Krishnan
@krishnannair
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Right hand batsman & co-founder @ geektrust - we use GenAI to help companies spot great tech talent!
Bengaluru, India
Joined February 2009
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Last Seen Profiles
Can we also celebrate startups that have hit revenue milestones?
We hit a monthly revenue of 1 crore for the first time last month 🎉
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Yesterday, my wife had to reach church for a service at 7 AM. She pre-booked an Uber for 6.
11 drivers cancelled on her (across uber and Ola). No exaggeration.
I think we need to move on from cab hailing (cancelling) apps, and go back to finding the taxi driver close by.
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Nowadays, I'm surprised if a candidate joins.
Back-outs are the norm.
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I turned 40 last month, been running a startup for 5 years, and married for 15.
Thought this is a good time to spew some gyan on turning old(er), being a founder, and giving one piece of advice on marriage.
(1/n)
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1/ I quit my job at ThoughtWorks 4 years ago. Became an entrepreneur with 0 experience in running a business. We’re still alive and kicking, a team of 9, close to profitable, and have 25K+ developers on our platform. Here are my reflections from the last 4 years.
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So after 9 months of development, looks like we will have our 1st paying customer for our AI interview agent :)
The client needs to run 150 to 200 interviews a month and we'll run it for them. We ran a 1 week pilot and they were convinced.
Onward!
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Yesterday evening a senior candidate backed out from his offer at one of our clients. He was supposed to join today.
This is the nth case in the last 1 month, and apart from the pain to our clients, we have lost close to 1 crore revenue.
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Wifey's painting got selected for an international water colour exhibition in Bulgaria 🥳
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If you're a techie, and starting up or joining a super early stage startup, do it for the learning, the career progression, the freedom and the impact you can make.
The odds of you making more money than by working at well paying regular job is abysmally low.
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We just moved into our new office at
@geektrust
, and I just can't believe it! Feels like a dream and happening to someone else :)
When we started we worked out of random coffee shops and
@snehajain88
's home mostly.
Sneha looks super excited doesn't she?
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Everyone's posting photos of
#PinkBangalore
? How old school! Here's my better half's plein air painting of pink Bangalore :)
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And the last piece of advice is on marriage. From 15 years of being happily married. The secret is to never use the words “I told you so”, “it’s your fault” or any variation of it (“why didn’t you”, “I was right”, “you should’ve” etc..). Try it out :)
Thanks for reading!
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I have a joke about recruiters but I'll get back to you in a few days.
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I found a new thing I enjoy - going to places with no network. Didn't have my phone on me for 2 days.
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The head of engineering of a UK based enterprise client got on a call just to tell us we're awesome 🥳.
And 2 weeks ago he didn't have time for us. He didn't expect we'd be any different from the rest.
Really appreciate it when clients go out of the way to say kind words.
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"We've interviewed 500 candidates and not hired one".
This is not a badge of honor. Your hiring process sucks. You probably have no empathy for candidates.
End of the day, the candidates will find other jobs. What about you? You got nothing.
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In all the hustle and bustle, I forgot that the 30th of Jan, 8 years ago was my last day at Thoughtworks before I left to start up.
Time flies fast. 8 years is a looong time and even now I often wonder whether I did the right thing by leaving a terrific company. (1/n)
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We grew some more last 6 months, and space was getting cramped.
And here was are today, in a magical space (for me) and I have to pinch myself once in a while. Bootstrapping is hard, and every month I worry how we'll pay salaries. Somehow we keep going :). Wish us well 🙏
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Wife's painting up at a festival for the 1st time. This is in Bulgaria. 🎉
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What you see of your colleagues at work is only 5% of their lives. Like an iceberg.
Be kind. You don't know what's going on in their lives.
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We completed 9 years as a company!
The last year was the toughest we've ever seen.
Had to reduce company size by 60%, and stop development of our AI product that we had worked on for 4 years (cue GPT).
Photo from our 1st anniversary and from yesterday :)
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A friend was joking that candidates are getting 50L water as a joining bonus in Bangalore 😄.
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6 years since
@dhanushgopinath
and
@snehajain88
came on-board and we started
@geektrust
.
I just love the company of these 2 and that's what makes it such a fun journey. Starting up can be stressful, and having fun is so so important.
Photo from six years ago.
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WFH has reached a tipping point with the 3 y.o asking me to take my laptop and leave the drawing room because she was there first.
I was making too much noise apparently.
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There's no easy solution here. But there should be some way to find a middle ground that makes sense for candidates and for companies.
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The number of people that get cc-ed for email replies tells you how hard it will be to work with that company.
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Muthalapozhi near Trivandrum. Bought fish from here last week. I ate. Wifey painted.
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If you’ve been in tech all your life, my friend, you don’t understand business. My respect for folks who’ve built their company from scratch, even small brick and mortar shops, has grown manifold. A lot of techies think only they do real work, everyone else does “timepass”.
