👋 Howdy to the 112 new legends who joined this week! You are now part of a 30,793 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are of some of our recent editions.

😩 Your First Product Will Be A Dumpster Fire. Teething problems of world leading companies.
🍒 The Perfect Onboarding In 7 Simple Steps. How to set your new members up for success from day one.
❤️‍🩹 Dust Yourself Off & Try Again: 8 Famous Founder Failures. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

PARTNERS 💫

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Wow, what a crazy week. Today we are announcing a funding round at Athyna, and launching Athyna AI. It’s been one hell of a ride. The round is more or less closed, 90% of it anyway but we did open a portion up in case you wanna get in on it yourself. Not investing advice: but you should definitely do it. 

It was fun writing this release piece this week. And we have more epic releases to come. So let me know if you like this content. If you don’t we will go back to what we do best. Interviews, deep dives, etc etc..

But if you do like it, this behind-the-scenes stuff—building in public as the kids call it—I’ll keep doing it. It does feel somewhat cathartic to have others along for the ride. Anyway, enjoy!

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

We raised $2.5M to Build Athyna AI

As with most of the world, recruitment is changing. And it’s all because of AI. I am excited to introduce you to our contribution to innovation in the space—Athyna AI. Gone are the days of talent acquisition taking weeks or god-forbid months to find a less-than-ideal candidate. And long gone are the days in which you needed to hunt locally for talent.

The world is smaller than ever. Talent lives in every corner of the globe. And we are dedicated to making sure that talent ends up where it should be. Talent meet opportunity.

For talent around the world that means a better life. And a career that may not have been possible in the past. For companies it’s also very simple: Incredible talent, matched with AI-precision, at lightning speed.

What’s the opportunity

Jeff Bezos has a philosophy around strategy—that is to focus on the constants. Spend time thinking about the things that do not change.

For us it’s the same. We know that people want incredible talent, matched with precision to their requirements, and they want it fast, or better yet—at lightning speed. Wanting something is fine. But it’s not always been easy. Sparse talent pools, unintelligent recruitment practices and slow. Sometimes taking months to fill a role. AI will change that. We at Athyna plan to lead this change.

Minutes minutes into my first meeting with our new investor & advisor, Bryce—CEO is TaskUS (TASK)—looked at me and said; “I love it, this is the future of our industry, I’m in.”

What did I tell Bryce to elicit a ‘s**t-yes’ response from a guy who has grown his company to $1B in sales. I told him about the future.

The Future of Recruitment

Today, in most instances, a company lands a job; it’s managed by sales, and then handed off to a recruiter who works with a sourcer. A typical recruitment process looks like this.

Pre AI recruitment cycle

Day 1: Recruiter aligns with hiring manager.

Day 2 → 5: Sourcer begins building pipeline.

• A job is put out on the jobs board.

• Scouring through the internal talent pool begins.

• Then there is headhunting.

• And only after a few days do the applicants begin getting sifted through.

Day 6 → 10: Recruiter—finally—interviews shortlisted candidates.

• Data is added into CRM in haphazard way.

• No consistency around candidate grading is applied.

Day 12 → 15: After all that the client meets the talent, a week or two in.

Athyna AI recruitment cycle

Day 0: Company receives job description in preparation.

• AI-smart matching begins immediately. Tens of thousands of candidates are vetted via machine learning and placed into a short list.

• Candidates are assessed on English proficiency and scored from 0/100 for matching fit.

• Shortlist of 25-30 is sent to the recruiter for approval. The recruiter sends invites for async AI-screening to the top 15-20.

Day 1: Recruiter aligns with the hiring manager.

• A job is put out on the jobs board. As candidates that are 80% match and above apply they are invited to an async AI-screening.

• Recruiter looks through short list, schedules calls where necessary for extra level of vetting. Still day one.

Day 2: Recruiter interviews top candidates

• AI transcribes the call and adjusts candidate scores based on interview quality.

• The recruiter endorses the top candidates. Still Day 2!

