Monocle Entrepreneurs Podcast Karoli Hindriks

Transcription

1 NAME FEMALE Dialogue [Music] At HSBC Private Banking, we know your journey as an entrepreneur will be as unique as the business you run. From growing your company to helping shape longer term goals, our unrivalled team of experts is here to support you and your family every step of the way. In recent years, we have surveyed more than ten thousand entrepreneurs globally, gaining unparalleled insight into the concerns and ambitions of business owners and what makes them tick. At HSBC Private Bank, we re here to help you align your values with business ownership and to build your families future. HSBC Private Bank, supporting entrepreneurial spirit. [Music] One of the most important and difficult aspects of growing a business is bringing in the right talent to add to the team, and in our increasingly global and connected world, the answer for many companies in filling the ranks and overcoming employment gaps comes from abroad. And to connect companies with skilled workers looking to make an international career move there s Jobbatical. A network taking care of advertising positions, and importantly, handling all of the logistics and moving people across borders. Karoli Hindriks is co-founder and CEO, while known in her native Estonia for becoming the countries youngest inventor Karoli graduated from NASA s Singularity University and has grown in scale to several businesses. You re listening to the entrepreneurs with me Daniel Bach. For today s program Karoli is here to talk about how she s helping companies around the world to grow and shape their workforce. [Music] I think I started to move towards the idea, but the moment where I had the idea, it was actually, I was in Silicon Valley I was in Singularity University for a summer. I was lucky to be among the 80 people who got into this think tank to and listen to the greatest thinkers in the medical space, all those different technologies in the world, and like what s going to be there in the future. And, I was in that very inspiring space, and in NASA Ames Research Centre in Mountain View. You know, every morning I ran, I love running so I went running every morning. I was passing by different headquarters, including Google. So, I was passing Google, and you can smell the pastries, and you feel, kind of, this king of the world feeling there in Silicon Valley. And, I started to ask, why is this feeling here? Why are those companies coming from Silicon Valley but not anywhere else in the world? And, then I kind of realised that it s about the people who are drawn there. So, looking at myself I was actually just I had finished television business, I decided to leave television behind, and I was in this place where I could have moved anywhere. And, I started to think, what if we collect the experience, kind of knowledge workers who want to move, who are ready to move, who are the most mobile crowd in the world. What if we start to send them into different places of the world so that Silicon Valleys could emerge from elsewhere. So, basically, when Silicon Valley has been attracting talent, then what if we take the talent who is curious to go anywhere and bring them to the places where those skills and expertise are basically needed. So, that was kind of the idea of Jobbatical, and I started to think how to actually make that happen. But, basically, knowledge distribution was my basis of starting Jobbatical. 1

2 And practically then, what does that do now? It's helping companies fill gaps in attracting that international talent. But structurally, how does that work? Can you break that down for us? First of all, again, when thinking about the idea and I myself come from a country which is kind of a corner of the world country. So, in a way I think it was the fact that I started Jobbatical was also too the fact that I had been an entrepreneur in the country which was not able to attract talent. I mean, you don t wake up in Tallinn and think about moving to Tallinn, at least you didn t three years ago. Today, maybe more so. So, basically, we were kind of well, my thought was to target those kind of places, like Estonia, who have not been the main talent magnets, or so obvious destinations for talent. And, to see how we can basically source talent for the companies that are there. Basically, what we are doing is we are collecting we have right now approximately 300,000 people in our community. So, people who are borderless, who have the aspiration to move, who mainly define themselves as global citizens, they are in the digital industry. What we do, basically, is we then match them to the companies in different locations of the world, and we have moved people from 48 countries to 34 countries. We match them to the organisations in different locations and we can do as much as, you know, match them to the fact that we can actually help them to do the immigration and help them to move. But, actually, what we are working on right now, where it s getting especially exciting is that, I mean, when we do the connecting talent and connecting companies there still has been the friction of immigration. Because, that s a big part of the you know, that s the big friction. So, what we are doing right now, we re starting to partner with Governments to actually have a Jobbatical Visa. So, basically, that people who are validated through Jobbatical would have an exclusive access to work in specific countries. And, what it does for the countries, is that, we are helping the countries to actually identify from the whole global workforce who are the borderless people in digital industry who are ready to move, and then we help through the fact that the Government gives us the, kind of, unique access. So, fast track access, the Government is able to get the attention of this audience. So, basically, the first visa which Jobbatical will be helping to validate people will be an Estonian normal visa, and now we are finalising, actually, with an even bigger Government where there will be an exclusive fast track access to a country for our community. So, in a way what we are creating is that for that community of borderless people we are, kind of, becoming like a new passport. Because, then like it doesn t matter are you Indian Passport, or are you German passport, or are you Norwegian passport. It matters that you are validated by Jobbatical. So, in a way we are eliminating the main friction that is stopping companies to hire the best people to build global teams, right. 2 Tell me a little about what the actual demand is, nowadays, for attracting that talent from abroad, as opposed to - I mean obviously, countries are probably trying to grow their own talent pool, but what, what is the actual demand like? That s such a good question, because I think we are, and this is so funny, that when we open news and what s actually, you know what the demand actually is increasingly being. The news and the demand, there kind of is like a gap between. By 2030, the world will be missing 85 million people from the work force, so this is kind of the landscape of talent and But, I, but I think when we look on the other side, what is also happening and why we see such an opportunity, is that people have also never moved as much as they

