Conversation with Kartik Mandaville, founder & CEO of SpringRole

Tell us a bit about how you started working with Science and how your relationship with Science has evolved over the years.

Mike Jones (CEO) reached out to me through a friend whose company he had acquired. We started off with a prototype of a project when I was in my final year of undergrad India. I started getting more involved with Science and built a team in India. I moved to USA for my masters at Carnegie Mellon — all my vacations was at Science. Winter, thanksgiving, spring break (nice reprieve from Pittsburgh’s cold). I got promoted to CTO and led a ton of projects — some new concepts, some multi million dollar businesses. Eventually I pitched SpringRole to Mike :)

What got you interested in cryptocurrencies and blockchain? What was your first experience with bitcoin like?

I got involved in bitcoin in 2013 while I was in CMU. Was just fascinated by it because you could create an entirely new currency with just code. Along with Mike Jones, we launched an exchange and I went to this conference in vegas — it was crazy. Ton of people all talking about this new world.

What are you trying to do with SpringRole? How has it evolved from when you got started?

Our motto is revolutionize recruiting. Over the last four years, we have built some very powerful tools attacking the various stages of recruiting starting from sourcing to screening and to hiring. Our latest venture is about using blockchain as a source of truth to verify information about a professional profile (work experience, education, skill sets, certifications). Employment verification is a multi billion dollar industry and the current process makes you re-verify already verified data. This happens because there is no reliable distributed single source of truth. Blockchain can be this because of the nature of decentralized and no one company controlling it.

When it comes to working in the recruiting space, is there anything that you think people are not paying enough attention to that will become fairly important and popular in the long run?

Sourcing is increasingly becoming more challenging. The increase in remote jobs and decrease in strict qualifications checks has made the problem of sourcing and assessments even more harder. There is a candidate for every job and there is a job for every candidate. The problem is matching. Just applying AI won’t help — this is a much bigger problem. Need to have intelligent technology enabled solutions along with structured data from humans (ie crowdsourced assessments)

How do you think about company and team building in this nascent space where lines between projects and companies are still evolving?

Focus on people who believe in blockchain more than anything. You need believers so you can be focused on building. Too many distractions out there non believers to quit.

What are some things in this space that you think are overhyped right now that we will soon see some disappointment about?

Infrastructure. Way too many new blockchains are coming up with funding upwards of 100s of millions of dollars. Overrated. You don’t need a billion dollars to build a scalable blockchain.

What do you think is a misconception around technical understanding of blockchain amongst teams using the blockchain to launch their products?

Applying blockchain to any problem does not solve it. There really needs to be a need for a blockchain. Wherever there is a need to eliminate trust is when blockchain makes sense. Also focus on non crypto users. They will help you grow!

If you had the power to bring about one radical change for user adoption of utility tokens, what would it be?

Get chrome to build an inbuilt wallet. Kill metamask and let chrome store the keys.

What is your strongest belief about how utility tokens will play out in the long run? What would likely need to happen for you to change your mind on that in the short run?

Each thing you touch in this world will be a token and all of these tokens will seamlessly talk to each other. Tokens will become ubiquitous and we won’t even realize. Companies like brave with 5 million DAUs have already started giving out tokens to users who then can give out to publishers. That is just awesome. There will be more folks like that.

Airbnb has asked the SEC to allow it to start issuing equity in its company to hosts. This would have been 100x easier with a token (allows non US hosts to participate, maintains a real time ledger and more).