Episode 424 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Kelton (or KJ) Hardrict, CEO & Co-Founder of Talvy.
Is the resume officially dead? It’s been a moment that seemed inevitable. I mean, the first resume credit goes to Leonardo da Vinci and that was over 500 years ago.
I’ve been in recruiting for over 20 years and I can officially say that this is the first moment where disruption in the industry is truly happening. AI has killed the resume and when you think about it, for a lot of jobs these days that require some level of AI aptitude, what you did 10 years ago doesn’t really count as much anymore.
So, I’m saying it… the resume is dead and this is good news for a recently funded startup.
Meet Talvy – a video-first networking platform that lets professionals showcase who they are, not just what’s on their resume. It’s like TikTok-meets-LinkedIn which allows people to be seen and voice their skills and interests versus a traditional resume. The company recently announced a $2M seed round of funding led by Link Ventures.
Chapters:
00:00 KJ Hardrict Introduction
02:50 KJ’s Experience as a Creator & How He Creates Content
05:23 The Evolution of His Content Creation Process
07:20 Biggest Lessons Learned as a YouTube Creator
09:28 KJ’s background: His Childhood and Path to MIT
15:12 How Sports Influenced Him
15:47 KJ’s Experience at MIT
20:21 Navigating a Major Health Issue
27:07 His Role at Posh
30:14 From Startups to Venture Capital at Link Ventures
34:13 Details on Talvy, the Video First Networking Platform
34:54 The End of Resumes in the AI Era
35:59 How Does Talvy Work?
39:32 Business Model for Talvy
42:13 How Talvy Handles Biases and Restrictions
45:35 The Current “Video First” Culture
48:03 Talvy – $2M in Funding + Launch
49:47 How Being a VC Made KJ a Better Founder
52:50 Navigating Leadership and Team Dynamics
54:16 KJ’s 3 Essential Apps
55:22 Podcast / Book recommendations for Founders
56:32 Hobbies Outside of Work
Transcript
Keith Cline (00:01.261)
KJ, thanks so much for joining us.
KJ Hardrict (00:03.724)
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Keith Cline (00:06.541)
excited to talk to you because we’re going to talk about your company, Tavi, so I’ve been in the world of talent for a very long time since 1998. There’s been evolutions, there’s been things that have changed. There’s LinkedIn, there’s, you know, back in the day, I had Jeff Taylor on recently for, you know, starting Monster back when Internet 1.0 happened, then LinkedIn. And now we’re in this weird spot.
That I think there is an opportunity for a company to really become the juggernaut of what is next. So we’re gonna talk about that. I don’t wanna talk about it yet, although I’m really excited talk about it. You’ve been creating content for YouTube for a very long time. I think you said since 2017. So you’re like OG content creator. Now I’ve been creating content and what I do is so minimalistic compared to you.
Like I don’t have all this B-roll that you’re like, like the editing process of your videos. I look at that and I just, what goes through my mind is time. Cause it takes so much time to create a, I mean, you have long form content of, you know, 10, 20, 30 minutes long that it takes an intense amount of time. So anyways, I am using this as an opportunity to learn from you about content creation and how do you pull it off?
KJ Hardrict (01:10.22)
Yeah.
KJ Hardrict (01:30.095)
Yeah, I guess I’ll take it back to 2017, the mindset that I had there. I was working on my first summer internship, it was actually at a Northrop Grumman software engineering intern. And I ended up finishing that project in maybe like two weeks. It was supposed to be an eight to 10 week long project. I was like, hey, can you give me something else? And they said, hey, this is all we have, right? Like maybe we’ll have other things come up ad hoc.
And we’ll hand it over to you, but that’s about it. And I’ve always loved content in terms of looking at tech reviews. And so I love MKBHD, TechnoBuffalo, CNET, all those channels that I used to watch a lot back in the day. And I don’t know, something in me was like, I can do that. I just never had the facilities to do it the right way. I was always someone who, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it.
100 % and so when I had internship money, I got a nice camera. I got a nice mic I got my editing software and I said, okay, this is this is what I’m going to do and I’m going to give it my best shot and that’s that’s kind of that origin story of the YouTube channel and it just really progressed at first, of course you know, I sucked at editing and I can’t look back at my old videos without cringing Because I just felt really robotic
Keith Cline (02:54.477)
Back then they were probably very modern of that era. Like now it’s obviously night and day, but 2017, like what were you using for your editing? Like Adobe suite type of stuff?
KJ Hardrict (03:05.186)
Yeah, so I went straight to Final Cut Pro and in my head it was what MKBHD was using. So I see his videos and he has his recommended tech. That’s just what I was going to use at the time.
Keith Cline (03:17.239)
So what do you use now? You’re still creating a lot of content. And some of your videos, I you have the day in the life of a MIT student, aerospace engineer with 1.9 million views, right? So this is, you have a lot of viewership. You have 115,000 subscribers, right? So what is your process now for creating content?
KJ Hardrict (03:42.691)
Yeah, so that’s evolved, right? When I was at MIT, that was a grind. And I don’t think that was a sustainable grind. I would study throughout the day. I’d come back. I’d finish my work. My roommate would go to sleep, and I would just be editing. And sometimes I would be a five, six hour edit from 10 PM to 4 AM. And it’s just what was what it was. Because I also had a really high bar for what I was going to put out. And so I’d
Keith Cline (04:04.449)
Wow, yeah.
KJ Hardrict (04:11.638)
scrutinized every second of that intro to make sure that it was polished. As I went into the professional workforce, right, and with my own startups, with my own ventures, it was something where I needed to give my time and energy there. And so for the past two and a half years, I’ve actually outsourced the editing arm of my content to someone else and they use the Adobe Suite. I jumped in on some edits that are important to me, like my proposal video, I edited that video, but for the general content machine, I now allow someone else to edit, which was a big shift in my head to allow someone to do that, especially when it’s all centered around me.
Keith Cline (04:46.647)
Bye.
