Counselling In Mental Health Nursing Rational Emotive Behavioural The

Question: Talk about theCounselling In Mental Health Nursingfor Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. Answer: Presentation The 21st century is normal as a time of quickened emotional well-being impediment and turmoil because of developing complexities, advancement issues, mental issues making an absence of harmony and agreement throughout everyday life. This hindered emotional wellness status requires successful mental intercessions and medicines for development. A portion of the excellent advising abilities, approaches and mediations hold a promising power over these quickened psychological wellness issues. One such directing mediation is Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) created by Albert Ellis. This REBT intercession is one of the best psychological conduct treatment (CBT) that holds a promising future (Jarvis, 2012). This examination centers around breaking down REBT mediation viability as a decent psychotherapy measure to control the dangerous emotional wellness issues in contemporary circumstances. The examination includes a point by point investigation of restorative qualities and restrictions of this mediation followed by assurance of touchy variables that deal with the guiding practice identified with REBT intercession. A nitty gritty note is given about the execution of REBT in future psychological well-being practice to comprehend the significance of this psychotherapy. Basically Analyzing the utilization of the Intervention in Mental Health Practice by Exploring the Therapeutic Strengths and Limitations of the Approach Based on social and passionate results of subjective procedures this Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) attempts to accomplish levelheadedness in deduction, feeling and carrying on by adjusting these psychological procedures. This REBT mediation works by following the essential idea of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) where accentuate is made to change or dispose of nonsensical perspectives, convictions and musings causing trouble. Be that as it may, REBT is not quite the same as other CBT by focussing more on the end of unreasonable conduct and feelings instead of just improving the balanced conduct and feelings (Shilling, 2012). As per Ellis and Ellis (2013), REBT hypothetical idea shows that not the down to earth injury or frequency but rather the passionate convictions and perspective that causes trouble. According to REBT standards, unreasonable conduct incorporates sentiment of outrage for anticipated circumstance or injury, sentiment of ridiculous desires, imparting feelings overdramatically and so on while normal conduct included intelligent and reasonable thoroughly considering a surprising circumstance. Further, Hyland and Boduszek (2012) showed that quality of REBT is in its clear methodologies and straightforwardness. This treatment depends on ABC model, which attempts to let individuals comprehend their wonder of musings, emotions and practices. In this model A represent an actuating occasion, B includes convictions and mentalities (discerning and silly) and C shows results (enthusiastic and conduct) for an enacting occasion. The specialist utilizes this model to legitimately recognize the perspec tive, nonsensical and judicious reasoning and the results of any actuating frequency to execute the treatment. Ajzen (2011) referenced a case of an advisor utilizing ABC model for executing REBT mediation to fix an understudy whose bombed an assessment and built up the sentiment of value and absence of knowledge. The specialist intruded on the perspective by expressing that terrible scores are consistently the result of lacking arrangement as opposed to lacking knowledge and worth. In help, Dodding et al. (2008) demonstrated that REBT mediation consider the advancement procedure as a significant piece of treatment making it a successful treatment for kids just as youth. The instructive style, direct methodology and sober mindedness premise help to build up a reasonable treatment instead of trusting it as a basic treatment. Durlak et al. (2011) featured another quality of this treatment that includes end of judgemental and good perspective from the restorative procedure. The advocates or specialist wont pass judgment on the helpless demonstration or rate or emotions as positive or negative rather they will just work to create levelheadedness according to REBT standards. As indicated by Ivey, Ivey and Zalaquett (2014) REBT forms unqualified acknowledgment of self and disposal of analysis about self from the however procedure, which turns into the extraordinary element of this treatment. Further, REBT attempts to upgrade self-esteem, certainty, confidence and judiciousness in lifestyle. These potential highlights are a lot of functional for adolescent and youth helpless. Ellis and Ellis (2013) likewise guaranteed in their investigation that REPT is an extremely powerful intercession for youngsters and adolescents on the grounds that the procedures of treatment depend on building up the quality that underp ins hopeful turn of events. Dilworth et al. (2013) showed that REBT is a self-advancement treatment where powerless build up the possibility to support themselves. Hyland and Boduszek (2012) demonstrated in their investigation that REBT conveys low backslide rate when contrasted and different treatments and prescription. Further, the time span and restorative objectives of REBT are extremely short and succinct accomplished inside 10 to 20 meetings. In any case, conversely, Ajzen (2011) expressed that alongside potential qualities this REBT intercession additionally perseveres certain impediment like treatment have the ability of duplicating individual cognizant in an off-base way by other helpless in a gathering. In the investigation of Ellis and Ellis (2013) based on perception, it is expressed that bunch REBT intercession makes a scatter of unreasonable and discerning reasoning procedure where for the most part the helpless chooses wrong pathway to work upon their psychological issues. Consequently, bunch mediation REBT is a tremendous disappointment. Another perceptible restriction of this treatment is its encounter procedure where the helpless needs to stand up to with their sentiments, feelings, musings and comprehension before the advisor. For the most part, individuals enduring psychological wellness issue don't continue that much gauge and solidarity to confront their own brain science and they may build up a sentiment of dread, outrage or obliviousness accordingly (Kazdin, 2012). These are the quality and impediments of REBT mediation that structures it as a potential nursing intercession. Recognizing and Discussing Racial, Cultural, Religious and Gender Sensitivity Needed with respect to the Counselor/Therapist for your Particular Intervention For giving any restorative intercession the advocate, attendant or advisor needs to follow certain morals, laws, guidelines and rights to adjust the demonstration of treatment. There are sure touchy elements that require uncommon consideration while giving REBT intercession in light of the fact that dissimilar to different psychotherapies, REBT includes an away from of powerless and their injury (Dryden Neenan, 2014). As indicated by Hyland and Boduszek (2012), any advisor rehearsing REBT needs to build up a multicultural directing competency on the grounds that huge numbers of the powerless of injury or mental issue have a place with the ethnic minority gathering. With the expectation to work viably, it is fundamental for the advisor to know the significance of culture in lives of individuals and decide the socially based contrasts to address them in the treatment procedure. The way of life of individuals characterizes their demeanor, conduct, otherworldliness, imagery and convictions. In this way, to actualize soundness in the feelings and practices as a piece of REBT intercession the instructor must perform with multicultural competency to give compelling treatment. The social contrasts in an advisor customer relationship may create leaps in correspondence styles, dialects and recognitions. Be that as it may, multicultural competency can assist with overruling these issues in mediation rehearse s. Further, Ajzen (2011) demonstrated that REBT directing methodologies should set sex mindful guiding objectives to address the sex affectability issue. A portion of the advising forms include both the female and male accomplices while actualizing REBT intercession while managing conjugal clash, separation or partition. Francis (2014) showed that women's activist directing methodology ought to be embraced to manage ladies quiet in REBT guiding. This women's activist advising process plans to give self-assurance, sympathy and command over the existence that is required to conquer the low confidence, losing expectation and uselessness in ladies persistent. Ellis and Ellis (2013) learned about the men directing methodologies required in REPT intercession to address the men issues and issues identified with nonsensical considering life. The male enduring mental issues just require the advancement of energy in their life. Be that as it may, very little investigation is performed to address the mental issues of men. However, according to Hyland and Boduszek (2012) five standards tending to men guiding includes pluralism, outside significance, and command over control, popularity based relationship and estimation of singularity. Based on these standards, the REBT advising turns out to be more easy to use towards male defenseless also. Further, Durlak et al. (2011) examined that REBT advocates need to manage the decent variety of racial and strict populace to give treatment. In this way, this enhanced REBT guiding includes the utilization of talented customer model to meet the touchy needs of various customer gatherings. There are three phases of this model includes relating stage, getting stage and evolving stage. In the relating stage, instructor attempts to comprehend customers religion, practices and culture as a type of pre-guiding information. In the getting stage, the specialist attempts to concentrate on comprehension the social, social and network factors that are making enduring and silliness. In conclusion, in evolving stage, advocate attempts to improve the distinguished deformities at the top of the priority list, communica

10 Ways to Render Sentences More Concise

10 Ways to Render Sentences More Concise 10 Ways to Render Sentences More Concise 10 Ways to Render Sentences More Concise By Mark Nichol This post subtleties different systems for diminishing and rearranging sentences. 1. Sentence Combination Stay away from back to back sentences that end and start, individually, with a similar word or expression as happens here: A typical method to follow the present condition of frameworks is checking execution measurements. Execution measurements show how resources are performing at the exchange level. In such cases, supplant the period between them with a comma and erase the second emphasis of the word or expression with which: â€Å"A normal approach to follow the present condition of frameworks is checking execution measurements, which show how resources are performing at the exchange level.† 2. Gathering by Subordination At the point when a sentence incorporates two back to back action word phrases, consider changing over one to a subordinate provision. For instance, note how the subject of this sentence is trailed by two proclamations of actuality: The eminent tea is an image of the city’s charitable neighborliness and is frequently served in a glass to show its jade-green shading. The primary explanation can without much of a stretch be subsumed into the fundamental statement as an incidental expression: â€Å"The eminent tea, an image of the city’s charitable neighborliness, is regularly served in a glass to show its jade-green color.† 3. Combination of Clauses Here, a basic subordinate statement sets up a pointlessly longwinded sentence: For social insurance elements with comparable classes of clients, they might have the option to diminish the general assessment exertion by applying the portfolio approach. The proviso is effortlessly incorporated into the fundamental condition by discarding for and rewarding â€Å"health care entities,† instead of they, as the sentence’s subject: â€Å"Health care elements with comparable classes of clients might have the option to decrease the general assessment exertion by applying the portfolio approach.† 4. Denominalization Nominalization is the complexity of exposition by utilizing things while utilizing the action word type of that thing, or modifying the sentence to dispose of the requirement for a thing, creates all the more clear, succinct writing; things, obviously, are essential to composition at the same time, particularly on account of formal things with so much components as - ation, they can be mishandled in the administration of passing on power. This sentence isn't excessively formal, however it is wordier than should be expected: Besides, organizations are taking reinforcements of the creation applications and putting away them for inconclusive periods. Denominalization-truly, â€Å"unnaming†-is basically an extravagant method of saying â€Å"rephrasing to dispose of nouns.† Note that in this sentence, the thing reinforcements can be changed over to an action word, rendering the action word taking unnecessary, and the last expression can be dense by changing the descriptive word uncertain into an intensifier, which empowers cancellation of the thing time frames: â€Å"Furthermore, organizations are backing up the creation applications and putting away them indefinitely.† The accompanying sentence is a case of an announcement with a twofold decker nominalization: The board may think that its valuable to take part in a discourse on an occasional premise with respect to the organization’s strategy. As in the past model, single word effectively replaces an expression â€Å"on an occasional basis† can be decreased to intermittently: â€Å"Management may think that its helpful to occasionally participate in an exchange with respect to the organization’s policy.† Yet, further decrease is accomplished by supplanting the expression â€Å"engage in a dialogue† with an equal word: â€Å"Management may think that its useful to intermittently examine the organization’s policy.† 5. Utilizing Terms Rather Than Definitions One procedure to accomplish succinctness is to abstain from portraying something by characterizing it; note the clarification in the accompanying sentence: He was inclined to committing humiliating errors out in the open. Here, the people conduct can be portrayed with a term that epitomizes the definition: â€Å"He was inclined to submitting false pas.† 6. Cancellation of Expletives The exclamations â€Å"there is† and â€Å"there are† are poor substitutes for a solid subject; note how the accompanying sentence gets looking powerless so far: There are hardly any, money and bookkeeping divisions that are not encountering some type of outrageous change. Interjections need not be extracted for each situation, yet limit their utilization by erasing such expressions for the unmistakable thing or thing phrase that follows (and erase the related that that shows up later in the sentence): â€Å"Few, assuming any, fund and bookkeeping divisions are not encountering some type of extraordinary change.† 7. Maintaining a strategic distance from Tautology Redundancy will be excess or reiteration, for example, appeared here: Might you be able to rehash that? To rehash is to accomplish something, so this sentence is proportionate to â€Å"Could you state that again again?† Indicate the activity somehow: â€Å"Could you state that again?† or, all the more succinctly, â€Å"Could you rehash that?† 8. Utilizing Brief Modifiers While adjusting a thing to give more data about it, utilize a previous descriptive word or phrasal modifier instead of an all-inclusive expression following the thing. The accompanying sentence shows utilization of a verbose adjusting phrase: She offered a clarification that was brief and to the point. This sentence can be straightened out by finding the depiction of the clarification before the thing: â€Å"She offered a brief, to-the-point explanation.† 9. Extracting Single Words Now and then, diminishing a sentence by only single word improves it, as appeared in the accompanying models: As opposed to surveying the entirety of the agreements, select an agent test to evaluate. In the expression â€Å"all of,† of is commonly unnecessary: â€Å"Rather than surveying all the agreements, select an agent test to assess.† How is innovation assisting with changing the manner in which old individuals are thought about? In the expression â€Å"helping to,† to is unessential: How is innovation helping change the manner in which older individuals are thought about? That is the most irritating blunder I have ever observed, and furthermore the most pervasive. Additionally, when it promptly follows and, is excess: That is the most irritating mistake I have ever observed, and the most pervasive. 10. Evading Prolixity Cease from colorful, verbose portrayals. The accompanying sentence is an extraordinary case of liberal longwindedness, however except if one is purposely prolix in the administration of funniness, be cautious about getting control over unnecessarily elaborate writing: One may with the most extreme certainty paper to win in a discussion in which one states that having one’s own methods for vehicular movement offers one more prominent adaptability than open transportation gives in the matter of movement to one’s spot of learning or business or to social events. Pare such excessively convoluted sythesis: â€Å"It’s simple to win a contention that having one’s own vehicle makes it simpler to get the chance to class or work or to meet companions than if one uses open transportation.† Need to improve your English quickly a day? Get a membership and begin accepting our composing tips and activities day by day! Continue learning! Peruse the Grammar classification, check our mainstream posts, or pick a related post below:The Royal Order of Adjectives Disappointed + PrepositionCareful with Words Used as Noun and Verb

