Sander's Newsletter, Issue 1

Recruiting and dog grooming and truth seeking

Hi there, and welcome to my newsletter — about all things future of work, company-building, and operating.

I’ve been building companies for 15 years, starting with Thumbtack (local services) and now with Scaled (startup recruiting) and GroomBuggy (dog grooming). I’m motivated to get jobs for people as tech accelerates and build new things from 0 to 1. This newsletter chronicles my birds-eye view on the workforce and my journey in creating jobs for the future.

If you’re receiving this — thank you! You’re a friend and I’ve subscribed you. I’m going to target publishing monthly. You’re on the ground floor, hang on to this email — a future collector’s item.

🎨 Projects

As my time at Thumbtack wrapped up, I took three months to reflect. “If Thumbtack was my first decade, what do I want my next decade to be?” After picking up a copy of Designing Your Life — recommended for anyone entering a life transition — I identified what brought me energy. Turns out that was building things from 0 to 1, navigating to product-market fit for 12-24 months, then handing off what’s working to someone else whose strength is scaling it from there.

So that’s what I’ve started doing.

⛰ Scaled

My first project is Scaled. Our vision at Scaled is to become the operating system for startup recruiting. After a winding journey, the first product that’s found product-market fit is G&A leadership recruiting for startups. We help startups hire senior People, Finance, and Legal leaders. Keep us in mind if you or a friend are hiring for these types of roles.

Helping hire hundreds of people at Thumbtack was the most important thing I did there. The recruiting industry often felt old-school and low quality. I saw an opportunity to help other founders hire good people. Thus Scaled was born.

The second product we expect to launch is recruiting-as-a-service, or embedded recruiting. For a fixed monthly fee you can contract one or more of our recruiters to be an extension of your internal team. Respond to this newsletter if you want to join the waitlist.

Demand for every type of skilled professional is at an all-time high. That is doubly true for recruiters. Recruiter salaries are at all time highs and rates for executive and other recruiting services are mooning (I saw a recent quote of $300k flat fee for an executive search). It has never been harder to hire good recruiters.

Recruiters historically have been under-appreciated but they are the lubricant of our economy, ensuring the right people are placed into the right positions. Without them the gears keeping our workforce vibrant grind to a halt. At Scaled we’re doing our part to get the right people into the right roles so innovators can build the future.

Our dreams for the future include a full suite of offerings to support founders and startups on their journeys:

• Leadership hiring, starting with People, Finance, and Legal leaders.

• Recruiting as a service, to help startups scale their recruiting faster.

• Scaled School, to train raw talent into a career in recruiting and place them with startups.

• Scaled SaaS product, to accelerate hiring for startups.

• Scaled Ventures, a venture fund attached to Scaled that will offer startups recruiting services in addition to a venture investment.

We have multiple roles open on our team, from Recruiter and Sourcer to Marketing Manager and President / General Manager of the whole shebang. We’re also taking on new clients. Let me know anyone who might be interested in chatting.

🐶 GroomBuggy

Over the summer I started a mobile dog grooming company with my best friend from high school and Thumbtack colleague of 10 years Nathan Allen.

Wow, is this fun. 🕺

Our goal is to build a family business. One we can hire our kids into, friends who need a lift, sponsor the local soccer team.

We thought to ourselves: “We’re world experts in marketing for local services. We’re also good operators and managers. Why don’t we take what we learned at Thumbtack and start a local service businesses ourselves.”

After three months of talking to skilled tradespeople of all types, the first person we found who was hungry, determined, excited to grow, hard working, enthusiastic about using technology, gritty, long-term oriented, honest — was a mobile dog groomer.

So mobile dog grooming it was!

We knew little about the pet industry. I’m not a pet owner (luckily Nathan is). In fact I was sort of anti-pet before starting GroomBuggy. I thought “Who are these people who value ANIMALS more than CHILDREN???”

Well, I’ve come around.

Since we started the company I have become amazed at how big this industry is. People spend A LOT of money on pets. One successful startup executive I was chatting with told me, “I love my dog so much that I would spend in the seven figures on her if she were dying and it could extend her life for six months.” In my experience, half of you reading this are shaking your heads in disbelief that some people think like this. And the other half are shaking your heads in disbelief at my ignorance.

Demand for the service is overwhelming. The keys to the business are a) figuring out how to acquire and outfit new vans — they are very difficult to find anywhere in the U.S., b) recruiting and hiring excellent groomers — turns out our belief that treating groomers with respect and paying fairly puts us ahead of many competitors, and c) running good operations.

Last week I suggested to my wife that perhaps we should get a dog. Given my prior views on pet ownership, she told me this is one of the most surprising things she’d ever heard me say in our 15 years of marriage.

Change is possible.