Keith Cline (04:59.063)
But freeing too, like you said, the grind of creating that video for seven minutes with all the different angles and B-roll is just so time consuming.
KJ Hardrict (05:08.088)
Yeah.
KJ Hardrict (05:11.862)
Yeah, it was a lot.
Keith Cline (05:14.093)
Totally. What’s been your biggest lesson learned? Because you publish this thing, you’re like, the world’s going to love this. And then no one watches it. And you’re like, So what would have been the things that you noticed resonate the most? Like the lessons learned of, know, maybe you don’t even think about it. It’s like, I do the best I can, right? What’s your thought there?
KJ Hardrict (05:38.188)
Yeah, I think with all of the content, it’s really just getting shots on goal that I’m proud of. And so as long as I’m proud of the edit when it comes out, I’ve started to drift away from figuring, like thinking about it in terms of views, in terms of like subscriber growth or attention, different things like that, because it’s just over time, you realize that it doesn’t really, it doesn’t correlate with the amount of work you put in and then the amount of viewership it’s going to come out. A lot of times it’s just what were people into that day, that week?
It might have randomly popped up. think one of my tech reviews popped off because Samsung just did an announcement and we talked about a very similar thing. And so I was being suggested after that video. I can’t really control scenarios like that. But what I can control is just putting my best foot forward in any given video. And so that’s the mindset shift. I did care a lot about the viewership and the retention graph and all the analytics in the beginning. But now I have bigger fish to fry and it’s just, hey, I do this because I love it.
Keith Cline (06:37.771)
Yeah, and I can relate even like some of the content on VentureFizz is be like a well thought out thematic piece. No one cares. You publish office pets, it goes crazy. it’s just like, know what? Provide the people what they want, but also just, I love your theme of create quality content that you’re proud of, cause that does matter. And that’s what I like about how searches change with, know, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, they reward
KJ Hardrict (06:50.185)
Yeah.
Keith Cline (07:07.681)
really good content versus the keyword search world of SEO that was how things were done or still is done. Anyways, it’s evolving there too. All right, enough about video creation that was something that I needed to learn a little bit more from you about. Let’s talk about your background story. So where’d you grow up? What were you like as a child?
KJ Hardrict (07:27.255)
Yeah, so I grew up in Southern California. Funny enough, I just told this origin story at an origin story founder dinner the other day. So I’ll give you a refined version of that. My mom was born in the Philippines and came over when she was 22. And so it one of those classic immigrant stories of $20 in her pocket. My dad was someone that grew up, he was born in the 50s in America as an African American. So he was directly
involved with a lot of the stuff that was going on during that time and say the century before that. And so in my head, lot of that, a lot of my drive, motivation, I was the oldest, I’m coming in looking at the world like they had no excuse. Like my dad never, like both of them didn’t know the American education system at all. Like he, my dad never went to college, my mom.
When studied in the Philippines, but then nobody respected any of those, anything when she came over here. So had to kind of start from the ground up. And when I look at their stories and the way that they were, was never, you know, food insecure. had a roof over my head. It just, it lights a fire under me that I can’t really describe, but it was, it made me go and try to tackle the hardest problems that I could possibly tackle because I felt like there’s just no excuse that I can bake into this. And so it kind of led into my mom took a bet on me, putting me in a school district that had the best high school in the state. And then so I had to test in from my elementary school. So it was just ingrained. I got to elementary school at third grade in the district. I had to kind of prove myself, go to the honors routes and then get the, do the standardized tests that can get me in.
And then I get to that school and then it became, okay, so what can I achieve now? And I was a big sports lover and I did a ton of sports, but because the school was very academics focused, like everyone around me is going to SAT Academy, like back to back with their music academy, back to back with their college prep class that’s like helping them on interviews and essays. But I’m just playing basketball. I’m just playing whatever sport I’m playing, volleyball, track and then coming back exhausted, doing my work and then repeating it. And so I never really had that other side of things. I couldn’t ever do things like robotics or math Olympiad or MUN or any of those things. And so I’m just kind of looking at the outside a little bit envious, but at the same time I was succeeding in what I was doing outside. And so like my family being really big sports family, they loved it.
They loved all of this that came along with being successful in sports. And it wasn’t until one day where I got into like a UCLA summer research program where I was thinking, man, maybe there’s something else that I could strive for. And UCLA really became my dream school. And then it was that summer when I was actually got on my radar, there was an MIT fly-in program. And so I just cold applied straight into the form fields because I never knew anything about proofreading essays or whatever. I’m just writing into the dialogue boxes my essay, my personal statement, and then sent it in. And then I got into that one. And when they flew me out later that year, this was beginning of my senior year, they were giving me presentations that were like, hey, you’re going to get a lot of offers, but this is why you should choose MIT. And I think in my head, it just rewired everything a little differently. Why are they selling me?
I was just going along for a ride. Like this is a really cool experience. But that really kickstarted a lot of my mindset shift. And funny enough later in that, like a month later, the college counselor at the school who I’d never really interacted with pulled me out of class one day and was just like, hey, I think you should reach for just bigger dreams and really go after these other schools that we think you genuinely have a chance for
Keith Cline (11:13.995)
Right.
KJ Hardrict (11:43.276)
really just not until senior year where I really thought about it. And so I just tightened up the standardized tests, did what I could and ended up getting into pretty much everywhere that I wanted to get into. But that kind of started this whole chip on shoulder mentality where it’s like, why didn’t I believe in myself? There are people around me that they were more accepting if I got like a sports scholarship somewhere than if I got into these schools that I got into academically. And so I just carried myself with a, okay, then I’ll prove to them that I belong. I got into a summer program before MIT. I studied aerospace because it was the hardest major that I could possibly take. And it was just something where if I can do rocket science, it was a term I heard all the time growing up. Like it’s not rocket science. And it’s like, okay, well, I’ll learn rocket science. then like they literally can’t say anything about it. But yeah things go on from there.