Sports Marketing Brand Equity in Professional Soccer

Question: 1. Picking and recognizing the association - Choose Manchester United as the association and compose a little depiction about the vision, crucial 60-70 words. 2. Expound on the portions not focused by Manchester United. i.e, Demographical, Geographical , Age, Gender and so on 100-120 3. Focusing of your association should which sections are browsed the subsequent inquiry and which system is to be applied and with thinking. 150-200 words. 4. Situating of the association is to be clarified to sum things up. Answer: Presentation Manchester United The picked club in this theme is Manchester United Football Club. It is an expert football club at Old Trafford, Great Manchester, England. It is one of the most presumed clubs in England and is nicknamed as Great Devils (Masterman 2014). Crucial Vision of Manchester United Football Club Crucial Manchester United The crucial Manchester United FC is to be the best soccer club and group on and off the football ground. It targets making it a worldwide brand by giving a right blend of strategic approaches and support of a quality group (Funk et al. 2016). Vision of Manchester joined Football Club The vision of Manchester United Football Club is connected with turning into the best football club both on and off the contribute by reveling moral strategic policies (Masterman 2014). Market Segmentation of Manchester United FC Segment Manchester United FC rehearses segment division. They are accessible to individuals of all ethnic foundation, age and sexual orientation. The tickets of the rounds of the club are accessible to a wide range of individuals with no reservations. Topography Manchester United is the most well known football club over the globe. It has in excess of 659 million fans over the globe. In this way, it is accessible everywhere throughout the world. A portion of the nations are past the objective division of the club. A few nations like China, Russia, India, Nigeria and Vietnam are past the objective division of the club. China has extremely low fan following of the club, where just 8% of the all out populace are evaluated to be adherents of the club. Indias populace contains just 2.8% of Manchester United fans and adherents (Funk et al. 2016). In light of such low after of the club, these sections are not focused by the club. Age The club focuses on age classification of 15 or more individuals. The club doesn't normally target individuals underneath the age of 15 years and individuals over the age classification of 65 are typically not focused on. Be that as it may, the club is a commonly recognized name for all age classifications of individuals. Sexual orientation Manchester United Football Club focuses on men of 15 or more. The club doesn't significantly target female for advertise division. Nonetheless, the segment division is open for fans having a place with all sex. Methodologies for division Manchester United will endeavor to grow its business sectors in nations where the accompanying of the club is low. Global showcasing is one of the most significant ideas, which the club will attempt to concentrate on. Certain techniques can be used for division. Use online life and versatile showcasing openings The club can use computerized media as the stage for extending market in different nations. Utilization of versatile application and destinations can be utilized for advancing the merchandize and the market of the club in different nations. The notoriety of online life has risen above the sky and web based life has a developing prominence among individuals. Consequently, it very well may be utilized for growing the market of the club in nations like China, India, Russia and Nigeria (Funk et al. 2016). Extemporize the odds of broadcasting rights on a worldwide stage Numerous nations don't have the communicated universal club football matches. Subsequently, the club doesn't discover have high fan following in such nations. In the event that the club gets broadcasting rights in such nations, at that point the matches can be broadcasted in these nations and they will have the option to create fan following in such nations. Computerized seeing on web and telephones will support the reason (Masterman 2014). Improve dissemination channel The club ought to improve the conveyance channel. They ought to improve the discount, retail and web based business channel. This will assist the club with making it item accessible in the market and build up a solid fan following in these nations. The accessibility of merchandize will enable the club to build up a solid client base. Situating of the association Manchester United arrangements in excellent products at significant expense. It has a brand picture in light of the gigantic fan following. Chelsea FC bargains in nearly less quality item at a similarly less cost to Manchester United merchandize. Arms stockpile FC bargains in low quality merchandize and item at extremely low cost. Liverpool FC bargains in tolerably great quality merchandise at low cost. In this way, Manchester United is in a better position analyzed than the contenders since it is the most popular l football club on the planet (Biscaia et al. 2013). End It can finished up structure the report that Manchester United is the most well known football club on the planet with a fan chasing after 659 million fans far and wide. They need to weight on advanced showcasing so as to extend their market in nations where their fan following is low. Their objective market is overwhelmingly guys of over 15 years old. They appreciate upper hand as far as situating, Reference List Biscaia, R., Correia, A., Ross, S., Rosado, A. furthermore, Maroco, J., 2013. Observer based brand value in proficient soccer.Sport Marketing Quarterly,22(1), p.20. Funk, D.C., Alexandris, K. furthermore, McDonald, H., 2016.Sport Consumer Behavior: Marketing Strategies. Routledge. Masterman, G., 2014.Strategic game administration. Routledge. Mullin, B.J., Hardy, S. what's more, Sutton, W., 2014.Sport Marketing fourth Edition. Human Kinetics.

Marketing Strategy of Levi Strauss- A SWOT analysis †Free Sample

Question: Compose a report about the Marketing Strategy of Levi Strauss? Answer: Official Summary: The report contains a short presentation on the subject followed by a prologue to the organization profile, which would clear us with respect to the brand worth and results of the organization, its industry picture and picture in the market. A SWOT examination is done to comprehend the present market situation and the difficulties and openings that the organization is looking in the market at the present time. There are different difficulties dangers and openings and the extent of development is firm as the market as of now has numerous players with same kind of items and frill. The different goals for upgrading market development, benefit boost and deals volume has additionally been talked about. This investigation will give us an intensive comprehension of the organization and its different perspectives. Presentation: Promoting methodologies of an organization are those procedures, which causes an organization to expand benefit by accomplishing deals development and a feasible situation. This investigation targets discovering the objectives that target expanding deals volume, piece of the pie, and benefit in the market. The present market circumstance will likewise be investigated remembering the market, item, appropriation, and rivalry. SWOT investigation has additionally been done to comprehend the present market situation. The market techniques regarding the 4p's to be specific item, value, place, advancement has additionally been examined. The item that will be examined in the report is Levi's Strauss pants. Organization profile: Levi's Strauss is an American attire organization that is known worldwide for its Levi Strauss brand of Denim pants. It was established in the year 1853. Levi Strauss is world broadly separated into three divisions. These divisions are in Europe, Middle East and Singapore. 10,500 representatives are by and by working for the organization. The promoting techniques of the organization basically incorporate TV commercials with old music chronicles. The organization has done well in the market and holds a decent brand value, the quantity of clique clients of the levi strauss pants is high among the youthful age. Levi's Strauss has a brand name which is well known among the individuals who think that its a style proclamation wearing the pants. All the showrooms of levi strauss are exceptionally slick and the climate is that they can pull in the adolescent without any problem. The examination is done fastidiously to appropriately comprehend what are the variables that truly influence the m arket space of levi strauss. The coordinated showcasing correspondence of Levi Strauss will assist with knowing the opposition in the market and an appropriate promoting plan can be attracted out of it to know Statistical surveying through a SWOT investigation: Levi Strauss is a brand that has a major market to play in. There are different market contenders with practically same product offering. In a market this way, the presence is extreme. So as to get by in the market the organization needs to think of new showcasing procedures to get new clients, new systems that would change the contenders client's to the levi strauss contenders. The SWOT investigation of the examination would tell us the different inner and outer qualities and shortcomings (Aldridge, 2005). Levi Strauss is an organization which manages attire and embellishments in the retail segment with the slogan of value never becomes unfashionable. The organization has its one of a kind selling recommendation of selling the most seasoned pants with the freshest style. It recognitions in the market of giving the clients the most in vogue structures of pants. The section of clients that it handles is the upper fragment and the center portion of the general public. The individuals w ith a faction to a la mode item are its principle purchasers. The SWOT investigation of the organization is given underneath: Qualities: 1. Solid brand name: The brand name of the organization is solid to such an extent that individuals while purchasing up-to-date pants and extras think about heading off to the Levi's Strauss outlets (Baines, Fill Page, 2008). The outlet consistently furnishes the clients with best of their stock and up to the degree of the client's expectations.2. Ace of the business: The Company has its name in the market since 1853, which is one of the most established so it is known as the ace of the market with broad information available and different techniques that has made it an organization that it is existing in the market for so long.3. Appropriation channel and re-appropriating: There are three colossal divisions that the organization has the world over, Europe, Singapore, and Middle East. It has a tremendous dispersion channel that gives the item everywhere throughout the globe. So as to hold its whole appropriation channel it needs to think of numerous deals and exchange advancements. T he deals and exchange advancement encourages it to hold in the market.4. 470 self-possessed stores and 16000 representatives: The Company has 470 stores of its own universally and has more than 16000 or more workers who works for the business. Having this enormous number of representatives and this many number of stores overall is a proof of the notoriety of the organization in the market. 16000 or more representatives are the explanation of its development and Levi Strauss is known for its plain conduct with its workers. Levi Strauss esteems its workers and in light of which the turnover proportion is low (Breward, 2003). The representative holding limit of the organization has made it to stand high before the competitors.5. Money and access to global capital: Since the organization has a tremendous cooperative attitude and great notoriety, its entrance to worldwide capital is likewise enormous. The money related help that the organization gets from the market is splendid. Access t o fund in the market gives the organization an edge over its rivals. The market is exceptionally unstable having quality like this is very commendable.6. Retro well known tunes: The publicizing methodology of Levi Strauss relies upon its accept of indicating the most famous tunes on its ads. They shoe the well known retro melodies, which looks slick and causes the watcher to see a positive and simultaneously entirely stylish about the product.7. Many assembling plants: the organization bears 60 assembling plants in the United States of America and 25 plants over the globe. The interest of the Levi Strauss pants is high thus the quantity of plants overall is colossal (Etzel, Walker Stanton, 2007). Shortcoming: 1. The organization has high weights from its rivals due to which it must be constantly arranged to be protective. The organization has solid rivalry in the market due to which it must be extremely clear about its techniques. The organization can't stand to lose its clients to its rivals. 2. Gigantic weight from the market: If there is enormous rivalry in the market, the contender is holding a similar line of item with exceptionally less separation, at that point the extension development turns out to be less. The organization needs to battle a great deal in the market to persuade the client to purchase the results of the organization rather than the competitor's. They can possibly do this on the off chance that they don't bargain with the quality. Quality is the main factor that holds the religion client. Oppurtunity: 1. Low assembling cost in global market: The organization can see this as an open door that there are nations where in the expense of creation is low a direct result of modest works, ease of land and so on Levi's Strauss gets this advantage of low creation since it has 25 assembling plants around the world (Groom, 2012). These assembling plants consistently produce the items at a low rate at that point created at the home market. It is as a chance and the quantity of plants should increment to have an edge over the contenders (Lake, 2015). 2. Developing easygoing wear advertise: The pattern has change, the quantity of individuals wearing easygoing wear has expanded and it is a help to the business. The pants business can play well and Levi Strauss can amplify its market, as this is a major chance. With respect to, the organization can amplify its promoting and its creation. The thought is to concocted new structures and styles and with various ranges so different classes of the general public can likewise become Levi Strauss' clients. To draw in different clients, the organization needs to care for it that it has more assortments and it there ought not be any trade off with the quality (Jones, 2002). 3. Worthiness on the planet advertise: The organization has items and extras which use to be worn by the western individuals sooner or later of time yet today the world has changed, individuals everywhere throughout the globe has acknowledged the western array, they wear them with incredible style and joy. Levi Strauss simply needs to search for additional business sectors to sell its items (Kerin, Hartley Rudelius, 2011). Dangers: 1. Quick evolving patterns: The present reality is dynamic and the pattern is changing step by step which gives very time for everything. Less opportunity for approaching up with new structures, less time for creation, less time for showcasing. This shortage of time prompts loss of creation, wastage of capital in showcasing. 2. Absence of property rights: In certain nations there are produces who make pants for the sake of Levi Strauss and sell them at low rates at business sectors. The client can't identify the quality and gets it at a low value (Kerin, Hartley Rudelius, 2013). This is exceptionally normal and it has demolished the client tally of the organization. The organization can't stop this since this is going on in some other nation (Kerin, Hartley Rudelius, 2011). 3. Expanding rivalry and item replacement: As referenced over the organization is confronting numerous difficulties in the global market as a result of its rivals (Kotler Keller, 2009). The market is hardened as the contenders hold same items and embellishments like that of Levi Strauss. The organization needs to investigate different angles before propelling its items in the market (Kotler Armstrong, 2012). There are enormous odds of large disappointments. Contenders: There are chiefly four co

