Tech Brew Ride Home - (Portfolio Profile) Grupa.io

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

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On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus episode of the TechMeme Right Home. That is our second very special portfolio profile episode. We've got another amazing company that I want to tell you about.

And as I said on the show this week, I think a lot of you listeners are going to be extremely interested in this company. Whether you're just an engineer or you're a startup, you can find a group of very, very useful. We're going to talk to the founding team of Grupa, which you can find out more about at GrupaG-U-P-A-D-I-O, Groupa.io. I want to start with Samuel. Samuel, could you just say hi? And then I'm going to go around and ask everyone else to say hi.

Hi. Indraja, say hi, please. Hi, Brian. Thank you for having us. And Shani. Hello, Brian. Hi there, everybody. Okay, I'm so super excited to tell you about this company,

because I believe that we are going to, with Grupa, transform how startups meet the engineering teams of their dreams. Samuel, give me the sort of the elevator pitch, if you will, what Grupa does in like two minutes, and then we'll go into details. Yeah, Grupper is not just a company, but it's a phenomenal. What Gruper does is we enable startups to be able to connect with product engineering teams at the big tech companies, Facebook, Google, Uber, and all these big companies, who today, they have free time. And that free time, they are using it to invest into startups or get involved with startups. What we do is we are a marketplace platform that connects this two side. early stage startups who are, you know, desperate for the next big talent, best talent to build the next big thing.

And these engineers in these big tech companies who are passionate and looking for purpose in building the next big thing. So we connect them under our umbrella one system to work on, you know, and the beautiful thing is they collaborate and execute based on cash and equity compensation system. So that's what Grupper does in its shirt. that's a key thing that you just said cash or equity so let's let's start with the engineering side this is a two-sided marketplace that's exciting on both sides but if i'm listening right now and i'm a software engineer and maybe i'm out of fang company but i do also have free time i can sign up with grupa and in my free time be introduced to to startups often at their earliest, earliest stages when they're building out their product,

they're designing their product, and maybe they're a team of one. They're so early, they might not have access to engineering talent yet. And so sort of as a side gig, if you will, if I am a talented software engineer, I can be introduced to these companies at their earliest, earliest stages and help them craft whatever the product is going to become, right? That is absolutely correct, Brian. So we really encourage and attract engineers who are already from FANG or X Fing or Unicorn companies to come work for group as like a platform where we match both startups.

We introduce the engineer to a startup founder, and we see we match the skill sets and experience as well. Ideally, it's expected to work around 15 to 20 hours, and there is a preference of the compensation model as well. We let them choose what their preferences as in cash only, cash plus equity only. And so as you're saying, this is not like this is something I would do in my free time, on my weekends, but also it's sort of like I can go to Grupa and it's a marketplace. I can take a look at these projects and these companies and say, wow, that's really interesting. I can give 20 hours to this. And not only can I be helpful in getting this off the ground, but I can get a little cash in my pocket or I can get some equity in a company at its very early stages.

You're absolutely right. So when you go and sign up and on board, when you go on the website, you'll be able to see startups that match your interests. And accordingly, once you indicate interest in the startup, we will schedule a meeting and then that goes forward. So ideally, it's a great matching process of both your skill set and experience and background. What is the onboarding process? How much of my resume do I have to share or anything like that? Yeah, that's not at all the process. It's pretty simple and straightforward.

We just ask you to sign up with your LinkedIn. And even if you sign up with Google, you'd still have to put in your LinkedIn URL. And once you do that, we pull all the information in the system. You just have to sign up as a team. We're also working around to sign up as independent and individually, but ideally we encourage teams to come together and work for us. And you said teams, which is also key too. Obviously, you know, anyone can go and sign up or whatever, but can you also match with, you know, other people that are working specifically on things that you've been working on in the past and things like that? Yes. So we have a Discord community.

Right now we have close to 300 members of engineers. So what we ideally do is we really put up a post and whoever shows interests. If they come as a team, that is great because they already have a working dynamic. And we encourage people to sign up as a team. But if not, we still show the startup founders as a team. So we network before and we introduce each other. For example, a front end engineer and a full stack engineer. I can introduce them in the back end.

