OtterTank | JobStash | January 2024 Edition

[Music] hello yes much better so um let's talk about Job sash so what is it it's a product that's live it's been live for about uh almost a year now um and we're a Crypton native job board so we curate organizations for which we then ingest uh job listings and publish these for free and we're public goods under this aspect um so the way our process works is that we currently ingest a bunch of data from Electric Capital inest all of these organizations detect their career page or their API for which they have jobs process is that with gbt and then U structure that data and add some specific metrics that make the job listings more appealing then we publish these to telegram or to foraster and distribute these uh across all of our audiences and funnel uh websites from all of our channels to our websites to which then they can smash that yellow button or that yellow arrow and apply to a job directly and we don't gatekeep we don't do anything uh evil um and our key differentiators are that we don't charge for anybody listing jobs on our platform and we don't charge for organization hiring and our ambition is to cover the entire ecosystem so we currently R up to 800 orgs I think by next week we're going to be at 36,000 orgs so we have you know bunch of Subs we send out you know about 60 job applicants or job applications per day uh that's 1.7 th000 a month uh stuff's going pretty Rosy uh we're actually starting to make a difference we have first conferred tires and life is good um but yeah uh hiring crypto is very different than one would expect so it's not just like you're build a job site and you'll have an impact but how do we actually turn this into a service that matters um so the main problem in recruitment is that recruiters get overwhelmed by uh low signal to noise applicants and for a flood of you know hundreds and hundreds of applications there's maybe a few that actually stand out and they are usable so first of all quality um next up is that most hires that actually get made because it's such a trusted ecosystem are made through personal referrals so I know Bob and Bob is good and I know that Al is looking to hire so I'll put the two in touch and I'm not a recruiter I'm just a dude so um job platforms might signal something that there's an opening But ultimately all of these people just don't get rewarded and so classical recruiters have a really tough struggle because maybe they even might place somebody but everybody knows everybody already in the space it's really hard to have an exclusive introduction and that's just how it is um next up um say I would have a refer uh who might be interested in collaborating with different protocols like he wants money why should we do something for free because you know this is a casino and we're here to get rewards um and uh they just won't engage because why should they fundamentally and the next problem is like how do I determine who actually supplied the candidates uh it's really hard uh some don't use an ATS and then it's just emails and then it's your word against somebody else's it's a m so we want to fix this right so the solution that we propos for this is to have incentivized ref fars U that's will suggest talent to protocols um so the way this works is that um we want to bring Talent uh that is trusted and qualified through algorithms that are then referred by trusted and rated refers that uh provide this referral to a company um so we want to incentivize them and give them a referral fee for not only maybe uh getting the candidate the job but also for introducing a candidate uh and we want to do this in awareness of the fact that not everybody's willing to pay these bounties so this has to work across the entire ecosystem or the whole thing is M and we just end up with another solution that covers maybe 20 30 companies but then like we have three and a half thousand organizations in the space and we need to cover them um the next problem is that um or the next solution is we want to solve this through at the stations on chain um so we have a bunch of data about everybody in GitHub um and we know that uh somebody works somewhere because we see it under public data but we also want to allow people to say hey uh you're my colleague I'm going to attest that you work at Job stash or hey can you attest that Bob works there because you two are colleagues so you can ask this question you have companies attest this you can have companies revoke it um there's a bunch of different expectations the positive and a negative sense and all this is fundamentally Unchained uh open to everybody to expects and we're just going to provide an API and an SDK and tooling around this um and the thir third solution is to create a Marketplace for this so um the idea is that you'd have organizations that are willing to pay um into a pot which then gets shared across um um refers right so uh it works kind of like bribes or like gges uh and the idea is the higher you uh put into the spots the more incentivized the refer is to come and provide referrals to your organization because at parity of you know different organizations uh going on um it's going to be um yeah an economical race um and this is how it works nice [Applause] schema I'll start um very interesting thank you for the presentation um yeah we are we are actually hiring someone right now for our team so it's actually uh seems like you have seen the problem and also the solution which is the referral for us normally so when we have a job online I think we have like a th people applying and then in the end we have like it goes to every filter we have a few people left and it's also hard to make make the right decision so I think the problem is like uh is out there it's also like described in a well way the only thing that I'm not really seeing here is that if I have a refer he's going to refer to me and he's not going to use the platform so that was the thing I was just thinking about like why would he then go to the platform also be incentivized maybe then he will be a bad actor in this case or there will be bad actors just to refer people to my company because they want to have some tokens from your platform and I think a good referer do does it for free because he also expects me to refer to him U but maybe it can all be in a protocol but a referer in this case in the presentation sounded to me like more like a head hunter uh that wants to get paid a high fee when he gets the right people in his like pool to be referred to the right team um so I'm not really so the question for from for me would be um what what is different what are