Gild

Gild INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in  San Francisco, in the Gild office. Sheeroy, who are you and what do you do?Sheeroy: So, Im Sheeroy Desai. Im the co-founder and CEO of Gild. At Gild what we do is we help our customers, which are companies from startups all the way to very large enterprises. We have a software solution that helps them find, engage and end up hiring software engineers.Martin: Great!Martin: What is your background?Sheeroy: My background. I actually grew up in  Pakistan  and I came to the  US  to go to college. I went to MIT and got electrical engineering which I never used. I was fortunate enough that I graduated from the university right at the time when IT/software boom was just starting, which was the late 1980s. My first job was actually  at a startup, even though back then I didnt know what a startup was.Martin: Was it called a startup?Sheeroy: No, it wasnt. That wasnt even called a startup. It was just I thought it was just a small company. It was like 40 person company and I worked for it and I wasnt even quite sure what they did. But it turned out to be one of the very early companies that was pioneering in IT services. And it eventually became a company called  Cambridge Technology Partners, which went public and eventually got bought up by Novell.But anyway, I was there for about 3 years when we were very small and it was great training ground to just learn everything about, you know, I did some amount of engineering but really rapidly moved on to product development/product management. And then actually even I got a chance to engage a little bit of marketing and sales.So from there, a number of us who are actually mapped up at Cambridge Technology in the early days and worked together, about 5 of us, ended up leaving and regrouped and started a company called Sapient. That was in, like 91. And then I spent the next 17 years of my life at Sapient in various capacities, from again, doing product, management, client management, to opening new offices, to eventually doing international expansion, and then I spent the last 7 years as a Chief Operating Officer there.We took the company public, so by the time I left, it was over a 5,000 person company. Its still listed on the NASDAQ today, I think its about 13,000 people. Its enormous.So that was, you know, a really great experience in many, many different ways. I mean, taking a company from startup all the way to IPO and beyond. You know, obviously youll be able to side our ups and our downs. Because we also lived through the dot com bust and then survived that, so it was a lot of learning in those 17 years.Then, ultimately I left. I think I was really burnt out, quite frankly, after all that time in the company. And especially at least in the last at least 11 years, I was really being involved in running a public company that takes a toll after a while. And I was really missing being an entrepreneur again, doing something small again.My problem was that I didn t know what I wanted to do and I looked at a lot of smaller companies, or startups, and I just couldnt get passionate, excited about anything.Ultimately, I really came to comfort of doing a lot of soul searching. I came to the conclusion of what I was truly excited and passionate about is what we do here at Gild, which is really helping companies in. Let me back up and say it this way, which is the way, companies find talent and the way professionals find opportunities is one area that actually still the underlined way it works, the underlined processes, the structure, hasnt really changed in last 100 years. We rely in the same artifacts, whether thats a resume or LinkedIn profile now, whether thats an interview, we still do those things. There is no better way to get insights into people and to make better decisions. We use machine learning and analytics help our shopping experience for everything else today. But when it comes to shopping, lets call it for technology professionals or profession in general, we are still in the dark ages. So it was really that insight that prompted me to start Gild, and this was about a little over 3 years ago, at this point. Well, Luca and I got together and we kind of, he had his own startup and I was kind of thinking about doing this. And we got together and decide to initially focus on software engineers and here we are today.Martin: Great! How did you come up with this name and what are other alternative names did you think about?Sheeroy: We thought about like a million of them. We probably made a list of about 100 different names. You know the challenge today in coming up with the name is probably a couple of full. Number one, its very hard to find a real word that can be used as a name because theyre all taken. So a lot of companies make up names, right. The second challenge, even if you make up a name, is getting the URL. So quite frankly, these challenge for us wasnt being able to come up with names that we liked, that were creative, but actually being able to secure a URL and we wanted a dot-com URL. So ultimately, things converged towards Gild. The reason we like the name Gild because its a play on the word Guild, with a U, GUILD. The whole idea that there could be guild of technologist or the guild of other types of professions that we are trying to help. So that was the idea behind, but guild.com was taken and we couldnt get it but gild.com, GILD.com was taken but we were actually able to secure at a very reasonable price. So, thats how we ended up with the name.Martin: Great!BUSINESS MODEL OF GILDMartin: Can you briefly describe how the business model is working?Sheeroy: The business model is simple. The business model is really a SaaS, enterprise SaaS model. Our customers pay us for basically getting access to our database. So what we have, at the end of the day, is we have a database of over 11 million software engineers from around the world, for whom we have generated all kinds of public information, ranging from just a profile, a biographical information, all the way to downloading and analyzing  a new open source, code contribution that they may have. To analyzing their activity on QA forums, to analyzing the twitter feed. So we analyze anything possible about a software engineer and then trying to arrive to insights from that.Over time obviously, insights are getting better because the more data you have, the more correlations you have, the better are your predictions. Since ultimately we are really trying to make predictions around how good is a software engineer, how in demand might they be, and how likely is it that they move to a different job or opportunity.So those are the analytics that we provide to our customers, but then we also give them access to all the detailed data that weve collected on someone.  This is a highly rich profile. So with our software called Gild Source, you get access to all of these. Then there are some work flow built in there as well, so you can do a lot of relationship building with the candidates, you can do all kinds, you know think of it as almost like a CRM system for hiring. So you have a database and a CRM system, all combined together, and our customers get access to that and they just pay us on subscription base.Martin: Is it only for full time employees that you are trying to match with the employers, or is it also for project related kind of matching?Sheeroy: So, we dont distinguish. We are simply out there, looking for information on software engineers and trying to tell a customer how good they might be. Im sure many of them are looking for freelance opportunities and probably majority of them are looking for full time opportunities. But we dont differentiate between the two.Martin: Because I would imagine, if you distinguish between the two, then you can say that theres some kind of trigger or analytics behind that. Okay, that theres an 80 % chance that person would be willing to switch his jo b.Sheeroy: Right. I think we probably can if we have enough data that we probably could analyze it and be able to say, we think this person is more interested in a full time opportunity or this person is more interested in, you know some kind of part time or consulting. We dont do that. Thats an interesting idea. Something that our customers really havent brought up to us. And thats one of the things we really rely on quite a bit is, our customers.Very early on in the company, we made a decision to invest very heavily on what is today called Customer Success. Where 4 or 3 years ago, people refer it as customer service, we call it customer success from the start. The whole idea was not just so that we are making sure that our customers are successful in using our product but also, it builds a deep relationship so we truly understand, get feedback on the product. And thats really important to us.Martin: Theres one very interesting algorithm that you are using. Can you tell us a little bit more how this matching into supply and demand works.Sheeroy: I mean, its number one out of many algorithms over here. We started off very simple. In the first iteration of the algorithm really was all about just trying to tell our customers of how good some of them might be.The first iteration, that Luca built, was purely based on analyzing a software engineers open source code. So we would actually download the entire code repository that we would find, we parse it so we knew what programming languages they were using, how many lines of codes that were written, and then we would run analytics, basic analytics from the quality of the code, how extensive was the code, how well documented it is, etc. And based on those analytics, build issues of algorithms which would say, heres how good we think this software engineer is. It is heck of a lot more sophisticated today, 3 years later.So the software contribution is on the component of what we do, as I said, we also analyze activity and the level of activity on things like Stack Exchange, which is QA site. Then we start looking also at things, where the other developers that this individual is working with. So sometimes they collaborate on open source projects. Or maybe they are answering questions, or going back and forth with another developer, who is also very highly rated. Now, its like birds of feather flock together, so people of similar types tend to work together. So, if you are collaborating or working with really high engineers, chances are youre pretty too. Thats an additional insight we can grasp.And then it has gotten even more sophisticated because as we develop a very large database of what I called fact based software engineers. So now we can based on looking at quality of code or based on looking at their QA activity, etc., we can say that, in fact this software engineer is really very capable. But we can also start looking at matching people biographical backgrounds with the quality that  we think they are. So over time, weve also been able to get insights into Okay if we see a correlation on Im giving an example, I am not saying this is true, but an example maybe that anyone who worked at a certain company during the late 1990s as a software engineer, the chances are We see correlation that a lot of engineers there at that time were very high quality. So chances are, if we know nothing about you, all that we know is that you worked at that company in the late 1990s, now we can start making prediction that likelihood is reasonable that youre probably a pretty good software engineer. So analytics and as I said, there are many, many algorithms out here and the overall quality of the analytics and the complexity of the analytics, has gone up quite a bit over the course of the last 3 years.Martin: When you were a very young startup understanding your customer needs etc, its very important and you also said that the customer success is very important for you. How did you try to understand what the customers really want in the early days?Sheeroy: You know, it is still a challenge, not just early days, because, and I think this is the conundrum, because customers are great at telling you what is wrong with your product, what they dont like. They are very great at telling you how to tweak a certain feature, about what they like to see. That is good.Martin: Evolutionary stepSheeroy: Evolution stuff, they are very good at that. What customers are not very good at is revolutionary stuff. Because a lot of times, they dont know what they dont really need. So its really interesting because of what we focus on a lot. This is a trap, I think a lot of companies and entrepreneurs get into it, which is you start focusing on the recommendations that the customers are making.We tend to focus more on the pain that the customer has: what is not working for them, what is the problem. And then, Luca, the product team is doing an awesome job, of analyzing all the things th at are not going well for the customers to come up with a unique solution. We always ask ourselves: Can we address this need in a way that no one else has. Can we address them in a unique way that is going to be significantly better than what anyone else is doing? Thats the first place we go. If we cant do that, then the question  can we just get rid of the pain? But what we have found is, if you pay a lot of attention So what really comes down to all of this is being close to your customer and enough of your customer so you can see the patterns, where is the most pain.  Where are they most unhappy? And then being able to really look at ourselves Okay, is there a unique way in which we address that. So thats how we come up with the revolutionary solutions, and thats hard. That takes time.Martin: Would you describe the Gild business model more of a local market place or would you say its a more global market place where I can find and hire developers from another country?Sheeroy: I ts global. Our database is 100% global. So thats number one, the database is totally global. You can search developers anywhere. In terms of how customers implement that obviously smaller companies are more regional. They are looking to hire potentially in 1 or 2 locations. And our larger customers are more global. Theyre looking to hire people anywhere. Now having said all that, I think there are such a shortage of software engineers, they are such in high demand, we are even seeing startups now looking for software engineers anywhere in the world. You know, we are such a great example, actually more than half of our engineers team are actually in Europe, in  Milan. So, were seeing even smaller startups, 50 people or so, having operations in multiple continents.Martin: When you started, what were the minimum features that you that you tried to develop in the product and ship to the market in order to understand what the needs are, so you can decide for a revenue model etc.Sheeroy: The minimum features when we first started was basically was search and results. That really was the minimal things we were trying to do, which is a reasonably easy interface by which you can say: Okay I am looking for an iOS engineer in  San Francisco  or the Bay area; and then being able to give them results that are relevant to that search and having analytics be good enough that they would make sense.I remember reviewing the first version of the product, it was really rough. The UI (user interface) was extremely rough, we made a lot of assumptions. But I do think among things we did well was, we immediately start taking it to market. We just started talking to tons and tons of prospects, showing it to them, getting their feedback and then about 3 months later, we actually started charging customers. Not because honestly that I thought the product was so great that we should be charging. But again, a startup is all about testing a hypothesis, right. First half of the hypothesis w as, if we give this level of intelligence is anybody going to care? That was getting anybody to say, this is great, I really like it. So second half of the hypothesis was, has anyone willing to pay for it. Thats why we start charging for it. And within a couple of months we had actually. I think within 2 months were like 20+ paying customers. So like Okay, this is working, people are paying for it.Martin: How did you solve this hen egg problem? Because when you started, this is basically a type of market place which is connected by some kind of scoring algorithm. How did you create the first 1,000 or 2,000 of developers and their first 50 100 companies.Sheeroy: Its a great question, which comes first, the hen or the egg. Actually, right before we started doing what were doing, the Gild Source business, the prior incarnation of our business actually was, we were building a website where software engineers could come and take coding challenges and puzzles and write code and we would analyze that code. So thats truly trying to build a market place. On the one hand, trying to get the software engineers, on the other hand trying to get customers and kind of have supply and demand. That is very challenging. It was actually an outflow from them, which is as we kind of work on there for months and months and we finally realized Gosh, we were trying to build a two sided market is very hard because just the value proposition for the software engineers wasnt compelling if there werent any employers. And for employers its not very compelling if you dont have at least tens of thousands of software engineers that they can search and choose from. That was a big problem.Thats how initially, Luca came up with the idea. He said. Well, lets address the supplier issue just by creating profiles for this software engineers by looking at their public activity. So in a way, we started creating an inventory of software engineers, so then we can then just focused on building out the c ustomers side of it. The initial thought was we would go back and build a community of software engineers but as we continue to move down, we realized, we dont really need to do that. So thats how we got going.