Mason Swofford

0:00 I'm Kevin Jervitch. Welcome to Founder and Covered. The show about those brave enough to dream big and bold enough to swim away from the safety of the shore. Here, we dive into the origin moments before the noise, before the spotlight, back when it was just a vision, a hunch

0:18 , and a founder crazy enough to chase it. For all the dreamers listening, this is where your story begins. Perkins Cooey is a leading international law firm known for providing high-

0:36 value strategic solutions, the emerging companies and venture capital team council startups and the investors who back them, supporting clients from formation to exit. In the past three years, clients have raised more than $23 billion. With a B in private markets between pre-seed and growth stages,

0:57 Perkins Cooey combines tailored counsel with sector experience. So when it's time to accelerate, whether for the next financing round, a strategic deal, or even going public, your team is ready to learn more, visit PerkinsCooey.com. It's nice to meet you and happy to chat

1:14 today. And I've talked to tons of people that have gone to Stanford obviously in the born and raised in the bay. But I read somewhere that you were literally top of your class, and you had the highest GPA at Stanford, which is insane to me because I'm a C

1:29 student. I've always been a C student. So I want to learn what was young Mason like, what was driving you to not only get into an Ivy League, but literally be like in a top 0.001%. What was young Mason like in Indiana? What was young Mason like? That's a good, I feel like if you ask my

1:47 friends versus my parents versus me, it's versus my siblings, all very different answers. But I am insatiably curious. So my dad always jokes that his father always got frustrated with him because he asked

2:02 a million questions. And I'm the youngest of three. And he said, you know, I got cursed with myself. And he's like, it's payback. So I asked my dad growing up a million questions. And that's, I'd say probably one of the core characteristics of me is just I am curious.

2:20 And I learn really quickly. When I was a kid, my parents would drive us to school from kindergarten to about second grade. And it was a pretty long drive. The school we were going to was like 30, 45 minutes away. And so in the car, they would quiz everyone on math, right? Elementary

2:35 school math. And I was the youngest to get up three. And so I was just in the car listening to my siblings get quizzed on math. And by the end of three years of that, I had progressed to the math level of my eldest brother. So just from asking, Oh, how do you do that? How do you do that

2:50 ? And so like, that was just me just always asking questions, always wanting to learn how things worked. Do you still feel like with what you're doing as a founder now, you still have that trait if you don't know something? It's a blessing and a curse. I can't, I can't just

3:05 move past something I don't fully understand. I have to dive in. And sometimes, you know, I have to take a detour of an hour. But I think I always think about the kind of Steve Jobs commencement address where he talks about his calligraphy class, how, you know, what a 10, 20 years later, that was so foundational

3:20 to him. And I think there's a lot of those where, you know, I had a patent at the last company I worked out that was related to how to securely store video footage. And the reason I came up with that patent was because I was just curious about the underlines of how Bitcoin

3:36 worked and was learning about Bitcoin. And it turns out there was some parallels between how they do security and Bitcoin and what we could do in this, you know, completely different field. The only thing related about them is, is its technology. But like, you know, I think learning all

3:51 these different areas does cause you to, you know, have, have insights. Yeah. And I think also, like think about as a founder, right? So you're trying to create something new, something that's not into the market, something that's maybe not legacy or legacy tech. And how do you do that? You

4:09 ask questions and why is it this way? Why are we doing it that way? And I think more inquisitive, you can be the more you'll realize this is kind of what Elon did at SpaceX. Like, why are we building what this material could be used this material? It's like endlessly asking these questions to really drill

4:25 it down to figure out like what is actually possible. I read somewhere. This was a fascinating story to me. How does the second grader end up with diamond earrings and some sort of trade with some gum? What was this about? Yeah. So as I mentioned, I became really good at math

4:42 . So I won, I won a math contest at my school. And the prize was this one set bubblegum machine, right? Like, I don't know if you've ever had, you know, the little one tiny little one set bubblegum. So it was a tiny little machine about the size of a baseball. And rather than being a normal kid and

4:57 just eating my gum or giving to friends, I started selling it, right? So I'm in second grade. I'm selling on playground, one set bubblegum for 25 cents. And then very quickly, this was all probably within like two months time, maybe one month time, but I then started bartering. So other kids would come, they'd give me hubba baba. And I'd say, okay, I'll give you this for that. And

5:14 then I'll resell the hubba baba for more. I started getting pencils or racers. I remember a kid gave me his brother's glasses case. Another kid gave me his brother's wallet. Like all sorts of, yeah , I should have realized when I was getting brothers things, not their things, something was up . But one girl came in and her parents owned all the I think dominoes franchises in Indiana. So