And then once they're hit it off, we introduce them as a team to the startup founder. And when we're talking about the startups that are on the platform looking for engineering talent, we're talking about everything under the sun, but generally startups at their earliest stages, is that right? Yes. We have pre-stage, seed stage series A. Idly from what we see until today is we have a lot of traction from pre-seed and seed stage startups. And some of the founders are tech founders, some of them are non-tech, so we ideally deal with a variety of startups. Let's say I get on a project, really fall in love with the project, you know, maybe work through a couple of iterations, sprints or whatever. But I've really fallen in love with this company.

Is that a possibility that this is my next gig? Yeah. Let me just think that. That's a very interesting question we ask internally. Whereas other marketplace sees themselves as the bridge. They don't want both sides to connect or take it further. We see ourselves like the bridge that actually bring them together, right? We think that if they want to go join in full time,

this is a way for some of them to test the orders before joining in. And for the startups, they want to hire, you know, high elite quality people. And they are still trying to fundraise. And when they have the right amount, they can get them on site. on board, there's a way for them to test too. It's like try before you buy. We are going to experiment different ways for them to join. We could say they could join. Instead of taking like normal recruitment agency, take 15 to 20 percent of the court, we could say, yeah, we could get equity in those companies instead. So we are playing long games. We're not trying to just be a rent-saking marketplace.

We're trying to invest into this startup to help them build the next big thing. If that includes them joining full-time, we're here to enable it. Well, and we're saying long game, but at the very very very, least, it is a limited risk engagement. Like these are, you sign on for a project and there's a time on it. There's the specification so you know what you're getting into. And it's like, all right, I've signed on for a temporary gig here. So there's little risk for participating in, but if you fall in love, you fall in love and then who knows?

Yeah, it's like Tinder. If you get, if you fall in love, then you take it to the next stage. Well, so Samuel, let's take it to the other side now because when you and I first talked, one of the things that I said was, you know, the hardest thing for startups is finding your, the engineering team that you're meant to be with, right? It is like dating. And so to take it to the other side of the table, if you're a startup, in the same way that, like, you know,

the right marriage can make your life, the right startup team can make your company successful. And so this is a way not to be glib about it, but if you're a startup, you can date engineering teams before you get married, right? Yeah. And so in the same way that it's a low risk sort of engagement for engineers for startups, this is a way of lowering the risks. You don't have to get people to sign on the dotted line and join your company before you know you can work with them. Is that the idea?

Yes. And I allow to Shannon talk more. Thank you so much. Yes, that is exactly it. So the best way to put it, you start dating. We introduce and recommend three teams. And these are high quality teams that we have pretty much verified. They have their portfolio available.

And also they have that experience and background with your preferred criteria. So we start matching, we recommend the teams, and you're the one as a startup to decide which team fits your criteria and you proceed with that. So there's that process of really a fast-stating is going to happen before a match is taking place, absolutely. And so if I'm a startup again, the projects could be anything. It could be just getting the first iterations out there all the way through getting a minimum viable product together. And so, again, this is this dating metaphor. I can chop things into pieces. And like, you know, if I find someone that's great at UX, all right, I shove all of these projects to that team.

And if I, you know, do something in a different part of the product or whatever. So essentially, you can, again, find the talent that works best for the different part, as opposed to this sort of one-size-fits-all, boy, we've got the three engineers that we could afford to hire, and they've got to do everything. Like, you can slice and dice and get what you need done with the talent that can do that. Absolutely. And this is exactly what we recommend. When you are onwarding with Grupa as a startup, there is a process you go through and there are multiple questions we ask you.

And part of it is about, okay, what technical needs do you need and what do you think you expect from a team? Do you need design? Do you need product development, engineering? Is it data science that you need? And based on that, all the recommendations happen. Also, we always encourage the teams to get together once the matching the stars and start up and team of experts are matched to kick off with the planning so they can set up criteria, design the roadmap together before they get into development. So with that comes the iterations one month length and through that, you know, they can really go

through development step by step and expand on the product until whether this is the MVP that they're looking for, they're looking for expediting go-to-market, whatever is the end goal they can work through it and build it through iterations. Not to poke holes because I don't want to do that. But thinking from the startup point of view, I might be thinking, well, but I'm working with these people that aren't employees. It's sort of on a contract basis. So what about my ideas?

