Pearl VP: Why Companies Laying People Off For AI Will Regret It In 18 Months

I think people who are laying people off because of AI or not hiring because of AI, I think are going to have a very hard next 18 months because AI is not expensive. AI is so accessible for everybody that everybody has access to the same tools. So, the only differentiation is going to be your people. So, if you get rid of all your people and replace them with the tools that all of your competitors have, you are going to end up discovering that you need to end up rebuilding your team of people.

Never thought about it like that, yeah.

We all have the same tools, and so the only differential you have left is who you're keeping on your team.

Yes. How do we go and compete against with those trillions of dollars and actually win this?

The good news is I think it's

This is Who We Hire, the podcast about how the best technology companies build their teams. My name is Louis set, your host, and today we are with Sam Mallikarjunan. Sam wrote the inbound playbook at HubSpot, led their expansion into Latin America when the company was still small, taught marketing at Harvard, USF, ran revenue at the cereal at Flock, built OneScreen from zero as a co-founder and CEO, and spent significant time with Demar Sha at Agent AI, the marketplace for AI agents. Now, he's a VP at Pearl, the company that is betting that AI can free 20 million independent professionals to do the work they're great at. So, Sam, I'm really excited to talk to you. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. We've known each other such a long time. I'm I'm excited to do this.

Yeah, I've been following you since the early years. You have one of my favorite hiring stories ever. Uh you wanted to work at HubSpot. Instead of applying and sending a resume that you knew was going to go into the void, you built a website. You ran a full marketing campaign aimed straight at HubSpot executives. You ran their own inbound playbook on them, uh and you got the job. You did this at 22. You you marketed your way in. So, now you're on the other side of the table, uh somebody who does hiring and builds, has anybody gotten that creative back at you?

No one has, which is odd to me, right? Because it's not that hard to do today, right? Like I built hireme.hubspot.com and I got you get free credits when you sign up for like Google and LinkedIn ads and stuff, right? So I just ran ads to sign up for the free webinar and why you should hire me. One, remember I didn't have a college degree at the time, right? And I was applying to a company run by MIT nerds. So I had I knew I had to stand out somehow. And that showed that I at least knew like I had I had read the assignment. I I knew like how to create a landing page, how to target people. Like back then that was still actually relatively kind of novel. And honestly, if I had been qualified, I probably would have applied the normal way and probably wouldn't have gotten hired. So like there's a lesson in there for people that I wish more people do this, whether it's to me or to to anyone else. Like everybody's using AI to apply to 10,000 companies at once. Everybody looks exactly the same. You got to do something to show that you're that you really understand. It's like it's like applying for a chef's job by making them a meal, right? You got to show that you can

I love it. That surprised me that nobody's done that to you. I don't know if you remember, but I I copied your strategy and I didn't create a whole website or go as deep, but I I did a hire me tax jar about nine years ago and you helped me retweet this out and I got the interview the same day and I got offered that job because of just just going in a spending an extra hour on something. But now with AI, it's like you can do this in 30 minutes. Just tell Claude co-work to go and help you do this.

You have a web page, your targeted copy campaign, right?

Yeah, plug it into HeyGen, it can even make your little pitch video for yourselves. I I think I had my friends, co-workers, and former managers also do like endorsement videos, right? Like have them do a 10-minute one and just have the AI auto remix it for, you know, the 3-minute for each each company. There's so much you can do nowadays that I would love to see people being more more innovative and honestly just making life easier on recruiters. Right right now, it's so hard for recruiters to just tell who's different because everybody can create custom applications, right? Like I can make my resume look like I'm perfectly built for your company, so can everyone else, and that's made it so hard to actually figure out who is like that who has that edge, who is slightly more perfect than the other one.

Yeah, and you you've built this career on some bold unconventional bets. You just made another one. You're transitioning from the AI agent world to join Pearl. What did you see at Pearl where humans still win that made it worth the jump?