Keith Cline (12:43.598)
I mean, I love the origin story, Like immigrant, like just the whole foundation of how you became who you are. And I think that is so important. You you talked about the chip, right? Like that’s something that, you know, it’s some of the greatest, you know, professionals, athletes, they all have that chip that drives them every day, right? How do you think like you’re, you know, being an athlete, how did, you know, sports like shape you as a person too?
KJ Hardrict (13:14.381)
I think it’s part of the mindset that we’re even talking about with the content creation, that there’s only certain amount of things under your control, but you can control how you show up every day, like the preparation that you put in, how you treat the people around you. And so I think it’s those, it’s a lot of the people lessons that I feel like sports taught me more than even the games themselves, if that makes sense.
Keith Cline (13:40.931)
Yeah. OK, so talk about your journey at MIT, right? So you’re coming from the West Coast. You had all these opportunities. You choose aerospace, engineering at MIT, the hardest major possible. So what was your journey like there? And talk about your academic career and other things you worked on while at MIT.
KJ Hardrict (14:04.065)
Yeah, so I think I had briefly mentioned earlier, right, that I was never able to do things like robotics, like Model United Nations, like speech and debate, whatever. And so even when I had the chance to do athletics at MIT, I declined it much to the, you know, like my dad, you know, for as much as go, go, go for your dreams. He was disappointed. My high school coaches were disappointed because they couldn’t.
You know, say that, they helped me get to where it was. And so I had to, I just really focused academically. Fortunately at MIT, the aerospace class is fairly small and there’s like less than 50 of us total. And so it became a really tight knit community. I knew all the professors really well. We took a trip to the West coast where we visited like private tours of Amazon Prime Air, where they were building drones, SpaceX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, all the places where we were able to talk to different directors. And I got really exposed to that early on. I think there’s a couple of things that developed really early on where I know I talked about the chip that was on my shoulder and I was just proving people wrong that I’m better than people think I am and things like that. that was short lived after freshman year. I felt like I did really well in school. And I’m like, I can’t do this just to, you prove others wrong. It feels wrong in my head. And so then the shift started becoming what can I do to maximize my success so I can help the people around me, whether it’s my family, whether it’s people watching me from afar, right? I need to carry myself in a certain way that just like exudes positivity and optimism because I want other people around me to feel like that. And so
I guess my YouTube journey started between freshman and sophomore year of MIT. I was posting tech videos. It was a lot of time, but it was really rewarding and it grew really fast. And I was flying out doing red-eye flights for one day to go to Samsung’s launch at the Barclays Center or going to SF to look at a new Google Pixel or DJI launch. There was a bunch of cool things that were happening. But at some point I had eight to 10 phones at a time and all these smartwatches and I felt like…
KJ Hardrict (16:26.411)
I was too newsy. there wasn’t really, I’m such a person that cares about just being a genuine human. And so if I didn’t have a chance to use a phone long enough to give a review, I won’t give a review. And then I’m just like, okay, then what am I doing? And so I shifted my focus onto my life. And I think the shift in mindset happened at around the same time in terms of I just want to show my life genuinely, authentically, and then also, as I’m studying, I want to do this for the people that I care about and for my audience that’s watching from afar. I can’t give up because there’s now 100,000 people that are rooting on my success and that I can’t just give up now. And so that kind of carried me through MIT. Aerospace was an interesting one in my head because I know I took it because it was really difficult. But I wasn’t really a big plane guy, a space guy.
At MIT, there’s people that know every model of every plane when they’re getting into it. They know the specs of the rocket engine when it’s going up. it didn’t move me that much. So I went in the autonomous robots route because I really liked to code. So out of the tracks at MIT, those are what you can take. So either rocket-focused, plane-focused, or you can do autonomous systems. And I thought I was going to work on, say, autonomous cars. This was before Tesla was out and things like that.
Keith Cline (17:33.846)
Mm-hmm.
KJ Hardrict (17:52.454)
And that’s what I focused on academically. And so I fell in love with the coding, AI side of things when I initially came in thinking, hey, I don’t want to just code all day. I want to get my hands dirty. And that’s why I went the aerospace route in addition to all the other stuff. But there was a decent amount of mindset shifts is what I’m getting at.
Keith Cline (18:15.212)
Yeah, mean, you gotta do what you love to do and what you’re passionate about. So that totally makes sense. Now, because you have this YouTube channel, your life is public, right? So as I was going through your videos, there was a point in your life where you had a major, major health issue that you had to work through. So what were the details on that?
KJ Hardrict (18:38.551)
Yeah, so this was a year after our, I guess, like graduation. That was the COVID year, so we didn’t have a graduation 2020. That was my graduating year. And I immediately had gone down and signed with that first startup, Deuce Drone. That was back in January of 2020. And so by the time we got kicked off campus in March, I went straight down to Mobile, Alabama to work on those drones because they had looser regulations around what we could do over there. And so went straight down there. Stanford was already accepted and I was going to start there in the fall. But in the meantime, I was like, hey, like I love working on cool things. And so I’m going to go down and work on this. I did that later that into that summer. The next startup, Chip Brain, actually formed and I introduced those founders together because, you know, one of the founders on Duece Drones was like, hey, I’m trying to get into AI. I introduced them to Curtis at that time, he’s their CTO, great guy. I shared a lot of time with him at the frat at MIT. He was our graduate resident advisor, was on the original like Alexa, Okay Google teams and so on. Said, hey, like if there’s someone in AI, that’s him. And I introduced them, that got started. But for me, it was like, hey, I have YouTube. I’m about to start Stanford and I have this Deuce drone company going on, there’s no way I the bandwidth to do that. And so I started Stanford, did that for a quarter actually. And then at winter break, I was helping ChipBrain on their demo and it ended up going really well. And they raised their, I think it’s pre-seed seed, whatever it was, but it was over a million dollars. And…
I think I fell in love with that process of how fast we were iterating and coding and like the team to the point where their CEO, she had a call with me and said, how serious are you with continuing Stanford? And I said, how serious are you bringing me on the team? Right. And she’s just like, okay, but there’s a full-time offer if I’m waiting, if I’m willing to take it and I take it. I’m in still in Palo Alto. I break my lease at this point, my now fiance’s in on the East Coast also, it’s COVID. I’m like, hey, I’m just going to go to the East Coast. I’m miserable over here in California. I can’t even go to the basketball courts or to the gym or anything. I need to wear a mask when I’m running outside. There’s all these things that I just, I need to get away from and I need to be around my people. And so went back to the East Coast, ended up living with my now fiance. The moment that we get in, in Philly.