📌 Thumbtack

Thumbtack continues to be a job creation machine putting billions of dollars into the pockets of small businesses. The latest product we launched is Front Desk, a first-of-its-kind concierge service to help small businesses grow more profitably. Local service professionals are on the road all day doing their job. They can’t always answer the phone when a customer calls, and when they get home late at night they’re tired and would rather not respond to customer messages. So, we can now do all of that for them.

Pros love this and it’s increasing their earnings and customer satisfaction ratings.

Onwards. 🚀

😇 Angel investment of the month

I’m focused as an angel investor heavily on future of work, education, training and recruiting.

At GroomBuggy we have hopes and dreams of building GroomBuggy University — an onramp for folks to go from $30-40k earning potential to $100k+ earning potential by becoming trained mobile dog groomers. At Scaled we have hopes and dream of building Scaled School — similar but for the recruiting industry.

In the U.S. there isn’t nearly enough awareness of — or respect for — how great of a career one can have as a skilled tradesperson. We need more good training programs out there for non-college educated folks to become skilled plumbers, carpenters, electricians, HVAC technicians and beyond.

I was chatting about this with a friend, and he said “You need to meet Ruchir.”

When I first heard what Ruchir and team were building at Skillcat — HVAC training and employment programs — I thought, “Great, we need more of that. But is that a venture business?”

Then I got on the phone with Ruchir and thought, “Holy cow.”

Ruchir started his career building virtual simulations to train oil workers. He has applied his experience to training people to become HVAC technicians. His goal is “to place 1 million workers into skilled trade jobs in the next few years” with HVAC as the beachhead industry.

How is he doing this? Through virtual training.

Virtual training? I was skeptical. 🤔

Then Ruchir told me that some members of his team are in the U.S. but most are in India. The team in India is full-time, professional electrical and mechanical engineers.

Ruchir and his team at Skillcat are building courses powered by 3D virtual simulations that walk a student through the foundational electrical and mechanical engineering knowledge one needs to be an HVAC technician. They’ve also built courses custom-designed for students to learn about all of the main HVAC equipment sold by suppliers and used by contractors in the U.S., the pros and cons of different HVAC equipment in the market, and the most common applications of various types of equipment. The multi-week course is administered virtually, relies heavily on augmented reality-like 3D renderings and virtual objects, and culminates in an industry-accepted certification and placement for work apprenticeship with a major local HVAC contractor.

😶

I thought the use of augmented or virtual reality for real applications was still a pipe dream.

Not so for Skillcat. They are getting 15,000 workers per month through the platform, the programming gets high ratings from students, they’re spreading primarily through word-of-mouth among their target communities, and their hiring partners are Sears and all the largest HVAC companies.

Incredible.

Rooting for you, Ruchir and team. 🔧

🎒 Grab bag

Some things that have recently caught my eye:

• 📰 Article #1. Erik Torenberg is one of my favorites in the startup ecosystem. He and his co-founder David are building On Deck which will accelerate startup creation at similar or greater scale as Y Combinator did. In his latest two articles he argues that achieving, being ambitious, striving for excellence and holding others to high standards — that’s not just ok, it should be encouraged. These things have fallen into disfavor a bit over the last decade or two. Let’s make it ok again for people to be ambitious.

• 📰 Article #2. I’m just as annoyed with big tech companies as you. But despite their many shortcomings they still produce enormous good in the world. One example I have watched is Google’s educational programs they have built to train the workforce and award credentials and certifications. They just doubled down and invested $100 million into this. I am all for anything that steers people towards trade schools and away from four-year degrees.

• 📚 Book #1. 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows is a memoir by someone who I bet if born in the United States and were in my circle of friends I would find annoying. He is an artist who chafes at authority, deliberately doing what he can at any opportunity to poke the man in the eye. Generally not my type. Well, he wasn’t born in the United States and he’s not in my circle of friends. He was born in China thirty years before me. And he is a total hero. His father was a famous poet in 1950s China, expelled from the Community Party and imprisoned near Siberia during the Cultural Revolution with his son. Ai Weiwei, the memoir’s author, is the son who then became an internationally renowned modern artist. Ai Weiwei also became a freedom fighter against authoritarianism and also got imprisoned for it. It is always good to be reminded that becoming a hero is possible.

• 📚 Book #2. Last year I spent all my audio hours listening to podcasts. I decided this year to spend those hours instead listening to books. It’s been great. Have you read The Scout Mindset? It is about why some people see things clearly and others don’t. This book articulates the trait common among the most successful people I know — the ability to see their lives and situations realistically, update their thinking based on new information, and generally seek truth regardless of where that might take them. For example my friend and Thumbtack co-founder Jonathan Swanson is the greatest exemplar of the Scout Mindset I know. Lots of people think they see things clearly but don’t. Do you?

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Let me know what you thought of my first newsletter.

See you next month!

👋 Sander