How to Build a Mafia: Lessons from Building a Job Platform
From startup to Google to building his own mafia. Hear Paul journey on how he started his own company and building the next generation of young entrepreneurs.
Kalibrr is a YCombinator & Kickstart Ventures backed online telemarketplace that matches people to jobs through the startup’s combined assessment platform and applicant tracking system.
There is a gleam in my eyes that I have trouble hiding when Paul talks about his entrepreneurial pursuits. I ask him about his professional journey, even though I already know all he is going to say. He received his undergraduate degree in UC Berkeley, landed his first out-of-school job at a San Francisco-based startup that sent him to India and later on joined Google. After his brief stint there, he moved to the Philippines and started a call center focused on working with Silicon Valley startups. The beginnings of Kalibrr started bubbling when Paul experienced trouble efficiently finding talent for his company. He saw these young and ambitious people, fresh from graduation, but with no skills despite a degree.
Kalibrr, since then, has gone through many pivots and changes, but remains true to its mission of improving the job search process for both employer and potential employee. It is one of the tech startups in the Philippines I believe is successful in innovating around problems and has established a great culture of internal mentorship. Paul, as an aside, mentions wanting to grow something reminiscent of the PayPal mafia — smart, young individuals get trained in Kalibrr in the hopes that they will one day start a company of their own. My eyes grow wide in excitement and I consider applying myself, if only for a moment.
What is one of the biggest challenges or failures you went through?
I think the biggest one was in YCombinator, because it was all about growth. We scaled and grew the wrong model. We burned through almost all of our cash and we were left in a situation wherein I had a large team of about 30, but a business that wasn’t getting a lot of traction. We had a high burn rate. We were running out of money and we were either going to shut down or I was going to fire 70% of the people and go back to investors and pitch a new idea. I ended up choosing the latter. It was the worst day of my life but we had to do that in order for Kalibrr to survive. As a CEO, my job is not really to do the job. My job is to play defense. To kind of always be looking out at the playing field to make sure the company will survive. Ultimately, everyone that we let go ended up in really good places. They’re all working for a variety of different startups. Because of that decision, we’re here helping tens of thousands of people. It sucks that we had to go through it, I hope I don’t have to go through it again, but I’m glad we made that decision.
If you could travel back to day one of your startup, what would you tell yourself?
To go slower than to try to go faster. I think startups naturally are designed to grow fast and you want everything to happen immediately. You feel impatient. What I learned is to be more patient. It takes a lot of time to build the right team. It takes time to figure out what problem to solve and how to solve it. It takes time to build a brand. It takes time to get customers. We’ve been at this now for four years. I thought we would get here in a year. I’d be more patient about building the best team and solving the problem. If we do that, the business will accelerate when it is ready to accelerate. It doesn’t mean we’ll work slowly and that we don’t hustle, but just to understand that.
How do you choose who you want to work with?
The most important thing with selecting a co-founder is having the same sense of mission. Our mission is towards all of those people who can’t get a job. I wake up everyday, thinking about how I can get closer to solving that problem. Sense of mission is important because it translates into the tight team you built. There’s a sense that we’re trying to do something big. We always ask how mission-oriented people are and that translates to the types of values people have. Skills you can learn, technology you can learn. But are you a good person and do you care about what you do? I think that starts with the founders and CEO.
What did life teach you yesterday?
Yesterday, I spent time reflecting on 2015. I have an Evernote and for the last 5 years, I’ve written down my goals for the next year. I have it on a folder so I can always look back on previous years. I think what life taught me in that reflection is that we’ve gotten pretty far and when things aren’t going as fast as they should have, it’s important to have some context of how difficult it is to do what we’re doing and celebrate the fact that we’re winning more than we’re losing. I think life ultimately comes down to that, right? You just have to win one more time than you lost and you’re a winner. Many people get scared about the fear of risking, the fear of losing. I look back at all those years and think, there are many things we or I didn’t accomplish in the year that I wrote it. Life is all about this constant balance of winning and losing, but in the end, you kind of just have to be right and win once. And when you do that you’ll be okay.
How do you know when to quit or to pivot?
I had an hour long discussion with my startup friend. He said “I keep asking myself what am I doing this for? What is the purpose?” I sensed that he was making an excuse. It’s a video startup, like in Snapchat there are stories about cities. He’s doing a whole app around them, called Mirror. He was asking me, “should I walk away?” The question I asked him is: can you look at your mom tomorrow and tell her, “mom I did my job, I did everything the investors asked me to do, executed relentlessly, but still there was nothing I could do.” Can you look at yourself or at your mom and say that? If you can do that, then you can walk away. When I asked him that, silence. Then he went to bed.
What are your thoughts on moving back here? How do you see startups in bringing that development back to the Philippines?
It definitely wasn’t the plan. I ended up here and I’m happy to be here. I think what makes Manila, Southeast Asia, the emerging markets special from a startup’s perspective is you get to use your abilities to solve meaningful problems. In the valley, a lot of those problems don’t get solved. A lot of the startups create anti-problems. It’s a solution to a problem that only the 1% has. Whereas in these regions, there’s a lot of important problems people have that haven’t been solved. And with technology, it doesn’t have to be purely technology, you can actually impact people’s lives in a very meaningful way. I challenge people to kind of leave that bubble and go to the emerging market. Imagine all the talent and ideas concentrated in the Valley. Rather than searching for an idea, I wish they would search for problems to solve.
When you watch nature shows do you root for the predator or the prey?
What’s the answer that won’t get me into trouble? Well, these nature shows, when you actually see them, they’re designed around the predator. The lion pride, the leopard. Sometimes, they’ll do it about the gazelle migration. And when I look at it, both of them have to survive. It just happens to be that in order for the lion to survive, it has to eat meat. In order for the gazelle to survive, it eats grass. I don’t feel bad for the grass because that gazelle needs to live. I don’t feel bad for the gazelle because the lion needs to eat it. I root for nature to run its course because that kind of ecosystem has optimized itself. If I were to root for the prey to win, then the ecosystem would not be able to run its course and that would be artificial, it wouldn’t be real, it would not be nature. When I watch nature shows, by nature, I want nature to win. Didn’t expect that one, huh?
Beyond Cheerleaders ← P R E V I O U S
N E X T → Remember the Turtles
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