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: Sheeroy, lets talk about the corporate strategy. Youre currently have this kind of market for software developers. What are your thought on adding other verticals and whether you can also apply this kind of data driven decision process.Sheeroy: We started a company so that eventually we solve the problem of hiring any professions, not just software engineers. So that remains our mission over time. We want to provide this level of analytics and insight into any professional. Lots of challenges to it.Weve been thinking about this for a while, and we have a viewpoint on how we can eventually get there. Which is a secret, Im not going to share that. What Im thinking is on that. But no, we obviously have been thinking about that and well continue in the lo ng term to execute towards that. So thats one answer.Second answer is, were building a company here for the long term. In the way we think about ourselves and talk about ourselves, we want to build a company, this type of problem were trying to solve its not going to get solved overnight. Its going to take some time. So were Okay with that. We are in no rush to just get there tomorrow. With that realization, we also have realized that, if you want to build a very large company, theres a saying if you want to build a monopoly, a broad monopoly, first you got to build a monopoly in a small market. Get that going, get that right, and then  you have the opportunity to build a monopoly in the greater market.So thats what were trying to do, were really trying to get it right in software engineering. And really understand what it takes to win and be successful there. Because once we have all the answers there then duplicating this to other professions would be a lot easier for us.Martin: I n terms of competitive advantage, would you rather say that Gild has the advantage of having  a large network effects, or is it more that Gild scoring system is the key source?Sheeroy: I think our competitive advantage is our analytics. I mean no one else that Im aware of, no other competitor I mean competitors are doing very resourceful things, they are competitors who are aggregating profiles. So to your point earlier, Ill go on LinkedIn and scraping it, Ill go scrape Twitter, and Ill go scrape Facebook, and Ill try to give you an aggregated profile, and we do all that. But no one is doing is really the additional insight of really telling you how good some of us and why we really think this person is good and what they are good at. Why they are in high demand or not, or when they might be looking for a job. Those are analytics that no other competitors are providing. That remains our competitive advantage.Martin: Great!MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Tell me about market development. C an you give us a brief overview of how you perceived the kind of market and the players in the market and what is currently happening over there?Sheeroy: So we play in kind of Recruiting HR market. Like most markets, its   fairly saturated, theres a lot of noise. Its a noise in market, which is a few are the head of HR, a few head of recruiting acquisition in a company. Chances are high, you probably get a 5-10 emails, voicemails a day telling you, Oh, I have this new amazing thing. A challenge for them, the challenge for us how do you actually get yourself above that noise level. Theres no easy answer to this. I mean I wish I could say, Heres the magic that we came up. But theres no easy magical answer to this. It is a number of things.For us, what we did is number one, that I think is a little bit unique and different than I see some other startups doing. We do all the normal stuff you would expect us to do: we do contact marketing, we do lead generation, and we do lead nurturing and all that stuff.But I think some of the things that we did differently is, we focus on brand building very early on in the life cycle of the company. So, we were only in the market less than a year, when we were able to get a business cover page story on the New York Times on Gild. That was huge. Probably when I think back in my career like years and years and years from now, Im most likely will remember that Sunday morning, getting the New York Times and right there on the cover. I mean, that doesnt happen very often. That was a good nine months of effort on our part. We had to cultivate a relationship with the New York Times, we had to stay on them, we had to give them really meaningful story that they could write about. It took a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of money, I guess in some ways. I got to get to invest in PR, as an example. A lot of startups dont believe in that stuff and I understand why they say that. But I think in our case, thats one example of many di fferent things that weve done that have allowed us to stand up above everyone else. And as you know, Id say, I think, one of the things that has distinguish us and hopefully will continue to distinguish us, is our efforts and our emphasis on brand building, which is a long term payoffs. It doesnt payoff short term.Martin: Okay.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM SHEEROY DESAI In San Francisco, we meet co-founder and CEO of Gild, Sheeroy Desai. He shares his story how Gild was founded and how the current business model works, as well as what the current plans are for the near future, and some advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcript of the interview is provided below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in  San Francisco, in the Gild office. Sheeroy, who are you and what do you do?Sheeroy: So, Im Sheeroy Desai. Im the co-founder and CEO of Gild. At Gild what we do is we help our customers, which are companies from startups all the way to very large enterprises. We have a software solution that helps them find, engage and end up hiring software engineers.Martin: Great!Martin: What is your background?Sheeroy: My background. I actually grew up in  Pakistan  and I came to the  US  to go to college. I went to MIT and got electrical engineering which I never used. I was fortunate enough that I graduated from the university right at the time when IT/software boom was just starting, which was the late 1980s. My first job was actually  at a startup, even though back then I didnt know what a startup was.Martin: Was it called a startup?Sheeroy: No, it wasnt. That wasnt even called a startup. It was just I thought it was just a small company. It was like 40 person company and I worked for it and I wasnt even quite sure what they did. But it turned out to be one of the very early companies that was pioneering in IT services. And it eventually became a company called  Cambridge Technology Partners, which went public and eventually got bought up by Novell.But anyway, I was there for about 3 years when we were very small and it was great training ground to just learn everything about, you know, I did some amount of engineering but really rapidly moved on to product development/product management. And then actually even I got a chance to engage a little bit of marketing and sales.So from there, a number of us who are actually mapped up at Cambr idge Technology in the early days and worked together, about 5 of us, ended up leaving and regrouped and started a company called Sapient. That was in, like 91. And then I spent the next 17 years of my life at Sapient in various capacities, from again, doing product, management, client management, to opening new offices, to eventually doing international expansion, and then I spent the last 7 years as a Chief Operating Officer there.We took the company public, so by the time I left, it was over a 5,000 person company. Its still listed on the NASDAQ today, I think its about 13,000 people. Its enormous.So that was, you know, a really great experience in many, many different ways. I mean, taking a company from startup all the way to IPO and beyond. You know, obviously youll be able to side our ups and our downs. Because we also lived through the dot com bust and then survived that, so it was a lot of learning in those 17 years.Then, ultimately I left. I think I was really burnt out, qu ite frankly, after all that time in the company. And especially at least in the last at least 11 years, I was really being involved in running a public company that takes a toll after a while. And I was really missing being an entrepreneur again, doing something small again.My problem was that I didnt know what I wanted to do and I looked at a lot of smaller companies, or startups, and I just couldnt get passionate, excited about anything.Ultimately, I really came to comfort of doing a lot of soul searching. I came to the conclusion of what I was truly excited and passionate about is what we do here at Gild, which is really helping companies in. Let me back up and say it this way, which is the way, companies find talent and the way professionals find opportunities is one area that actually still the underlined way it works, the underlined processes, the structure, hasnt really changed in last 100 years. We rely in the same artifacts, whether thats a resume or LinkedIn profile now, w hether thats an interview, we still do those things. There is no better way to get insights into people and to make better decisions. We use machine learning and analytics help our shopping experience for everything else today. But when it comes to shopping, lets call it for technology professionals or profession in general, we are still in the dark ages. So it was really that insight that prompted me to start Gild, and this was about a little over 3 years ago, at this point. Well, Luca and I got together and we kind of, he had his own startup and I was kind of thinking about doing this. And we got together and decide to initially focus on software engineers and here we are today.Martin: Great! How did you come up with this name and what are other alternative names did you think about?Sheeroy: We thought about like a million of them. We probably made a list of about 100 different names. You know the challenge today in coming up with the name is probably a couple of full. Number one, its very hard to find a real word that can be used as a name because theyre all taken. So a lot of companies make up names, right. The second challenge, even if you make up a name, is getting the URL. So quite frankly, these challenge for us wasnt being able to come up with names that we liked, that were creative, but actually being able to secure a URL and we wanted a dot-com URL. So ultimately, things converged towards Gild. The reason we like the name Gild because its a play on the word Guild, with a U, GUILD. The whole idea that there could be guild of technologist or the guild of other types of professions that we are trying to help. So that was the idea behind, but guild.com was taken and we couldnt get it but gild.com, GILD.com was taken but we were actually able to secure at a very reasonable price. So, thats how we ended up with the name.Martin: Great!BUSINESS MODEL OF GILDMartin: Can you briefly describe how the business model is working?Sheeroy: The business model is sim ple. The business model is really a SaaS, enterprise SaaS model. Our customers pay us for basically getting access to our database. So what we have, at the end of the day, is we have a database of over 11 million software engineers from around the world, for whom we have generated all kinds of public information, ranging from just a profile, a biographical information, all the way to downloading and analyzing  a new open source, code contribution that they may have. To analyzing their activity on QA forums, to analyzing the twitter feed. So we analyze anything possible about a software engineer and then trying to arrive to insights from that.Over time obviously, insights are getting better because the more data you have, the more correlations you have, the better are your predictions. Since ultimately we are really trying to make predictions around how good is a software engineer, how in demand might they be, and how likely is it that they move to a different job or opportunity.So t hose are the analytics that we provide to our customers, but then we also give them access to all the detailed data that weve collected on someone.  This is a highly rich profile. So with our software called Gild Source, you get access to all of these. Then there are some work flow built in there as well, so you can do a lot of relationship building with the candidates, you can do all kinds, you know think of it as almost like a CRM system for hiring. So you have a database and a CRM system, all combined together, and our customers get access to that and they just pay us on subscription base.Martin: Is it only for full time employees that you are trying to match with the employers, or is it also for project related kind of matching?Sheeroy: So, we dont distinguish. We are simply out there, looking for information on software engineers and trying to tell a customer how good they might be. Im sure many of them are looking for freelance opportunities and probably majority of them are l ooking for full time opportunities. But we dont differentiate between the two.Martin: Because I would imagine, if you distinguish between the two, then you can say that theres some kind of trigger or analytics behind that. Okay, that theres an 80 % chance that person would be willing to switch his job.Sheeroy: Right. I think we probably can if we have enough data that we probably could analyze it and be able to say, we think this person is more interested in a full time opportunity or this person is more interested in, you know some kind of part time or consulting. We dont do that. Thats an interesting idea. Something that our customers really havent brought up to us. And thats one of the things we really rely on quite a bit is, our customers.Very early on in the company, we made a decision to invest very heavily on what is today called Customer Success. Where 4 or 3 years ago, people refer it as customer service, we call it customer success from the start. The whole idea was not ju st so that we are making sure that our customers are successful in using our product but also, it builds a deep relationship so we truly understand, get feedback on the product. And thats really important to us.Martin: Theres one very interesting algorithm that you are using. Can you tell us a little bit more how this matching into supply and demand works.Sheeroy: I mean, its number one out of many algorithms over here. We started off very simple. In the first iteration of the algorithm really was all about just trying to tell our customers of how good some of them might be.The first iteration, that Luca built, was purely based on analyzing a software engineers open source code. So we would actually download the entire code repository that we would find, we parse it so we knew what programming languages they were using, how many lines of codes that were written, and then we would run analytics, basic analytics from the quality of the code, how extensive was the code, how well docume nted it is, etc. And based on those analytics, build issues of algorithms which would say, heres how good we think this software engineer is. It is heck of a lot more sophisticated today, 3 years later.So the software contribution is on the component of what we do, as I said, we also analyze activity and the level of activity on things like Stack Exchange, which is QA site. Then we start looking also at things, where the other developers that this individual is working with. So sometimes they collaborate on open source projects. Or maybe they are answering questions, or going back and forth with another developer, who is also very highly rated. Now, its like birds of feather flock together, so people of similar types tend to work together. So, if you are collaborating or working with really high engineers, chances are youre pretty too. Thats an additional insight we can grasp.And then it has gotten even more sophisticated because as we develop a very large database of what I called fact based software engineers. So now we can based on looking at quality of code or based on looking at their QA activity, etc., we can say that, in fact this software engineer is really very capable. But we can also start looking at matching people biographical backgrounds with the quality that  we think they are. So over time, weve also been able to get insights into Okay if we see a correlation on Im giving an example, I am not saying this is true, but an example maybe that anyone who worked at a certain company during the late 1990s as a software engineer, the chances are We see correlation that a lot of engineers there at that time were very high quality. So chances are, if we know nothing about you, all that we know is that you worked at that company in the late 1990s, now we can start making prediction that likelihood is reasonable that youre probably a pretty good software engineer. So analytics and as I said, there are many, many algorithms out here and the overall quality of the analytics and the complexity of the analytics, has gone up quite a bit over the course of the last 3 years.Martin: When you were a very young startup understanding your customer needs etc, its very important and you also said that the customer success is very important for you. How did you try to understand what the customers really want in the early days?Sheeroy: You know, it is still a challenge, not just early days, because, and I think this is the conundrum, because customers are great at telling you what is wrong with your product, what they dont like. They are very great at telling you how to tweak a certain feature, about what they like to see. That is good.Martin: Evolutionary stepSheeroy: Evolution stuff, they are very good at that. What customers are not very good at is revolutionary stuff. Because a lot of times, they dont know what they dont really need. So its really interesting because of what we focus on a lot. This is a trap, I think a lot of companies and ent repreneurs get into it, which is you start focusing on the recommendations that the customers are making.We tend to focus more on the pain that the customer has: what is not working for them, what is the problem. And then, Luca, the product team is doing an awesome job, of analyzing all the things that are not going well for the customers to come up with a unique solution. We always ask ourselves: Can we address this need in a way that no one else has. Can we address them in a unique way that is going to be significantly better than what anyone else is doing? Thats the first place we go. If we cant do that, then the question  can we just get rid of the pain? But what we have found is, if you pay a lot of attention So what really comes down to all of this is being close to your customer and enough of your customer so you can see the patterns, where is the most pain.  