the difference between the a Head Hunter and refer in this case that's a great question so um yeah a head hunter is somebody who ultimately wants to get a bounty for the placements and not every company actually pays these out uh some of them do and it's you know somewhere between one eth and a few thousand dollars but not everybody does um and a refer a recruiter a classical record is not going to move for like hundreds of dollars he's not going to do anything he's not going to introduce any talents um and some companies might be able to pay out the boundary for placement successful placement other might just be able to or want to have like high quality available candidates which everybody has a own social graph and knows that you know person a who is the perfect match for that is available so the role of the refer here is actually that to be the amplifier of the hiring message of the organization and our platform ultimately just becomes like the launching pad for like this message will get distributed to people interest to earning uh some small fee for actually referring somebody um okay uh cool my question is around um that incentive alignment I think it's always difficult when people were doing things generally for free and then we add incentives to it it sort of distorts the behavior um so whether the first question would be like what are your thoughts on that and how do you sort of overcome this Distortion that that may happen uh and then the other question I had was around the attestation I think it's a good use case but um it sounds like a very like easily abused thing right I could attest whatever like and like if I don't like someone I can just attest that that really bad or something or if I I can just attest to like yeah so yeah those two things that's uh okay so let's starts with um um so the first issue sorry the question again in incentives right so um the incentives misaligning like we we try to solve this because we want to create a system where um every there's a shared pool right in which uh every every particle that decides to boost their own hiring message also ends up putting a percentage of their boost into a shared pool which then gets accessed by everybody who is refer in the system right so everybody will earn something but just less compared to uh people who are boosted and then the incentive is for good actors to come and submit good candidates which we weed out uh they go through our platform right we have data about everybody because we literally adjusted all crypto GitHub um so we know who's what and other people are attesting that they have worked with other people so we know that they're legit and if an attester sorry if a refer refers bad talents he will have negative referral at the stations that these were not good matches and so he's ultimately going to get voted down and going to be like kicked out and like slash or whatever from the system and then when it comes to uh the quality issue as I said we have all this data so we curate and we're able to algorithmically determine like the quality of the death so we know like the entire public commit history of a developer on in the space and so we know that somebody has legitimately worked your organization we're not going to go into the game of like are you good or not because this is none of our business and no recruiter will ever talk this about this because of ndas and privacy but we know that somebody will have worked somewhere uh so that's the only thing that we're attesting is like yes you worked no you didn't and then we can attest it the organization can attest it and other colleagues can attest for it or roke this as well um yeah so you mentioned uh using GitHub data yes automated methods of uh going through GitHub data to evaluate developers or developing developer activity can be gained right you can just you know you could you could set set up your thing you could just do a whole bunch of commits that's just changing one to a zero one to a zero and Back Again a thousand times and now you're the most active so like it's how do you it seems like you'd still require someone to actually look at that to to like avoid that from happening like there's no automated way to prevent that from occurring great question so this is a very comti where scammers in the space who are like trying to like be imposters and pose as like a legit developer we'll have like GitHub repos that are exactly as we describ um the difference is that we look at um organizations that are listed by Electric Capital uh so we downloaded all of the data set it's um 12 Mill 112 million commits 1 million users 4,900 ORS and 143,000 Ros right so we have all this in our local database it's accessed immediately on the spot we don't need to go to G Gib anymore it's inred pipeline so because of this we check for every developer have you committed and have you merged in a repo that is tracked electr capital and then we attribute this developer to have worked for this organization if there is public activity yeah it's not it's not it's not their own private repos it's publicly known repos for publicly known organizations that are reputable in this space so you're as a centralized company you're basically vetting you know that part of the system I mean there can still be game but that's a huge improvement over uh over that now that that comes back to my main criticism for all of this because I actually think this looks like a great company I actually think this makes perfect sense as a company and I think that could even do really well as a company what I don't understand is why do you need a blockchain for this because this is a crypto Shark Tank and and and I will say before you bring up um onchain at a station um OT tank um is that I'm a river otter by the way Amazonian riveron just to be clear ruthless creatures um so the the thing about archain ad stations is that in itself is this giant nut to crack and I'm not necessarily convinced you can build a company around that and that you and and and if you were to even attempt to do that you should do that in a space specialized way like we're trying to create standards between companies so that they can individually put their attestations on chain themselves I don't see there being some sort of third party in between there right um and and I think that's so if if I remove the attestation part I don't see why this is a blockchain project just make it a company it seems like you're already dependent upon uh centralized processes like this aspect of curation you might as well go that route I don't understand why there's a second factor that is why attestations are interesting