3 are doing right now. If anything, it s the biggest growth in terms of who is moving is among highly skilled. The highly skilled specialists also move the furthest, so the average distance for highly skilled specialists is to move 11,000 kilometres. Basically, people move more than ever before, and I think this totally makes sense, because we are so much more globally connected, and that is happening because of internet, right. So, people move more than ever before and there s a talent shortage, it s basically a growing gap between the employers and their needs, and the talent that the can find locally. 3 Do you think that s a bit of a product of how fast things scale today, especially in the tech word where we re creating these gaps of talent? We see in the news all the time about problems like, in America GM Plants closing and whole industries going away. But whole new ones are growing so rapidly that companies just can't fill that gap, is that sort of where you fit in do you think? I think there are a few things, first of all, if you don t find that talent locally, we help you to bring that talent. And, I think one thing that has been wrongly communicated is now, when we bring that talent that somebody else loses. But there is actually - I really like Enrico Moretti an economist has discovered the correlation of jobs that every highly skilled job, creates five jobs in the community. So basically, if you actually fill that gap with that highly skilled specialist, this will help to create five jobs in the community. So, in a way it s like a win-win situation for the local community as well. But, yes, definitely there are industries that are so fast developing, all the automation going on, the education is not keeping up with the changes. Yes, definitely we fit in there. I wonder about also the problem of diversity, is that something that something that you re coming up against a lot? Because I've just come from the Slush Conference in Helsinki, as we said where we heard a report there that 97% of companies that got VC backing in Europe in the past year, had an entirely male dominated founders. And - and so that, that s an issue on one side, but are companies at the same time having a problem attracting a diverse range of people? Companies have a problem attracting diverse range of people when they start too late, and I think that s what we are seeing as well. And, and again like, when I think back about the original story of my idea, and like why is Silicon Valley successful? What I didn t think back then, and I didn t see that, but now, through building Jobbatical I have realised that, part of the success is also the cultural diversity that is in Silicon Valley I think there was like the Silicon Valley index said that 74% of like 25 to 44 computer science workers are all foreign born. So, there s a lot of people from different backgrounds who have come together, and you are asking questions much differently than you ask if you re, you know, like minded. Ten black suits looking alike ask very similar questions, right, so nobody is actually challenging the way you think. So, that s very much what we are advocating as well. In our own team we have 20 nationalities, and I see that somebody coming, you know, from Egypt, or US, or Hong Kong, is challenging me with questions that I didn t even think are questions, right. And, so that s definitely Gender diversity, I mean I was the second woman in my country to raise around, and Estonia has more start ups for capital than any other country in Europe [laugh]. So in that sense, definitely, that s an opportunity for us to improve. I mean, the idea of the future of work always comes up in a lot of these conversations, and for companies trying to attract talent, part of that is retaining talent and finding people that can grow with the company or stay in a job. But in the start up world, I guess, we all want to work for more sexy, interesting, and cool companies, but a lot of