Where are they most unhappy? And then being able to really look at ourselves Okay, is there a unique way in which we address that. So thats how we come up with the revolutionary solutions, and thats hard. That takes time.Martin: Would you describe the Gild business model more of a local market place or would you say its a more global market place where I can find and hire developers from another country?Sheeroy: Its global. Our database is 100% global. So thats number one, the database is totally global. You can search developers anywhere. In terms of how customers implement that obviously smaller companies are more regional. They are looking to hire potentially in 1 or 2 locations. And our larger customers are more global. Theyre looking to hire people anywhere. Now having said all that, I think there are such a shortage of software engineers, they are such in high demand, we are even seeing startups now looking for software engineers anywhere in the world. You know, we are such a great example, actually more than half of our engineers team are actually in Europe, in  Milan. So, were seeing even smaller startups, 50 people or so, having operations in multiple continents.Martin: When you started, what were the minimum features that you that you tried to develop in the product and ship to the market in order to understand what the needs are, so you can decide for a revenue model etc.Sheeroy: The minimum features when we first started was basically was search and results. That really was the minimal things we were trying to do, which is a reasonably easy interface by which you can say: Okay I am looking for an iOS engineer in  San Francisco  or the Bay area; and then being able to give them results that are relevant to that search and having analytics be good enough that they would make sense.I remember reviewing the first version of the product, it was really rough. The UI (user interface) was extremely rough, we made a lot of assumptions. But I do think among things we did well was, we immediately start taking it to market. We just started talking to tons and tons of prospe cts, showing it to them, getting their feedback and then about 3 months later, we actually started charging customers. Not because honestly that I thought the product was so great that we should be charging. But again, a startup is all about testing a hypothesis, right. First half of the hypothesis was, if we give this level of intelligence is anybody going to care? That was getting anybody to say, this is great, I really like it. So second half of the hypothesis was, has anyone willing to pay for it. Thats why we start charging for it. And within a couple of months we had actually. I think within 2 months were like 20+ paying customers. So like Okay, this is working, people are paying for it.Martin: How did you solve this hen egg problem? Because when you started, this is basically a type of market place which is connected by some kind of scoring algorithm. How did you create the first 1,000 or 2,000 of developers and their first 50 100 companies.Sheeroy: Its a great question, whi ch comes first, the hen or the egg. Actually, right before we started doing what were doing, the Gild Source business, the prior incarnation of our business actually was, we were building a website where software engineers could come and take coding challenges and puzzles and write code and we would analyze that code. So thats truly trying to build a market place. On the one hand, trying to get the software engineers, on the other hand trying to get customers and kind of have supply and demand. That is very challenging. It was actually an outflow from them, which is as we kind of work on there for months and months and we finally realized Gosh, we were trying to build a two sided market is very hard because just the value proposition for the software engineers wasnt compelling if there werent any employers. And for employers its not very compelling if you dont have at least tens of thousands of software engineers that they can search and choose from. That was a big problem.Thats how initially, Luca came up with the idea. He said. Well, lets address the supplier issue just by creating profiles for this software engineers by looking at their public activity. So in a way, we started creating an inventory of software engineers, so then we can then just focused on building out the customers side of it. The initial thought was we would go back and build a community of software engineers but as we continue to move down, we realized, we dont really need to do that. So thats how we got going.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: Sheeroy, lets talk about the corporate strategy. Youre currently have this kind of market for software developers. What are your thought on adding other verticals and whether you can also apply this kind of data driven decision process.Sheeroy: We started a company so that eventually we solve the problem of hiring any professions, not just software engineers. So that remains our mission over time. We want to provide this level of analytics and insight into any professional. Lots of challenges to it.Weve been thinking about this for a while, and we have a viewpoint on how we can eventually get there. Which is a secret, Im not going to share that. What Im thinking is on that. But no, we obviously have been thinking about that and well continue in the long term to execute towards that. So thats one answer.Second answer is, were building a company here for the long term. In the way we think about ourselves and talk about ourselves, we want to build a company, this type of problem were trying to solve its not going to get solved overnight. Its going to take some time. So were Okay with that. We are in no rush to just get there tomorrow. With that realization, we also have realized that, if you want to build a very large company, theres a saying if you want to build a monopoly, a broad monopoly, first you got to build a monopoly in a small market. Get that going, get that right, and then  you have the opportunity to build a monopoly in the greater market.So thats what were trying to do, were really trying to get it right in software engineering. And really understand what it takes to win and be successful there. Because once we have all the answers there then duplicating this to other professions would be a lot easier for us.Martin: In terms of competitive advantage, would you rather say that Gild has the advantage of having  a large network effects, or is it more that Gild scoring system is the key source?Sheeroy: I think our competitive advantage is our analytics. I mean no one else that Im aware of, no other competitor I mean competitors are doing very resourceful things, they are competitors who are aggregating profiles. So to your point earlier, Ill go on LinkedIn and scraping it, Ill go scrape Twitter, and Ill go scrape Facebook, and Ill try to give you an aggregated profile, and we do all that. But no one is doing is really the additional insight of really telling you how good some of us and why we really thin k this person is good and what they are good at. Why they are in high demand or not, or when they might be looking for a job. Those are analytics that no other competitors are providing. That remains our competitive advantage.Martin: Great!MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Tell me about market development. Can you give us a brief overview of how you perceived the kind of market and the players in the market and what is currently happening over there?Sheeroy: So we play in kind of Recruiting HR market. Like most markets, its   fairly saturated, theres a lot of noise. Its a noise in market, which is a few are the head of HR, a few head of recruiting acquisition in a company. Chances are high, you probably get a 5-10 emails, voicemails a day telling you, Oh, I have this new amazing thing. A challenge for them, the challenge for us how do you actually get yourself above that noise level. Theres no easy answer to this. I mean I wish I could say, Heres the magic that we came up. But theres no eas y magical answer to this. It is a number of things.For us, what we did is number one, that I think is a little bit unique and different than I see some other startups doing. We do all the normal stuff you would expect us to do: we do contact marketing, we do lead generation, and we do lead nurturing and all that stuff.But I think some of the things that we did differently is, we focus on brand building very early on in the life cycle of the company. So, we were only in the market less than a year, when we were able to get a business cover page story on the New York Times on Gild. That was huge. Probably when I think back in my career like years and years and years from now, Im most likely will remember that Sunday morning, getting the New York Times and right there on the cover. I mean, that doesnt happen very often. That was a good nine months of effort on our part. We had to cultivate a relationship with the New York Times, we had to stay on them, we had to give them really meanin gful story that they could write about. It took a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of money, I guess in some ways. I got to get to invest in PR, as an example. A lot of startups dont believe in that stuff and I understand why they say that. But I think in our case, thats one example of many different things that weve done that have allowed us to stand up above everyone else. And as you know, Id say, I think, one of the things that has distinguish us and hopefully will continue to distinguish us, is our efforts and our emphasis on brand building, which is a long term payoffs. It doesnt payoff short term.Martin: Okay.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM SHEEROY DESAIMartin: For our readers, we always try to share some knowledge, so they make less errors when they start their companies. What would be your advice when starting a company? Maybe you can also talk about when starting a market place.Sheeroy: Starting a company, a couple of things I could probably go on for a while. Just imag ine a couple of things.One of the things that I said earlier, which is dont be afraid to put your product into market early. I think one of the mistakes, entrepreneurs make is that they want to put out a highly polished product and get it right. The fact that matters, you wont get it right, you just wont. Because you dont know, you dont know what the market really wants. So dont worry too much about that, get a product on the market and then get real feedback. So thats the first thing I would say. Thats a process of constantly iterating until you achieved product market fit. Stay really focused on that. So, thats not a unique advice that Im giving, lots of people do that. But its harder than what people think it is.The other thing is, and maybe this is a little more what I see here in the Valley. So Im trying to give some slightly different advice. Theres a lot of   focus on fundraising. Of course, especially if you are going to be a SaaS startup or something like that, theres a lot of investment you need to make, and the revenue is kind of trickle in slowly. So, believe me from first hand, I totally understand that financing has a key role. But I do think theres a tendency to get a little bit consumed by financing and worry a lot about evaluation and this and that. From all my experience, I can tell you, worry about the quality of the investor, someone whos going to be a long term partner. Someone you trust and youre going enjoy working with for 10 years because thats what youre signing up for. I think a lot of people get focused on evaluation and the amount they raise, and things like that. I kind of emphasized enough spend really time vetting the investor. If it is a VC firm, vet the partner. This is someone you really want to be talking to on a Sunday evening because thats going to happen. This is the person you want to be seeing at least once a month and this is going to happen because you got to spend a lot of time with this person. So thats the other pi ece of advice Id give.Market place is tough. I mean, what Id say is learn from us and learn from others whove done the same thing, which is youve got to  create a supply somewhere. I think the best way to get a market place going is to create that supply artificially.In our case, it was really aggregating and creating these profiles, which end up really being our business. Thats the funny thing, because we havent gone back to building a market place. But, I would say, try to figure out how to artificially create one side of the market and then go aggressively create the other side. The other side hopefully should be the side that pays, so you can start monetizing.Martin: From my understanding, a lot of people when trying to start a market place, they can start by artificially creating some kind of supply. Like some people, what I would call a good artificial supplier, which is real. And some others are trying putting fake profiles, which from my understanding, the majority of people are doing that. What would you recommend, I mean obviously, the artificial supplier would be supported but in most cases it wont work. Would it?Sheeroy: I think it depends on the market place. This is a question of what happens when the rubber actually hits the road, right? What do you actually do? There is no easy answer. I think each market place is a little bit different, but what I would say is, number one is be clear where you are going to generate your revenues from. That part you cant fake. What you got to make sure number one is what is going to be valuable value proposition. Get that value proposition right, then on the flip side, can you generate that artificially. There are many different ways to do it artificially, you dont have to have   a huge market. Say, I wanted to build a food delivery startup in  San Francisco. Think what I would worry about most is who is going to want the service and are they willing to pay for it. I could artificially put up hundred restaurant s, you can order from any of these restaurants, and the people start ordering, then I got to make sure maybe its me once the order comes in, is running to the restaurant and getting the food or I have some freelancers thats doing that for me. The other side doesnt need to know how you are satisfying the demand. So those are many ways in which you can create artificial supply without really, you dont have 1,000 restaurants. You dont have any agreement with 1,000 restaurants but the buying side doesnt need to know that.So those are the creative things about. So thats why I think market place is tough and I have a lot of admiration for people who pull off market places. Uber, for example has done great. Until you have a startup where you dealt with a market place problem, I dont think you understand, how logistically hard it is to pull something like that off.Martin: Sheeroy, thank you very much for your time. When you hire the next time one of your great employees, whether its a techi e or a finance guy, maybe you should be thinking more about data driven recruiting. Thank you very much!

