From Bollywood to Wall Street to clever recruitment: Page 2 of 2

Challenges along the way

Tushar names HackerTrail advisor Hari Krishnan (also the CEO of PropertyGuru Group) as one of his key inspirations in Singapore and Southeast Asia. “He’s the guy who paved LinkedIn in the Asia Pacific. He’s a very smart individual who came from a background where he did not have particular exposure to the human resource industry, but then obviously took that up as a challenge and delivered very high value there.

“And from there now he’s jumped to be something completely different. So he’s a true-born entrepreneur, he understands how to build businesses, he understands that resources will always be limited so optimising those resources is really the best way forward. So from an Asia-Pacific standpoint he certainly stands as one of my mentors and one of the people I look up to.”

For Tushar, the business has not been without its challenges. “The challenging aspect is when it comes to educating your audience about what you are doing. What I mean by that is typically in the hiring space when people have thought about using technology to hire talent, they’ve thought more about job boards. And when they’ve thought about hiring one specific talent for a very specific role, they’ve thought about recruiters who have no technology or most of which have no technology.”

The result, he says, is that when you’re trying to introduce a solution that uses technology to solve the same pain point that an external recruitment agency does, it requires a lot of training, education, awareness on the part of the rest of the ecosystem.

“That’s been the hardest part – to explain to people, to educate them on how we’re doing things differently, yet leading to similar outcomes only better, faster and cheaper,” he explains.

Tushar also had to pick up new skills along the way. “One very key expertise I didn’t have before was business development. Because whatever I was doing within the corporate world was to internal stakeholders not to external people. One of the things you realise when you step outside the corporate shell is that your pedigree doesn’t mean anything. What matters is how good your product is and whether it serves the need that the clients are looking to fill.”

This means one has to be fantastic at not just visualising how a product works but translating that to the client’s need and making it easy enough for them to understand and pay for, he adds.

Running a startup has also changed him as a person. “Well, it’s been a ridiculous amount of change, I think my wife can probably write a mini book on it! I think it opens your eyes a lot, it completely opens the way you think about creating value in the ecosystem.”

“So when you’re a small screw of a very big machine, that’s the level of impact that you can have. Versus when you’re trying to create a machine, it could be a small machine for now but when you’re trying to create that into a machine itself then exposure to all of the different facets of creating a business is absolutely mind-blowing,” he explains.

The fact that he has employees working for him; that made him realise very quickly that it was a change from just him to him being responsible for his own ecosystem. “So I think that lends a different level of forced credibility on who you are as an individual and how you conduct yourself, because there are a lot more other people who are banking on you.” 

That tenacity and pragmatism seems to have paid off, for HackerTrail has secured part of its S$900,000 seed funding from the Javelin O-Startup Fund, a Singapore-managed seed fund. The other part of the funding will be from angel investors and Tushar aims to secure the full amount by end July.

He explains that the funds will be used to build their team, to include a sales function, operations function and proper marketing function. “Technology will continue to be augmented, if you look at overall the spend that we’re going to do, about 80% is going to be on talent and about 20% is going to be on operations and sales and marketing spend.”

Going forward, Tushar says that Malaysia is a strategic market for HackerTrail and that they’re working on expanding there by year end.

Lessons learned

When asked what he has learned as an entrepreneur, Tushar cites three key lessons. “One is that when people say that when you step away from corporate life, you should give yourself 18 months or two years or three years. I think that’s complete bullshit. I think you have to give yourself at least a five- to 10-year runway if you want to make a significant impact in what you’re doing.

So that’s one learning – give yourself enough runway, don’t kid yourself, it’s a long, long journey.”

Secondly, he feels it is important to have concerted opinions, which means regardless of who you may trust or look up to, always trust multiple people because you get fantastic perspectives.

“But when you get those, hear those perspectives very carefully and have your own opinion at the end of it. So you are the entrepreneur, it’s in your hands, it’s not in anyone else’s hand, which means you can get curated wisdom from a lot of sources but how you translate and how you make sense of that is only up to you.”

The third lesson is around product. “Because the bar on product has gone so high, don’t build a feature, build a real product. If you want to build something good then you’ll get pats on the back but you won’t make money. If you want to make money, you’ve got to push to be great.”

If someone gave him US$1 billion with the condition he could never start a company again, would he do it? Tushar says he would, because that doesn’t mean he can’t fund other companies.

“If I can get to a status where I’m funding budding entrepreneurs and I’m growing the ecosystem that way, I would be lending expertise for them to scale up and not starting the company myself, that’s what I would do.”

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