Paraform raises $20M Series A led by Felicis to connect companies with specialist recruiters as AI talent wars intensify

Thank you. Um, up next we have our lightning round beginning with John from Parapform. Welcome to the stream, John. How are you doing? Good to meet you. What's happening? Good, guys. Thanks for having me. Uh, what's the latest? Can you kick us off with an introduction on yourself? Jord's getting the hammer ready.

What's the latest news? Do you have any good numbers for us? We love big numbers, hopefully with lots of zeros. Yeah. Um, hey everyone. Yeah. Um, great to meet you guys. I'm one of the founders and CEO of a company called Parapform.

We just announced our 20 million series A led by Felicis and um, an incredible group of founders. Congratulations. I like when Jordy does it because he goes in the camera feed. It's great. Congratulations. Congratulations. 20 million bucks. That's amazing.

Um, tell us what the company does, the inciting concept, the idea, how big you are, the scale of the business right now, that type of stuff. Let me guess, you're going to hire one of an AI researcher. Use of funds. Yeah. Yeah. We're getting one day a week. Yeah. Fractional. Yeah. Fractional. Fractional AI researcher.

Oh, I saw that. and also like the founding engineer who you know four four different companies I think his name was Soh. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Um no yeah but uh for those of you who don't know Parapform is a marketplace where we help the world's uh most important companies hire top talent by connecting them with uh expert recruiters who actually uh act more like sports agents than talent sourcers.

And you know, I've actually seen your your post recently about the meta super intelligence team. Like you guys framed it as like traded internally.

We've been talking about this for over a year and it's really cool to see that sort of trend uh sort of playing out live, but also it's happening a lot sooner than we thought. So really interesting to like dive deeper into like the trend of like just recruiting in general. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean we've been we've been talking about this a lot because it's good content. It's interesting.

And uh I think what uh what's s the surprising thing that we learned this week I think is that we put up that traded graphic for the meta researcher and it got millions of views like millions of views and it's funny and there's an element that can go broader but it really does speak to the fact that tech has gone mainstream.

The question that we've been mulling is where does this go next? Because when you look at the GOAT debate between LeBron James and uh uh Michael Jordan, you're looking at points per game. You're looking at lifetime career points, number of MVPs won, number of uh championships won.

Um what metrics are you interested in looking at? Uh is LinkedIn still relevant? Is GitHub still relevant? Uh are you quantifying these things? What are you doing to try and match these folks together? you imagine that AI can be very useful.

There's a whole bunch of different ways that I could imagine this uh working, but you probably have to do some filtering on both sides to understand who's a good recruiter and who's a good who's good talent. For sure. Yeah.

I think like you know the the trend that you guys picked up, it's like you're on to something and it's like very similar to what we think.

It's like I don't think that a important tech company hiring let's say the best marketing person will be too dissimilar to the Lakers announcing that you know LeBron joined or the Dodgers getting Otani.

I think how we think about it is as AI sort of um you know rapidly advances and it automates a lot of the mundane work I think humans sort of focus on more like higher order functions right um and one person will be able to do a lot more um obviously the GDP will accelerate so the average salaries will go up we've always internally talked about how the age of like a seven figure salary is rapidly approaching it already is for certain industries but I think it will be a lot more mainstream um so yeah I think like there's going to be more scar scarity towards good talent, it's going to get even more competitive.

And when there's that scarcity, usually the value of a broker goes up.

And we actually see recruiters, you know, kind of turning into almost one of the most important roles in tech where essentially they're like brokering this human capital between the most important companies and making sure they represent the best talent.

Um, in terms of metrics, I think very similar to maybe like the MBA or the MLB, like obviously they'll measure the company's performance.

I think a lot of people commented on how like it's ridiculous to pay $100 million or whatever, but really these companies they're smart like they're doing that because the return on that is greater. Um, right? Like I mean solving AGI I think is like a important enough problem where you do that, right?

So I think um, you know, that's one thing that you're going to measure, right? Like how well are companies going to perform and achieve their objectives? I think there's other like key KPIs like you know I'd imagine it's just like the northstar metrics for different teams.

Um, I wonder if there's going to be universal things like points, assists, and uh, you know, minutes played. But yeah, I think it's something interesting to think about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we kind of already do this at a little at like a smaller level when someone says like, "I was early at Stripe.