Yeah, it's it's interesting cuz I have an AI that screens recruiters for me, and no other company has ever gotten through the filter. They were the first recruiter that I've talked to in in two or three years. Um since since I built it. What's fascinating to me is that I have believed for years that humans human expertise is not going to go away. We're not going to lose out on humans, especially for things where we really care about the output, right? Like the I kind of funny story on this. My wife accidentally used the platform the other day because at 4:00 in the morning the cat ate the dog's anti-anxiety meds. She panicked, Googled like, "Do I need to take him to the vet?" Saw an ad for JustAnswer, which is one of the Pearl brands, pop up, and was able to like talk to a vet right there, right? Like shh Could she have asked AI that? Yeah, sure. But is the answer too important to trust it like an unverified AI? Also, yes. And especially when you need like help with things. Like if you're an expert, there's there's getting an answer to things, but then there's also like you just need help. You need somebody to do stuff for you. And you need to be able to have that trusted relationship. The interesting thing about what we're doing at Pearl by building this kind of like super agent platform is enabling experts to leave the companies they're at and be on their own. Because if you went to law school, you don't go to law school because you like to do sales and marketing, right? Or or finance and billing or any of that that other kind of stuff. You know, cuz you you want to do to to do law. So, you join a company that has sales people and account managers and marketers and finance people. In the age of AI, can you have a business that effectively runs itself while you just do what you love? Uh, and that's the that's the story that is the world we all want to live in. We don't want to live in a world with like 10 companies that like we all work for. Right? Every dystopian hellhole science fiction movie is based on that premise. I'd much rather see a world where there's hundreds of millions basically all we all have our own, you know, companies. We'll have our own vast concepts of a career and it's just about who works the hardest, who creates the most value.

Do you see that as a future? Do you see a society in our lifetime where we have more entrepreneurs than people working for the man?

I suspect so because I think the reason we form companies is going to change and end up being more similar to like the origin of the English word, like a company of people that you get together because we like working together. Right? Like my last two companies, I've recruited a lot of people that I've worked with before. Uh, one because I shared operating system, background, everything else like that. Uh, but two just cuz we like working together. Like you you won't have There'll be fewer people working at companies because they have to. I think it'll be people working at companies because they want to. Uh, either going to be that or it's going to be a dystopian hellhole if they if if the if opening on everybody else figures out how to make all value accrued up to them, that's that's one thing. But at that point, it's a society civilization issue, not a business issue. Right? We collectively retired as a species. There's not, you know, we're not going to be teaching teaching much about that in business school.

Going back to where the we we have like we're creating companies and and the a company's a group of people and you're actually doing things because you like. So, like is that it sounds like it's a lot more mission-focused and I'm reading this book right now, Uncorruptable, and Eric from The Lean Startup talks about how to make companies actually last and the mission that is is created within it and how shareholders and the bottom line is not the number one interest, but because the way they set it up it actually becomes it extremely profitable and and and well-run company. Well, when you're talking about open AI and the direction that that they're headed, how do we go and compete against those those trillions of dollars and and actually win this?

Okay, the good news is I think it's there's only two plausible outcomes. Either we all lose, in which case we have to redefine the social contract between like human humanity, or they're not What worries me more is actually they're not going to achieve their goals. They're not going to get to artificial general intelligence. We're still going to all have to work, but there's going to be this massive like over-investment in data centers. There's going to be a massive like all these valuations etc. Like the way we're we're most likely to get hurt is the AI bubble popping and hurting and having that cascade through kind of the consumer marketplace and and capital availability and and all all that kind of stuff. That happened in 08 happened with Silicon Valley Bank collapse that kind of stuff. They're either going to continue being effectively what they are in terms of their presences in our lives, or they're going to win and then we don't have to worry about it. I spend very small percentage of my time worrying about open AI and Anthropic and such. Other than uh trying to keep up with what's new in the models and tools and stuff that that they roll out. Because if and when they achieve their goals, it will be a like a flash point, right? Uh it's not going to be kind kind of like a gradual death by a thousand cuts. We're already there. AI has the capability to do almost everything we want AI to do. So, if it was going to take over the world, we have those skills already, right? Um so, I'm I'm not overly concerned about those people. I think what who you're competing against is a much broader set of competitors. Cuz in a in a world in which we all have our own companies, it also makes us competitors for each other. Uh so, I think that I'm much more worried about what other people uh kind of like on my similar plane, are doing. Because this is an incredible advantage. Like my nephew is going to college for the first time this fall. And I was explaining to him how I used to be the ninth most popular CMO on Twitter. Back in 2009 or whatever, I was the ninth most popular right after I was actually more popular than the chief marketing officer for Dick's Sporting Goods. The reason is it's because there were like 20 CMOs on Twitter back then. Right? Like it pays to be an early adopter. And just like social media, mobile, the internet, like I got got my first CMO job at what, like 20 years old because I knew how the internet worked. Right? I think that is the real interesting watershed moment here is who's going to take advantage of this opportunity and not not be scared. Don't be nihilistic about it and also don't be don't be scared of other companies. They're not worried about them.

I love it. Going back, you led HubSpot's push into Latin America. The company was still small. How did you go and build that team from the ground up?