We were in the hotel waiting for me to get my keys to my new apartment. And that’s when my, like all the health issues came up all of sudden. And so like my, I think I gained 15 pounds that first night in like the hotel. And so I wake up and my feet are gigantic. My hands are big, my watch doesn’t fit. And so obviously we go to the, actually it wasn’t obvious because we were going to go to Ikea to look at furniture.
Keith Cline (21:38.158)
Mm.
KJ Hardrict (21:56.854)
And I thought I got stung by a bee or something because I never got sick ever. Yeah, I never got sick ever. And so it wasn’t until, you know, the medical people in our lives got a hold, I guess, like I told my mom, my mom sends out a text to someone else. They come back and they’re like, hey, you got to go to the emergency room right now. We go to it. Stuff got really real when they escalated me hospitals multiple times where I would go in and they said they can’t treat me.
Keith Cline (21:59.961)
Just swollen.
KJ Hardrict (22:25.835)
And so then they recommend another one, they can’t treat me, and then I had to go to the main UPenn, just medical school hospital. And yeah, that was a really scary time.
Keith Cline (22:39.183)
Yeah, mean, the videos, it was just crazy to watch. But obviously you battled through it and it looked like to get back on track of where you were before was just a lot of effort too in terms of the gym and working out. It just seemed like it was a whole process that just was like, Another thing that you…
not same as a chip, but something that you had to overcome to get back to the level playing field of where you wanted to be.
KJ Hardrict (23:15.019)
Yeah, so it was, yeah, I think when I look back, there’s silver linings that if I overcame that, right, I’m not, in a morbid way, I’m not afraid of failure, I’m not afraid of death, I’m not afraid of anything. I’m just going to put my best foot forward and do what I can and I control what I can control. Because it was, it was a very down time during that time because I was working on two startups at the same time, full time, had
full, but it was contractor salaries because I was just 1099. I was doing my YouTube channel, but part of getting sick and everything that I was on, I couldn’t function as high octane as I was used to. So mentally it was hard to work. And then I was logging hours, right? And so now I’m taking time off. I’m not on a W-2 medical plan. And so I’m just not logging any hours. And then now my face is blowing up, so then I’m losing
like self-esteem, putting myself on camera for the YouTube channel. So then it was one of those moments where I was like, shoot, this is everything that I had going for me is just back at ground zero. I had gotten my hundred thousand subscriber plaque in Philly. The like it came in the mail as I was in the hospital. And so that was like the the time frame of everything. And it was like literally cloud nine couldn’t be doing any better the week before.
And it was like playing pro runs at basketball in LA with like other like ex NBA players, college players. And then the next week, like I’m, I can’t like jump an inch off the ground if I wanted to. So yeah, like it’s a, it was a lot to handle at that time.
Keith Cline (25:00.463)
Yeah, going back to the Chipbrains company, so I was doing my research on, I know who’s Chipbrains, I was kind of looking around, I’m like, wait, John Fanning, who I don’t know, but I certainly recognize the name immediately, and I’m like, wait, John Fanning of Napster, who’s like, Sean Fanning’s uncle, right? So he was involved with the company too?
KJ Hardrict (25:22.41)
Yeah, yeah, so that.
Yeah, he’s actually the one that got me into this whole startup sphere. I had gotten into Stanford, I was ready to go to Stanford because of my aerospace videos, my day in the life videos, he had watched that and he was trying to start the drone company and said I was Deuce Drone. And he reached out and one of those January, February days, I forget when it was, he takes me over to Cafe Luna over here and basically lays out his plan for this company and said, I know you’re going to Stanford, I’m not trying to stop you but.
Keith Cline (25:31.224)
Really?
KJ Hardrict (25:55.256)
here’s an offer to work on this company with me. And that’s what really kicked things off in terms of my
my startup journey, I guess, like exposing that I can do something like this at a young age. But it does get really complicated after that. So I don’t know how much we’re going to get into.
Keith Cline (26:18.691)
We don’t need to get into that. I just was like connecting dots. I’m like a person and I’ll cut all this part out. I’m a person who just likes to connect dots. I’m just like, wait, John Fanning was involved in this? Yeah, so we’ll cut it at.
KJ Hardrict (26:31.917)
Yeah. And so he was a big part of the startup mindset for me, but then he was also a big part of some of the startup trauma that I was a part of. it’s like both sides. Yeah.
Keith Cline (26:41.839)
That’s funny. Okay, so after Chip Brain, you go to work at Posh, which is a company that I’m familiar with. So what was your role there?
KJ Hardrict (26:58.519)
Yeah, so like just for some extra context there, I was just a year or so out of being sick or at least getting diagnosed. So I’m still really big in flames, still taking meds every day. And for me, this was my stable company. like I know other people around say, okay, series A startup, all these things. But for me, I only worked at companies, less than 20 people where I had to, I was called at midnight if something was wrong.
And so for this one, I can just take a role with people that I like. Nick Leonard was one that I had a conversation with really early on. And he’s like, hey, like just give this a chance. For me, I was trying to not put myself in a mold. think that was what I was most scared of. I knew I could work as a back end software engineer for a Google or an Amazon, but I knew that that was a slippery slope for a career path that, you know, for other people, fantastic. And you can set yourself up for life. But for me, I didn’t want to lose the
the itch to build something myself. And so this one was a nice, like in-between opportunity where it was young enough where I get to put my stake in it. But it was, I had health insurance, I had benefits, things like that, that I’d never had before. So that’s what I was kind of indexing on. And then on the client and solution side of things, it was one of those where…
we were talking back and forth about what this role looks like, where I can code, but I can also talk to the clients, see what their problems are, directly fix those. And so I think right now it’s starting to get trendy, right? We have forward deployed engineers, solutions engineers, client success engineers. Yeah. And so like those are just, that’s what I wanted to do. And so when I saw that role opened up at that point, I genuinely didn’t care what the salary was or the role was. And I, Hey, that’s what I wanted to do.