(6/n)
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I don't get it.
I now need to pay my full Slice bill within 5 days of getting my bill.
My old school credit card gives me a lot more time to pay.
Their value prop was enshrined in their name and now they've realised it doesn't make sense? Why would I (or anyone) use it now?
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If you’ve built tech at a startup and have not been involved in building the business, then you have not really been exposed to the real difficulties of starting up. Tech is what scales the business but if there’s no business, what are you scaling.
(7/n)
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Two of the biggest lies going around:
"8 nearby drivers" and "we're almost finished finding your ride".
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A startup that was offering 40lacs for a 6 year experienced recruiter is now laying off 75% of all employees. Shocking.
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Imagine a product that can tell you how to write readable, maintainable, clean code? Code that others can read and understand.
At
@geektrust
when you upload your coding solution, we're not only evaluating you, but also helping you get better!
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For all the founders who can't hire, it's your hiring process thay limits you. There is talent in India but they can't get past the gates you keep. You have to have to hire for potential and skill. This is the way.
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Imagine a product that looks at a piece of code and tells you if you should interview the person who wrote the code.
That's what we imagined years ago. Today, our AI tool sent out our first automated evaluation. What was a 3 day turnaround for manual review took just a minute.
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Traveling to Blore from parents' place in Kerala and my bag has:
1) Tapioca
2) Banana
3) Rambutan
4) Passion fruit
5) Jackfruit
6) Chips
7) Boli
8) Pickle
9) Chutney powder
10) Jackfruit halwa
11) Random ayurvedic root
12) Last but not the least - fish fry 😃
Peak Kerala moment?
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A recent set of commissioned paintings on Bangalore done by my wife. (1/5)
St. Patrick's church and the pink trees.
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Out of all the paintings my wife does, I love the ones that make you feel like you want to go to the place in the painting!
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Being able to be home today with your loved ones is a great privilege. Much to be grateful for if this applies to you.
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My wife picked up a paint brush just a few years ago.
Her confidence is not high but she sent her painting to 2 international water colour festivals, and she got accepted to both! The one below will be on display in Moscow soon.
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Thread: As we come to exactly 1 year of the lockdown, here's the story of how we
@geektrust
grew 10x during the pandemic.
How we went from almost going bust, to surviving and growing. Our headcount grew from 10 to 50 and our revenues grew 10x.
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Best gift ever!
@clair_sebastian
has been with Geektrust for 6+ years, and over lunch last week, as a parting gift she and
@lukasimha
gifted us this.
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Met a classmate after a long time. 20 years ago, he used to come to college in this car. Glad to see he still has it :)
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Last month, for the 1st time ever, a big chunk (40%) of our revenue came from enterprise customers.
It's taken us a while to figure out how to win and service enterprises, but hopefully it's a sign of us maturing as a company.
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As a leader you can lead with love, kindness and empathy.
You don't have to be a douche bag to be successful.
The world does not need more toxic leaders.
I've met 500+ founders and most of them are nice human beings. The jerks are far and few in between.
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People don't change jobs often, and hence, they will look to maximize their opportunities. This is fair from their perspective.
At the same time companies, especially smaller ones, depend on this candidate's commitment that they will join.
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Look at them waves!!!
The Bengaluru authorities have granted our wishes and we now have a sea right in the middle of the city! Drive through beach types.
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We are in private beta for our AI code evaluation assistant (Geektrust ) that evaluates code and helps companies shortlist developers for hiring.
Since we're in private beta, the company manually goes through the code as well. Here are the initial results.
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We ran AI interviews today for our 1st paying customer!
Last year was tough. We stopped dev on all our existing products (5+ years of effort), and we had to let go of 60% of our team. It was heart breaking.
From there to here, the team at Geektrust has worked incredibly hard.
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Running is more about convincing your mind to keep running, than you body.
Whatever goal I set for myself, at the halfway point my mind is like - "I think we're done here. Let's go have some appam egg roast."
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An ML engine that does automated code reviews. For clean code. Super excited to announce a preview of our second product - Codu!
It will review code just like someone from your senior tech team would.
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11/ I’ve expanded on some of these, and there are additional thoughts here -
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This day, 3 years ago, magic happened. I got the bestest co-founders I could've hoped for. It's a miracle we don't hate each other considering the amount of time we've spent together. The journey has brought a close friend closer, and made a colleague, a friend. Onward.
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My FIL passed away last week. He was 84 and his system was slowly shutting down. Even though he had a tough time the last year or so, he didn't have to struggle through hospitalization. He passed peacefully in his sleep.
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She manages a household of 8, and when she gets an hour or two to spare, paints this!!! The next one from my talented better half.