Yeah, so for everybody listening who applies to things, don't worry about whether or not you're qualified for a job. Right? It's the hiring manager's job to tell you if you're unqualified. It's your job to figure out if an organization or a job is right for you. I was not qualified to lead the expansion into Latin America. I took a week off. I read like a book called Doing Business in LatAm.

No way.

And then but like somebody had to, right? And I was good at figuring stuff out because I was leading experiments and and later HubSpot Labs. And so I was willing to take it on. validated that it was what we should do next. And then they hired somebody who was brilliant, who knew what she was doing, and had and led international expansion for HubSpot for a long time. Understand what that culture was, especially while I built up the team around me who would who would eventually lead the rest of the growth.

Do you remember who the first hire in the region was?

The first hire, his name was Rodrigo. He was in we built the team originally in Boston. Now there's obviously distributed teams, but this was before like remote work was common. In fact, I don't think we had any remote employees at HubSpot at the time. So, the first person was Rodrigo, who was a marketer. Well, actually, the first people were sales, right? Because the way this works is, especially HubSpot at the time, is you'll generally end up with a sales rep who has an idea. And they're like, I think we can sell to these types of leads that we haven't sold to before, whether it's nonprofits, e-commerce companies, whatever. So, the sales team was like grabbing LATAM leads and selling to them. Then we built up the marketing board behind it. So, Rodrigo, who was from Brazil, because LATAM is, also by the way, essentially two markets. There's Brazil and everyone else. And so, I had one person for Brazil, one person for everything else. She She was from Chile. But yeah, the first hire outside of the sales org was somebody who knew the country, who knew the culture, who knew the language, but who also knew our way of marketing and could help start to build up the content. Because we had all the other acquisition engines, but we didn't have was the content, how to talk to them.

So, you then went on on and hired a in like international expansion expert once you prove this out. So, it was go and experiment, see this is going to be a channel we're going to actually invest in, now hire somebody to go and run it. That was the playbook.

Yep. That's That's the playbook for almost everything HubSpot does. And most, you know, kind of lean agile companies these days is validate if it's worth doing first, cuz there's more good ideas than there is bandwidth. Validate if it's worth doing first and then find an expert to to run it. And usually they're not the same people, by the way. Usually the people who are really excited by blazing a new trail are always the people you want to have scale things. Because they you have to start thinking in systems and orgs and stuff like that, which, you know, is is a different mindset and mentality. But yeah, once we knew it was a great idea, I mean, we were paying like 10 cents a click. It's the only time I could have been able to buy my way out of a problem, just because marketing there was so cost effective. Because Salesforce and such hadn't really started making a push into that market yet either. And then little things man, like translating the site really really well and the product the platform into the language, being able to offer support in some of those other languages. Like that's all that that really mattered because we we did have the localization. We had the localized education, onboarding, support, content, platform. We also didn't just treat them like they were in Spain, right? It wasn't the EMEA team that was running this cuz Spain is a different Spanish. It's a different cultural paradigm. I think a lot of people make that mistake is they just try and translate things into into the language and they assume that translation is the same as localization. Which is it is not and I learned that from the woman that we hired who knew what she was doing. She's who taught me the difference between translation and localization. Localization being how do I make it mean to you what I want it to mean to you not just how I make it say the words that that I want it to say.

I love that. Uh is there anything you got wrong going into into LatAm? You mentioned like Brazil's probably different than the rest. Did you learn that while researching or did you learn that when it was too late?

I learned that um from my first hire because I hadn't originally planned to to bifurcate the market but he was Brazilian and he explained to me the difference between Brazil and kind of everyone. That was definitely like learning from the people on my team and learning from the the success that that we were trying to have there. The biggest mistake that I probably made, honestly I think we could have been more aggressive. I I I had uh some of the people on my team because this is a a new initiative, right? So some of them were were interns and and it helps that we had interns who were like, you know, Harvard MBAs candidates and stuff like that. So they were it's not like a go get coffee intern but it is still a different thing when you're it's hard for people to think about money differently, your money versus the company money. Right? And it was actually a struggle to get some of the people on my team to be aggressive. Like I think I took a one week vacation once and told somebody on the team spend $5,000 by the time I get back. I honestly don't care about what but you have to like break that cycle in your mind of like, you know, take take the gloves off and throttle and you know, take take risks. So, I think that was the biggest if we had a mistake, that was the only one or that that was the biggest

And when he's called that culturally like the last 10 team specifically didn't want to go and and spend as much.

Yeah, it was it was partly a cultural thing. It was also partly partly just like a where you are in your career thing.

