Ep29 Teja Yenamandra—Beyond Resumes-The Case for Talent-First, Human-Centered Hiring

Hi, welcome to Tales from the Sky Lounge. It's a podcast about business, consulting, and venture investing. We get out there in the world. We talk to people who are making it happen and we get their stories. And if you could like and subscribe, it really helps us get our word out. So, today in the Sky Lounge, Ta Yanamandra. Hey, Tasa. Hey, what's up Todd? Welcome to Sky Lounge. Thanks, man. Happy to be here. Well, who are you and what are you working on? Awesome. So, my name is Tasjamandra. I'm founder of a company called Gun.io and we're a venture-backed labor marketplace that specializes in connecting high-end freelance engineers with software companies. So, we're basically an upgraded version of Upwork, I would say. Okay. And then I just before we get too far, I got to ask you about the sword on your wall there. Are you like a ninja or something? You know, so I've had that for a few years and I love Japanese culture and anime and all this stuff. And actually, funny enough, so this art piece next to me, I think I used MidJourney or maybe whatever OpenAI calls their art generation tool. And I basically asked it to make an AI generated pirate ship with our company logo on it. And then I sent it to paintmylife.com and they commissioned this piece. So it's like I got a whole bunch of Japanese memorabilia and stuff all around here. So yeah, I'm a big nerd. Yeah. Well, and I kind of knew the answer. You're a ninja, right? You used to do jiu-jitsu for a minute, right? Yeah. No, I did it for I trained for like eight years or something like that. You know, it's when you run a business, it's tough to balance all that stuff, working out, training martial arts and working. But yeah, I trained for a long time and then I tore my ACL, and then most recently got stem cells injected into my knee. So, I will keep you posted on how that turns out. I think optimistic. Go slow. Play the rests while you can. Well, and then you've had quite a good run here with gun.io and you I can only imagine exercise is one of those things where it helps you de-stress. So, it's great to a point, but then there's a balance where you can get a little bit nuts with your other life and then your business starts to falter. Maybe you talk to us about how you think about that and then kind of where's the line and how do you know? Yeah, there's this concept in exercise science around basically your peak ability to recover based on all the different factors in your life. You know, how much sleep you're getting, what your stress levels are like during the day. And I find that if I work out twice a day and I also have a demanding work schedule, like it's not like we're just hanging out at a desk and chilling like we're trying to solve problems, right? Scale a company and solve client problems and all this stuff. And so there's a balance where I think if you train too much and if you work too hard, it's really hard to recover unless you're able to sleep like ten hours a night, which is kind of really difficult to do. But no training is not the answer either, I find, because then you don't have an energy outlet. And the mind works well when the body is taken care of and you're putting good food in it and resting appropriately. So I find for me, lifting a couple of times per week and then walking multiple times per day, getting some sunlight in the morning, that helps me perform better at work for sure. Sure. Vitamin D. Yeah. Yeah. And in the travel world, it's like the best way if you're facing jet lag is to get up with the sun, get that early morning sun, and then before you go to bed, get that sun, too, so your circadian rhythm can reset to the location of where you're at. That's the key. So on the business side, there's kind of a flip side to this, right? So if all you do is work out and you don't take care of your business, then your business can falter, too. Is there kind of the same thing where you can go too hard too fast in business and then you burn out? It's the same kind of thing, right? Yeah, totally. I mean, it's interesting because in the business world we really value growth. That's what companies are valued on is how quickly they grow. But I would say immediately following our institutional round, I don't know, two years ago or something like this, we actually expanded headcount really dramatically and I think there is an argument to where now, a couple years afterwards, when you're trying to expand the business, you want to be able to ingest changes like any process changes, product changes, headcount changes. You want to give the business time to ingest, draw those new connections between people, settle into the strategy that you're pursuing versus keep changing stuff or adding people in. So I guess that means you kind of have to learn to be less aggressive here and there and just let the company settle into what's new. Yeah. So change management, there's this theory of forming, storming, norming and performing and then you hire somebody else and you go back around and you do it again. But it sounds like you're in agreement with that kind of philosophy where you're always changing and then you have to give it time to shift through those gears and then right when you're performing again you got to layer on some more complexity to do it again. Yeah. No, one hundred percent. I mean, we see this with clients, right, who are like, hey, we want to hire a bunch of developers at once. Normally, we try to recommend, hey, try to do a couple in a batch, ingest, understand output, understand performance, make sure they're integrated into the culture. Then you can start to stack more and more as you understand, hey, where are the gaps, what's a good fit for our culture and so on. So, yeah, totally agreed, one hundred percent. And so your company is interesting in that you hire and service a lot of US-based people, right? You hire US people for US companies. So do you consider yourself staff augmentation or you take on projects or how do your people tend to work? Yeah. I mean, so I think one of the unique things about our business is we're the best in the world at what we do, which is we get really talented professionals that are for the most part independent professionals like senior level ICs and put them into companies so that they can go crush whatever project or initiative exists at that company. And so we actually start from the talent side first. And when my two co-founders and I identified the opportunity and started the business, we were like there are a ton of really skilled developers here or really anywhere in the world that are competing on a price basis on the existing labor markets like Elance, Upwork, now Fiverr and so on. And we wanted to create a way for these really talented professionals to find work not on the basis of price but on the basis of merit. And so I look at this like, if you're scaling a company and even us at the board level, we're taught to go bring in somebody, make them a key part of the business, internalize core competencies. That's how you build a very valuable company. And that's true for the most part in many cases, but sometimes you need really entrepreneurial people that are able to own a problem full stack, not just at the technical level, but at the business logic level. And so we start with that. We start with the talent side first and we say hey, who are the best in the world? How do we get them? And then we work to try to find good companies that need those people. And so I think that operates a little bit differently. I think we operate a little bit differently than how staffing businesses normally operate, which are typically demand side focused first and then they sort of fill the supply based on demand. Right. Yeah. And you can make a lot of money and you can lose a lot of money in those arbitrage type opportunities. So hopefully you're on the making a lot of money side of things. It's like any other thing in life, right? You get what you deserve in some ways, right? The harder you work, the more precise you are, the better your matches, then it's easy. If you make some mistakes, then it's not so easy. So what do you look for in a match? What makes it a high quality match between? So you start with a talent and you find these high quality individual contributors at a senior level, mid-senior level, you put them into what or how do you go about finding a good puzzle fit for them? Yeah, I mean we must have done close to ten thousand placements or engagements at this point. And so for us, one of the things that we've learned is it starts at the match. I think that's the right starting point. And so the anatomy of a good match for us is obviously there has to be some degree of technical alignment between the company needs