneralize it, Like, what recommended interview structure would you recommendto other founders who may not need the volume that FloCareer comes with, butare looking to kind of set some kind of standard so that they can startbringing in talent and evaluating at a really at a really kind of successfullevel where they, they find the right talent for their teams?

What generalized structure would.Recommend to other founders out there.  

Mehul: Sure. So, so you know,again, if you think about, what are the best practices in terms of, asking theright set of questions to the. Interviewers by the interviewers to thecandidate. Right? Especially if you are hiring senior folks or, mid-levelfolks, not like fresh out of the college.

Yeah. You need to have your interviewsmuch more interactive in terms of, real hands-on experiences and whatnot.Right. And that's where many times we see the gap in, in companies interviewprocesses where you. Techies. Usually they have their own favorite interviewquestions and they keep asking the same questions again, right, because.

Again, they were not hired to structurethe interview or coming up with more content or good interview questions andwhatnot. Right. So they keep asking the same question that, that which aretheir favorite questions, which eventually gets leaked on the glass door andany of the platforms online.

Right? So what we do is we ask ourinterviewers to come up with a good scenario based interview questions, right.Just to give a very. Simple example, right? Non-technical example is if you askanybody, you know how to make pasta, they, they can recite a recipe, right?Right, right. Get the pasta, boil it, add the sauce, and you are done.

Right? Anybody can tell them. But whatwe encourage our interviewers is, looking their at their own work and see whatkind of problems they faced in last few months, right? Mm-hmm. And from that,Coming up with a good set of interview questions. So we have in the same pastaexample, let's say somebody's making pesa pasta.

Sure. They, they had so much of a sauce,so much of a pasta sauce and not enough pasta, and they're at home is no chanceof buying more pasta immediately. How would you fix that? A good chef would beable to fix that. They will say, okay, in that case, I will probably, boil somebroccolis and, edit to the Sure Mix so that you know it.

Neutralize the strong, pester sauce,right? If I don't have enough pasta. So these are the real life problems. Onlyif you have worked on it, you will, you will know that, okay, I face thisproblem, and this is how I usually have solved in my past life, right? Yeah.Yeah. So, so, so similarly, we, we have now almost close to 50,000 questionsacross like 300 plus skills.

Wow. Where these people have. Going backto their own problems that. Come up with a good interview questions, and wekeep refreshing these questions, right? Because sooner or later this will getleaked, out there on the internet, so we have certain meta, we use those, okay?The same question has been asked more than end number of times.

Then retire those questions, right? So,so that's what I advise, people who wants to structure the interview that, lookat, the skills that you want to evaluate, the can. And look at the real life,like, examples, how would you test their abilities by writing some codesnippets and, and not like quite testing them, but as you mentioned, the pairprogramming, right?

You, you kind of, the way you work in adaily environment mm-hmm. Work, but you are not constantly testing the otherperson. You are just challenge challenging them with some problems. Let them goout, do their research. They can, they can refer to things. We don't want themto remember things, right? We don't.

We want them to solve a problem. So realpractical, scenario based questions. Using them, can they solve a real lifeproblem? Right? If yes. Then yeah. That those, those are the people who, whocan be your great asset.  

Julian: Yeah. It's sointeresting thinking about, not only just past example, but also the, the, the,utilizing real life scenarios that you've, had within your company to reallyget to someone's thought process.

And there's, it's a lot of times that'swhat people really care to understand in how you solve a problem, what yourprocess is behind that, in terms of the information you're grabbing. Where doyou go, how resourceful are you? They are within those scenarios. Questionsthat elicit some, some sort of response.

Always kind of give you a template ofhow to respond versus offering some level of creativity that, that doesn't havethat structure. But how do you collect that information and then communicatewhether uh uh, if you do it in your interview process. How do you score answerslike that in a way that you're really, accurately, recording their level of,whether it's aptitude or critical thinking or whatever attributes, how do yourecord those out of those kind of more open-ended answers?

Mehul: Yeah, that, that'sagain, a great question because interviews are mostly subjective, right? Yeah.How do you bring more objectivity out of it, right? Yeah, that's, that's thequestion, right? So, what we do is we kind of, have a, a community program forall of our freelancers, where we engage with them, we explain this perspectiveto them, we help them come up with good interview.

And not just the questions, but thegrading guidelines, how would you evaluate the Kennedy. What kind of answerswill, will, will deserve, full marks. Right? And, and when would you give, thenext level of, categories, right? When we do you four, five star, for example.