4 4 companies don t create that culture off the bat. But are we trying to, you know, solve those issues in the way we would recruit people? Does that make sense? It makes sense, I think what I would challenge here, and I think this is like when I m myself building Jobbatical and I m looking at the recruitment. I think what has changed in the world is that CEO was a very comfortable corner office with a nice couch and a pretty view, who was able to boss people around and everybody came to him or her, right. I think what is shifting is CEO, is serving people today, and I think in a way what has changed is also that we don t own, like companies don t own people anymore, and we shouldn t want to, because it's actually - when I today look at somebody who has been working 10 years in the same place and same position, I don t see it as, as strength anymore. So, I think the rapidly moving world is also forcing us to kind of let go that stigma that we should, kind of, all our fingers just hold onto the person and not let them go, and that s the, kind of success of the company. I see much more that we are as leaders we are kind of building the network of ambassadors, like people working with us for a journey, and I really like how Ray Hoffman calls it like a journey doing a journey with us, and then taking another journey, and maybe coming back at one point. But we don t necessarily need to own people in order to be successful. It s actually the other way around. I think the meaning of retention, for me has changed, and I think that it is changing for the companies in general. Because, we want people to adapt to changes, which means that we have to be able to adapt to changes ourselves. I want to track back, just a little bit, about your journey as well and where, sort of, that ethos comes from. Where exactly did you start out and, and sort of, how long did you have this vision, that then grew into Jobbatical? My own journey as an entrepreneur started very randomly, I must say, because it was - and looking back it's kind of a funny story, because, I was 16 and I was in a small town in Estonia. So Eastern Europe, small country, small town, and it was only 8 years after the Soviet Union collapsed. So, basically before that you couldn t even create a business like there was no private enterprise. Right. So, all the changes had happened, and it was, in school we, we had this exercise, we had to create a student company and I was chosen to be the president and that sounded so exciting to me that I started to think with my classmates, what could we then do? What are these exciting things that we do? From T-shirts to other things, and I had this idea to create a soft pedestrian reflector, like a fashionable accessory, basically, which would make you visible at night. So, it turned out that it is a unique idea and when I stepped into the Patent Office, they were so surprised to see a 16-year-old that, basically, they did the whole research for free for me. And, it turned out that it s a unique idea, and I became the youngest inventor in Estonia, that really helped with marketing, so we became a very successful student company, and from there I decided to move forward and actually started my own company from there. So, that became my first business and we sold a lot of reflectors all over, and especially Northern Europe, a little bit out to Portugal and Belgium as well. But, from there I think I just when you get the feeling that you don t necessarily have to be from New York or London or have a fancy background or PhD in order to make a difference, and you can actually make a difference with just being a school girl from Perno. Then I just got so addicted to making a difference that I have been kind of on entrepreneurial journeys since then. But I actually managed to get just after I started my student company, I was a year in the States, I managed to get a scholarship and do an exchange year in the States, and