Gild

Gild INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in  San Francisco, in the Gild office. Sheeroy, who are you and what do you do?Sheeroy: So, Im Sheeroy Desai. Im the co-founder and CEO of Gild. At Gild what we do is we help our customers, which are companies from startups all the way to very large enterprises. We have a software solution that helps them find, engage and end up hiring software engineers.Martin: Great!Martin: What is your background?Sheeroy: My background. I actually grew up in  Pakistan  and I came to the  US  to go to college. I went to MIT and got electrical engineering which I never used. I was fortunate enough that I graduated from the university right at the time when IT/software boom was just starting, which was the late 1980s. My first job was actually  at a startup, even though back then I didnt know what a startup was.Martin: Was it called a startup?Sheeroy: No, it wasnt. That wasnt even called a startup. It was just I thought it was just a small company. It was like 40 person company and I worked for it and I wasnt even quite sure what they did. But it turned out to be one of the very early companies that was pioneering in IT services. And it eventually became a company called  Cambridge Technology Partners, which went public and eventually got bought up by Novell.But anyway, I was there for about 3 years when we were very small and it was great training ground to just learn everything about, you know, I did some amount of engineering but really rapidly moved on to product development/product management. And then actually even I got a chance to engage a little bit of marketing and sales.So from there, a number of us who are actually mapped up at Cambridge Technology in the early days and worked together, about 5 of us, ended up leaving and regrouped and started a company called Sapient. That was in, like 91. And then I spent the next 17 years of my life at Sapient in various capacities, from again, doing product, management, client management, to opening new offices, to eventually doing international expansion, and then I spent the last 7 years as a Chief Operating Officer there.We took the company public, so by the time I left, it was over a 5,000 person company. Its still listed on the NASDAQ today, I think its about 13,000 people. Its enormous.So that was, you know, a really great experience in many, many different ways. I mean, taking a company from startup all the way to IPO and beyond. You know, obviously youll be able to side our ups and our downs. Because we also lived through the dot com bust and then survived that, so it was a lot of learning in those 17 years.Then, ultimately I left. I think I was really burnt out, quite frankly, after all that time in the company. And especially at least in the last at least 11 years, I was really being involved in running a public company that takes a toll after a while. And I was really missing being an entrepreneur again, doing something small again.My problem was that I didn t know what I wanted to do and I looked at a lot of smaller companies, or startups, and I just couldnt get passionate, excited about anything.Ultimately, I really came to comfort of doing a lot of soul searching. I came to the conclusion of what I was truly excited and passionate about is what we do here at Gild, which is really helping companies in. Let me back up and say it this way, which is the way, companies find talent and the way professionals find opportunities is one area that actually still the underlined way it works, the underlined processes, the structure, hasnt really changed in last 100 years. We rely in the same artifacts, whether thats a resume or LinkedIn profile now, whether thats an interview, we still do those things. There is no better way to get insights into people and to make better decisions. We use machine learning and analytics help our shopping experience for everything else today. But when it comes to shopping, lets call it for technology professionals or profession in general, we are still in the dark ages. So it was really that insight that prompted me to start Gild, and this was about a little over 3 years ago, at this point. Well, Luca and I got together and we kind of, he had his own startup and I was kind of thinking about doing this. And we got together and decide to initially focus on software engineers and here we are today.Martin: Great! How did you come up with this name and what are other alternative names did you think about?Sheeroy: We thought about like a million of them. We probably made a list of about 100 different names. You know the challenge today in coming up with the name is probably a couple of full. Number one, its very hard to find a real word that can be used as a name because theyre all taken. So a lot of companies make up names, right. The second challenge, even if you make up a name, is getting the URL. So quite frankly, these challenge for us wasnt being able to come up with names that we liked, that were creative, but actually being able to secure a URL and we wanted a dot-com URL. So ultimately, things converged towards Gild. The reason we like the name Gild because its a play on the word Guild, with a U, GUILD. The whole idea that there could be guild of technologist or the guild of other types of professions that we are trying to help. So that was the idea behind, but guild.com was taken and we couldnt get it but gild.com, GILD.com was taken but we were actually able to secure at a very reasonable price. So, thats how we ended up with the name.Martin: Great!BUSINESS MODEL OF GILDMartin: Can you briefly describe how the business model is working?Sheeroy: The business model is simple. The business model is really a SaaS, enterprise SaaS model. Our customers pay us for basically getting access to our database. So what we have, at the end of the day, is we have a database of over 11 million software engineers from around the world, for whom we have generated all kinds of public information, ranging from just a profile, a biographical information, all the way to downloading and analyzing  a new open source, code contribution that they may have. To analyzing their activity on QA forums, to analyzing the twitter feed. So we analyze anything possible about a software engineer and then trying to arrive to insights from that.Over time obviously, insights are getting better because the more data you have, the more correlations you have, the better are your predictions. Since ultimately we are really trying to make predictions around how good is a software engineer, how in demand might they be, and how likely is it that they move to a different job or opportunity.So those are the analytics that we provide to our customers, but then we also give them access to all the detailed data that weve collected on someone.  This is a highly rich profile. So with our software called Gild Source, you get access to all of these. Then there are some work flow built in there as well, so you can do a lot of relationship building with the candidates, you can do all kinds, you know think of it as almost like a CRM system for hiring. So you have a database and a CRM system, all combined together, and our customers get access to that and they just pay us on subscription base.Martin: Is it only for full time employees that you are trying to match with the employers, or is it also for project related kind of matching?Sheeroy: So, we dont distinguish. We are simply out there, looking for information on software engineers and trying to tell a customer how good they might be. Im sure many of them are looking for freelance opportunities and probably majority of them are looking for full time opportunities. But we dont differentiate between the two.Martin: Because I would imagine, if you distinguish between the two, then you can say that theres some kind of trigger or analytics behind that. Okay, that theres an 80 % chance that person would be willing to switch his jo b.Sheeroy: Right. I think we probably can if we have enough data that we probably could analyze it and be able to say, we think this person is more interested in a full time opportunity or this person is more interested in, you know some kind of part time or consulting. We dont do that. Thats an interesting idea. Something that our customers really havent brought up to us. And thats one of the things we really rely on quite a bit is, our customers.Very early on in the company, we made a decision to invest very heavily on what is today called Customer Success. Where 4 or 3 years ago, people refer it as customer service, we call it customer success from the start. The whole idea was not just so that we are making sure that our customers are successful in using our product but also, it builds a deep relationship so we truly understand, get feedback on the product. And thats really important to us.Martin: Theres one very interesting algorithm that you are using. Can you tell us a little bit more how this matching into supply and demand works.Sheeroy: I mean, its number one out of many algorithms over here. We started off very simple. In the first iteration of the algorithm really was all about just trying to tell our customers of how good some of them might be.The first iteration, that Luca built, was purely based on analyzing a software engineers open source code. So we would actually download the entire code repository that we would find, we parse it so we knew what programming languages they were using, how many lines of codes that were written, and then we would run analytics, basic analytics from the quality of the code, how extensive was the code, how well documented it is, etc. And based on those analytics, build issues of algorithms which would say, heres how good we think this software engineer is. It is heck of a lot more sophisticated today, 3 years later.So the software contribution is on the component of what we do, as I said, we also analyze activity and the level of activity on things like Stack Exchange, which is QA site. Then we start looking also at things, where the other developers that this individual is working with. So sometimes they collaborate on open source projects. Or maybe they are answering questions, or going back and forth with another developer, who is also very highly rated. Now, its like birds of feather flock together, so people of similar types tend to work together. So, if you are collaborating or working with really high engineers, chances are youre pretty too. Thats an additional insight we can grasp.And then it has gotten even more sophisticated because as we develop a very large database of what I called fact based software engineers. So now we can based on looking at quality of code or based on looking at their QA activity, etc., we can say that, in fact this software engineer is really very capable. But we can also start looking at matching people biographical backgrounds with the quality that  we think they are. So over time, weve also been able to get insights into Okay if we see a correlation on Im giving an example, I am not saying this is true, but an example maybe that anyone who worked at a certain company during the late 1990s as a software engineer, the chances are We see correlation that a lot of engineers there at that time were very high quality. So chances are, if we know nothing about you, all that we know is that you worked at that company in the late 1990s, now we can start making prediction that likelihood is reasonable that youre probably a pretty good software engineer. So analytics and as I said, there are many, many algorithms out here and the overall quality of the analytics and the complexity of the analytics, has gone up quite a bit over the course of the last 3 years.Martin: When you were a very young startup understanding your customer needs etc, its very important and you also said that the customer success is very important for you. How did you try to understand what the customers really want in the early days?Sheeroy: You know, it is still a challenge, not just early days, because, and I think this is the conundrum, because customers are great at telling you what is wrong with your product, what they dont like. They are very great at telling you how to tweak a certain feature, about what they like to see. That is good.Martin: Evolutionary stepSheeroy: Evolution stuff, they are very good at that. What customers are not very good at is revolutionary stuff. Because a lot of times, they dont know what they dont really need. So its really interesting because of what we focus on a lot. This is a trap, I think a lot of companies and entrepreneurs get into it, which is you start focusing on the recommendations that the customers are making.We tend to focus more on the pain that the customer has: what is not working for them, what is the problem. And then, Luca, the product team is doing an awesome job, of analyzing all the things th at are not going well for the customers to come up with a unique solution. We always ask ourselves: Can we address this need in a way that no one else has. Can we address them in a unique way that is going to be significantly better than what anyone else is doing? Thats the first place we go. If we cant do that, then the question  can we just get rid of the pain? But what we have found is, if you pay a lot of attention So what really comes down to all of this is being close to your customer and enough of your customer so you can see the patterns, where is the most pain.  Where are they most unhappy? And then being able to really look at ourselves Okay, is there a unique way in which we address that. So thats how we come up with the revolutionary solutions, and thats hard. That takes time.Martin: Would you describe the Gild business model more of a local market place or would you say its a more global market place where I can find and hire developers from another country?Sheeroy: I ts global. Our database is 100% global. So thats number one, the database is totally global. You can search developers anywhere. In terms of how customers implement that obviously smaller companies are more regional. They are looking to hire potentially in 1 or 2 locations. And our larger customers are more global. Theyre looking to hire people anywhere. Now having said all that, I think there are such a shortage of software engineers, they are such in high demand, we are even seeing startups now looking for software engineers anywhere in the world. You know, we are such a great example, actually more than half of our engineers team are actually in Europe, in  Milan. So, were seeing even smaller startups, 50 people or so, having operations in multiple continents.Martin: When you started, what were the minimum features that you that you tried to develop in the product and ship to the market in order to understand what the needs are, so you can decide for a revenue model etc.Sheeroy: The minimum features when we first started was basically was search and results. That really was the minimal things we were trying to do, which is a reasonably easy interface by which you can say: Okay I am looking for an iOS engineer in  San Francisco  or the Bay area; and then being able to give them results that are relevant to that search and having analytics be good enough that they would make sense.I remember reviewing the first version of the product, it was really rough. The UI (user interface) was extremely rough, we made a lot of assumptions. But I do think among things we did well was, we immediately start taking it to market. We just started talking to tons and tons of prospects, showing it to them, getting their feedback and then about 3 months later, we actually started charging customers. Not because honestly that I thought the product was so great that we should be charging. But again, a startup is all about testing a hypothesis, right. First half of the hypothesis w as, if we give this level of intelligence is anybody going to care? That was getting anybody to say, this is great, I really like it. So second half of the hypothesis was, has anyone willing to pay for it. Thats why we start charging for it. And within a couple of months we had actually. I think within 2 months were like 20+ paying customers. So like Okay, this is working, people are paying for it.Martin: How did you solve this hen egg problem? Because when you started, this is basically a type of market place which is connected by some kind of scoring algorithm. How did you create the first 1,000 or 2,000 of developers and their first 50 100 companies.Sheeroy: Its a great question, which comes first, the hen or the egg. Actually, right before we started doing what were doing, the Gild Source business, the prior incarnation of our business actually was, we were building a website where software engineers could come and take coding challenges and puzzles and write code and we would analyze that code. So thats truly trying to build a market place. On the one hand, trying to get the software engineers, on the other hand trying to get customers and kind of have supply and demand. That is very challenging. It was actually an outflow from them, which is as we kind of work on there for months and months and we finally realized Gosh, we were trying to build a two sided market is very hard because just the value proposition for the software engineers wasnt compelling if there werent any employers. And for employers its not very compelling if you dont have at least tens of thousands of software engineers that they can search and choose from. That was a big problem.Thats how initially, Luca came up with the idea. He said. Well, lets address the supplier issue just by creating profiles for this software engineers by looking at their public activity. So in a way, we started creating an inventory of software engineers, so then we can then just focused on building out the c ustomers side of it. The initial thought was we would go back and build a community of software engineers but as we continue to move down, we realized, we dont really need to do that. So thats how we got going.