Yeah, so Pearl has this thesis that AI is going to absorb everything that is not in the profession of craft, which sounds amazing. Sounds you know, I I see those pictures or or memes where it's like humans are should be swimming in the river and and enjoying these wild vacations, but here we are looking at our fico score and and uh it's sitting behind the computers all day. It sounds amazing, right? Like you bought into that bet twice. You were an agent AI. You know, you're doing your own hiring, your own team now at Pearl. Like are there any roles that like you you mentioned you have a AI that screens recruiters. Like I work for your assistant. Like a a human well, maybe. I don't I don't know. Maybe that was AI.

Um but are there any roles that you're not actually filling because AI is covering them and on the opposite end, are there any roles that you're like, no, like an AI is never going to do this for me. I need a human.

There's definitely roles that I don't let AI do. I let AI help. But with law, with finance, like remember AI is built on probabilities. So, anything that requires determinism, like the IRS is not going to let me off just because I said it was it was probably the right amount of money to pay you, right? So, with finance I get even more nervous because a single hallucination cascades through a spreadsheet like you know, or through a model uh to an insane degree. So, there are no roles I'm not hiring for because of AI. I think what AI has done is complicate word design incredibly so. Because much like we can all be uh have our own companies and stuff like that, what it's done is it's we're all still ver masters of our vertical, but we're all T-shaped, right? We're kind of like okay at a bunch of things. It has dramatically increased the number of things that we can all be mediocre at, right? So I can write mediocre code, engineers can do mediocre product marketing, uh sales reps are knocking up like mediocre MVPs to show prospects just on lovable or whatever. And so you're no longer defined by like a single specialty. So when you have, you know, people on your PPC team with brilliant ideas about contributing to engineering, how do you design an org? How do you design career development? How do you design um the workflows that that people can have? That I think is what's far more interesting. So I don't think we're going to have less people, but we're definitely going to rethink how everyone's organized when before it's the customer, right? It has to go through a human. It has to go through an expert, somebody who's good at that job.

Yes.

Um but it can go through a lot of other hands before it before it does. I I think that's what's most interesting. So Now I think people who are laying people off because of AI uh or not hiring because of AI, I think are going to have a very hard next 18 months because AI's not expensive. This is what's different between this and like the dot-com revolution. Dot-com you had to spend $20 to build a website, right? Here um AI's so accessible for everybody that everybody has access to the same tools. So the only differentiation is going to be your people. So if you get rid of all your people and replace them with the tools that all of your competitor have, you are going to end up discovering that you you need to re-end up rebuilding your team with people. So I think it's very short-sighted.

thought about it like that. Yeah.

Exactly that way. We all have the same tools and so the only differentiator you have left is who you're keeping out of the team.

Yeah, so going back to what you just said something really interesting where the org design is going to change and that you need to go and develop that career path for that PPC specialist that has some really brilliant ideas in in in engineering. So how how are you thinking about that? How do you design that path that really didn't exist before?

Yeah, so it's interesting for me at Pearl because I'm building out an entirely new unit. I'm building out They've always been consumer oriented, right? Somebody has a question, somebody has an answer. My job is to build out the part of the company where somebody needs help and somebody can't help. So it's more complex interaction between people. And there's already a lot of people that that have been working on this. It's why they've already got the traction they have. I'm not starting this from scratch. I'm coalescing some things, but they're all on different people's teams. So right now what I'm doing is I'm working with everybody's managers and the people on the team at Pearl come up with half jokingly called shared custody agreements. Right? There's There are people who are qualified to help develop you as an engineer. And you need those people. You need somebody to be talking to you about that. But you may not be working on an engineering pod or a dedicated engineering team. You might have a lot more like cross-functional teams. We've got a marketer like essentially mini startups. We have these this kind of setup. So I am directing people's work and strategy and everything else like that, but there's somebody else who's developing and maintaining their career. Which is which is the most important thing.

I love that.

I think that's going to be the way that we reorganize ourselves is halfway between holacracy, if you remember the chaos that was, you know, just self-assembling teams and all that nonsense, and a rigid hierarchy. I think it's going to be more of like a like a pod just-in-time like a flexible pod structure where there's people responsible for projects and initiatives and getting things done, and then there's people responsible for helping you develop the mastery and making the big decisions. Like I don't care if we use Postgres, Superbase. Like I don't care, whatever. I In fact, I think they're the same thing. So I want somebody smart making that important decision, even if they're not the one working on my team, but I don't need that VP like, you know, in kind of in in that loop. So I think the big thing is don't lose focus of the importance of career development. Cuz I could have just had everybody report to me and and and sorted it that way. But if you're not helping people grow, one, you're going to lose them. Uh and two, you're missing out on your most valuable asset, which is the unrealized potential of the people already on your team. So, that's the mistake that I see people make so far is they feel like, "Oh, we don't need to have uh you know, structured teams or anything anymore because everybody's like self-organizing." That's not the case. You still need to help somebody understand like the other day I was teaching somebody how to pre-sell a meeting, right? Like you're going to pitch to a bunch of decision-makers. Helps to float ideas to people who are going to be there in advance and ask for feedback and the battle's won before it starts. That's not That's That's a career maturity move that we still need to be coaching and developing in people. Yeah. So, that's my big advice is to figure or my my plan right now, we'll see how it works, is figure out co-parenting agreements with people who can develop them professionally and help them make big decisions while you're still figuring out how do you direct their work and strategy and their impact.

