Staffing Industry Spotlight: Amit Matani, CEO of Wellfound

Staffing Industry Spotlight is an interview series with staffing leaders who are shaping the staffing industry. The series is brought to you by Ascen, an all-in-one employer of record and back office platform for staffing agencies. In this installment, we spoke with Amit Matani, CEO of Wellfound, previously AngelList Talent. Amit discusses the evolution of AngelList into Wellfound, the intricacies of managing talent marketplaces, and the role AI plays in recruitment today. He also shares insights into the challenges of finding senior engineers in the current hiring landscape.

Francis:

Thank you, Amit, for being in the staffing industry spotlight. The first thing we'd like to know is who you are and what you do.

Amit:

Thanks for having me. I'm the CEO of Wellfound. We were formerly called the AngelList Talent. Spun out from AngelList about six years ago and rebranded ourselves to Wellfound about two years ago or so. I focus on building our product, building our team, bringing our product to market, and talking to recruiters and other people to figure out how we can better serve them.

Francis:

I'm familiar with Wellfound. You launched out from AngelList a while back—can you share how that transformation into a spinoff came about?

Amit:

Sure. I joined AngelList when it was about 10 people way back in 2013 or something, so it's been a long time, but we had been building three products since the very beginning. One was kind of the social network for founders and investors and early-stage startup teams, and we built basically two apps on top of that. The initial app was essentially for founders and investors to meet each other and take that kind of idea offline. It was like a dating network for founders and investors, but the deal would get done offline. Uber actually did their earliest money in was done through AngelList that way. The team came on and talked about the product, and then an email was sent out to investors on the platform, and they did the deal offline. Pretty quickly after that though, we realized that hey, right after you raise money, what are you going to use that money more?

Well, you're going to use it to hire your team. And some of our founders were not getting invested in, so it's like, well, why don't we try to get some of these founders that didn't raise money to join the founders that did and kind of built the ecosystem? And so it's just grown since then. These two products ultimately grew from these small email lists to pretty massive businesses. On the venture side, we took the deals from offline to online. And on the talent side, we grew from an email list for founders to a platform, a job marketplace for recruiters and job seekers all across the world. We have recruiting teams on the platform that are bigger than some of the biggest startups we had overall, since the beginning, right? And so, as we grew, it became pretty obvious that the overlap was becoming less and less.

One side served investors, and the other served recruiting teams and job seekers. And there tended to be kind of a confusion, but also kind of brand confusion, right? On the one hand, people are investing maybe millions or tens of millions of dollars and giving it to us, and we're almost like a bank on the venture side. On the other side, we're a fun job marketplace. So it really didn't make sense to keep having this overlap where we didn't have a shared customer and had completely different brand identities, and so we decided to split up the businesses about six years ago with that in mind. But we started as AngelList Talent, AngelList Venture. And obviously, given the same name and everything else, we were trying to go for this Virgin America, Virgin Atlantic type of thing, but it didn't quite work. People are still confused, so we decided to kind of bite the bullet about two years ago and just completely rebrand it as Wellfound to create more separation between the two.

Francis:

Yeah. Was it spun out as a separate company?

Amit:

About six years ago, it became an entirely separate company. We had been sharing a bit of a code base for the last few years, but we cut that out. The way the structure works is there's an SPV of investors in the original AngelList, and employees from the original AngelList, they just own a chunk of the underlying company. We’ve been paying ourselves and making a profit over the last few years, and that was how we were funding operations. So, we haven't gone out and raised any money at all since we spun out.

Francis:

You've been around some pretty important startups. AngelList has been central to Silicon Valley and San Francisco for a long time, and you started there at the beginning, right?

Amit:

It was a couple of years. The story here was I started a couple of companies beforehand. The last company that I had before I joined AngelList, we basically just couldn't get it to work, and we were like, all right, let's go try something else. But Naval, the founder of AngelList, was one of our big investors. We actually raised money on AngelList. Naval convinced me to come work for AngelList for a bit with the original idea of, hey, I'll do it for a year or two, but I stayed a lot longer than that.

Francis:

Naval convincing you to do something must be pretty good, whatever he's trying to convince you to do.

