Lessons on startups and the future of work from Flockjay Founder/CEO Shaan Hathiramani

Flockjay’s inaugural cohort graduation

Flockjay at the ASU GSV Summit

Flockjay Founder/CEO: Shaan Hathiramani

I spoke with Shaan Hathiramani, founder of Flockjay, a $0-upfront tech sales academy. Flockjay retrains job seekers from non-traditional backgrounds to double their income and get future-proof tech jobs. The company’s mission is to empower upward mobility through education and access. Flockjay only gets paid if students get a job.

Following his graduation from Harvard in 2008, Shaan taught financial literacy in the West and South Sides of Chicago and worked in finance at Citadel. Through his teaching and professional work, Shaan sought to bridge the gap between the academic and professional worlds by democratizing access to vital, life-changing skill based training and education. These experiences and passions originated from his life-long passion for teaching, and inspired him to found Flockjay.

Shaan and I spoke about identifying problems, finding solutions, building companies and communities, and the Y Combinator experience. Shaan had insightful advice for aspiring student entrepreneurs:

Take intentional time to live and breathe the problem before jumping into the solution. Revel in this discomfort. Really empathize with and immerse yourself in the problem of interest. Speak with people who are affected by it from all sides of the equation. Ask questions to dig deeper. Get first-hand experience. Leverage your personal and academic experiences to draw meaning from this discovery.

Shaan lived and witnessed in his communities the struggle to access future-proof jobs in tech, especially for those who came from non-traditional and underrepresented backgrounds. In order to understand the employer side of the problem, Shaan consulted for startups, often for free. He did work to understand what roles were most difficult to hire for, why companies struggled to fill them well, and what suboptimal solutions they relied on. This discovery process allowed Shaan to empathize with all stakeholders, and laid the foundation for Flockjay.

Avoid the temptation to be a building architect: startups are about living in the first floor for a long time, and iterating your way out. All too frequently, aspiring founders follow a very sequential mindset, afraid to test their ideas until they are perfectly crystallized with a multi-year blueprint. The reality of building a startup is actually about constant feedback loops, trial and error, and productive failure. One way to understand any problem is to start building small-scale tests, and observe how they break. Experiment as you derive new insights bridging the gap between your own thinking and the needs of your end users. This should converge on building something that people actually want.

The value of Flockjay, Y Combinator, and truly any similar development focused experiences is in the shared experience of its people. The most transformative aspects of programs like Flockjay and YC come from the diverse people you meet, engage and form relationships with, and derive inspiration from. Yes, the skills you learn are necessary, but the shared context and meaning that come from the sprint towards getting an amazing tech sales job or pitching at Demo Day is an incredibly powerful force that lasts long after the programs are over. It’s entirely possible to create this force in other ways and communities, too.

Ultimately, the best education oriented communities are meant to play supporting roles in each individual’s growth rather than be a panacea. Flockjay aims to remove the obstacles for its fellows to enable them to change their own lives. The Flockjay community is built on Shaan’s initial inspiration for founding the platform: empowering people with the resources they need to achieve their goals, regardless of where they come from. To this end, Flockjay is an incredibly diverse community united by the organizing principle of learning and transforming people and businesses through sales roles at technology startups. Through being user (fellow) first, Flockjay has created this strong, diverse community that compounds the teachings and development students experience through the program itself. Flockjay has created life changing opportunities through being a safe space for fellows to develop their inward identities and confidence to define and realize their own success stories.

Apply to join Flockjay’s next cohort here!