Wow. So, I know how the plot was ran by uh the Martian and Brian, right? So, it it kind of sounds like that that you have two people you said it would wouldn't exist without the both of them, right? But it's it's having that team. It's having those those two people that you have your direct manager, but you also have somebody that's your career coach and and and guiding you. And is that somebody that you pick? Is that somebody that's designed an org? You know, let's say it's a 100 people, uh who who who's doing that? Who is their career coach in that org? Is it an HR person that's powered by AI? Like how do you see that developing?

So, like after this call, I mean, I've talked for 70% it's going to tell me I've probably going to say I spoke too fast. It's going to say like I, you know, wasn't clear as it could be on some things. Uh so, AI I think is going to get good at giving us feedback. It's not there yet for most people and I think most people aren't there yet uh with themselves because most managers themselves suck, right? Like most managers are not doing a good job of coaching and developing people as it is. And so, people just honestly don't even know what good looks like. Like if you have crappy manager, your career growth is rate limited by the ability of your manager help develop you. Not anymore. You can go use AI for that. In a well-functioning org though, I think that what we're going to do is still have the functional hierarchy. Still going to have an engineering team, still have a product team, still have a marketing team, still have a finance team. And that decision-making structure one will make the big calls because that's part of what executives, leaders, managers do. Um but two will own helping everybody develop those career paths. Uh we're going to buy I think we need to bifurcate like the work that I'm doing today with the developing my potential for tomorrow. Uh and you still need to have the person who's developing you for tomorrow understand what the life you want to get to looks like. Right? The reason that a a VP of engineering can work with a junior engineer is or a director of engineering is because director wants to become the VP and the manager wants to become the director. Like they've they've they're further ahead in the movie. Uh that the person wants to be a part of. So I think that the the strategy, the structure that kind of performance view that And this is where it's going to get interesting is I'm interacting with these uh you know, engineers or whatever more often than kind of the VP of engineering is. Uh and so I actually think that initiative managers, people who are leading things, are going to also have to learn more about um about how to give people feedback. Right? And about like understanding how things work. Because I was always able to just ignore engineering cuz I had a great chief technology officer and whatever like I he he knew what I was doing, I knew what he was doing. It was fine. Now I think that I need to spend more time understanding what it's like to be a product manager and uh and and a frontline person because I have weekly one-on-ones with them cuz we talk about work and and professional development. And then they have to have their own, you know, career development stuff with their own org. So as long winded way of saying I think it's going to go both ways. I think people should use AI to help themselves level up faster than their in all probability crappy manager is able to. I think managers should use AI to become better managers and become more effective. Um and then I just I still really believe that in a world in which being really good at something matters cuz just being a generalist now is is not that great of an idea because AI is a generalist at everything and it's allowing everybody else to be a generalist at everything. So you're still going to need a specialization and you're going to want to be led by somebody who has just seen they've read further in the book than than you have.

Uh definitely fun time. I think it's we had Meg Bear on the the podcast and she talks about like we need to as CEOs we need to be in the forefront of this and be trying to replace ourselves and trying to you know asking ourselves the hard questions as well and it's like parenting books like that they did some research it's it didn't matter if you read the book just the act of going and buying the book you became a better parent uh and the maybe it's the same with managers right? It's just what like having an example of wiggle what good looks like the the acronym Kevin Dorsey gave me there but since we're dropping names we had your friend you guys worked together for a while here Rand Fishkin and he mentioned he was on the podcast and he mentioned that he loves hiring people that can thrive in process-less environments um so you've hired revenue team at Zero Gravity team as a marketer now you're dealing with all these different functions you just mentioned where you know you're talking to marketing more engineering more is that like as you're you're growing those teams and as you're communicating with those those different folks are you looking for that as well are you looking for people who can thrive in these process-less environments just because everything is changing so fast or when you're talking about developing this specialty is just that that's what you really want you want to find somebody that's really zoned in on their craft and knows is uh want to become the best BBC marketer in the world.