Amit:

Well, it's funny. Obviously he's got quite the notoriety now. Back then, he was still very well respected but didn't have one of the same cachet that he obviously does now. But I think one of the things is there are leaders that are world-class at specific things, and I think Naval especially is world-class at convincing you about doing things. It is just like Steve Jobs's reality distortion field that you always hear. It's like when you talk to him, you're like, oh man, let's go. Let's go do some stuff.

Francis:

You're like, I'm ready to build something completely different.

Amit:

Yeah. To be clear, we said no the first time because he wanted us to move back from New York to San Francisco. We were like, nah, we're cool here. But then he was nice enough to say, "Hey, why don't you guys start in New York, and we'll see how it works?"

Francis:

Are you in New York now?

Amit:

Yeah, so I went to school at Berkeley, stayed in SF for about four years, and felt like, hey... This is 2012. I was like, oh, this feels a little too... The whole town feels start-uppy. It feels like a company town, which seems crazy now because 2012 was completely different than it is now, with pre-Facebook IPO and a lot more money going in. But I wanted to try out New York. I grew up in LA, and I was like, hey, let's try it out. Same kind of thing. I'll be there for a year, come back to SF, and obviously it's been a long time since then.

Francis:

It’s definitely a different life in New York. You're now CEO of Wellfound. I know from your past, I think you sold a company in mobile games. That is quite a different market, selling to consumers versus B2B in the recruitment space. How has that shift been from these two types of companies? Do you have to completely relearn everything about being a founder and a leader, or is there some crossover?

Amit:

I think there's a decent amount of crossover, so it's on two sides, right? So, on the first side, it's the ability to build stuff, right? I think for me, I've always wanted to build stuff. Funny enough, the first app I built in college that many people used was an applicant tracking system. This was in 2006. I was part of a club.

Francis:

Was that a Hot or Not?

Amit:

No, no, no. Hot or Not was a different thing, but I will talk about that. So this was 2006. I was part of a club that used to get a lot of resumes to join the club, and they used to print them out on paper. And I was like, this is inefficient. Ruby on Rails had just come out, and I was like, oh, let me build an app that allows people to submit their resumes so we could track the process. So I've been building recruiting software for a really, really long time. And then Hot or Not was interesting, too, because Hot or Not was essentially the precursor to most dating sites today. Obviously, there was the rating portion that it was popular for, but the biggest part of a dating site, it was kind of yes or no on each side, and both sides would have to say yes, and it became a double match.

The overlap between recruiting is significant. It's very much the same problem. A lot of times... Well, it's not the same problem, but it has... A lot of the problems rhyme. And there's a lot of times when we're talking about something that I'll be like, well, to simplify it, think about it in the dating terms because it's a lot easier for people to understand. For example, in job marketplaces, you don't know it until you see it happens all the time, happens in dating. You need to try before you buy. A lot of times, it happens in the job marketplace, and it happens in dating. The only difference is, in some ways, dating is more fun than interviewing, right?

Francis:

Definitely!

Amit:

It's always funny. We had a board member before. He was like, "You're like a dating app, but you only make money if people get married essentially. So it's an interesting approach, whereas, like dating, dates account for something too. So it's similar stuff. I think the coding part of it is similar. There are some inherent marketplace dynamics that are similar. But I think the things that were different obviously are working with buyers, working with sellers, what you call larger companies and their sales cycles, working with sales frankly, right? It's just a different process than selling a product to a user who then puts in their credit cards and buys it versus someone who's spending $100,000 or something else. It's a completely different ecosystem with completely different supports. You just have to learn kind of all of that, but it's similar stuff if you're kind of a founder, I guess.

Francis:

That makes sense. So Wellfound is more than just a job board. You're doing a lot of stuff. You've got this ATS piece. I'm very curious to hear about free ATS. I've seen some other folks do that. And I'm not sure how successful some other people have been in that market, but you all are doing it. Curious, how do you see Wellfound as a product?