Like what if my great ideas, someone's going to run with us or whatever? But you guys have already thought of that aspect as well, right? Absolutely. So you can secure your idea. your idea is going to be pretty much safe with Grupa. We sign mutual agreements. There are NDAs. There are perhaps service level agreements in place

that we put together and we make sure teams and startups and also our platform signs it before we kick off a project. I think in many ways, Grupa manages the expectations for both parties and we're rooting for both their wins. So we try to manage the expectations and make sure everything is in place for both parties. And this is remote. They can come to your office and have some jam sessions and figure out what you need to.

It's sort of like the ability to hire the best talent from all around the world. But again, it's whatever you need. If you need someone to come in and work with your team, like that's something that's possible as well. Yes, absolutely. That's part of the agreement and expectation management from the very good go.

Can I ask, like, again, like, what level of engineers are we talking about? Are we talking about skills across the gamut? If I have a very thorny problem, I'm working in, I'm trying, I've got a Web 3 idea, like we can find people with crypto experience or what. We can find anything is essentially what you're saying. That is correct. We've had, in fact, this whole week we've been matching somebody with crypto and fintech background and Web3, in fact. Yes, we see across all needs from startups.

Crypto and Web3 talent is extraordinarily hard to find right now. I keep hearing from everybody. So if that's you and you're listening, grupa.com, that I.O. Because they just said that they've got some folks that can do this sort of thing. to close out this side of it, again, if I'm a startup and I have, I've worked with a team, and oh my, they just absolutely knocked it out of the park. They've done more than I could even imagine, but it was a temporary thing. And so now I'm thinking, great, now I've got to find somebody to hire that will replace

this All-Star team? What is the process of the relationship? Is it as a startup, can I, you know, go to this team that I've worked with and say, let's make a deal. What's your, what can we do? So let me take that up. So before now, we've done many experiments and iterations and we've seen people want to do short term. But what we deeply know founders want is continuity. And so that's part of why we design the system for iterations. But occasionally, see some startups just want to do, let's say, three months, MVP or something like that, especially if it's cash only kind of engagements, but mostly cash and equity or equity only are like one to two years engagement. So if it's short-term engagement, there's this handoff process we

have, right? After the engagement, we sometimes they could say, hey, they're hiring people internally that they want to move the work to, and maybe they don't want to work with that team again. So that engagement, so we have engagement manager inside grouper that managing that's handoff process where all the IP or the instance of the work is in the from the virtual machine or any tools and resources with handed off gradually gracefully what startup's fear is graceful handoff right because it's hard to execute that we have done that multiple times and the you know it's not as easy as saying another engineers come and take over stuff is it needs to be a strong handshake to

happen between the team that's that's been working or the team that is about to take. Well, again, this is rare because many founders want continuity, they want people that have skin in the game, and they want long-term engagement. That's why we design for the cash and equity compensation system. Right. So to sum up, this is designed for speed.

This is designed for startups where they might not have the money, the resources to hire the best engineering teams. This is a shortcut to getting to amazing engineering talent. And maybe, on the back end, it's a relationship that could be longer term and could be the key to your company's success. Samuel, I believe this was your idea. How long have you been thinking about Grupa? Where did the idea for this come from? This idea came up when I was shutting down my second company and my friends from White Company were raising money. Typically, then they were raising

like 100K, $125K. And I was in Lagos then, and then they came back, they were struggling, struggling to hire a talent. It felt like, what's happening is a talent war.

And everybody are fighting for this finite set of people, of expertise. And I kept thinking, we don't have to be, it's not a zero-sum game. What if it could be a positive song game? What if you can unlock new form of talent,

new form of human capital? And I spent a lot of time working with my co-founder, thinking, So initially, the first iteration of a group was to hire remote teams. But 2020 happened, COVID happened, the entire war shut down to become remote. And we noticed that the big tech companies, many companies that were laying off, the big tech companies were still attracting them. And it felt like these small companies were already positioned to fail.

And we wanted to change that. We felt like our mission is to empower these small people to win. So how do we do that? We noticed that when I moved to the Bay, that was early last year. But the first time I came to the Bay was in the Bay, in 2019 and I saw massive Salesforce employees, many engineers, and I was just wondering how many of these people are truly utilized and how many people are underutilized.