So, adaptability is always important. It's universally important. Um I think it depends on the stage that you're at, right? Much like uh deciding to ask an expert, you know, for legal advice or just asking ChatGPT what what you should do. It It's It's about how how consequential it is. When you're an early-stage startup, you want people who thrive in chaos and no process because there is no process, right? You want people who can figure stuff out. As you grow, um like you don't really want the HubSpot CFO innovating, right? Like that that has to be right. And as a platform grows, it's a good example, right? It's like we can be lean, do stuff like the fast way when we're small, but once we have, you know, $100 million in revenue, we've got customers who are really counting on us, um you have to have experts who are investing in like that kind of uh that kind of specialization and and who care about processes. AI can help with lots of these processes. So, I have an agent or I had an agent at my last company that would attend all meetings for me, um and summarize it from my perspective. So, and sometimes it would send no summary, which meant that there was no reason for me to have actually been in that meeting. No information I needed to have, nothing I needed to contribute. Um so, I think we say have a good It's like "Yes."

I would say 10% of meetings actually turned out that I didn't need to be in. So, AI can help with the processes, but I think right now you want people who have a lot of resilience and adaptability. But instead of blowing up your organ trying to like hire a bunch of AI-native people who then can't scale with you where you need to go, this is going to sound weird, man. It's way more about psychological safety. Cuz right now there's there's this there's tons of psychology research on this, right? But like when we're stressed out, we tend to not be creative, right? If we're being chased by a lion, I'm not sitting here wondering about like pricing and packaging strategies and stuff like that.

No, you're right.

Exactly. And right now, people are scared for two reasons. One, the macroeconomy is looking pretty fragile, right? Everybody's Lots of people doing layoffs and that kind of stuff. And at the same time, people are worried about AI is going to like replace their jobs, which for many reasons it's not, but that is a worry that people have. And we're asking people then go be creative and innovative. We're saying like, "Hey, like yeah, like go figure out how to infuse AI, like come up with all these clever ways to use it." And that's they're just completely contradictory things. So, as the CEO right now, it's much more important to make sure that the people on your team understand that you also don't know what it means. Like when the CEO tells you, "We need to infuse AI into our road map." They don't know what that means either, right? So, let's be clear about that. My head of marketing at Agent AI, I you know, she she used to make fun of me, but at least I was self-aware because I'm like, "Can't we use AI to do this?" And you know, maybe the answer's no. So, like your boss doesn't know any more about the right answer than you do is something that we all just need to admit to each other now. And if you're an early-stage startup, yeah, take lots of risks. You need people who thrive in chaos cuz the consequences are much lower. And people also they just expect you to suck. Once you're a global company, you're publicly traded, whatever, like you have There's some things that you have to get right and you have to have people who don't just blow past the process. So, processes don't not matter is all I'm trying to say there. We need resilience, we need adaptability. Most importantly, we need psychological safety for everybody. But I wouldn't I wouldn't assume that there's a universe in which all processes stop stop mattering. I think they're going to evolve, but they they're still going to be very important because there has to be checks before you deliver things to to the customer.

Yeah, it's pretty you had a pretty crazy ride there from 150 to they have over 8,000 employees there. I think you you made it. You watched them IPO. It's it's just insane and and you had to be adaptable to be able to survive in that. There's you know, a lot of people that do well in the startup but then can't thrive in those process. I think you did because of that reason you just shared as well where where proactively dealing with legal where most people are running and hiding from it. So, with like go going back to HubSpot and and that growth, you you had a brand, you had a name. It was I presumably not in the beginning, but uh it towards the the middle there, a lot easier to hire people. Everybody I know has wanted to work in in HubSpot. We do a lot of recruiting in LatAm. It's extremely difficult to recruit people from from HubSpot. They're really happy there. They're growing there. Um it's a dream company to to go and work for, but on the other end, you know, you were at OneScreen, you started OneScreen, you had no brand, no name. Um how did that change your your recruiting playbook? Were you able to leverage your previous brand and say, "Hey, I'm a um you know, or did you just recruit people that you you loved working with," like you mentioned?

At HubSpot, we were kind of playing on easy mode in a couple reasons. One, we were marketers marketing to marketers about marketing. So, hiring marketers was pretty straightforward.

You're going to say that five fast.