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: Sheeroy, lets talk about the corporate strategy. Youre currently have this kind of market for software developers. What are your thought on adding other verticals and whether you can also apply this kind of data driven decision process.Sheeroy: We started a company so that eventually we solve the problem of hiring any professions, not just software engineers. So that remains our mission over time. We want to provide this level of analytics and insight into any professional. Lots of challenges to it.Weve been thinking about this for a while, and we have a viewpoint on how we can eventually get there. Which is a secret, Im not going to share that. What Im thinking is on that. But no, we obviously have been thinking about that and well continue in the lo ng term to execute towards that. So thats one answer.Second answer is, were building a company here for the long term. In the way we think about ourselves and talk about ourselves, we want to build a company, this type of problem were trying to solve its not going to get solved overnight. Its going to take some time. So were Okay with that. We are in no rush to just get there tomorrow. With that realization, we also have realized that, if you want to build a very large company, theres a saying if you want to build a monopoly, a broad monopoly, first you got to build a monopoly in a small market. Get that going, get that right, and then  you have the opportunity to build a monopoly in the greater market.So thats what were trying to do, were really trying to get it right in software engineering. And really understand what it takes to win and be successful there. Because once we have all the answers there then duplicating this to other professions would be a lot easier for us.Martin: I n terms of competitive advantage, would you rather say that Gild has the advantage of having  a large network effects, or is it more that Gild scoring system is the key source?Sheeroy: I think our competitive advantage is our analytics. I mean no one else that Im aware of, no other competitor I mean competitors are doing very resourceful things, they are competitors who are aggregating profiles. So to your point earlier, Ill go on LinkedIn and scraping it, Ill go scrape Twitter, and Ill go scrape Facebook, and Ill try to give you an aggregated profile, and we do all that. But no one is doing is really the additional insight of really telling you how good some of us and why we really think this person is good and what they are good at. Why they are in high demand or not, or when they might be looking for a job. Those are analytics that no other competitors are providing. That remains our competitive advantage.Martin: Great!MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Tell me about market development. C an you give us a brief overview of how you perceived the kind of market and the players in the market and what is currently happening over there?Sheeroy: So we play in kind of Recruiting HR market. Like most markets, its   fairly saturated, theres a lot of noise. Its a noise in market, which is a few are the head of HR, a few head of recruiting acquisition in a company. Chances are high, you probably get a 5-10 emails, voicemails a day telling you, Oh, I have this new amazing thing. A challenge for them, the challenge for us how do you actually get yourself above that noise level. Theres no easy answer to this. I mean I wish I could say, Heres the magic that we came up. But theres no easy magical answer to this. It is a number of things.For us, what we did is number one, that I think is a little bit unique and different than I see some other startups doing. We do all the normal stuff you would expect us to do: we do contact marketing, we do lead generation, and we do lead nurturing and all that stuff.But I think some of the things that we did differently is, we focus on brand building very early on in the life cycle of the company. So, we were only in the market less than a year, when we were able to get a business cover page story on the New York Times on Gild. That was huge. Probably when I think back in my career like years and years and years from now, Im most likely will remember that Sunday morning, getting the New York Times and right there on the cover. I mean, that doesnt happen very often. That was a good nine months of effort on our part. We had to cultivate a relationship with the New York Times, we had to stay on them, we had to give them really meaningful story that they could write about. It took a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of money, I guess in some ways. I got to get to invest in PR, as an example. A lot of startups dont believe in that stuff and I understand why they say that. But I think in our case, thats one example of many di fferent things that weve done that have allowed us to stand up above everyone else. And as you know, Id say, I think, one of the things that has distinguish us and hopefully will continue to distinguish us, is our efforts and our emphasis on brand building, which is a long term payoffs. It doesnt payoff short term.Martin: Okay.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM SHEEROY DESAI In San Francisco, we meet co-founder and CEO of Gild, Sheeroy Desai. He shares his story how Gild was founded and how the current business model works, as well as what the current plans are for the near future, and some advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcript of the interview is provided below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in  San Francisco, in the Gild office. Sheeroy, who are you and what do you do?Sheeroy: So, Im Sheeroy Desai. Im the co-founder and CEO of Gild. At Gild what we do is we help our customers, which are companies from startups all the way to very large enterprises. We have a software solution that helps them find, engage and end up hiring software engineers.Martin: Great!Martin: What is your background?Sheeroy: My background. I actually grew up in  Pakistan  and I came to the  US  to go to college. I went to MIT and got electrical engineering which I never used. I was fortunate enough that I graduated from the university right at the time when IT/software boom was just starting, which was the late 1980s. My first job was actually  at a startup, even though back then I didnt know what a startup was.Martin: Was it called a startup?Sheeroy: No, it wasnt. That wasnt even called a startup. It was just I thought it was just a small company. It was like 40 person company and I worked for it and I wasnt even quite sure what they did. But it turned out to be one of the very early companies that was pioneering in IT services. And it eventually became a company called  Cambridge Technology Partners, which went public and eventually got bought up by Novell.But anyway, I was there for about 3 years when we were very small and it was great training ground to just learn everything about, you know, I did some amount of engineering but really rapidly moved on to product development/product management. And then actually even I got a chance to engage a little bit of marketing and sales.So from there, a number of us who are actually mapped up at Cambr idge Technology in the early days and worked together, about 5 of us, ended up leaving and regrouped and started a company called Sapient. That was in, like 91. And then I spent the next 17 years of my life at Sapient in various capacities, from again, doing product, management, client management, to opening new offices, to eventually doing international expansion, and then I spent the last 7 years as a Chief Operating Officer there.We took the company public, so by the time I left, it was over a 5,000 person company. Its still listed on the NASDAQ today, I think its about 13,000 people. Its enormous.So that was, you know, a really great experience in many, many different ways. I mean, taking a company from startup all the way to IPO and beyond. You know, obviously youll be able to side our ups and our downs. Because we also lived through the dot com bust and then survived that, so it was a lot of learning in those 17 years.Then, ultimately I left. I think I was really burnt out, qu ite frankly, after all that time in the company. And especially at least in the last at least 11 years, I was really being involved in running a public company that takes a toll after a while. And I was really missing being an entrepreneur again, doing something small again.My problem was that I didnt know what I wanted to do and I looked at a lot of smaller companies, or startups, and I just couldnt get passionate, excited about anything.Ultimately, I really came to comfort of doing a lot of soul searching. I came to the conclusion of what I was truly excited and passionate about is what we do here at Gild, which is really helping companies in. Let me back up and say it this way, which is the way, companies find talent and the way professionals find opportunities is one area that actually still the underlined way it works, the underlined processes, the structure, hasnt really changed in last 100 years. We rely in the same artifacts, whether thats a resume or LinkedIn profile now, w hether thats an interview, we still do those things. There is no better way to get insights into people and to make better decisions. We use machine learning and analytics help our shopping experience for everything else today. But when it comes to shopping, lets call it for technology professionals or profession in general, we are still in the dark ages. So it was really that insight that prompted me to start Gild, and this was about a little over 3 years ago, at this point. Well, Luca and I got together and we kind of, he had his own startup and I was kind of thinking about doing this. And we got together and decide to initially focus on software engineers and here we are today.Martin: Great! How did you come up with this name and what are other alternative names did you think about?Sheeroy: We thought about like a million of them. We probably made a list of about 100 different names. You know the challenge today in coming up with the name is probably a couple of full. Number one, its very hard to find a real word that can be used as a name because theyre all taken. So a lot of companies make up names, right. The second challenge, even if you make up a name, is getting the URL. So quite frankly, these challenge for us wasnt being able to come up with names that we liked, that were creative, but actually being able to secure a URL and we wanted a dot-com URL. So ultimately, things converged towards Gild. The reason we like the name Gild because its a play on the word Guild, with a U, GUILD. The whole idea that there could be guild of technologist or the guild of other types of professions that we are trying to help. So that was the idea behind, but guild.com was taken and we couldnt get it but gild.com, GILD.com was taken but we were actually able to secure at a very reasonable price. So, thats how we ended up with the name.Martin: Great!BUSINESS MODEL OF GILDMartin: Can you briefly describe how the business model is working?Sheeroy: The business model is sim ple. The business model is really a SaaS, enterprise SaaS model. Our customers pay us for basically getting access to our database. So what we have, at the end of the day, is we have a database of over 11 million software engineers from around the world, for whom we have generated all kinds of public information, ranging from just a profile, a biographical information, all the way to downloading and analyzing  a new open source, code contribution that they may have. To analyzing their activity on QA forums, to analyzing the twitter feed. So we analyze anything possible about a software engineer and then trying to arrive to insights from that.Over time obviously, insights are getting better because the more data you have, the more correlations you have, the better are your predictions. Since ultimately we are really trying to make predictions around how good is a software engineer, how in demand might they be, and how likely is it that they move to a different job or opportunity.So t hose are the analytics that we provide to our customers, but then we also give them access to all the detailed data that weve collected on someone.  This is a highly rich profile. So with our software called Gild Source, you get access to all of these. Then there are some work flow built in there as well, so you can do a lot of relationship building with the candidates, you can do all kinds, you know think of it as almost like a CRM system for hiring. So you have a database and a CRM system, all combined together, and our customers get access to that and they just pay us on subscription base.Martin: Is it only for full time employees that you are trying to match with the employers, or is it also for project related kind of matching?Sheeroy: So, we dont distinguish. We are simply out there, looking for information on software engineers and trying to tell a customer how good they might be. Im sure many of them are looking for freelance opportunities and probably majority of them are l ooking for full time opportunities. But we dont differentiate between the two.Martin: Because I would imagine, if you distinguish between the two, then you can say that theres some kind of trigger or analytics behind that. Okay, that theres an 80 % chance that person would be willing to switch his job.Sheeroy: Right. I think we probably can if we have enough data that we probably could analyze it and be able to say, we think this person is more interested in a full time opportunity or this person is more interested in, you know some kind of part time or consulting. We dont do that. Thats an interesting idea. Something that our customers really havent brought up to us. And thats one of the things we really rely on quite a bit is, our customers.Very early on in the company, we made a decision to invest very heavily on what is today called Customer Success. Where 4 or 3 years ago, people refer it as customer service, we call it customer success from the start. The whole idea was not ju st so that we are making sure that our customers are successful in using our product but also, it builds a deep relationship so we truly understand, get feedback on the product. And thats really important to us.Martin: Theres one very interesting algorithm that you are using. Can you tell us a little bit more how this matching into supply and demand works.Sheeroy: I mean, its number one out of many algorithms over here. We started off very simple. In the first iteration of the algorithm really was all about just trying to tell our customers of how good some of them might be.The first iteration, that Luca built, was purely based on analyzing a software engineers open source code. So we would actually download the entire code repository that we would find, we parse it so we knew what programming languages they were using, how many lines of codes that were written, and then we would run analytics, basic analytics from the quality of the code, how extensive was the code, how well docume nted it is, etc. And based on those analytics, build issues of algorithms which would say, heres how good we think this software engineer is. It is heck of a lot more sophisticated today, 3 years later.So the software contribution is on the component of what we do, as I said, we also analyze activity and the level of activity on things like Stack Exchange, which is QA site. Then we start looking also at things, where the other developers that this individual is working with. So sometimes they collaborate on open source projects. Or maybe they are answering questions, or going back and forth with another developer, who is also very highly rated. Now, its like birds of feather flock together, so people of similar types tend to work together. So, if you are collaborating or working with really high engineers, chances are youre pretty too. Thats an additional insight we can grasp.And then it has gotten even more sophisticated because as we develop a very large database of what I called fact based software engineers. So now we can based on looking at quality of code or based on looking at their QA activity, etc., we can say that, in fact this software engineer is really very capable. But we can also start looking at matching people biographical backgrounds with the quality that  we think they are. So over time, weve also been able to get insights into Okay if we see a correlation on Im giving an example, I am not saying this is true, but an example maybe that anyone who worked at a certain company during the late 1990s as a software engineer, the chances are We see correlation that a lot of engineers there at that time were very high quality. So chances are, if we know nothing about you, all that we know is that you worked at that company in the late 1990s, now we can start making prediction that likelihood is reasonable that youre probably a pretty good software engineer. So analytics and as I said, there are many, many algorithms out here and the overall quality of the analytics and the complexity of the analytics, has gone up quite a bit over the course of the last 3 years.Martin: When you were a very young startup understanding your customer needs etc, its very important and you also said that the customer success is very important for you. How did you try to understand what the customers really want in the early days?Sheeroy: You know, it is still a challenge, not just early days, because, and I think this is the conundrum, because customers are great at telling you what is wrong with your product, what they dont like. They are very great at telling you how to tweak a certain feature, about what they like to see. That is good.Martin: Evolutionary stepSheeroy: Evolution stuff, they are very good at that. What customers are not very good at is revolutionary stuff. Because a lot of times, they dont know what they dont really need. So its really interesting because of what we focus on a lot. This is a trap, I think a lot of companies and ent repreneurs get into it, which is you start focusing on the recommendations that the customers are making.We tend to focus more on the pain that the customer has: what is not working for them, what is the problem. And then, Luca, the product team is doing an awesome job, of analyzing all the things that are not going well for the customers to come up with a unique solution. We always ask ourselves: Can we address this need in a way that no one else has. Can we address them in a unique way that is going to be significantly better than what anyone else is doing? Thats the first place we go. If we cant do that, then the question  can we just get rid of the pain? But what we have found is, if you pay a lot of attention So what really comes down to all of this is being close to your customer and enough of your customer so you can see the patterns, where is the most pain.  