5 that was the first time when I thought because, this year changed me completely. Like, I remember half a year, it was January when I was sitting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I thought that if everybody could do this, I think we would have a much better world. Just seeing things completely from a different point-of-view and seeing that I m not right about everything. Or, my view is not the right view, it s just one of the views. So, I think the inspiration kind of was planted there, but it was after I decided to leave television, before Jobbatical I launched National Geographical Channels, Fox Entertainment Channels, and before that I was in MT. That was when I kind of started to formulate the idea. Is stepping out of where you were in that country, where, in Estonia where sort of the entrepreneurial world was a bit new and getting that new perspective that helped shape your idea of what you could do yourself? I think, just where Estonia was back then, I mean today, it's a country that a lot of media is talking about. It's an example of you know being the most digital country in the world. But I mean at that time it was a very poor country, everybody started, so it was actually every adult got equivalent to 10 euros to start their lives. So, I think the, kind of, you had to be entrepreneurial to kind of come out of it, and I think that s where a lot of what the State managed to create there was that everything was simple. So, the user experience of the country is perfect in a way that you don t you know, bureaucracy is quite it s easy to start a company. I mean, back then it was harder, but like the attitude towards entrepreneurship was good and in order to do anything you, kind of, were pushed to be entrepreneurial, right. And, so I think it was kind of a good landscape to start something. It sounds like, you sort of lucked out in the timing of this and you sort of were able to come into a good, you know Network and Space where an entrepreneurial idea could take off. But do you think there s something about you naturally that fits that, mind-set, that entrepreneurial world? Or is it just, you lucked at it with an idea? I don t think entrepreneurs are born, I think we do have, maybe are programmed either to be more risk averse or more risk taking. But the story that I think changed for me, was that fact that when I went home and shared my idea with my dad, like the rational father would have said, that, go and study, you re just a girl, I mean just, you know, Eastern Europe, all of that story. He said, instead, that, whoa, that s exciting, what if you go to the patent office? Like, I believe that rather than me having a special gene, it was me having the encouragement at the right time. In a way it s like I believe that every child can make a difference in the world, and I think it s our role just to make sure that each of them knows that. And, I think I was told that when I was 16 and that helped me to push my ideas further. I want to hear a little bit more about, pushing your ideas forward a little bit and actually selling at Jobbatical. When you came up with that idea and decided you wanted to scale that, we mentioned the Slush Conference and before we came on air, you said, that was a part of your journey a little bit. But where did that begin, how did you start to actually sell that idea? So basically, the first - the selling, was to find my co-founders, right. And, when I think in terms of first selling the idea, was, I think the journey of finding the first Angel investors. When I started Jobbatical, I was already very well known in Estonia, so I kind of was, spoilt a bit, I thought I will just go, stand do to the pitch, share the mission and I will get investors. 5

6 It didn t happen. So, I was kind of, taken aback, and I had like then a one-year-old daughter at home and I really made, it s kind of made me think that maybe, you know, not so many girls in that industry. You know asking, you know doubting in my own like, am I good enough for that, is that idea good enough, and so on and so forth? But I decided to push it forward and I went to Finland, so I pitched in Finland. So, that s why Slush has an important place in my heart. And, I found my first backers in Finland, and then UK, Russia, Latvia, and then finally some Estonians also joined when all the foreign investors were onboard [laugh]. But I remember that there was a funny story, and that was I think he was the very first yes that I got, was when I went to Finland, I got a meeting after the pitch, and I took the morning ferry. I arrived at Helsinki, but the ferry was late, like almost half-an-hour, I saw that I would be definitely late for a meeting. I couldn t take a cab because it was so jammed. So, basically, I took my heels off, and on my stockings, I just ran like two miles, so when I got to the meeting I was completely sweating. But then I had a one-and-a-half-hour conversation and I got my yes. So, I think the one definitely important thing about, you know, this journey is that it s there are so many moments when you just it almost seems logical to give up. But if you just endure the pain a little bit more then you finally get your yes. Tell me a little bit about what else you ve had to endure, as far as challenges and sort of scaling and growing this, as you ve gone along? What are the sort of the biggest issues you ve had to face personally and as a company? I mean, there are always issues, there are so many issues. But as a company, I think, definitely there I think one of the difficulties about Jobbatical was the fact that, when you re building a market place, it s always good to start with, like, let s say that you start Jobbatical between one country or two countries. But if we would have done that, we had to be international from day one and building that liquidity internationally was really tough. So that was, I think, one of the big challenges, you know how to get started in all those different countries and how to find enough clients, how to get the credibility? So, definitely that, I mean, also the fact that we have actually hired most of the people through Jobbatical. So, most of the people actually have travelled. You know, they have circled the globe to join our team. So, it has been also interesting to see how this company of over 20 nationalities, you know, how to even build that culturally diverse company, right. I think as an entrepreneur what happens I think one of my biggest like, in that sense, learnings for myself was that as an entrepreneur you start, like, I started Jobbatical, my vision, you re so hands-on, you re so passionate about it. And, initially when it s five people you re kind of side-by-side and you kind of feel it together. As soon as you get to I think it was when we got to 25, I had to rethink how I m running this company, because I was micro-managing everybody. I was just making people feel miserable even though my intention was good, right. So, I had to rethink how I m even you know, what kind of leader I am, and how am I communicating with people and how I am giving them the freedom to do what they are good at, instead of just thinking that only I can have hands on and everything. So, I think there are constant challenges. I mean, I had my 35 th flight on Monday when I came here, since September. So, in that sense it is quite a journey, but it s also so exciting. Like, I mean, literally the conversations, I mean, we are changing we re creating our own visas, like we are changing policies we are talking to people that I would not have imagined are sitting around the same table with me when I started Jobbatical. So, I think it s really fascinating. 6