and the developer needs because otherwise there's a lot of ramp. And a good developer will argue, hey, if I know X language, I can learn Y language really easily, right? That's true in some ways, but what's also true is then that time to learn this new thing is on the company's dollar, which is not ideal for a company. So that's kind of the balance. Good technical skills in some ways, what we've seen in the marketplace is a good signal for being able to learn other new skills that are adjacent, but still there needs to be some basis of technical alignment on a skills level. So that's kind of step one. Step two is they have to be high ownership, especially in a remote work environment. You have to be a proactive communicator, you have to be a clear communicator. Step three is you have to be high ownership, high integrity, which is more of a values thing. And so I would say those are the three levels that are important to check when you're trying to make a good match. But I don't think it ends there. Not only do you have to do that, but I think to do what we do well, you have to also make sure that once the engagement has started, people are performing well together. And so that means there's a good statement of work rhythm. That means the expectations are clear and the expectations may evolve as the company evolves. So all of that operating rhythm at the engagement level needs to be handled well. And I think that's actually where a lot of these high volume marketplaces don't do very well. They have a lot of labor liquidity, even if they're a bunch of fake profiles. There's millions of people there. But after you find the match, you're kind of like okay, I got a bunch of tooling. I got to use the tooling to manage the people that I bring on. But that takes work. It's not easy to do. So it's not just about the match, but I think it's about the delivery as well. For sure. Well, it's definitely an innovation over lots. There's lots of companies that just make the match and then you hear from them at tax time and that's it. That's it. So, yeah. Yeah. Which is no bueno. I mean, I guess it works for a lot of people. It works for their margins maybe in the short term, but I would argue in the long term you want to make sure that people are delivering. So well, what are you seeing in the market right now as far as what are people, you know, you hear horror stories about all these layoffs, particularly with the big companies. Those are usually the last ones to go and they go in a bunch. So are people frozen right now? Are you seeing people start new projects or what do you think? Where's the business cycle right now? Yeah, I mean it's a good question. So caveat is I know a lot about a very narrow piece of the world, which is getting freelance developers in companies and helping them perform. So anything that I say about macro, I'm sort of out of my depth to some extent, but I'll share some observations. So one of the things that I felt about, let's say last year's layoffs and the year before, is that through COVID we saw massive expansion in our business and I think other players did too. I think interest rates were cheap, weird things got funded. A lot of companies hired a lot of people. And so when interest rates spike and when deals don't get done, I think that creates a lot of shedding, right? Regardless of the AI impact, regardless of anything else, I just think the fundamental economics of borrowing or taking equity changes and therefore companies are not as ambitious about what they're building and therefore that will impact the R&D line, which is where developers live typically, right? Developers, product designers, these sorts of folks. So I think that's one level. I think another level is you're starting to hear this now around AI's impact, which is really good people can be even more productive, right? And so that's how I think it'll shake out. If you can leverage some probabilistic model to help you create a straw man to think through something, you get to the solution way faster. These models are not deterministic. They don't solve things for you. They guess at the solution and you can check it to see if it's accurate or not. So I think long-term that will likely make developers more efficient. And economists will argue either way about whether that will decrease long-term the demand for software engineers or increase. Right? There's the increase argument, which is Jevons Paradox. Right? When they made steam engines more efficient, that actually drove the demand for coal. And the con argument is everything you see on LinkedIn where people are like, I built a seventeen billion dollar company using one person and a dog, and you're like, oh okay, that's smart. Yeah. And so that's the pro and the con and both sides are kind of clickbaity. We'll see. Yeah. Somewhere in the middle is the truth, right? Yeah. I think the reality is if you're a good dev, you can own the full stack, you understand the business logic, you can implement, right? You're talented, you're curious, you're easy to get along with. Sky's the limit, right? I think in more immediate terms, a third level is tariff impact. You know, I'm still kind of shocked that the market reacted the way that it did. I guess fundamentally if you slap on tariffs, that does affect in some ways GPU costs, cloud computing costs. There is some additional cost structure that us and tech have to experience. Plus maybe H-1B tightening will affect our ability to hire people if we run a domestic company. So that's some impact, but I don't know. I think we're in a big game of who will blink first. So I don't expect, I may be wrong, but I don't expect the tariffs to stay forever. I agree. I think it's a short-term thing and then it'll equal out and we'll get to work pretty quick here. Yeah. Me, too. Yeah. And then let's go back to Gun.io. I mean it's so fascinating how people start companies. Okay. Tell us the origin story for y'all. How did you start? Yeah. I mean, so the TLDR is we were working on something else and we tried to go on Elance, I think, and try to find developers to help us work on something because we had to sell. I needed to be on the phones and trying to grow the business and we just got inundated with a bunch of resumes and profiles and we were like, we don't have time to filter through this and also the tooling of these platforms was not awesome. And so we were like, we know a lot of smart people. It's just kind of a weird experience to be like, hey smart person, come and work for us. You have to kind of create a project structure and define what win looks like and handle billing and invoicing and all this stuff. And so we were just like, it would be neat to do this as a business because we know that this need exists. And so we came together and we started the company and then for real, we just spent forty hours plus a week for four weeks cold calling companies on Angel List. That's all we did. Okay. That's it. We just hit like a hundred a day cold emails, manual. There was no automation in this. We did not think about, oh what if we just scraped a bunch of leads and set up an email series. We just were literally dialing the phone using our cell phones and sending manual emails and then that got us like our first, I don't know, hundred grand or something in revenue and that's how we got started. That's it. Hustle. Got to love it. And then who are your founders? You said you met him in college, it sounds like, and yeah, so what? Yeah. So one buddy, Rich Jones, he's like one of the most brilliant developers that I've ever met. He's a contributor to Python, just a solid open-source developer in the community. He gives talks on security. He's just the man. He's very smart. And so I would actually say it was mostly Rich's idea, honestly. And then my other buddy, John Paul, I met him in China when I was working there. And yeah, John Paul is sort of the operations, marketing person. So I would be like, you know, can a three-person company have a COO? If so, that's what he was at the time. Yeah. Yeah. The glue. Yeah. Yeah. He was a glue guy. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Get stuff done. Yeah. Get stuff done. That's it. I'm over here thinking about things that are not important and JP is doing the real work. So that's JP. Yep. And then what year was this that you guys started? Like 2013, 2014? I think we incorporated 2013 and then I would say we became full-time somewhere around 2014 or so. Okay. And then where were you in the world and then how did you get to Nashville from China, I guess? Yeah. So after I graduated college, I basically just wanted to go work in China. I studied Chinese and I thought it would be cool to live there for a few years. And then I worked for a tech company out there. They sold that company to some public company.