AI-powered talent acquisition will be orders or magnitude faster and more accurate than anything that has come before it. We plan to embed talent across the entire recruitment cycle. The future of hiring.

How we got here

Here is the quick dot point history of the highs and lows so far in our journey.

• ‘Founded’ August 2018, with first $1 coming in Jan 2019.

• Grew kinda fast for six-months before stagnating for six, co-founders left Dec 2019.

• COVID hits, we lose 70% of our revenue, we fire most everyone.

• Two months later we show signs of life, then inexplicably grow 22% MoM for 2 years.

• Shiny object syndrome sees us raise money to build EOR.

• Round launches the day Netflix makes 1st tech layoffs—market crash.

• Nearly raise $5M at $25M valuation but gets reneged due to conflict.

• Kill off all new products including EOR, close off VC round and raise a $500k bridge.

• Two years of growth and breaking enterprise.

• AI wave hits—a way to scale our business model appears.

That brings us to today. And the huge opportunity we have in front of us with the rise of remote work and global teams.

The remote hiring market today

In today's global job market, remote work isn't just an option—it's a defining trend that’s reshaping how, where, and when we work. Let’s dive into the numbers that highlight the transformation.

• Growth in Remote Work: Remote work has steadily increased globally since 2015, growing 1-3% annually. Post-COVID-19, 27% of workers were remote in 2022 (Statista).

• Strategic Benefits for Companies: In 2023, 41% of companies adopted remote work primarily to expand their talent pool, with an additional 28% citing it as a secondary reason (Statista).

• Remote Workplace Market Growth: The remote workplace services market is projected to grow at a 23.8% CAGR, reaching $58.5 billion by 2027 (Notta).

• Use of Outsourced Talent: 71% of hiring managers plan to maintain or increase their use of freelancers over the next six months (Upwork).

• Remote Job Listings: It’s estimated that by 2028, 73% of all departments will have remote workers (Upwork).

Anyway, I think you get the point. Global hiring is here to stay. And remote work is eating the world.

Behind-the-scenes of building Athyna AI

The idea for Athyna AI actually came in the first days of the company. The dream was always to be able to beat the market with speed. The reason for that is, there are two types of candidates—active and passive. Active candidates, are well, by definition, active in many other processes. And passive candidates are only passive until the moment they take your call. Then you are on the clock. Looking back into out Slack it seems the conversation around AI began to really heat up mid-2022.

The problem was, in mid-2022 we were in the middle of a raise to build EOR (think Deel, Remote, Oyster etc.), and although AI sounded great, it was a longer term proposition. We have since pivoted away from EOR and thanks to the fateful day of November 30, 2022, we are back in the business of AI.

The thesis once we were back in the business of AI was very simple. We thought we should attack depth of talent, quality of matching and last but not least speed. So that’s what we are doing

Depth of talent comes from two things: size of your vetted talent pools, and how we you can use those pools. Quality of matching comes through the depth of talent, and how well you can blend the recruiters eye with machine intelligence and speed comes from all of previous parts in combination. One builds on the other.

Once we had our needs analysis mapped we started building. All product and features pitches needed to map back to a user need from one of our three ICPs: talent, customers and internal. Having our first few releases planned out, next we moved to product positioning. What are we building, and why should people really care?

It’s all well and good to create an amazing product but if you can get—and hold—the attention of the end buyer then what is the point.

Fast forward a handful of months and boatload of hard work from our product team and we have the foundation to build the future of talent. Or rather, the future of how talent acquisition is done.

Now that some of our building-in-public is done, let’s take a look at what Athyna AI does today, what it will do tomorrow and where it is heading in the longer term.

Exploring Athyna AI

So what does Athyna AI do today? Well—firstly, it’s a tool for our team to outperform the competition. Because of the strength of our brand we have had hundreds of thousands of applicants for our roles, tens of thousands of which have been vetted. Now thanks to Sam Altman and his nifty LLMs we can source talents that the clicks of a button.

Think about how powerful it is to have a sourcing tool that will search thousands of profiles, rate and rank them and then push them across to your recruiter. Not only does remove-bias, it does it in the blink of an eye. Quality of match, tick. Lightning speed, tick.