Right? Yeah. So, so, so bringing thatstructure into the place, not just the questions, but what is the gradingguidelines, that's, that's an essential part of that interview.Structuring.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Tell us alittle bit more about FloCareer and what, what's been exciting about thetraction you have so far, and what you, what are you particularly excited aboutin terms of the next next chapter of the journey of FloCareer?

Mehul: Sure, sure. So, soyeah. Despite, a lot of news nowadays about, the fan companies laying offpeople and whatnot, right? There are always this conflict. Information outthere in, in, in the market, right? That okay. Despite, people laying off,large number like Facebook laying off people, Google laying off Microsoft,laying off people.

Yeah. And at the same time you get thejob market report, which says job market is still strong. Right. What we haveseen in, in this quarter is just ending today. Right. And, and we just had aquarter over quarter quick review. The final numbers will be compiled next weekof course, but quarter over quarter here in US, we have seen strong growth for,for this quarter.

Yeah. So we were just talking today thatwe can become that, we kind of hope for a lot of people, right. We. A lot oftouring of our customers, in January also, right? Yeah. And we have seen,interestingly, if I, if I can quantify right in bay we saw a lot of pessimismbecause of, a lot of, fang companies were laying off over there and you alwayshear, oh, my friend got laid off and this.

But outside of the Bay Area, we saw alot of optimism on, on, on, on the, on the, the job market, right? Yeah. Wehave seen the growth. We continue to see the growth in the next quarter. That'sour expectation. Yeah. And what we are excited about the future is that, whenwe talk to our freelancers, right?

We have the two arms on the freelancerside. They come to us and, and let us know that I'm not worried even if I getlaid off tomorrow, because I. Great secondary source of income now, which I candepend on, right? And, and that. A really good sense of satisfaction. Yeah.Because, when you are able to build that ecosystem for people which helpscompanies as well as individuals, right.

That gives you that sense of purpose,right? Yeah. So in terms of our journey, yeah. We are looking for strong growthin us this year. And expanding, into multiple d. Segments, beyond technologytwo is what we are looking at.  

Julian: Yeah. I know there's alot of external factors and, and feel free to, you comment on those.

But also internally, if you were tothink about external and internal, what are some of the biggest risks that FloCareerfaces today?  

Mehul: That's a greatquestion. In terms of the risks, I would say that, whenever anybody, orespecially. Investors look at the companies, they, they, they, they look atthree things, right?

Is, is the problem that you're trying tosolve is real? Is it a real problem that you face, right? Yeah. Number two, isthere a big enough market? Are, are are large number of people facing thatproblem or not, right? Right. And number three, the solution that you areproviding is capable to kind of meet, the requirement, right?

And if we, if you look at all thesethree things, right? Is hiring an issue. Is, is hiring a real issue? Of courseit is. Everybody knows that, right? Ask anybody, they say, yeah, we have aproblem finding the right people. And, and, and it's a large enough problem.And, and our, our solution does scale. So my concern always has been that, thepeople who solve the problem for us, our, our freelancers, right, theirengagement.

With the process. Yeah. Their engagementand their bandwidth and their motivation to work with us. Right. That has to bethere at all the time and be, that's, that I see as a risk because if, if, ifthey get disengaged for some reason then we would've trouble, right. Wewouldn't be able to satisfy the needs of our customers because demand is huge.

We need to make sure that. People whoare working for us are, are, are engaged and motivated, right? Yeah. That'swhere we spend a lot of energy internally to make sure that they're engaged. Wekeep giving them programs not only just the monetary benefits, but beyond that,what all we can do for them so that they They're motivated.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And ifyou, everything goes well. What's the long term vision?  

Mehul: The long-term visionfor us is, making, if, if interview as a service becomes a norm across,anybody's hiring plan, right? Like today, the applicant tracking system in anHR tech is a norm, right? You cannot imagine any HR.

Functioning without an ats. Right. Likeinterview service is still a greenfield, lot of companies are adapting to that,but, but it is not completely widespread. So we would like to make sure thatthat becomes, household, like not a household, but you know, every company, wewould think about it that, okay, who is gonna be my interview as partner, yeah.In, in hiding strategy.  

Julian: Yeah. I was like, thisnext question I'm gonna call, I call my founder faq. So I'm gonna hit you withsome rapid fire questions and we'll see where we get. So, always like to openup. First question. What's particularly hard about your job?  

Mehul: What's hard about myjob? Yeah. I would say, it is, time management, right. Amount of time isrestricted and that there's so much things that you want to do. So you need tostay focused and, make sure that you bucketize things correctly and do it, ontime.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah. And Ialways like to thinking more, more about FloCareer.