I was in the US and then I moved back initially because I needed to get a labrum repair surgery for my shoulder. My folks live in Nashville and I was like, well, I need to get the surgery and I need to chill for like three months. I can't use a computer really. So I came back, got the surgery, and JP was in Pennsylvania, Rich was in the Bay Area at the time, and I was here in Nashville. And then we just started the business. We didn't think about it. We were just like, "Cool, we're remote. We're serving a remote market. We don't need to be in the same place, right? That's it."

You were remote first from the start. You didn't even think about it. You just naturally were remote all the time. Yeah, 100%. That's how open source projects work, right? They're remote. It's async collaboration. The tooling was not what it is today to do this, but we made it happen. We had no issues.

This was before Slack was even invented. I remember Slack came out maybe two or three years later, but it's basically IRC with a nice UI, right? If you remember IRC, that's what you would use. Then Discord was more gaming-oriented IRC with different default settings and basically a different color way. For us, off the shelf, Slack is probably the go-to. That's important because effectively we run a community. We run a community and we get this community placed into companies so they can make money. That's what we do. Any sort of community software, there's a lot out now too. There's things with different wedges. You got Slack that's more education-based for community. You could do YouTube for your subscriber community. There are a lot of different options today.

You guys were in business and got a good head of steam up and at some point you became VC backed. How did that happen? The short story is that we had a couple of acquisition offers and we were not ready to sell the company, mainly because we were making a good living and the company was doing well and we like what we do. We like to scale human impact. That's effectively what we do. We take people and we try to put them in companies so they build something cool together. We just liked it and I remember we would sit down and be like, is this worth taking right now, and uniformly be like, nah, not really.