for us and this has a lot to do with what is going on in the public goods space nowadays and uh nudge nudge retr pgf or optimism so uh what's going on there is that um the next season or the intents of R pgf is going forward is to generate non defi transactions on the super chain um and attestations are perfect methods to generates transaction volumes that have a legit use case and given the fact that there's you know according to elect capital 23,000 devs in the space uh and you know 3 something K companies we should be able to generate sufficient volume of transactions in order to like go and actually um qualify for the next round let's just put it that way it seems to be a bit of a backwards approach you're saying yeah optimism needs this traffic instead of saying companies need this solution right so it's a two-prong thing so back to your original question uh the reason why attestations are interesting is because we want to release the St ation system as a public good so that other job sites uh and companies that don't have an ATS can integrate an SDK that will build and provide and then everybody can adopt I agree with you there 100% but that goes back to my main point why are you a blockchain company then why why aren't you just a normal company because you because then if you just release this software for people to publicly use the ad stations which I think is the right way to do it so well done on that why why even connect yourself to a token or a blockchain or any of these things when you can all just do it in a trusted way like these kind of companies exist and you're doing this within a particular Niche and I think that's a great idea um that's that's a great critique uh I would argue that you know does everything need to be on blockchain not strictly um I still think that in this specific case because of the nature of attestations that I can revoke it actually gives the data or it gives the control to the candidate himself and you can then say no I actually disagree that refer or that recruiter represented me terribly I no longer agree to his terms and I'm revoking it instead of it being in control of an ATS or a third party suddenly in his control I mean you are still in control of that platform I mean you host the attestations are on chain so he can then say I disavow this recruiter or this refer and then we give him control and this is like in a trusted or in a closed or centralized trusted system then we are the trusted party actually I agree with you entirely there but again it doesn't make sense for you as a company that's that's not a profitable Enterprise right uh right oh well in in that sense we would just take a commission out of the the the boosts right so uh organizations come pay into these boosted pools and again you can do that as a caliz company but I think that's my cue thank you I'm Stop the Loop I'm G to open the floor to other questions I just got to say uh overall on the premise I love the idea and it's actually something I've pitched to a friend of mine in recruitment I'm like you know how do you prove that people are who they claim to be when they come through your funnel um and blockchain is a great way to do that uh especially onen activity things you can pull around and things people can get rewarded however like there's definitely some clear problems to solve with uh gamifying the whole incentives pool um uh generally referrals have Al always been um been out of social credit benefits or been out of like getting shares in a company as if you're an employee in like a big company like Google um so how do you I mean we've already touched on the incentives alignment um but how do you get out of this 23k developers pool that we're talking about in crypto there's a big world of developers out there there's excellent developers outside of crypto that might be qualified to take the job so how do you get out of this uh small pool of uh devs and um um and have you considered like getting some kind of system for onchain attestations that is not gamified but like provided by the companies themselves almost every single company gives uh some kind of credit to their employees like Google gives Badges and stuff like that and over gives badges to people all the time um but yeah have you considered any of those ideas right um yeah so about about the badges or Okay so let's let's start with the first question which is like how do I break out of the 23k barrier um and let's assume for a second that we stay in crypto right um so we have data about the developers that are present in the Electric Capital data system and we're using those as a seed that we have provable data on that they've worked for organizations right so they are the initial set of users which were allow able to onboard with provable data or we can also on board people who have something like a company Eno right so at autot Tech right um and then we're able to say yeah you seem to have a company know so probably you work there um and then these people would start going and attesting other peers that are not discoverable say a cicb Dev he doesn't have public recos because all of the stuff is private somebody can attest him say the designer say the PM say the scrum Master whatever all these people can be attested by the seed circle of people who is sufficiently wide enough and distributed enough across all the organizations to actually go and cover them in like a few hops um then expanding out of crypto is actually really hard because there's no public data about any project that I have ever worked on in my entire career uh and everything is nads and I challenge you to go to any consultancy and ask hey what projects are going on they're just going to throw the door in your face um and it's really tough because nobody's allowed to talk about what they're doing so there's no provable date about anything in the web too so I can I like I can't trust LinkedIn um and and that's a fundamental issue that it's really tough to break out and then there it gets really hard and then I have to start trusting everybody and assuming that there malicious actors even more and like cracking down but here at least we have these 23,000 users who should be able to like say no no that's not true somebody's cheating uh like like we can do like you know um bantine fall tolerance and be like no we need like a sufficient consensus around V uh so that's something we could Implement I want to how are you going to make the first 100 million um uh that money bag um I don't know well yeah so that's I don't know it doesn't yet have a denomination attached to it um um similar along those lines um who are you