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Hiring is hard. A lot of good candidates get missed out on because they lack a few things that you don't have the bandwidth to train for. So here's Geektrust's hire + train initiative. Hiring is free, pay only for training!
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Typical Trivandrum bylane. Narrow, green, packed with houses.
This is the view from the gates of my house.
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@ponnappa
Personally, I don't think this is true.
In the last 2 months, we've hired a CA, a geologist, a QA, and a couple of developers for Geektrust who wouldn't get past the screening stage at 99% of companies who think they hire good engineers.
The problem is in the hiring process.
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As a founder, or someone in a similar position, please please tell your teams to take time off to take care of themselves or their loved ones as they need to.
Don't be the guy who asks if "deliverables will still be met."
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Yesterday, my neighbour was asking for an oxygen bed for his friend in our whatsapp group.
He finally got a bed via BBMP hotline. Just wanted to put it out there you should keep trying official channels too.
Don't assume it won't work.
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We have 3 co-founders at
@geektrust
, 1 is a woman. We have 2 principal devs, 1 is a woman. We have 2 people in our product team, both are women. We have 2 in our Ops team, 1 is a woman. Marketing is handled and lead by 1 person. Yes, a woman.
#walkthetalk
#WomensDay
#startups
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5/ Hiring the first set of people is hard and painful. Try to build your core team from your own network. If you don’t have people from your network who will join you, that is probably a sign, and something to fix before you start up.
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Spotting developers on weekdays. Spotting tigers on weekends.
That's our founder
@snehajain88
for you. 😄
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Just heard the sound of an electric scooter whiz past my cab on ORR. Sounds like the future is here!
And looks it too. Well done
@atherenergy
!
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I had no clue what I got myself into. The saddest part is that it took me a long time to realise I didn’t know jackshit.
Be always aware that you don’t know much. You learn by observing, listening to advice or going through stuff. I did the last.
(3/n)
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The lockdown has meant the wife has no time to make full sized paintings. So she paints on a smaller canvas, whenever she can. I love these small ones!
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Being a founder is like being an artist. The returns you get are not commensurate with the effort you put in.
And like all artists, you hope one day it'll change :)
You do what you do for the joy it gives you.
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Blooper video while applying to a VC funding program 😀.
@snehajain88
was sporting enough to let me put it up.
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To build a company, you have to do things that don’t make sense. If it made sense, everyone would be doing it.
As your company grows most people in your company also want to do what others are doing. Social comfort is hugely underestimated in decision making.
(8/n)
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Was looking to buy a Mac on an exchange offer, but realized i'll need to exchange my car to afford it.
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"Founders are cheap labour for a startup".
Heard this yesterday and couldn't help agree!
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We have a 53% gender diversity ratio. We have a woman cofounder. We have more women in leadership positions than men. Our senior most developer is a woman. Our lead ML engineer is a woman.
From a company that walks the talk, our first women in tech event. Do share!
Our first event exclusively for women developers.
OneCode Wow Weekends: 18 & 25 Sep
Register for 2 weekends of talks by women tech leaders, interact with them, learn about clean code, meet companies and get ready for a wow job search experience.
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Wife and kids back from a short break in Kerala, and lo and behold, I became a poet.
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One simple truth I've learnt about hiring in the last 4 years. Companies that have a culture of humility/leaders with humility, are able to hire. I've seen this consistently.
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Finally we have a website put together!
Do like and share :)
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Over 6 years I've realized that most startup help books are useless. I now only read stories by founders that provide true insight into themselves and their journey.
Failing to Succeed by
@vaitheek
is a gem. Hats off sir for the journey you had, and the book you wrote.
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My super talented better half is running her 1st watercolour workshop!
Dates: Aug 27 - 28, 9:30 AM - 1:00 PM.
Location: AECS layout, Kundalahalli, Bengaluru.
If you're interested, please checkout the poster and WhatsApp her. This is for years 16 and above.
RT please 🙏.
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9/ Distractions are a-plenty. It’s hard to stay focused. Especially when these distractions have lots of money to offer. Like someone told us, “Every time you say No to distractions, your value goes up”. I think this is true.
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I'm thrilled to announce that
@geektrust
has started a fresher hiring vertical. Many have gone through a dev bootcamp, and all of them have cleared our coding challenge.
If you're looking to hire fresher devs, see here ->
RT for reach please! Thanks.
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We're thinking of launching
@geektrust
in Australia. Ya, little bit audacious but going to try a SaaS model, and I need your help with market research. So could you please share this 5 minute survey with techies/companies in Australia? Much appreciated!
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It is ok to fail.
It is ok to not raise money.
It is ok to build a “life style business”.
(1/n)
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Learnt of a new chemical compound via the 9 y.o - pottasium pomegranate 😂
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"Companies won't look at diploma holders but Geektrust makes sure they do" - feedback from a diploma holder who got placed through us as a software dev 🤩
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