Exactly. I I once sent an email to follow up to a campaign that said, "I know that you know that I know that you opened that email and didn't click for it." And it just absolutely crushed it. It performed so well. Um so, like both from a marketing perspective and from a recruiting perspective, we were playing on easy mode. That wasn't true for like the product and engineering orgs, right? Like people you know, we see all the people who wanted to come work for the sales and marketing and support teams at HubSpot cuz those were the favorite teams, but they had to build like a culture of credibility for some of the other orgs where they weren't playing on easy mode. But we definitely had a lot of like the inertia of the brand. Brands could still be cool back then, right? We could do a Gangnam Style video and people didn't just like cringe at it like we would if if anybody tried to do that today. Which I think is sad, by the way. Like companies should be able to be fun.

it back. Let's do

Yeah. So, we're going to bring it back. Um at OneScreen, I I had two co-founders who I had worked with previously. Uh and then I intentionally try to not over hire for people who have worked for me before.

Wow.

one, generally they've learned they should have learned what they can from me. So, the woman who helped me get Agent AI started as leading growth for me. Um, she went to go work at Jasper afterwards cuz I'm like you've there's not there's nothing more I can teach you. Uh, but two, you also don't want to create an accidental culture of insiders and outsiders. So, like at Proloco, for example, I'm not just going to hire a bunch of people who I've worked with at HubSpot and stuff like that because then there'll be people who feel like, whether it's true or not, uh, there'll be people who feel like they're maybe not on the inside of something. All right, so you end up with uh, this culture of insiders and outsiders. You end up with a confirmation bias because you if I trained you, by definition, kind of like you think similarly to how I think. Um, so at OneScreen we uh, start got the core started with people that we knew, but then after that after that was recruiting. I'm I'm a pretty good recruiter. Sell the mission, sell the vision. Um, like we wanted to at OneScreen we wanted to change the way the economics of the physical world. Right? Like and it started because of the pandemic. Um, you know, these businesses could only have half of their customers in their business. I'm like this is the original idea. It's like, oh, this commercial's running on the screens. What if they were smart and targeted? And what if the business owner actually got paid for them? If it was a website, that's what would happen. Right? So, like that was the vision that I sold people is yeah, we started with a with a marketplace of billboards. That's fine. Right? But one, it's helping marketers do something that they haven't been able to do cuz the game of millimeters we've all been fighting with internet marketing is boring for most marketers. It's like letting them be clever and and creative again. Uh, so on the demand side, that was really good. Then on the supply side, selling the story of like, hey, we're going to help these cuz most billboards are owned by small businesses. They're not like you think of Outfront, Clear Channel, Lamar. I think they own like 8% of inventory last time I checked.

Wow.

Um, so it's like how can we help these small business owners, whether it's a barber shop with TVs playing, make money or a small business that owns like, you know, a bunch of bus stop, uh, you know, uh, media like that. So, that was I didn't have the brand, but I had the mission and we could sell the mission. And it's the same thing here at Pearl, right? Like I'm not going out and recruiting like who wants to work at another AI company? Like, come great, you do. Uh, and they've been around for 23 years. They have a strong brand, a strong culture, but the way that that we're going to win good talent is by explaining people that if you come to work every day and you crush it, you have made the world a slightly better place. Which is what we thought at HubSpot. Right? Like every time we crushed it, we said, "Okay, we're getting one step closer to companies not just shouting at their customers, but instead creating value for their customers, engaging with them." It was the world we wanted to live in. Um, so I think as you're thinking about recruiting, brand helps fill the pipeline, but the mission and the values is actually what closes the candidates. So, I have a very, very high win rate even when I don't have a big pipeline.

And that is like something that you're identifying and shouting at them, uh, well, let's give me that shouting at at customers. So, no shouting. You're You're pitching them that like on LinkedIn cold or you're you're asking like what what what How how are you getting that pipeline even to begin with?

Uh, so for Pearl, I have a recruiting team. So, again, it's it's it's much easier. I just need to make sure that I'm winning like really high value candidates that I want, um, people who are trying who are also being recruited by like Anthropic and Open AI and stuff like that. Um,

You're working directly with the recruiting team and saying, "Hey, these are, you know, my top 10 choices. This is the mission that we need to to sell them." And you're you're injecting some of uh your vibe and and and why they would should come work with you?

Yeah, uh, cuz recruiters Recruiters are incredibly good at their jobs, right? Like the fact that their recruiters got me when I was actively not looking for a job. Like I was

Yeah. literally did not

of AI assistant. How did they do that? What what

Well, they they got past it because they did research about why I was a good fit. Uh and so they explained the the email that they sent cuz they didn't know it'd be screened by an AI agent. But the email that they sent me said reference specific things in my background, things I said in interviews about like why human expertise matters, um things like the stuff I've talked about with my management and leadership philosophy, uh like they they customize the why, right? Cuz anybody can reach out to you and say like, "Hey, we'd love to talk to you about a job." I don't have time. But it's like, "Hey, we'd like to talk to you about a job uh and like here is exactly why." It's It's Hire Me Hubspot just in reverse, right?