Keith Cline (28:34.777)
That’s exactly when I was looking at your role, I’m like, he was a forward deploy engineer. That’s exactly the title now. Yeah, totally.
KJ Hardrict (28:50.828)
Sounds like a cool team. And so I think Nick, was just messaging on LinkedIn, say on a Wednesday. I think I had an offer by Monday. And then I took a couple of weeks off to just level set and then started yeah, like Posh was a great part of my life, like getting my footing together. I think it helped build back some confidence that, no, I didn’t just get to where I was because I knew people and had connections.
Like over the first year at Posh, got promoted twice and got two raises and then I got promoted again, like shortly after that. And so now was one of the senior engineers on the AI voice product team. And it was with people that I hadn’t known before coming in. It was just the, you know, a DM from Nick. All I knew was that he went to MIT also. And I guess going through that… elevation within a company that fast, that early with people that I didn’t know, I started to feel…I get my mojo back for lack of better words.
Keith Cline (29:58.161)
All right, then you move on to become a venture capitalist. So what was the thought of transitioning over to becoming a VC at Link Ventures?
KJ Hardrict (30:07.435)
Yeah, so at the latter year or like the latter couple months of Posh, it was nothing against them. I was doing great work. I was passionate about the product. But I think part of me in realizing and living in the moment of getting those promotions really fast and elevating really high within the company, was one of those things where I knew it wasn’t mine. Like it wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t my baby but I can do really well in it. And so that’s where I started thinking about, you know, what is it that I want to do? And I think it just happens. It was just by chance at this point, Nick had left to start his company and he came over here to Link Ventures and that’s where he was working out of. That’s where that’s who funded them. Our director of engineering at Posh at the time he came and was there his CTO. And so they were both here and I was fairly close to both of them. And so when they came here, that was already a big eye-opener for me. But then one of those days, Nick had posted a, I guess reposted one of Dave’s posts talking about a job posting that they had out. And it was for a Technical Principal on the investment team. And the job description was really weird, right? In terms of you had to, they were preferably looking for someone out of MIT that has preferably had around five years of startup experience that preferably is comfortable being on camera or on a podcast or a panel. And then I’m looking at it like, what? This is a little weird, right? Like they were looking at me and trying to write it down and hunt me down. And so I messaged Nick and say, hey, you know, like, do you think? And he’s looking at it too and saying, you know what?
Keith Cline (31:37.36)
I’m uniquely qualified for this role.
KJ Hardrict (31:55.949)
Even if you don’t have any finance experience or anything, I’ll give it a shot, right? I’ll introduce you to the COO of Link Ventures. I had my first lunch and it was actually with Nick and Derek and Roman, the COO at Link Ventures. And we just had some pizza at Area Four And one thing just led to another. I ended up having a lunch or a meeting with pretty much every partner, every person on the team, got to know them. Part of the whole thesis around
where I was coming from was I don’t want to have to stop creating content and I don’t want to have to stop building if I want to build. And for both of those, they were really encouraging of me. And so I’ll always be grateful for that to continue to build, to continue to create content. And as long as those two needs were met, because of the startup drama that I’ve been a part of and the trauma that ensued with that, I wanted to really give back to the startup community and the young founders in the space really give them, be able to give them pointed advice, invest in people that I felt like had the bad good mindset. It’s very qualitative the way that Dave invests. And I think I really resonated with his thesis. And so I went that direction.
Keith Cline (33:10.147)
And you made a couple of investments. saw one for, I think they were called Soshi at the time, like Northeastern students doing AI social media marketing agent and collect.ai. So were you just spending time just on campus, just meeting with student founders primarily, or was it broader than
KJ Hardrict (33:16.204)
Mm-hmm.
KJ Hardrict (33:29.184)
Yeah, it’s a lot of, we tried to have a lot of coverage. I would be on campus for events, we would host events over here, just kind of be in and around the founder circles. My YouTube helped a decent amount where they came in and they were already warm. They’d be like, oh KJ and I’m like, yeah, yeah, that’s me. Let’s talk business, Ryan, and talk about who they are. And yeah, a lot of the deals just came organically like that.
Keith Cline (33:57.756)
Alright, let’s talk about what you’re working on now. So, Talvy what is it?
KJ Hardrict (34:04.95)
So Talvy is a video first networking platform and long story short, it’s the, say Facebook is to TikTok as LinkedIn is to Talvy. And so we’re just trying to see what is next after something like LinkedIn. What is next after resumes, which we feel like are archaic right now. It’s just, you can’t fit someone in a one page PDF.
Right? Like you can’t pull out those human traits and so Talvy is what’s next after that.
Keith Cline (34:38.595)
think your timing is spot on because living in the world of recruiting, town acquisition and creating content for companies and what it’s like to work there and running a job board. Resumes are just not what they used to be because of AI. So people, know, match this resume and they’re not lying, but they’re just going to mold their resume based on the job description. They apply.
It goes into wherever the abyss of a thousand other applies. So they’re not even getting seen if even if they are a glove fit. And what is shocking to me is how LinkedIn has stayed so prominent, so important for all these years. And I think I joined LinkedIn. I was one of the first 500,000 users recruiter. I was like, what is this? This is amazing. And I think it’s only like grown in importance as far as building your brand as a founder and whatever job function you’re in, yet it’s owned by Microsoft, right? And it’s surprising that no one’s disrupted LinkedIn yet. So that’s why when I saw what you were doing, I’m like, wait, I need to talk to KJ and learn more of what he’s doing. Cause there is going to be some shift as there always is. So how does it work?