Where are they most unhappy? And then being able to really look at ourselves Okay, is there a unique way in which we address that. So thats how we come up with the revolutionary solutions, and thats hard. That takes time.Martin: Would you describe the Gild business model more of a local market place or would you say its a more global market place where I can find and hire developers from another country?Sheeroy: Its global. Our database is 100% global. So thats number one, the database is totally global. You can search developers anywhere. In terms of how customers implement that obviously smaller companies are more regional. They are looking to hire potentially in 1 or 2 locations. And our larger customers are more global. Theyre looking to hire people anywhere. Now having said all that, I think there are such a shortage of software engineers, they are such in high demand, we are even seeing startups now looking for software engineers anywhere in the world. You know, we are such a great example, actually more than half of our engineers team are actually in Europe, in  Milan. So, were seeing even smaller startups, 50 people or so, having operations in multiple continents.Martin: When you started, what were the minimum features that you that you tried to develop in the product and ship to the market in order to understand what the needs are, so you can decide for a revenue model etc.Sheeroy: The minimum features when we first started was basically was search and results. That really was the minimal things we were trying to do, which is a reasonably easy interface by which you can say: Okay I am looking for an iOS engineer in  San Francisco  or the Bay area; and then being able to give them results that are relevant to that search and having analytics be good enough that they would make sense.I remember reviewing the first version of the product, it was really rough. The UI (user interface) was extremely rough, we made a lot of assumptions. But I do think among things we did well was, we immediately start taking it to market. We just started talking to tons and tons of prospe cts, showing it to them, getting their feedback and then about 3 months later, we actually started charging customers. Not because honestly that I thought the product was so great that we should be charging. But again, a startup is all about testing a hypothesis, right. First half of the hypothesis was, if we give this level of intelligence is anybody going to care? That was getting anybody to say, this is great, I really like it. So second half of the hypothesis was, has anyone willing to pay for it. Thats why we start charging for it. And within a couple of months we had actually. I think within 2 months were like 20+ paying customers. So like Okay, this is working, people are paying for it.Martin: How did you solve this hen egg problem? Because when you started, this is basically a type of market place which is connected by some kind of scoring algorithm. How did you create the first 1,000 or 2,000 of developers and their first 50 100 companies.Sheeroy: Its a great question, whi ch comes first, the hen or the egg. Actually, right before we started doing what were doing, the Gild Source business, the prior incarnation of our business actually was, we were building a website where software engineers could come and take coding challenges and puzzles and write code and we would analyze that code. So thats truly trying to build a market place. On the one hand, trying to get the software engineers, on the other hand trying to get customers and kind of have supply and demand. That is very challenging. It was actually an outflow from them, which is as we kind of work on there for months and months and we finally realized Gosh, we were trying to build a two sided market is very hard because just the value proposition for the software engineers wasnt compelling if there werent any employers. And for employers its not very compelling if you dont have at least tens of thousands of software engineers that they can search and choose from. That was a big problem.Thats how initially, Luca came up with the idea. He said. Well, lets address the supplier issue just by creating profiles for this software engineers by looking at their public activity. So in a way, we started creating an inventory of software engineers, so then we can then just focused on building out the customers side of it. The initial thought was we would go back and build a community of software engineers but as we continue to move down, we realized, we dont really need to do that. So thats how we got going.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: Sheeroy, lets talk about the corporate strategy. Youre currently have this kind of market for software developers. What are your thought on adding other verticals and whether you can also apply this kind of data driven decision process.Sheeroy: We started a company so that eventually we solve the problem of hiring any professions, not just software engineers. So that remains our mission over time. We want to provide this level of analytics and insight into any professional. Lots of challenges to it.Weve been thinking about this for a while, and we have a viewpoint on how we can eventually get there. Which is a secret, Im not going to share that. What Im thinking is on that. But no, we obviously have been thinking about that and well continue in the long term to execute towards that. So thats one answer.Second answer is, were building a company here for the long term. In the way we think about ourselves and talk about ourselves, we want to build a company, this type of problem were trying to solve its not going to get solved overnight. Its going to take some time. So were Okay with that. We are in no rush to just get there tomorrow. With that realization, we also have realized that, if you want to build a very large company, theres a saying if you want to build a monopoly, a broad monopoly, first you got to build a monopoly in a small market. Get that going, get that right, and then  you have the opportunity to build a monopoly in the greater market.So thats what were trying to do, were really trying to get it right in software engineering. And really understand what it takes to win and be successful there. Because once we have all the answers there then duplicating this to other professions would be a lot easier for us.Martin: In terms of competitive advantage, would you rather say that Gild has the advantage of having  a large network effects, or is it more that Gild scoring system is the key source?Sheeroy: I think our competitive advantage is our analytics. I mean no one else that Im aware of, no other competitor I mean competitors are doing very resourceful things, they are competitors who are aggregating profiles. So to your point earlier, Ill go on LinkedIn and scraping it, Ill go scrape Twitter, and Ill go scrape Facebook, and Ill try to give you an aggregated profile, and we do all that. But no one is doing is really the additional insight of really telling you how good some of us and why we really thin k this person is good and what they are good at. Why they are in high demand or not, or when they might be looking for a job. Those are analytics that no other competitors are providing. That remains our competitive advantage.Martin: Great!MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Tell me about market development. Can you give us a brief overview of how you perceived the kind of market and the players in the market and what is currently happening over there?Sheeroy: So we play in kind of Recruiting HR market. Like most markets, its   fairly saturated, theres a lot of noise. Its a noise in market, which is a few are the head of HR, a few head of recruiting acquisition in a company. Chances are high, you probably get a 5-10 emails, voicemails a day telling you, Oh, I have this new amazing thing. A challenge for them, the challenge for us how do you actually get yourself above that noise level. Theres no easy answer to this. I mean I wish I could say, Heres the magic that we came up. But theres no eas y magical answer to this. It is a number of things.For us, what we did is number one, that I think is a little bit unique and different than I see some other startups doing. We do all the normal stuff you would expect us to do: we do contact marketing, we do lead generation, and we do lead nurturing and all that stuff.But I think some of the things that we did differently is, we focus on brand building very early on in the life cycle of the company. So, we were only in the market less than a year, when we were able to get a business cover page story on the New York Times on Gild. That was huge. Probably when I think back in my career like years and years and years from now, Im most likely will remember that Sunday morning, getting the New York Times and right there on the cover. I mean, that doesnt happen very often. That was a good nine months of effort on our part. We had to cultivate a relationship with the New York Times, we had to stay on them, we had to give them really meanin gful story that they could write about. It took a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of money, I guess in some ways. I got to get to invest in PR, as an example. A lot of startups dont believe in that stuff and I understand why they say that. But I think in our case, thats one example of many different things that weve done that have allowed us to stand up above everyone else. And as you know, Id say, I think, one of the things that has distinguish us and hopefully will continue to distinguish us, is our efforts and our emphasis on brand building, which is a long term payoffs. It doesnt payoff short term.Martin: Okay.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM SHEEROY DESAIMartin: For our readers, we always try to share some knowledge, so they make less errors when they start their companies. What would be your advice when starting a company? Maybe you can also talk about when starting a market place.Sheeroy: Starting a company, a couple of things I could probably go on for a while. Just imag ine a couple of things.One of the things that I said earlier, which is dont be afraid to put your product into market early. I think one of the mistakes, entrepreneurs make is that they want to put out a highly polished product and get it right. The fact that matters, you wont get it right, you just wont. Because you dont know, you dont know what the market really wants. So dont worry too much about that, get a product on the market and then get real feedback. So thats the first thing I would say. Thats a process of constantly iterating until you achieved product market fit. Stay really focused on that. So, thats not a unique advice that Im giving, lots of people do that. But its harder than what people think it is.The other thing is, and maybe this is a little more what I see here in the Valley. So Im trying to give some slightly different advice. Theres a lot of   focus on fundraising. Of course, especially if you are going to be a SaaS startup or something like that, theres a lot of investment you need to make, and the revenue is kind of trickle in slowly. So, believe me from first hand, I totally understand that financing has a key role. But I do think theres a tendency to get a little bit consumed by financing and worry a lot about evaluation and this and that. From all my experience, I can tell you, worry about the quality of the investor, someone whos going to be a long term partner. Someone you trust and youre going enjoy working with for 10 years because thats what youre signing up for. I think a lot of people get focused on evaluation and the amount they raise, and things like that. I kind of emphasized enough spend really time vetting the investor. If it is a VC firm, vet the partner. This is someone you really want to be talking to on a Sunday evening because thats going to happen. This is the person you want to be seeing at least once a month and this is going to happen because you got to spend a lot of time with this person. So thats the other pi ece of advice Id give.Market place is tough. I mean, what Id say is learn from us and learn from others whove done the same thing, which is youve got to  create a supply somewhere. I think the best way to get a market place going is to create that supply artificially.In our case, it was really aggregating and creating these profiles, which end up really being our business. Thats the funny thing, because we havent gone back to building a market place. But, I would say, try to figure out how to artificially create one side of the market and then go aggressively create the other side. The other side hopefully should be the side that pays, so you can start monetizing.Martin: From my understanding, a lot of people when trying to start a market place, they can start by artificially creating some kind of supply. Like some people, what I would call a good artificial supplier, which is real. And some others are trying putting fake profiles, which from my understanding, the majority of people are doing that. What would you recommend, I mean obviously, the artificial supplier would be supported but in most cases it wont work. Would it?Sheeroy: I think it depends on the market place. This is a question of what happens when the rubber actually hits the road, right? What do you actually do? There is no easy answer. I think each market place is a little bit different, but what I would say is, number one is be clear where you are going to generate your revenues from. That part you cant fake. What you got to make sure number one is what is going to be valuable value proposition. Get that value proposition right, then on the flip side, can you generate that artificially. There are many different ways to do it artificially, you dont have to have   a huge market. Say, I wanted to build a food delivery startup in  San Francisco. Think what I would worry about most is who is going to want the service and are they willing to pay for it. I could artificially put up hundred restaurant s, you can order from any of these restaurants, and the people start ordering, then I got to make sure maybe its me once the order comes in, is running to the restaurant and getting the food or I have some freelancers thats doing that for me. The other side doesnt need to know how you are satisfying the demand. So those are many ways in which you can create artificial supply without really, you dont have 1,000 restaurants. You dont have any agreement with 1,000 restaurants but the buying side doesnt need to know that.So those are the creative things about. So thats why I think market place is tough and I have a lot of admiration for people who pull off market places. Uber, for example has done great. Until you have a startup where you dealt with a market place problem, I dont think you understand, how logistically hard it is to pull something like that off.Martin: Sheeroy, thank you very much for your time. When you hire the next time one of your great employees, whether its a techi e or a finance guy, maybe you should be thinking more about data driven recruiting. Thank you very much!