" What that really means is that like you were there for the creation of like the first 50 billion of market cap or something. And so if you were one of 20 on that team, yeah, we might give you, you know, $50 million in points, right? essentially. Um, so yeah, what what else is going on with the top of funnel?

Where where where are candidates uh percolating up into the parapform system these days? Yeah. So, one of the fastest growing uh roles we see are for deployed engineers. Like obviously uh Palunteer um they're one of our customers too. They they coined this term and really uh do a good job.

Sean Sankar, the OG, the first to ever do it, the first uh forward deployed engineer. He's been on the show. Exactly. Yeah.

I think you know obviously you know you guys know this too but I think the biggest bottleneck in AI is quickly becoming implementation right where you know we already have very good LM we have already very good technology it's just a matter of getting them into the hands of everyday people and the broader industry and I think um you know go to market motions are evolving to like actually fit this forward deployed engineer role where basically you have to like very customize your AI solutions to you know everyday everyday customers.

So I think for deployed engineers is where a lot of really good talent will converge and at Parapform what we're seeing is not only companies like Palunteer but also you know companies um you know traditional companies like you know um you know that uh they're also like looking to hire for deployed engineers.

So that's one trend we see um emerging very quickly. Yeah. Uh any commentary? You mentioned uh So Pereak uh the Indian engineer who works at three to four startups at the same time. He uh Su Hail says he's been praying on YC companies. Uh multiple people are hitting the timeline now saying that they fired this guy.

Uh that feels like something where we need almost like an inverse LinkedIn because clearly he can pull jobs off of his LinkedIn and say he just worked at one place at a time. Um but do we need some sort of reputation score? Could that be abused? H how does that evolve? Yeah. Really? Yeah.

And I think it's also interesting to think about like the kind of remote work versus in person. Like this obviously wouldn't have happened if it was in person and you have to like validate things. But I think there's a really a lot of interesting things there.

For example, you know, I think with AI like I think AI can be incredibly helpful in the recruiting process making it more efficient. But there's also going to be a lot more spam.

There's a lot like recruiting is always driven by like this power law where unfortunately there's only a small amount of very good people and a large amount of you know sort of it's like a long tail, right? And I think with AI, I think that trend will like even accelerate.

So I actually think that having a human in the loop to vet these things out and not only just these things, but like think think about like culture fit, interpersonal dynamics, do I like you? Like these kind of things are actually like very much like what recruiters are effective at.

So I think um you know I think parapform can help uh you know basically prevent these situations. Um yeah. Yeah.

One one question just getting into I'm I'm sure this question came up in in various pitch meetings and throughout building the whole company there's uh back in the early internet days the dot era every CEO said hey we're going to need way less people um and people are saying that again right now how how would you answer that question you're obviously building a a talent platform um is like you know and I'm sure people you know might say well what happens in a year if the hiring market gets gets wrecked, how is that going to impact your your business?

But I'm I'm curious how you you know see that market evolving.

Yeah, I think fund fundamentally in terms of value creation, if you think about it from that perspective, like I remember seeing a story where when cursor winds surf these tools became so mainstream, you know, um like these fortune 500s, you know, they were asked, hey, are you going to hire less engineers because, you know, can one person do more?

And they actually said, no, because of these tools, we're going to hire even more engineers who can use this to be even more effective. Right? I think at the end of the day like there is a ton of value to be created. There's a lot more innovation to you know continue to happen.

So I think that actually we're always going to need people. It's just that each person will be more effective. So I think we actually have a very optimistic view when it comes to like the human and AI collaboration. Um and I think another thing is yeah like we talked about like the sports agent analogy.

I think each talent will you know become more and more valuable. So you know maybe the frequency of hire may decrease but the value of each hire increases and when it comes to sort of like a success based model like parapform I think the value we capture is sort of actually increasing even more with this trend.

So um yeah I guess like not too worried there. Talk to yeah talk to us about where the value is occurring and where uh where it's landed historically and where it's going forward. Like uh when I've hired engineers through recruiting agencies typically the company pays like one month or two months of salary.

So, it's like a percentage and then there's some sort of clawback if they don't make it after three three months.

Um, Sarah Guell was talking about uh how some folks are helping AI researchers negotiate and they're taking a cut of the pay and it seems like they're taking it from the researcher because if I can get you five more 5% more, that could be millions of dollars, you're fine paying me a million bucks for that negotiation.