selling this to like is it is HR using this are you teaching Human Resources how to use this is it devs like who's going to who's the decision maker on using your product yeah so these are HR Ops talents uh sourcers at prodal right so it's um somewhat not really technical inail for which we're building a fancy front ends uh which will make it really easy they can sign up with their company email and not require wallets um this kind of stuff maybe maybe they will need a wallet because they need to sign up chain sign stuff on but we're going to make it easy on them so that there's an icei and they're not going to have to like go through e SC do crazy stuff there um but fundamentally yes the centel is HR and talent Ops yeah um yeah thank you very uh thank so much for for your pach it's just curious to know I like to my knowledge as I know there are lots of uh uh quite close quite the same companies with quite the same business models uh when they're paying uh for referrals when they have like this onchain reputation for example there is like intropia or guys job protocol guys Talent protocol and some of them are already dead unfortunately so it's just curious for me to know uh like why why will you succeed why will HRS uh will will will use you yeah thanks great question so the difference between the entropia and the higher chains and particles and us is that um entropia had at its peak I know 20 30 organizations uh h chain has 51 uh last day checks uh and this is because not everybody in the space is willing to pay bounties um and it's always the same players like and safe is one of these ORS and you know there's a few others but I could enumerate them because if you go across like who's paying for futured stuff it's always them uh the difference is that what we want to do is we want to not only allow them to boost their own pools we want that boost to go into a shared pool so that other people or other organizations who are not participating in this boosting economy are also uh able to to uh reward referers for free and then they get a touch or a taste of the service and like oh this is actually good stuff we might put some money into this as well uh that's one aspect and then you know we if we want to se it we might just take some of the money that we'll have hopefully left over from R BF and put it to that so that it gets used for the EOS system all right one last question good one last question thanks um I I think it's a great project I was just wondering uh business wise you said you will not take any money from the companies and from the um the people applying Etc you're making a really I'd say complicated um or yeah very sophisticated um Network and and and and business case here did you ever think about just being like the number one crypto job platform that just just does it like everyone else and you know if that would be like the first version of iteration and just see if people will pay for it because you might grow much faster and go much bigger doing that or do you think there's just way more competition or there's there's a lot of competition out there that's really good at uh taking money from a few parties right um and you know I started this whole thing out out of spite against recruiters um and I don't want to turn into that right so this is kind of like where it starts and then it's like how do we put a Twist on this without introducing like all these placement bounties and all this stuff that I think doesn't really bring much benefit um what I do see though is that there's people like you and me who know people in our network uh who want to kind of be rewarded and or want to help and I think it's to reward them right so that's kind of like the differentiator uh other than that you know our numbers have just been going like up only recently right so it's it's it's been it's been a whole path from zero to where we are now like we got ignored and now we're starting to like have impact across the board um so you know this is these are our growth stats it just keeps going up uh you know referrals and and Views like also keep going up which is great um so give us time will become the number one I'm pretty sure of this uh because we do what we're doing like better than any other competitor and we're way more sophisticated technically what we're missing right now is BD and marketing because we're just a bunch of nerds um help so you know uh we build stuff very well we're not really able to externalize this uh so we do need some help with that um yeah and U yeah does that answer your question all right uh thank you otter make your best not best please cast your vot well I go first I give it a four from investment perspective I see the need for developers to maybe have this platform but I as an investor am not going to use the platform so for that reason I'm out would say I would say um yeah so the scalability of these platforms is quite hard to get a lot of people on the platform you are growing the numbers are still low uh the total drel Market we have just heard in the in the in the a is hard to get so I think maybe you you reach maybe 50% of the crypto total dress bow Market but not all the people um that are actually out there and also to reach them I haven't heard any solutions for that so I would give it a four for now um so I think the last project I think had a good blockchain use case but was not a good business and I think this project actually is a good business I can see the business case at least um however I don't see it as being a good blockchain use case so uh this doesn't happen often but I'm also out of four so um yeah good stuff thank you uh so I gave it a a six um and just some comments right here I think it's good traction um but but it's really only like at good traction for for this stage um but it's only really one side and this unpaid right um so it's a bit hard to sort of you know use that as sort of the trump card um I think the general design is at this stage like overly complicated um so my general advice would be to like focus on solving just one problem for the other side of the market which is you know the companies right rather than the applicants and try and validate it with without some sophisticated onchain mechanism but you could do you know incentivized referrals by just paying people cash um or testing in your own database right um like you don't need to go down that really complicated path um and yes my my general advice would be to to simplify in a lot it seems really ambitious and I think that's great to build out like later on but it's like you really got to find that that type product Market fit right now [Music] much