Meet The Disruptors: Khaled Hussein Of Betterleap On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Success, especially in business, has never been a result of one person. It’s always been the people, the team, the culture, the drive, and the mission that got everyone together to make it happen.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Khaled Hussein.
Khaled Hussein’s impressive entrepreneurial journey started when he launched Tilt — a social network for money, backed by innovators from Y Combinator to Andreesen Horowitz to Alex Ohanian. After selling Tilt to Airbnb, Khaled went on to found Stipple, a venture studio for incubating and investing in early stage startups. Next, after ongoing first-hand experiences with the shortcomings of traditional recruiting, Khaled then founded Betterleap to connect companies with more talent in less time.
Khaled is an active investor in over 40 startups and a trusted resource, mentor and advisor to many. Follow him on Twitter.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I was born in Egypt in very modest circumstances where being an entrepreneur is basically a necessity to being able to afford living expenses. My father built and operated a number of small businesses so I was very fortunate to see my father’s experiences with hiring and growing his businesses at a young age.
Fast forward, I immigrated to the US and got my Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Virginia Tech. After completing my Masters, in an attempt to learn more about tech entrepreneurship, I joined an early-stage startup called Webmail, that later got acquired by Rackspace, where I worked in many different roles ending with leading the strategic cloud strategy.
I then went back to my entrepreneurial roots and started a company called Tilt, which was a YC and we raised impressive capital from a16z, SVAngels, and others. Hiring and growing the team at Tilt fast enough was always a challenge, I was always left wishing I could deploy more resources on hiring.
We sold Tilt to Airbnb and my main focus then was on growing the payments teams. Recruiting was again a challenge at scale so my co-founder, Anna Melano — who used to be a product specialist at Airbnb, and myself decided to build Betterleap to make it much more efficient to engage with more external recruiting resources.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Betterleap is a platform that takes the hassle out of finding and working with vetted tech recruiters.
The traditional way of engaging with external resources limits the ability to scale quickly. Typically, a company has to find a good recruiting firm, interview them to make sure they are a good fit, then start the contract negotiation process where you go back and forth on legal language as well as pricing, then you eventually do a kick off call with that agency. All of that for one agency.
Addressing this challenge, we built a growing network of vetted recruiting firms/agencies at Betterleap. We standardized the contracts and terms of service, and made it possible for a company to just simply connect their Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and publish the roles they need help with. Once the roles are published, they’ll get automatically matched with a recruiting firm that specializes in that role. They’ll get to see a full profile (LinkedIn for recruiters) of the recruiter, their past customers, hires, reviews, …etc.
If a company doesn’t like the recruiter, they simply press the “rematch” button and they’ll get automatically matched with another recruiting firm right away. That’s magic. Using Betterleap, for the first time, companies can engage with multiple high-quality recruiting firms on multiple roles to hire great talent faster.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Some of my most impactful mentors have been Bill Boebel and Pat Matthews: Co-founders of Webmail, which got acquired by Rackspace.
When I first joined Webmail, I was still new to the field of technology and did a lot of IC type of work as an engineer but I was searching for more, so one day I ran into Bill, we started talking, and next thing I know I’m tasked to work on a high-impact partnership. I didn’t know anything about how partnerships worked or even where to start, so naturally, I started asking a ton of questions.
Bill then said “I’m going to leave you for three months here at your desk. Let’s chat when the partnership is done.” I was stunned! I pulled it off, made a bunch of mistakes along the way but learned that sometimes the best way to learn something new is to jump in and just do it.
I’ve taken this lesson to heart in the companies that I built after that, as well as when I mentor and coach others in the same boat.
Pat ended up investing in every company I built since then and has been a huge supporter and an operating mentor for me throughout the years.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
To me, disruption in an industry, in a positive way, is about improving the quality of life. This could happen through improving efficiency, reducing costs, creating opportunities, and so forth.
The important key points in a good disruption include — Getting the timing right, as one of the most common reasons startups fail is their timing was wrong; The right team, as people talk about the right execution but really it’s about assembling the right team. That’s again why recruiting is probably one of the most important industries ever in the human history; And the right resources, this can be capital, material, partnerships, and so forth.
If you end up missing some of these key factors, this innovation is probably not going to work the way it’s intended.
Can you share five of the best insights you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- Make something people want — Paul Graham from YC.
- I built Tilt, which was a YC startup, and I remember the first time Paul Graham saying that phrase to us. It was such a profound way to simplify the entire goal of finding product-market fit.
- Be stubborn on the mission but flexible on how to achieve it — Jeff Bezos
- Betterleap is definitely a good example here as our mission is to help companies grow by giving them all the recruiting resources they need. We’ve gone through a number of iterations and pivots before we landed on our current iteration and now we’re able to see it actually work and grow rapidly.
- Consistency is the key to achieving and maintaining momentum. — Darren Hardy.
- We don’t really chase that adrenalin of having one great day, or great month, or great year. If we keep stacking good days on good days, we’ll always have great months and great years.
- If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my ax. — Abraham Lincoln
- To me, it’s about being strategic and not impacted by what other competitors are doing. Let’s focus on adding value, building the right product, having the right team, and eventually, you lift your head up and realize that you won.
- If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants — Isaac Newton
- Success, especially in business, has never been a result of one person. It’s always been the people, the team, the culture, the drive, and the mission that got everyone together to make it happen.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
I enjoyed reading The Compound Effect.
There are so many great things in this book but the two that stuck with me the most are:
- You’re responsible for your own ___ (anything), happiness, actions, feelings, …etc.
- It’s very empowering and energizing for you to realize you can do something about whatever it is you’re thinking through right now.
- Success isn’t about this one big thing but it’s about the million other things that you consistently pile on top of each other to build something great.
In the early days of my career, I always thought success was about building this one big unicorn, and that anything else isn’t really successful. I worked so hard on making Tilt that success story and anything else was simply considered a failure.
However, as I got a little older and reflected a bit more, I realized that this is far from the truth. I’ve been fortunate to have had a lot of these “small” successes and hopefully, keep growing that stack and increase our impact on the world one step at a time.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Staying positive. Entrepreneurship is a marathon and full of ups and downs. This is one of my favorite quotes on being resilient and thinking positively no matter what it is you’re going through.
An arrow can only be shot by pulling it backward. So when life is dragging you back with difficulties, it means that it’s going to launch you into something great. So just focus, and keep aiming. — Paulo Coelho
How can our readers follow you online?
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