On the talent side of the equation, we have built a best-in-class AI powered, job search tool, we’re calling Ava, to help candidates land their dream gig. Optimise your LinkedIn profile, generate tailored, job-specific resumes and run our AI Matching Index across jobs you think you’re a fit for.

Ava, will do two things at once: firstly, it will add massive value to job seekers all across the world, and secondly it will help us grow our talent tools and give us indicators of which talent is looking for which opportunity and when they are looking for it. Adding value while growing our talent pools. Double tick.

We have a load more features that are currently in-play or set to be launched in the next weeks but for now I want to tell you about how we plan be become the central point of focus for remote workers all across the world.

Amazon & 3rd party sellers + Athyna 3rd party hirers

Recently, I read the Amazon shareholder letters—those penned by Bezos anyway. The next stage of growth for Athyna, will be focussed on becoming the central hub for remote work and building global teams. And it couldn’t help but strike me how similar the decision making process has been to the Amazon decision to open up to 3rd party sellers.

The analogy here is Athyna opening up a global jobs board that offers not only Athyna jobs—but all remote jobs listed across the world. No one owns this space. For now anyway. Take a look at this passage from the 2018 letter.

“The success of this hybrid model accelerated the Amazon flywheel. Customer were initially drawn by our fast-growing selection of Amazon sold products at great prices…”

“The success of this hybrid model accelerated the Amazon Athyna flywheel. Customer Talents were initially drawn by our fast-growing selection of Amazon sold products at great prices Athyna listed jobs with great companies…”

I am avid reader. And lucky for me, success leaves clues. I knew we wanted to become the central hub for remote work, and was mulling this idea over again and again in my head. But it wasn’t until I read this passage that it really sunk in.

Roadmap

Much of what we are building will start as internal tooling to deliver the most incredible talent in as short of timeframe as possible. But the option to spin our the tools is very interesting to us. There are a handful of revenue opportunities but there is something that is even more interesting if we get other recruiters using our Athyna AI tools—data.

Vision for the future

Our vision for the short to medium term is to build the biggest business as possible in the business model we have today. As a talent marketplace. But as we grow and build out an incredible advantage around data many more opportunities open up to us.

Sponsored jobs, boosted profiles, enrich talent profiles, AI-sourcing, all while delivering the best of global talent to the biggest companies in the world. The future is exciting—and we are excited to play our part in building it.

Invest with us

And hey—good news is—if you believe in what we are building you can take part in our round. We have raised $2.5M in our Pre-Series A but we have a 10% allocation left for our community. To secure your investment you can head to our Wefunder page to invest.

And that’s it really. It’s an exciting time to be in business, an exciting time in tech and above all else an exciting time to part of Athyna. If you made it this far because you love building-in-public posts great, and if you made it this far because you want to invest, even better. Either way thanks for reading—LFG!

Extra reading

• Athyna 2023 Year In Review - December, 2023

• How Athyna Makes Remote, Work - January, 2024

And that’s it! Find out about Athyna and if don’t forget if you want to invest, now is your chance.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Sharing this because the final line is simply incredible copywriting. Morning Brew are doing everything well right now.

I have a wonderful failure resume myself. Important to remember that we all do.

And a quick reminder of just how hard things are some times.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

My dad told me when I was 18 that I should “invest in real estate because it grows 10% a year—always has.” I was confused. “It’s great Bill because inflation historically is 3%.” More confusion sets in—and then it hits me like a tonne of bricks.

“That system doesn’t work. At some point something break right?” 

One of the best reads I have had in a while was Why I Don’t Invest in Real Estate by Tomas Pueyo of Uncharted Territories. It’s a cautionary tale for all real estate bulls out there.

Also, I highly recommend this newsletter. It reminds me a lot of Not Boring but less technology related. Give it a read, I promise you won’t regret it.

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting PostHog - product analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, data warehouse and more.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you—hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
🏡 Looking for a personal board of directors: Check out Sidebar.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️