KJ Hardrict (36:02.058)
Yeah, so first of all, I think a lot of what you’re seeing is true. Fundamentally, people are using AI to just generate their resumes to fit a job description. And then on the company side, they’re using AI to see how close a resume is to a job description. Now all their resumes get an A rating. And so they, on the company side, talk to countless hiring managers, founders, VP of People’s and they genuinely admit that they say, hey, I feel guilty about it, but I haven’t looked at an application for, say, four months or whatever. And they get, say, 1,000 applications a week. And so these people are literally not being seen. And when we’re going about solving that problem, we were trying to do it in a way that really empowers the person. We’ve seen AI automated interviews. We’ve seen black box assessment software. But for us and our team, one of the big things that we wanted to make sure of was that we’re never going to rank somebody against another because what does that even mean? Someone could be a great software engineer for Amazon, but I wouldn’t want to hire them and vice versa. And so it became, what do people actually care about? And when you ask someone, who’s your favorite colleague? It’s like, it’s Joe or Sarah because they work really hard. Whatever you give to them, they’re willing to learn. They have that grit.
They work well on a team. I love having lunch with that person. It just enhances our company culture. You don’t say, it’s because Sarah had three years experience at Microsoft. Why I love her so much. So it was how do we pull out the human-centric traits, but in a way that’s systematic on both sides so that we genuinely save time.
Otherwise, we’re not helping anybody. So on the applicant side, I need to help them become better storytellers and own that profile. So have as many takes as you want. Come onto the platform, tell your story on the five human-centric axes that we’ve set in place. So it’s like craft, mindset, growth, purpose, and connection. And there’ll be prompts that really just pull out your personal origin story. Like what I talked about my origin story earlier, it’s…
KJ Hardrict (38:17.813)
How do we pull that out of someone systematically? And then on the other side, all the AI under the hood is really just understanding someone holistically. So we know what makes them unique, what parts of their story make them unique. And as we onboard an employer, we know, I love somebody. Like say they tell us, love people that are go-getters, that have been through tough challenges, that are motivational, like different things like that. And then now we’re matching people to how you describe what your ideal employee
is. And we’re not like comparing people against each other, we’re comparing people against who you imagine you want to work with. And so now the ranking, the ordering becomes just how close does this person to what you describe and we can do that with your applicants, we can do that with everybody who’s made a Talvy profile in general and there’s all these other, I guess the synergies from there.
Keith Cline (39:16.099)
And is your goal to make this a consumer oriented product like Talvy is the brand and this or is it to help companies with, it could be almost white labeled to be an add on to greenhouse of, hey, create a Talvy video in addition to your resume. Cause there will be a transition shift from resumes eventually going away, but we’re not there yet. But I think video aspect is interesting for companies to add that layer in as a baby step, but so what’s your vision for what you want Talvy to be?
KJ Hardrict (39:52.929)
Yeah, you’re spot on in the short term. So if you’re larger firm and you have a HR team already, we integrate with the Ashby, with the Greenhouse. As someone comes in, now we have their resume, we parse that. So that becomes part of your story. And then we go and send an invite link out to the applicant to just, hey, create your Talby profile so we can get the fuller picture of you. And from there, it’s like all that context gets bundled up and we are embedding of that person is like all the context included, including the resume, including other stories, and it just makes a more rich query on the other side. But I guess to your first question, there’s a couple angles of this and we’re launching, it’s like this week. So by the time anybody sees this, we’re, so we already also have this concept of a Talb group. And so we’re
Keith Cline (40:44.099)
Yeah, this would be a couple weeks out before it launches, yeah, or published.
KJ Hardrict (40:51.274)
Right now we’re using it for, John Warner’s running a Imagination in Action Conference here at MIT, and then he’s gonna have the speakers make Talvy profiles, and for us that’s, you can make a group where you can have a feed of people, and at a conference you’ll know, hey, there’s like eight different stages, bunch of different speakers, I want to know which one that I would resonate with most, and I can go to, you know, X, Y, Z, and know where to spend my time.
If there’s conference goers, it’s, I want to find like-minded individuals that I hope to meet and shake their hands. We get the awkward cold intros out of the way and everybody kind of knows each other from the get. And then we’re also working with someone that’s running a big hackathon that’s going to be like a global hackathon. And so he wants a community of people that they can go to and you can have a feed of these people and then they’re just making updates to their videos. so long story short, there’s…
a big consumer aspect because I’m just trying to help people become better storytellers and we haven’t been charging on the consumer side. And then on the business side, it’s how do we save them enough time so that they use this every day and they enjoy using it every day so that we can keep the machine going.
Keith Cline (42:05.304)
Interesting. I have a lot of thoughts running through my head, but this is not the place. We’ll have to do this as a side topic discussion. so One of the things that I’m sure when you were talking to maybe, you know, chief people officers, head of HR, you know, there’s challenges that they face around bias for this type of format, right? Videos. You know, there’s some companies that they don’t even have the ability to see the LinkedIn profile picture because it’s wiped because of the know, restrictions that they have in place to hopefully overcome those bias. So what feedback have you had as relates to that or what challenges do you expect there?
KJ Hardrict (42:45.909)
Yeah, so that brings up one of the biggest challenges that we’re going to come across. First of all, mindset wise, every single person on our team is either an immigrant themselves or a child from an immigrant. And so everybody takes this really seriously because they’ve all been overlooked on an opportunity because of the way they look or how their name is spelled out on a resume. Like we heard from somebody that I won’t name names, but they have like even felt comfortable enough to tell us that they’ve rejected someone because
they couldn’t recognize their name on their resume, for example. And so for me, the mindset is if we understand what the person wants, like on the company side, and we can show that one sentence that’ll get you to hire that person before your brain even gets to, like I wouldn’t hire someone that looks like that. It’s like, I would be stupid not to hire this person because this is exactly the person I need, for example. And so that’s just like the mindset around it.