Amit:

So, overall, based on what we built, we are a recruiting system in a box for early-stage companies. And so you can use as much or as little of our tools as you need. And a lot of people use all of them. Some people only use a few as they grow especially. But if you are a small team, early-stage founder, you want to start recruiting, do the whole thing on Notion, kind of pain in the ass, or you can come to our platform, and within 10 minutes, you can have a job posting set up for free that will give you a distribution to 10 million people that all want to work at startups and tend to be really high quality. If you ask anyone, it's like, oh, the pool is really high quality. That's what we get. Beyond those job postings, once those candidates respond, you'll get inbound applicant systems to sort and rank and everything else.

Beyond that, once you get those applicants, you can move them through the process, through our simple ATS. So, we want to make sure that you're not dropping balls. On top of that, if you're not getting enough inbound, you can also go source on our platform and look at that 10 million pool and sort it up and down. That’s kind of our core marketplace. On the other side, we have the candidates who are applying to jobs. We've had the ATS for seven years or so for free, and most of our tools have been for free. And we make a little bit of money off of, or we make money off of, increases in distribution or saving time. So we have a product on top of the core marketplace where we'll do the sourcing for you, and we can source on our platform and off platform.

We have a lot of companies doing it. We drive a lot of hires that way. It's like hiring a sourcer, but we can turn it off, scale it up, scale it down, and it works really well. But our vision, at least for the base system, is that we don't want you to drop balls. We want to create a great candidate experience. And if you're going to use a spreadsheet, a Notion Doc, or something else, we'd rather just give you a full-featured ATS for it. Now, does it do everything? Absolutely not. Is it anywhere close to Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever? No. No. We're not trying to be. Go graduate to that when you're ready. But if you're going to use this instead of...

If you're going to go use a spreadsheet, then we'd rather you use a system. And we had companies like Hugging Face and others that have used this over their many layers, and they graduated the Lever, they graduated to something else, but we want to create a great candidate experience early on. So that's kind of why we give it away. On the other hand, as companies get bigger, they'll start using some products less and some products more. So, for example, once you move on to Ashby or Lever, you might just use us as a job marketplace. And so we sync your ATS jobs to our platform and candidates can apply, and they'll go directly to your ATS. So it's very all in one, but it's also very modular, and you can kind of keep what you want, use what you want essentially.

Francis:

If they want to use everything, they can, but they don’t need to.

Amit:

Exactly. They can. And again, as your recruiting system gets more sophisticated and your company gets bigger, then yeah, of course. You're going to have different tools for different purposes. But look, if you just want to get this thing going, you don't want to make a fuss or anything else, just use one system. We can basically provide that to you right out of the box.

Francis:

I'm super curious about this sourcing piece. It seems like there are a couple of different models or layers, maybe an on-platform one and an off-platform one. Is all this automated, or is there a manual person behind it? There must be AI involved.

Amit:

There is. Yeah. So the story behind this is about we basically... One of our big products is a managed sourcing marketplace, so you can source candidates on our general talent pool, and candidates can say I'm actively looking, passively looking, not looking. They're actively or passively looking. You can source in that pool. But for the most in-demand candidates, we move them to a managed marketplace. And initially, we called that A-list. Now we call it curated. And the basic idea was that we made sure they were looking, we checked in with them, and we made sure their profiles were up to date just to make sure that when you search, you'd be able to find them, and they would be responsive, right? And companies who reach out on this platform can get anywhere between a 40 to 60% interest rate. That's not the response rate. That's the interest rate, right? So every two messages you send, you might get one or two calls from that.

Francis:

Wow.

Amit:

And companies really like this. But the problem was that, especially for our early-stage founders, they would come in, they'd be like, "Oh, I really, really need to recruit. I love this product. I'm signed up. I'm ready to pay you," and then they would not reach out to anybody. And they're like, "What happened? Is it not working or bad fits?" They're like, "Oh, I forgot. Let me just go back in and go reach out." And they do that. Next week, they don't reach out again. It's like, what happened? Same problem, right? I forgot. I don't have time. And so we had an operations person at the time that just talked to these founders like, "Hey, what if I just took over your account for you. Instead of you reaching out every week, let me just do it for you on your behalf." And they're like, "Okay. Yeah, let's do it."