5:34 they were, you know, pretty, pretty wealthy. And she after school, I remember she comes up to me and has these pink diamond earrings and goes, Mason, what can I get for these? And I go, okay, I 'll give you three, three pieces of bubblegum. And then she's like, no, that's too little. Okay,

5:49 seven. And I give her seven. And then I go, I actually have to give one back for tax. So in the end of the day, I give her six. I had no idea how tax worked at the time. I just heard about it. So I gave , I gave her six pieces of bubblegum. And it was great. However, her mom was not happy about it in the end of the day. So later found out, and I actually gave them to my sister as like, you

6:07 know, a gift and, and whatnot. And then, then we ended up having to get them back. And I got shut down my bubblegum operation in second grade there. But did she give you back the bubblegum? Kevin, I am so glad you say that because that's what I always bring up is I never got my bubblegum back.

6:22 She OG one or maybe she owes me one. Yeah, it was you seven. Exactly. That's cool. So even at a young age, you kind of had this entrepreneurial mind. And at what point as you 're starting to grow and you're focusing your academics, and obviously there's like this business

6:39 acumen that's deeply ingrained in you. At what point did you start even thinking about? I'm an Indiana. I want to go to a prestigious college. I want to go to maybe Harvard or Stanford. When did this kind of first drop in your mind? And then once it did, what was

6:57 life like trying to attain sort of that first major goal of your life? I would say that I know that I definitely knew that I want to be an entrepreneur when I was about 10 years old. That's when I first knew that. And I know that because I remember when it was I think maybe I was a little bit

7:17 older than 10, but the stock market crash had happened in the great recession. And I didn't have a lot of money in my savings, but I had I told my parents to invest all my money. I said, I think this is the right time put all my money in whatever. And they bought me some stocks, right? And then from that point on, I was like someone between 10 and 13. How did you want to buy though

7:37 when everyone was selling by the dip? I don't know. I don't know. I said I was long-term oriented. I'm not going to need this money until I'm at least 18, which to a again, 10 year old is forever away. So the other piece to that though is from that point on, I started I was

7:53 horrible. I started returning every birthday gift I would get. And I would take take the money, I would return it, take the money, and then I would invest it or put in my savings account because I was like, I need money to no one in Indiana. I don't think people still maybe don't know about venture capitalists, but I definitely didn't know about venture capitalists that they would just

8:08 give you money. So I thought I was going to have to self fund myself. So that was when I said, I'm going to do a startup. Now at the time, I was misguided. I thought Harvard was the best school in the world. So I said, all right, I'm going to go to Harvard. And that 's what I'm going to do. As I got a little bit older, I realized that for me Stanford was really the

8:24 best place. It combined excellent academics with, frankly, the entrepreneurial mindset. That is that is , I think, core to what Stanford is, which is everyone on that campus has an idea or wants to do a startup or anything, at least the people I surround myself with. So I don't know what the exact age

8:41 was that I realized that. But I was at least 10 years old when I said I'm going to start a company in the future. And I need to start preparing for that. That's beautiful. You ever see that video where Mark Zuckerberg is getting into Harvard and is like that is like filming on me. He's like in a bunk. He's like in

8:56 the bottom of a bunk bed. And he's like, was there a moment like this? Because these sort of like, as a child, whether it's maybe five or six years for you, there's a ton of dedication. There's a ton of editiveness. You know the odds that are against you. Like you

9:12 said, a goal of maybe 10 or 11 years old, I want to do this. You're going to apply to these schools. A lot of your friends are going to get rejected. Mostly everybody at your school is going to get rejected. When that letter comes in the mail, do you remember that day? And do you remember opening it up?

9:28 Can you take us through this? I absolutely remember. So you say most people from my school, so no one from my school had gotten into Stanford in 17 years. So the last person I got in, he was a track star. So he got in because he was incredible at track. So by guidance

9:45 counselor, everyone was like, good luck. On a good year, maybe one person from my school gets got into an Ivy League, you know, large public school in Indiana. So what was your graduating class size? 712. Wow. So that's a big class. Big class. Yeah. I mean, I, yeah. So, and I

10:02 thought I had a good shot. My GPA to the second closest was the same between their GPA and like the 50th. So I was pretty, pretty out there. I had taken more AP class. I think I had more fives on AP

10:17 tests than anyone else in the state of Indiana. Like I felt good, but at the same time, I also was coming from a from public school in Indiana. Like, you know, I was nervous. And so I went and I got a haircut and I'd been growing out my hair for the last year or whatever.