But then on the building aspect, this is also a big reason why we’re not scoring candidates. We’re not saying one person’s a better engineer than another person. Like when we pop up in the feed, we just think this person will be a great match for your organization, period. And there’s also things where if AI tech isn’t where at a level that we feel comfortable with using that as an actual part of this person, like our understanding of a person, that’s also not going to be included.
And so right now I’d say, yes, we record video, but we’re making sure that we are not, you know, taking in this person’s black, so they are not a good match, right? Like, so we’re, you have to be really adversarial in the, in the models and how they’re trained and what you’re using to make sure that we’re only pulling out details that make sense. And we’re always going to also show our work. We’re think this person’s a good match because of X, Y, Z.
Like check to these parts in their videos, do different things like that. And I think we’re also jumping in front of, like we’ve talked to employment lawyers over the past, it’s like constant conversations, because there’s new laws evolving in the space. And it’s just like being as deliberate as we can. And for me, it’s just putting a genuine effort forward. And we can even do things like correct for bias in the other direction, right? Maybe someone, we’re noticing some bias within that person or within a specific company and we give them a notification that says, look, we’re noticing a little bit of a trend here. Maybe rethink how you’re evaluating these people type of thing. But yeah, like that long story short, there’s a bunch of different avenues that we’re trying to tackle with this, but it’s a great point. That’s a big challenge that we’re going through.
Keith Cline (45:34.939)
But it’s also, we’ve become a video first culture, right? Like it just seems like everything is dominated by TikTok, Instagram, as far as social and people, it’s just more of the fabric of society where I’m sure there’s been other video first resume job seeking type of platforms that were too early to market, not ready, the laws weren’t there, whatever the case may be of what their obstacles were. I think…
I looked up, so the first resume was over 500 years old. Leonardo da Vinci actually was the first credited resume out there. So it’s over 500 years, the resume is still like this piece of paper that’s electronically submitted now. It doesn’t really tell the story of the person anymore. And I think to do that, you need an engagement, which is video, to tell that story. So I think it’s the natural evolution.
KJ Hardrict (46:06.485)
Yeah.
KJ Hardrict (46:24.491)
A couple of decades ago, you would be able to walk in with your resume to this employer that you’re trying to work with, meet the person that you’re going to work with, shake their hand and kind of give your spiel, right? Now, because of AI automated interviews and AI automated applying, there’s such an overload of applications that they’re almost like locking their doors saying, don’t come to me, there’s too many people coming in. And so for me, it’s like, hey,
Keith Cline (46:35.246)
Right. Yeah.
KJ Hardrict (46:52.959)
give yourself a chance by letting your voice be heard from the jump.
Keith Cline (46:57.808)
And that’s what I think you just nailed on something that I’ve been thinking about is, you know, there should, instead of sending a resume, maybe you do and there’s, hey, we want this person, everyone should have an interview, right? That’s somehow a fit. If it’s scoring the resume, the doc, then it’s like, okay, out of a thousand people, these 300 people have some level of knowledge of what we’re actually looking for. They should all have a shot to pitch themselves. Like, founders pitch themselves. everything’s a pitch. So I would love to have the opportunity for 30 seconds to plea my case of like, this is why I’m a fit for this job, because I’ve done X, Y, Z, and it’s hard to get that across on a resume. I’m passionate about A, B, C, like just, and then you feel that person’s like, just that drive and design, you so it’s just, I think something about them. And it’s like, okay, we got to interview this person. And I think it’s the opportunity that
KJ Hardrict (47:46.783)
Yeah, there’s something about them.
Keith Cline (47:53.285)
be seen versus in the abyss of greenhouse that’s never to be seen because it’s just in that world. I think it’s really, timing is everything. And so you raised two million from Link Ventures. Congratulations. I love the branding initiative, New York Times, Billboard type of profile. So how’s that working out?
KJ Hardrict (48:06.74)
Thank you.
KJ Hardrict (48:17.502)
Yeah, it’s actually going better than I even imagined it to. It was one of those pie in the sky ideas the team and I had because I think part of the the trustworthy of telling being trustworthy and allowing people to become better storytellers, it’s showing how exciting it could be if you put yourself out there and you have an interesting story. And I think right now, because of the advent of social media, there’s two sides of the coins. Yes, some people are able to be on camera more and they feel more comfortable.
But on the other side, we have super creators that are the most popular people on the planet. And they feel like, okay, I’m not gonna create content because I can’t be Mr. Beast, right? And so there’s like a hesitancy because they’ll have full production teams there, right? And so it’s like, okay, how do we pull out the everyday person? And we didn’t want it to feel like Forbes 30 under 30, which I’m sure you know the rap that it’s getting. And so for us, it was like,
Keith Cline (49:15.652)
I feel like it’s not really, it’s like you got good PR people putting you in front of the right people or it’s, I don’t even know if it’s a pay to play type of thing, but.
KJ Hardrict (49:23.016)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s like a pay to play. It’s like a clout thing. But we were like, no, we just want everyday people with great stories and we want to spotlight them in Times Square because when would they ever get a chance to do that? And they’ll never have to, they won’t have to pay anything for us. We just want to spotlight great humans. And what we get in return is more people comfortable sharing their story for the chance of having something like that they would have never had a chance to.
Keith Cline (49:47.024)
Do you have a hard stop at 12? Like, if I go over a little bit, is that okay?
KJ Hardrict (49:50.834)
I can go a little longer.
Keith Cline (49:52.945)
Yeah, not much longer. I just have a couple follow-up questions. All right, so in your time as a venture capitalist at Link Ventures, how do you think that helps shape you to be a founder?