And I kept nurturing that idea, but we had the courage and boldness execute in May last year when we moved to the Bay. And we went in Berkeley, Skydeck incubator then. So we had the sandbox, so to say, to experiment. And we noticed that founders don't mind working 20 to 30 hours or 35 or less than or even 40 hours with these funk people and these fang engineers they were already having free time and it was already happening i call it romeo and julia it's a love story that's happening today but the biggest problem has been how do they engage how do you manage the engagement

process how do you effectively manage the workflows and make it easy for both sides to you know understand that they're getting value from the work and from the compensation and so that's when we started we designed group and started the iterations on um what's point possible if we could unlock capital that today are underutilized in the big tech company. When I say capital in this case, I mean human capital, talent, experience, expertise, and how can we go on this mission to democratize access to innovation, allow anyone anywhere to build the next big team. Today, the problem is it centralized.

And so we think decentralizing, democratizing it, giving people access to this elite talent, elite resources to build the next big thing. It's a worthy mission. You said something that we haven't touched on, which is the group of platform also helps with like, you know, the technical bits. So like whatever the project is in terms of the details, the deliverables and things like that. Group is also a platform for both sides that will make sure that the project is understood by both sides, that the deliverables are delivered, the timeline is understood, all that stuff, correct? Yes, so we noticed today that people, even this engagement that's happening offline, people try to first meet, they try to sign the contract.

And if I walk at Google, I don't want to go hire a lawyer to review contract, all those stress. But even after they go through all those hiccups, now how will I give equity? How much do I charge? What do I charge? Then they go through that. Then the last thing is how do we manage your work? And so they use Jira and all these tools to manage.

But we felt like, what if we can create an all in one place and integrate all this tools to make it happen, such that group past sort of behaves like ways, but for product development. Can we guide them, lead them through the path, give them analytics and insight into what's going on, who is working on what, performance, who is executing, how can we make them

more efficient and effective in work? And how can we bring more value other than just connecting people? And so that's been our vision. And that's another thing too is that because you're running the platform, you have the you have the insight and the visibility into when a company comes to you and says,

we need this UX problem solved. Well, you know that three projects ago, this team did something similar. So it's essentially you're a matchmaker in the best sense of the word where you have the visibility to who's going to be able to solve the problem most effectively, like, you can make the best match, essentially. Yeah. Ultimately, we see ourselves like an AI company, a data company. Right? So the vehicle, the engagements are the vehicle.

But what we really, really want to do is capture the data and insight into those engagement and see how we can bring meaning and purpose into making other engagement more effective and efficient. So I, you know, obviously, I'm not, I don't want you to share some of the great data points that you've shared with me. But in a broad way, what is the traction that you've seen with the matches that you've made so far? Are companies happy so far with the engagements?

Are companies coming back multiple times? So far, it's early days. I've only been working with you all for about four months now. But in whatever way you're willing to share, What have you seen in terms of how the platform's performing? Amazing. I remember telling you that since the time it came to now, we have 5x. And we think we could be on track by the end of the month or early next month to be at a million AR this year. That could be somewhere around 100K in monthly revenue.

But I think what's most important for us is not just that number. It's what does that number mean to the engagement? Talking to these people every day, unlocking new connection that could never have. happen other than if group had not exist. So we spoke with one guy in Y Combinator and spoke to the engineer at Facebook and just understanding that we brought these people together, right, understanding that how can we make this more efficient?

How can we bring more meaning? How can we get feedback on both side and improve the success, improve the engagement, the quality of the relationship? As Shani said, this is not just come and connect, but just come and connect with marriage. How can we make the engagement more fruitful? and how can we help them use this insight to do better?

So we have worked with a couple of companies, including YC, on-deck companies, and we have a lot on our pipeline, including A16Z and Sequoia and soft-bank companies. And so working with them every day even makes us know why we're here. We're here because we want to enable this to happen at scale. And even for Grupa, we use Grupa for Grupa. And just seeing the magic and the way it has transformed the company, we think it can transform the world. And that's where we're here.

Actually, that's a third side to this. If there are VCs out there, investors and venture capital companies that have, you have a portfolio of companies that might have need for engineers. You're willing to engage with VCs as well to help them out with their companies? I think from day one, we had this deliberate thoughts towards going to market because the engineers in the big tech don't want to work with any kind of stuff. is a new form of angel investing. They see this as instead of putting my 5K, 10K checks into startup, I put my skill.