It's almost like you, you've createdlike a capture network for interviews for, for for for candidates, right? It'sa caption network in the sense that you have a lot of different interviewersvalidating this person's experience skills, and. Overall maybe impression and,and ability to, do the, the work or responsibility at the company that you'reservicing.

How many interviews do you, does acandidate go through per per job? And then also how do you keep thoseinterviewers kind of up to date and trained? Being that, that's such a highvalue add to, the, the overall system and it kind of is dependent on thequality of the interview. Being able to vet the right skills and, and thingsoutta talent.

So, two questions there is how manyinterviews per, candidate? And, and secondly is how do you keep, the quality ofthe interviewer high.  

Mehul: Sure. And I'll giveyou a third one also very interesting statistics. So how many interview roundsper job? It varies from companies to companies a lot.

Minimum three I have seen. Mm-hmm. Andmaximum goes up to H also. Yeah. We only take care of the first two or threerounds on our platform, fastest turnaround I have seen. Two round on our sideand one manager round, and that's it. Yeah, that's, that's the fastest, right?Yeah. Quality, quality depends on two aspects.

Do we have a good interviewers and do wehave a good interview structure and questions? Right? So these are the two criticalparts of our solution, and, and we. We have evolved with a lot of processesand, and, and, and technology to ensure that, both are good. But a veryinteresting observation on our platform is that, these, these candidates, wedon't source the candidate, the candidates are provided by the hiring team.

Right. So the same candidate might haveinterviewed for two different hiring companies. Yeah. We cannot share the dataacross them because, like it's, it's completely owned by, companies and thecandidates right now. So we just want to make sure that the same candidate arenot asked the same questions no matter where they are being interviewed.

Right. So that's what we ensure on ourplatform. And, and when we look at the same candidate will be interviewed byhow many companies, and I thought maybe two or three or four when they'rehunting for the job. Yeah. To our surprise, we. Many people who interviewed onour platforms 17 times. Wow. Maximum 17 was the maximum number.

Yeah. Same candidate gave interview onour platforms 17 times, in, in, in, within, within around five to six monthstimeframe. Right. Wow. Yeah, so, so that's, when you ask me that question, howmany round of interviews for a given. But the same candidate where, wherethey're hurting for the job is the maximum number that I saw, which was reallyinteresting.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. It's sofascinating thinking about, the overall kind of transition or change into, alot of companies are looking at service-based organizations to help, offload.Processes that are, I think, I think a little bit more dependent on the actual,when they need them.

When you need interview services, whenyou're hiring, you need, say, development services, say for like an agencyperspective, if you're building out a certain feature that's away from yourcore function, but you feel a lot of companies being very. Thoughtful orintentional about, adding or, or purchasing services that they need in acertain point of time, but then offloading them when they're not needed.

Have you seen that common trend with alot of companies that you've been working with, seeing that they're offloading,a big portion of that responsibility onto you, especially with the interviewprocess, but do you kind of con, do you see this continue to be more and morepopular? As companies find efficient ways to scale and grow their businesswithout say hiring somebody internally as an HR person doing all theseinterviews and then trying to figure out what job function they should haveafter this big hiring push, what kind of trend are you seeing with companiesand do you, do you think it's gonna catch on in the future?

Mehul: Sure. So what we haveseen is, the churn on our platform is very, very minimal. Yeah. Having said.Depending on the size of the company, the startups who work with us, right?They usually get funded. They do a lot of hiring in the quarter or the nextquarter, and then they kind of slow down a bit, right?

Not a bit, but significantly I wouldsay, right? Yeah. They will hire a lot of people in one Quran and then theywill go quiet for a couple of quarters, then they go for the next round and,and then they hire a lot of problem, right? So, so that kind of, ups and downswe see with smaller companies and startups for large, services, industry giantsthat we serve are pretty consistent in terms of.

They are so diversified. They have somany different customers. They, they have, they, so they, we do see, a lot ofrequirement, month over month, repeat for them. Right. Another trend that wehave seen recently is, the companies like who do the nearshoring or offshoring,right.

When they present their interviewers,sorry, they're candidates to the hiring companies in. They wanna make sure thatthey just don't give just a resume. Mm-hmm. But a detailed and thoroughinterview report. So, so, so those, we have seen a lot. We just had a inJanuary we've started working with Deal which is a payment company for, across,like 150 plus countries.

Right? So, so we are working with themnow when, when, when somebody is hiring, let's say some, a person in Boliviaor, or Ukraine, yeah. They wanna make sure that, okay, I'm hiring somebody. Arethey, capable enough to do the job that I'm supposed to be, giving it to them.Right.