Um, then there's platforms. So, do you see that economic equation shifting? um from the company paying to the employee paying to platform getting comped. How do how is that evolving? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean I think that Sarah Go example is also like exactly like what that's what sports agents and even in the music industry I think that's what they kind of do.

But yeah to answer your question um I think where we are creating value is actually while keeping quality you know consistent and maybe even better we're actually reducing the time to hire significantly.

So you know like every customer cares the number one thing they care about is you know the best candidates fast right?

So the metric we look at is time to hire and paraphform is making revenue by filling the most difficult world uh roles in the world and um we our average time to hire is under one month and I think when it comes to efficiency I think what what happens is at every step of the procurement process or the recruiting funnel we're making it really really efficient um I think we're basically decreasing downtime for example if you want to work with a recruiting agency you're relying on word of mouth You never know whether they're good or not before you work with them.

And there's a ton of these little things that waste your time and and obviously cost. But at Parform, based on what our customers are looking for, we're able to match them with the best possible recruiters based on their track record, their candidate network.

We have so much data on them that we're able to do like an instant good match of like best recruiter for the best role. So that already saves like weeks. And most customers find the candidate that they want.

they hire end up hiring within the first week or two of posting on parapform and these are like director of engineering at you know high touch like these are like very very difficult roles so I think that's where we create value it's you know reducing the time to hire while maintaining and improving quality yeah fantastic thank you so much for stopping by I think we I think we had a I I'm it's coming back to me now I think we had a call maybe in 2023 early on it's amazing amazing amazing to see your progress congratulations on the new round excited to uh excited to follow along We'll talk to you soon.

Have a great rest of your day. Really quickly, let me tell you about Graphite. Graphite. dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship f ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. 52 million series B from none other than Anthropics Anthology Fund with Menllo Ventures.

uh had breakfast with a friend of the show, Bailey Barrow, this morning and he he honestly wouldn't stop talking about graphite. He's absolutely obsessed. He really was. Did he say graphite fanboy? He said he's running the TBPN stack. Yeah, the linear graphite graphite goes down the list. But um it's all good stuff.

Harvey, Asauna, Ramp, Replet, they basically they got every logo. They got every logo. They got every logo. But uh head over to graphite. dev and check it out yourself. Who do we got next? Uh, well, we have some more timeline posts. So, uh, Mike Nuke, he's been on the show before talking about Arc AGI.

Um, Arc AGI 3 was just announced, the AI benchmark from France Chalet and Mike Nuke. Um, and this came as unexpected. What aren't people still they're still struggling with AGI 2? That's right. But the goal for ARC v2 was to endure 12 to 18 months. The goal for the V3 is over three years.

Um and so we he's talked about this before when you design a benchmark you you have to assume that uh that like if the current models are scoring 50% right now on your benchmark they are going to solve it in weeks like it's not even it's going to be days don't even people won't even bother with it.

We were talking about this with the IMO um yeah with uh with some folks from Cognition uh you know it's like the IMO is so close to being solved that people aren't even really focused on it more anymore because they're like of course we can do that let's not bother with it and so uh team was saying when you're designing a benchmark you need to target not only will it get 1% it'll get 0% in you need to imagine a benchmark that in a year the AI will still be scoring like negative 100% Like it will get every question like so wrong that Yeah.

that it's that it's actually conducting even more points. Exactly. Like you need to you need to really think through the philosophy of what makes uh a really really hard benchmark and they've done it at RKGI and we're uh we're really happy to support the team over there.

So if you're uh building a foundation model, head over and give it your best shot. And if you're a human, go try and solve one of these prizes. They're pretty fun. They're pretty fun. More breaking news.

Uh Quinton Farmer, one of the co-founders of Toland's has announced a series A led by Ra Boy over at Coastal Ventures. Congratulations. They launched uh just a few months ago. They have 3 million downloads, $12 million run rate, and now adding this $20 million series A.

Wait, is this that this is the one they're using fun like Tomagi? I think it's like purple dino things. No, purple aliens. Yeah, alien best friend. Yep. So brilliant. Uh absolutely ripping. 7 uh 76,000 reviews on the iOS app store. 4. 8. Wow. An alien best friend. Uh very cool.

And and somehow less dystopian than the AI boyfriend. Wired has an article today that just came out. What could an healthy AI companion look like? So if you're looking for a healthy AI companion, I love it. Why don't you bring the gong for them and then we'll bring in our next guest. Let's do it. Let's do it.

Hit that gong Jordy for tool. Congratulations to the team over there. You're welcome