And that actually drove a lot of traffic and traction. Basically, we were able to... That company, in particular, made a hire within four weeks after that, right? And they would've never made that hire had we not taken over their account. And for them, they told us what we wanted, we started reaching out, and they would just take calls. That's all they had to do. They didn't even have to log in if they didn't want to, but some did. And so we started scaling that up. It was just on platform, really no AI. But one of the things that we saw is a company would come on board and say, "Hey, really want us hire for a particular role." And because a job marketplace, we don't have everybody on our system. We just have the ones that are looking, have signed up, and everything else. So, we started sourcing off-site for some of these companies.

So going off platform to other tools to say, okay, let's fill this in. The problem with that is obviously, we didn't have the efficiencies we had with running the platform, owning the marketplace, and everything. And so about two years ago, we started figuring out how can we bring the efficiency we have on our local platform to the broader pool. And so we started building a product that merged our own data with data that we could find on the internet and create a big talent graph. From there, AI is used to generate features for each profile. So, for example, it's like, oh, this person worked at this company. Well, that's a startup because we have data pulled from Crunchbase to figure out it's a startup, inferring skills that they might have. And we built an auto sourcer on top of it. And so that really makes things much more efficient, but it's not just run automatically.

We have expert recruiters who basically run the systems. So the auto sourcer selects candidates, our experts, recruiters make sure this is a good fit, and then reach out to the candidate. When the candidate responds, they handle the back and forth and then send over the ones that continue to be a good fit to the company. The company says yes or no. They say yes, then we schedule a call, and the company takes over. So we're handling everything up to basically the call. So you tell us what you want, and we'll have calls scheduled on the next day, which is kind of the pitch to the companies.

Francis:

That is really, really cool. So how do you think that relates to... To me, that sounds very, very similar to RPO, which is a huge industry, but you don't market it like that at all. You're calling it sourcing.

Amit:

So I think RPO does a little bit more than we do. We see ourselves as a tool that RPO also can use. In fact, we have some big agencies that actually use the product as flexible, scalable, sourcing. So I think it basically frees you up to do other things. So, for example, taking that first call with a candidate, I think a great RPO firm can have that candidate, talk to that candidate, get them excited about the company, get them prepared to talk to the company, also suss out, is this going to be a really good fit? Or let's maybe pass you on to somebody else. Beyond that, setting up internal systems for the companies, at the end of the day, is also a human problem. We work with many companies and one of the biggest issues we have with them is they don't know what they want. And yes, we can help with that, right? We do because it's important to us, but we are not going to write their job descriptions, manage their process, set up their ATS, making them effective.

We're basically just handling that piece of, okay, you know what you want, and we'll generate the leads for you. And maybe we expand into that or partner with companies to do that, but for now, we've kept it purely on the sourcing side.

Francis:

All of our customers are staffing agencies], and we are somewhat convinced that, over the next 10 years, the industry will rapidly change a lot from AI. What staffing agencies do is going to change a lot. How do you see tools like yours and AI affecting the overall recruitment market?

Amit:

So it's interesting, right? I think when I talk to great recruiters, the thing they do really, really well is, number one, work with the company or the hiring managers to extract out what they're actually looking for and manage them through the process and stuff, which it can't be overstated how much work that is. And we've seen this. This is why I obviously go back to dating. It's like people come in and say, "I only want this. I only want this. I only want this." And they see a candidate and they're like, "I don't want... I actually want this." Right? It happens all the time, and it's a point of huge frustration for us and everybody else. Or you send a candidate over, it has every little thing, and they're like, "Well, actually, I missed that thing." Or you send a candidate over, and they're like, "Well, they weren't as excited to talk to me as another candidate was, so I'm going to pass on them." Right?

It's a hugely multidimensional problem with a lot of latent attributes where people just don't know what they want either at all, or they don't know until they see it. And I think a good recruiter works with a hiring manager to figure out, what do you actually want? Let's actually work through putting that out there in a good list, and let's set up an interview process that works with that, and so we can extract that information and then handle them through every little extra piece of information, right? And I think part of that can be done with AI. We've seen some interviewing, planning tools and everything else, but a lot of that is just being really seeped into the company and knowing exactly what they want. And I think, in a lot of ways, AI is going to allow recruiters to focus on that piece. The other piece is just selling the candidate, getting them excited, and getting them through the process.