So, yeah. So we saw that, so a lot ofinteresting dynamics here.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cancan an interview process ever be fully automated?  

Mehul: I don't think so. I'ma futurist, so I, I like to see, like, all sort of things coming up, but thereis, there is a human part, which is essential, in, in, in interviewing forprobably semi-skilled jobs or part-time jobs, if you want somebody to just,stack your Christmas trees, just.

November and December, maybe you told methat part. But you know, if you are looking for, for knowledge workers, right,who can contribute, who can be creative, they're, human interaction is very,very important, yeah. So I believe that, I don't think that would be fullyautomated. At least not in near future.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I alwayslike to ask this question because I love how founders extract any, knowledgeout of anything that they ingest. Whether it was early in your career or now,what books or people have influenced you the most?  

Mehul: Great question. Yeah.So, in terms of books, probably a book that, that would've influenced me themost is the Seven Habits, yeah. Of highly effective people, right? Yeah. And,and it has a lot of, a lot of tho you know, the talks over there is, is is notjust transactional solutions, but value-based, To the level of, spirituality? Iwould say so. So, I, I, that book has definitely impacted me a lot, there is,there is a book about interview with Del Lama about, happiness. Right? That hasalso a, a profound impact. And in terms of people I was so fortunate to workwith, early on in my career Frederick, who I worked with at the first job outof the college.

He, he, he's the author of the first,realtime protocols, so streaming based protocols in, in early nineties,influenced a lot on my work style and, and coding style and whatnot, right?And, and, and then later on in my second startup where I was working, my hiringmanager was ed Bun on the founder of VMware, right?

Work with great people like JR Rivers,and, and so on and so forth. Lot of great people. Carlos, Alonzo, another,another great mentor that I, I I came across in my early days really shaped mythoughts Yeah. My, my, my, my leadership style and, and so on and soforth.  

Julian: Yeah. What's what'ssomething that you are, you are good at now but you wish you were better atearly on as a founder.

Mehul: Oh, it has been a longlearning journey. Yeah, yeah. There are, there are certain idealized versionsthat you have at the beginning, right? And, and, and one of those that I alwayshad was, that any person can learn anything and, and be productive if there isa wish, right?

Yeah. But for a fast-paced startups,that's not the case. You, you, you have to make sure that, people are alsohaving the right, aptitude mm-hmm. For the kind of, skills that, that jobdemands. I'm not talking about the tools, but I'm talking about, a specific,aptitude towards, certain skills, yeah. Like, for example, customer facingskills. Mm-hmm. That's. Not anybody can learn that, it, it, it requires, yourown inherent, implicit motivation for that.

Julian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'slike matching not only the, the skills you have, but the interest in curiosityyou have in a specific domain that actually kind of creates that right.

Mehul: Yeah. Yeah. Thepresets that you are born with in some cases. Yeah. Yeah. Some people, some peoplehave a great, sense of humor and others don't, doesn't mean that, anybody canbecome a standup comedian. Right?  

Julian: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Definitely not me. But I, I, I, I, I I, Mara is one around the, around theapartment.

No. Last little bit is I always like toask before we ask for your plugs and your websites and your linked. I alwayslike to make sure that we didn't leave anything on the table. So is there anyquestion that I didn't ask you that I should have or that you would have liked toanswer? Anything that we left on the table here?

Mehul: No, I think we havepretty much covered, uh uh. Everything that we wanted to cover, I suppose, andyeah, I, I think, yeah. Yeah. Good.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Mahulast little bit is where can we support you? Where can we support FloCareer?Give us not only your LinkedIns, but your websites, your Twitters, wherever wecan be a fan of, of, of you as a founder, but also your company and what you'rebuilding.

Mehul: Sure, sure. Yeah. Youcan find all of those links on our website. It's www dot .flocareer.com. It isflocareer no w there, ffl career.com.  

Julian: Amazing. Mehul, it'sbeen such a pleasure. Not only learn about your experience in terms of theengineering team that you've been a part of what's worked, but as and worked,but you've, you've gathered from big companies, but also how you've createdsuch an ecosystem for companies to really offload a lot of the processes thatyou know are not necessarily.

Needing to have their ownership but canbe kind of automated, quote unquote to a certain degree, to help them runefficiently, run effectively and hire people that are not only, at a highvelocity, but also match well with their organization and their objectives asteams. It's been such a pleasure learning about FloCareer.

I hope you enjoyed yourself on thisshow, and thank you so much for taking the time to join us.  

Mehul: Thank you very much.Thanks for having me here.  

Julian: Of course.

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