And so they want to make the right bets. And the trust group had to do the filtering and the vetting of not just the experts, but the startups too that join. And so, you know, Shannon leads that initiative towards finding the right VACs, partnering with them. How can we get the portfolio companies that matter to the community? And how can we make the Fang engineers? These people care, they have financial stability today. they just want financial breakthrough.

And they are seeing group as a path towards that. And so that's how I hear to enable it. Well, let me sort of sum up by giving you why I was so excited to learn about you. And, you know, I've said this to you guys offline. What you just said on both sides, number one, if I'm a talented engineer, everyone's used to it's become commonplace to write

$5,000 checks and help out your friends and invest, angel invest or whatever. This is the opportunity to angel invest with your time and your talent. And so it's sort of something that no one has ever really had a breakthrough with before, but once

you realize that this is possible, it's kind of mind blowing. And then the other side of it is you know, I, again, I'm old enough to remember that when you would try to gin up a startup, you had to get a server, put it under the desk in your office. You had to, the fact that at this point for startups, there's plug and play for almost everything. If you need HR, there's plug and play. If you need, obviously, you know, there's AWS that's plug and play.

the talent. This is something that has always been, there's not been an elegant solution. This isn't exactly plug and play. You're not putting people into slots like their widgets. You're making matches. But at the same time, that sort of cold start problem of, we've got this great idea,

but it's not going to go anywhere until we can get the talent that is commensurate with what a great idea this is. This is a shortcut to that. It's a stab towards the plug and play of the Cold Start problem on the talent side of the equation. Absolutely. Absolutely, Brian. Let's end with any asks.

Obviously, if you're an engineer, I'm assuming, go to groupa.org and sign up if you're a startup that is an immediate need of engineering talent, group of dot i.o. But any other ask, if the audience is out there all over the place, media, VCs, startups, are you looking to hire? Are you looking to introductions to folks? Like anything you want and anybody that has anything, like shout it out, and you'd be amazed what the audience can come up with.

Yeah, I can actually jump in and start first. Like on the startup side, if you are actually looking to find the best product engineering teams out there, we are here for you. Also, if you are venture capitalist and investing in companies and you have a portfolio that you really want to help them expedite their go-to-market, we are here for you. So make sure you reach out to us. And if you're an engineer, I think I'm quoting Sam on this, we give you the freedom and liberty to choose what you want to work on, how you want to work on, when you want to to work on to simply put it that way and you choose the compensation model.

You can always reach out to us on groupa.io. We have a Discord community of 300 people that is very engaged. We would love to have you there as well. Yeah. And to any founder who want to really change the world and struggle through that process, and just feel like if this idea doesn't come up to life, if you don't have the best people you can't bring it to life, group is here for you. Let's change the you all together. Thank you. And I want to say to anyone listening,

you can also reach out to me directly, and I'll put you in touch with Grupa. But groupa.io, this was one of the first companies that I talked. You might have been the first one I talked to. I don't know if you were the first check that I wrote, but this idea blew my mind when I heard it. And it's going to transform the way that startups find talent and shortcut to success, I think.

So everyone, group of team, thank you so much for coming on. And more soon, right? Thank you so much. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Brian for having us. Amazing. Hey, Brian, jumping in here real quick to say, how amazing was Grupa. If you want to learn more, again, check them out at Grupa.io or just flag me with any questions

and I'll pass them along. And as I mentioned on the show this week, reminder that the ride home fund is a rolling fund so you can invest at any time because the fund rolls over quarter to quarter. As a matter of fact, if you're a new subscriber and you invest in the fund for the first time by February 28th, your money will go into all of the investments that we made in Q1 of 2022. And there are five great companies so far, just as amazing as group us. So go to righthome fund.com if interested in joining the party. And any startups, if you'd like to come on the show, show like Rupert just did and grab the podcast microphone to launch yourself to the world in your own words. I'd love to see what you're up to. Hit me up at Brian at ridehomefund.com. And if you just

know of a cool startup that we should invest in, if you make an intro for me, I'll share Kerry with you and you don't even have to invest a dime. Again, Brian at ridehomefund.com. Talk to you on Monday.