I know right now, we're kind of in a company market versus a candidate market, so people are kind of less inclined to do this stuff, but I still think top talent requires pitching and selling and getting people interested, and also just making sure that this is a good fit for us. And I think recruiters can help with that. We are obviously seeing AI interview tools coming out, too, and it's very interesting to me. I don't know. I'm almost an elder millennial right now, and I look at these things, I'm like, I would never do that. But I've talked to some people who are younger Gen Z, and they're like, "Yeah, this sounds like less work, less intense than a regular interview." And you can imagine that an AI interviewer gets better over time, and it's probably better or as good as the median recruiter, it is definitely not going to be as good as the best, but it's probably better than the worst.

And if you're spending all day doing interviews, your last interview is probably not going to be good. They're all going to start blending together, whereas AI can at least maintain some level of objectivity throughout the process. So it's super interesting to me. I think the role will change. I think there's a lot of space for humans overall through the process still. And I think it's... I'm an engineer. I've spent a lot of time with GitHub, Copilot, and all the AI tools that help engineers do work. And there was a... I think it automates a lot of the stuff that I used to do. A lot of the skills I used to have probably can be automated away, but the leverage on everything else, knowing what to build, how to build it, knowing to ask the right questions and everything else, I have way more leverage on that now because I can just have the busy work done by AI, and I think we're going to be in a similar place with recruiters.

Francis:

I think you're right. Delivery is becoming increasingly automated, but you still have to sell. Like you said, you have to find out what the customer wants. And then the best firms... And then it's still actually pretty complicated to piece all these AI tools together.

Amit:

Right.

Francis:

So you still have to be pretty smart. The talent graph thing that you mentioned, what data to piece together, what AI tools to use, or where to insert a person into that to make sure it's good, that whole organizational.

Changing gears, are you still having the curated marketplace, or has that now ended because there's more of the sourcing?

Amit:

No, we still have the core... So the core recruiting system box with the jobs, ATS, and sourcing, do-it-yourself, still all there. But for the people that want to move faster, need to scale faster, and don't have time at all, you can do the autopilot product that not only gets our platform but off-platform as well too. So it's kind of choose your own adventure. But the way we think about this very much is trade time for money, right? If you have a lot of time and capacity and don't want to spend money, we have tools that are either free or very low-priced, and you can use them. If you have no time, you need to scale up and be flexible. We have tools that cost more money, and we can handle all this stuff forward for you.

Francis:

Yeah, that makes sense. So right now, you have a very good overview of the talent market. What are the roles right now? It’s a company-favored market right now, but where are the areas where startups are really having trouble? Who or what are the roles that are hardest to find?

Amit:

It's always kind of wherever the market is imbalanced. Right now, the imbalance is companies want on-site, senior employees, and these senior employees want to be all remote, right? So if you want to step a hedge, work on-site in New York or SF or any of these places, you're definitely going to be in good shape. We have most of the companies that are sourcing with us on these other products are like, "I have so many remote candidates. I don't want any of the. I want people to come in." That's the culture that I want to build. And so those are the ones that are, for us, the most in demand. So, there are very few senior software engineers that want to work on-site, yeah, and they actually want to do that five days a week or whatever. And so we're seeing a lot of demand for something like that. I think on the other side, we're seeing a lot of demand with global engineers at the lower level because I can get some arbitrage and stuff like that.

But for now, the most in-demand roles are the on-site roles with seniority because most senior people want to be remote.

Francis:

That's so interesting. It's away from a skills-based thing per se, and more about a willingness, more about who they are as a person, what they want.

Amit:

Well, it's, again, supply-demand, right? How many senior engineers are in the world? There's not that many. How many jobs are remote? If 95% want remote, well then you can only source from that 5% talent pool. And on top of that, you can only source from the people in your general geo area, right? So, it drastically limits the pool.

Francis:

And they don't say it on the resume.

Amit:

That's right. We see this all the time. We'll reach out to a candidate that lives in New York, and they're like, "Oh, it's on-site?" They say, "No, I want to work hybrid two days a week." And it's like, well, okay, but the company doesn't want to support that in their culture right now. So if you want to step ahead, that's kind of the spot to take, I think.

Francis:

Well, Amit, thank you so much for being on the series. All great stuff. You obviously have a great overview of the market.

Amit:

Thanks for having me!