7 7 I m curious about, how companies are using the platform now in building their own teams for, for different companies, for all the different nations and countries that you touch? What are some of the challenges that companies are coming to you to help solve at Jobbatical in building their teams? Yeah, I mean there are definitely - so, when you re hiring locally - so basically companies come to us usually when they are lacking specific skills locally, right. When you hire locally, again, this touches, first of all it touches the diverse part, because you re kind of, you are interviewing somebody, the name is very familiar, you kind of understand how they may be thinking. But suddenly now, international hiring, you are looking at - the first bias happens is that, you are looking at a name that you can't even pronounce. So, you don t, like there s this fear, so basically, it's the skills match is there, but now it's the, I call it like the gatekeeper, the recruiter who has to overcome their own internal fear of interviewing somebody who s very different from them. This is actually something one of the things that was like a surprise, I didn t realise that this would become a problem. So, we have had to really help them to overcome, a lot of writing quantum marketing we have done around it, or speeches, videos, to kind of just help them get comfortable with the idea that you are interviewing somebody whose name you cannot pronounce and seems so foreign to you. Because, at the end of the day that person may be the perfect hire for you. So, first of all, kind of helping companies overcome their internal biases, I think that s one part. I mean the big part is still the immigration. So, we are today able to support immigration in 42 countries. We have partners in 42 countries and we can help the immigration process. Our goal is to get, in those 42 countries, Jobbatical Visas so that they don t even have to think about immigration anymore. There s the need, and then there s the talent, and then there s the policy, and the policy doesn t actually make sense anymore, especially in that knowledge worker area. In so much as you can say right now, what is on your diary these days? What is your role right now in, in moving the company forward? What have you got going on? Yes, so I have this big role of the government discussions that we re doing. So, not only, we are changing Jobbatical with that, we also change the way immigration works in the world. So, I mean leading the team, I have today, such a strong management team who is building the product, taking care of different parts of the team. Then my big role is having the, making sure that they are all okay, and then having the discussions with the government, to basically open Jobbatical Visa s so that more people can move, and more people can be hired. Compared with when you launched this, and when you were pitching it as, as you, you took us through, what does the company look like now compared to that vision, is it anything similar? It is, but it has expanded. So, when I started Jobbatical, my initial thought was that, to make it more comfortable for people to move to a new country, the job has to be a short term. So, what happened here was, what we discovered really fast, to admit that was that, what we did with that was that people didn t - we discover people don t actually care. Some things are nine months, some are six, some are - can be five years right. So, full time jobs, but what we did to ourselves was that, we kind of put ourselves in a box, because the employer suddenly, only saw a short term and the ones who actually hired, wanted to hire from abroad long term didn t get any help from us. Initial pitch was very much about short-term and I didn t again, today the world is in a different place, because when I started to talk about Jobbatical, so in 2015 nobody was

8 talking about immigration. The thought of talent mobility, or people moving around, it was very new. So, I think now we have understood that our opportunity is even greater, and also that it has become so much more relevant than it was when I started the discussions. So, I m really admiring my first backers because like I said there is an angel whom I ran to, he told me after that meeting I have no idea about this industry, but I believe in you [laugh]. So, I m really glad they believed in me, but I think today I see this is much more relevant than when we started to talk. [MUSIC] FEMALE That s all the time we have for on today s show, thank you very much to Karoli Hindriks for coming in to share the story of Jobbatical. Thank you very much to Mirianna la Grasta for the research help and Kieran Matthew Banerjee who mixed and edited this show. I m Daniel Bach, thank you very much for listening, and goodbye. (MUSIC) At HSBC Private Banking, we know your journey as an entrepreneur will be as unique as the business you run. From growing your company, to helping shape longer term goals, our unrivalled team of experts is here to support you and your family, every step of the way. HSBC Private Bank, supporting entrepreneurial spirit. End of Recording 8