Yeah.

Here's why like I think you'd be a really great fit for this. I same thing like I'm speaking at a and this AI's like really good at this cuz it can figure all this stuff out. I'm speaking at a conference in Orlando later this month just uh for free for a small business to help them do their annual kickoff uh with their company. And she just plugged in like, "Hey, I want somebody who can do a motivational speech about AI and lead a hands-on workshop who lives in Florida." And the the AI spit me out cuz I do. Uh and then she just like sent that to me. And I'm like, yeah, I get pitches to like come speak at your company and stuff all the time and I usually say no because it's I don't have you have time to consider it. But by taking that extra step and using AI not to make your life easier, but to make your audience's life easier, that's the that's the real magic of AI, right? Write the way they want to write, like send it to me in bullet points in my case, don't send me a big block of text, you know. That is the great recruiters of the future are going to be really really good at explaining why I'm reaching out to you and why you should this is going to be worth some of your time.

So this was completely cold. It wasn't somebody that had a relationship in the past, but they were able to get really creative. Uh so so there was one creative campaign uh since you're you're I Hire Me Hubspot. It was this one. It got through.

I hadn't even heard of them. I honestly hadn't even heard heard of Pearl.com. I kind of wish I had because it's incredibly helpful to be able to pay like 60 bucks and just have like a lawyer look over your, you know, employment agreement or whatever it is you need to have happen. Or be able to talk to a vet or something like that.

What's 60 bucks? I I need a real estate contract. Sure, shoot. Right now, Pearl.com. I'm about to go on.

Go to Pearl.com. It'll It'll redirect you to JustAnswer.com cuz that's the answer marketplace.

Okay.

But yeah, it's um it instead of either trying to have AI do it or do it yourself, which risks, you know, a mistake, or paying like a very expensive lawyer, it's like get an actual lawyer who just has a spare probably 20 minutes of their time uh to go in and like answer your question properly.

That's awesome.

That's It's a great concept. But um yeah, I mean the way that they that they got through to me was by explaining to me why they were reaching out and why I should care. And you have to do that uh whether you're applying for a job, uh you have to do that whether you're recruiting for a job, and you have to do that even just like work with other people. Like I have a friend cuz you can kind of tell, right? Uh if somebody's using AI to write if unless you customize the style and tone. I have a friend who's about a year ago and I I asked him like, "Are you using AI to write your text messages to me?" And he said, "Yes." Um and it's because he has, you know, he's neurodivergent in his own special ways and tends to historically just send me like massive walls of text or like a link to a 4-hour YouTube video. Um which is, you know, I love him and I value his his perspective, not how I communicate. Uh and so he ended up uh putting the AI in between me and him so he could get hit the wall of text or the 4-hour video and then it would communicate with me in the way that was best for me. Cuz communication's not about like what's easiest for you. Doesn't matter if you if you if you nailed that pitch and no one understood it, you didn't actually nail it. Right? Um so as a

was your experience for you is having that AI layer with your friend.

Exactly. Communicate to me the way that I want to be communicated to. Uh AI makes that reasonable now for for customers sure, but also just for your co-workers and colleagues. Like when I I have a pitch to make to the executive team actually later today and I'm going to send them as a follow-up a little like I essentially have lovable code up and interactive thing based on all of this stuff I've been talking about and they'll be able to get video audio text. They can ask the questions if they want to instead of like having to talk to me in kind of a synchronous meeting. It's can we can we communicate to people they want to be communicated to whether it's prospect job you're applying for or co-worker or customers. It's not about you it's about whether the message lands.

And that's that's a world I want to live in Sam. I love it. Thank you so much for for coming on sharing so much knowledge here. As we wrap up where where do you want folks to to find you?

Well, the good thing about the bad thing about my my last name being Mallikarjun on is it's hard for people to pronounce. The good thing is there's not many so if you Google Sam Mallikarjun on you will find me. LinkedIn's probably the best way to reach out to me. Although I do also I have a website but I haven't updated it in like 10 years. I think I'm like 75 pounds heavier in the photo like I kid you not. But yeah, just find me on LinkedIn. Find me on Twitter. If you can't get in touch with me you're not trying. I'm extremely first generation on the internet.

Send him some ads. Let's go. Sam, thanks so much for being on Who We Hire.

Thanks for having me.