KJ Hardrict (50:05.278)
Yeah, so Link Ventures specifically, think I, you see so many founders come through. You see the great ones, the ones that fail, the ones where you’re like, man, if you just did X, right? Like if you were just more comfortable putting yourself out there, you’d probably be a lot more successful. And I think I’m just a great pattern matcher for lack of a better term. And I’m just looking at all of these things and kind of looking at the Venn diagram and what makes them successful. And I think at one point I looked in the mirror and said, why can’t I do this also? And as I continued to build, it was one of those things like, yeah, fundamental leader is nothing. And even talking to Dave, the general partner of Link, he’s also saying, like, he’s always saying, now’s the time more than ever, right? So if you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna do it. And I think it was the mixture of the constant exposure to founders, being in these meetings where I’m hearing the investor side of things where they’re talking about why they don’t want to invest in this person, why they do. And I think it was a similar discussion to like what we were talking about in terms of the hiring, right? No one said, I hired this person because they worked at X company or did this for Y years. It’s no, we hired this person because there’s something about them. Like I don’t know how many investor meetings we had where they’re like, you’ll just meet them and you’ll know.
Right. And, and it’s true. Like we talked to them and like, okay, there’s, there’s something that just drives this person more than any money success could that they’re, they have a mission in their head and whether it’s successful or not, they’re going to give it a hundred percent and they’re going to give it an honest go. And then that became things that we indexed on. And so with Talvy, I think it’s just a mixture of a lot of things, right? It’s the understanding what the founders are looking for on that side. It’s understanding what makes a great founding team, what makes great founders on my side because of my YouTube channel. Like we alluded to the Deuce Drone situation and I only got that opportunity because I made YouTube videos and put myself out there. And so every opportunity from there on out, I never had to apply to anything. It was just, Hey, KJ, would you like to have a chance at this opportunity? Even for Link Ventures, they never saw my resume one day. It was just, I had lunch, I had another lunch, I met another partner.
KJ Hardrict (52:29.95)
And at one point there was an offer on the table. So it was keeping me up at night. How is there fundamentally something wrong in the system if applicants feel like they can’t land great companies, like great applicants. I know their profiles, they’re great. And then on the company side, they’re like, man, I can’t find the great people. And so there’s something fundamentally wrong there. Like, how do we solve this? How do we solve it at scale? And how do we do it in a way that really empowers people to just tell their stories?
Keith Cline (52:59.737)
Okay, in the time that you have been founder, CEO of Talvy what have you learned? What were like, wow, this was different than what I expected.
KJ Hardrict (53:16.234)
I think the big thing that I’m trying to do, there’s something that I’m grappling with and it’s more of a battle with myself. So I get chronic migraines, if I get enough, my immune system goes down and then I know what happens when my immune system goes all the way down. And so there’s a certain aspect of things where I was always able to kind of do everything myself.
Now I have a superstar team that I’m working with every day. And some days I have to just allow myself to just let them cook. It’s just, hey, like I can even just take a backseat today. You do you. Like I trust that your system architecture is going to be fantastic, that you’re covering all these loose ends. And so I think it became more freeing, but it was all, was just uncomfortable at first. Just not having full touch on everything. But,
I think it’s something I continue to learn every day, like interacting. And I’m also building with like three of my fraternity brothers and then the CEO of Chip Brain is now on our team. And so there’s a interesting dynamic with everybody.
Keith Cline (54:24.977)
I noticed that. That’s awesome. Okay, so three apps you can’t live without can’t be Talvy, can’t be your, you know, Slack, email, or your calendar.
KJ Hardrict (54:34.739)
So it can’t be Claude. feel like Claude’s running into that territory.
Keith Cline (54:37.615)
Yeah, you can use Claude yeah.
KJ Hardrict (54:40.305)
Okay, so Claude’s definitely one of them. Like it’s like during the day, it’s the Claude code, but it’s my LLM of choice when I’m just asking a random question when I’m at home.
We have Notion. I’ve always done my content on Notion in terms of my content calendar. It can link everything. I love the page layouts. It just feels like a, it was one of those where Google Drive or Google Docs, that concept had to be disrupted at some point. And then so this feels a lot better and a lot more free. And it also likes Markdown. So whenever AI output, I can put in Markdown. Great. And so I would put Notion as the second one. And then I guess like it’s,
It’s not really an app, but my NBA League Pass subscription, so can watch Laker games while I’m on the East Coast and keep my mental health up. That’s the last thing I can’t live without.
Keith Cline (55:31.249)
All right, podcast or book recommendation for founders obviously can’t be your own channel.
KJ Hardrict (55:36.989)
Yeah, so I really loved how I built this from Guy Raz, but that one, I feel like it became less frequent. Diary of a CEO is one that I’ve gotten intrigued with a lot. And then now recently, I guess my favorite would be Lenny’s podcast with different product people and growth, because I’m just really obsessed with hacking growth. But that’s the one that I’m really into right now.
Keith Cline (56:01.893)
Yeah, Lenny’s amazing. I deal with the product management community closely. I have a community that I run in Boston that just, it’s like he is phenomenal. And I learned so much from his content. So I’m very grateful for what he does. Okay, odds of the Lakers winning the NBA title this year.
KJ Hardrict (56:21.321)
You know, asked me two months ago, it might’ve been like 5 % chance, and now I’m like, you know, 20%. Yeah, there’s a puncher’s chance.
Keith Cline (56:27.867)
saying there’s a chance, there’s a chance. They’re running hard, they’re looking good. LeBron’s still doing triple doubles and crazy things like that. So diving for balls and, I know, it’s crazy. Okay, outside of work, what do you like to do for fun if there’s those moments?
KJ Hardrict (56:35.229)
Yeah. And then Luca’s looking like unstoppable.
KJ Hardrict (56:45.725)
Yeah, so like even with the team, we have a gym downstairs underneath the office and we like working out on most days. Outside of this launch week, we do it most days. We’ve got to get back into it. But on the weekends, I’ll have two, like both Saturday and Sunday mornings, like three hour basketball sessions that I really enjoy.
Keith Cline (57:04.689)
Nice. Well, KJ, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through your background story, obviously the whole journey, and obviously I’m here rooting for Talvy that it’s the next great company in the Boston tech scene.
KJ Hardrict (57:15.539)
Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a great conversation.