10:35 So I had hair longer than you have right now. And I remember I got a haircut when they told us emails were going to come out like, you know, five o'clock on Friday. So I went and I got a haircut at like 445. And I just on there, you know, I can't be on my phone because I'm on my

10:50 haircut. And they start feeling my phone buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, because I had a bunch of friends that also applied to Stanford. And we were all in a group chat, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. And I'm like, Oh, maybe this wasn't such a good idea to take my mind off things, get in the haircut. And then afterwards, I checked my phone. I see all of their texts that they didn't get

11:06 in. And then I open up my email and I remember looking at as I'm literally walking to my car and I see I got accepted. And all I do is I get in the car. I had blacked out at that point. I sped home. I think my dad poured champagne and, you know, we celebrated, but yeah, it was,

11:24 it was awesome. That's a special moment. Those moments in life, where it's just years of dedication, you cannot beat them. I had something similar. I played, I played professional sports. And I remember, you know, the day of the draft, like that was that moment for me. It

11:40 was like, you know, since I was a child. And then I signed with the Philadelphia Eagles. And yeah, those are always like super emotional moments. I love watching them on YouTube, whether it's like acceptance, whether it's getting drafted, whether it's finally getting the promotion for the person who's worked

11:55 that for 20 years. That's beautiful. Okay, so you get into Stanford. Had you been to California? I had been twice. So for anyone that hasn't been either to California, but if you haven't been on Stanford's campus, it's probably the most beautiful thing you'll ever see.

12:11 There was a lot of times in my life, I would literally just go there when I was in San Francisco just to walk around, just to like soak up the vibe of what's possible, because you really feel that when you're there. So you get to Stanford. You get on campus. Did you know what you wanted

12:28 to major in? I knew somewhat. I thought computer engineering. I end up doing computer science very related. I was really into robotics when I was in high school, because to me, we didn't really have computer science, but we did have some robotics things that you could do. But I was pretty dead set. I was going to do kind of something computer related

12:46 . Yeah, I had read somewhere also that you were getting the self-driving pretty early. Is that true self-driving and also Nvidia? You kind of before AI, everyone's talking about AI these days, of course. And we're going to get into your company a little bit. Everyone's talking

13:01 about agents. Thank God. I started messing around when coworkers dropped. It's super interesting to me, but you were into this before it was even, it was still AI, but people were calling it machine learning years ago. How did you spot that? Was that when you were at Stanford,

13:18 you started maybe some of the research labs were using their GPUs? Or how did that become a thing in your mind where, hey, this is going to be the future 10 years before anyone's even talking about it? Yeah. In high school even, I thought AI was cool because I just wanted to build

13:35 things. And so I remember I built a little, if you ever played Call of Duty, a century gun, right? Yeah. So I made a little century nerf gun that could track with a camera. This was early AI. It wasn't very good, but it could track people and theoretically shoot them with a little

13:52 nerf gun. So I thought that was fun, but I got to Stanford in early AI, as you said, really machine learning. It was just math. It was statistics. And if there's one thing that I am really good at amongst people in the world, it is statistics. And so I just got into AI as a

14:09 subfield of computer science because I was really good at statistics. And so I just started taking these graduate courses as a freshman in statistics and then end up going into AI. And so I got really into it. And then I started working in the labs and the NVIDIA thing you mentioned. So

14:24 yeah, it was 2016. And I was in a lab at Stanford. And I know it's 2016 because I looked at my fidelity account and I can see that it's 2016. And so you know what your cost basis of that stock was when you bought that? Yeah, it's I think it's up like 50 or 60 X

14:42 since then. So I mean, I've made other misses and stuff. I bought and sold Tesla in like 2013, made like two X turns out it's like, you know, up 100 X since then. But with NVIDIA, I was in all these labs at Stanford. And I was really into AI and I was like,

14:58 holy cow, what you could do with AI, I was doing some medical research at the time was. And it was so impactful. I was like, this is this is incredible. This is going to really, you know, the rate of the rate of change, the rate of improvement had only been a few years since AlexNet. And AlexNet was this huge unlock in vision models. And I already saw where we

15:17 had come from since then. And I was in all these labs in every single lab, regardless of what you were doing, everyone was using NVIDIA GPUs. And so I call it dumb luck or something. I said , I think AI is going to blow up. And I think this NVIDIA company is the good one to bet on for this.

15:32 And so I put all my money, which unfortunately, I wish I would have been, you know, my seat now, where I actually have a little bit of money. But at the time, I didn't have a lot of money, but I put it all in NVIDIA. And it is now the majority of my net worth outside of this company that I'm building is just that stock that I bought then. What kind of college

15:48 student puts all his money in NVIDIA? Tim, incredible. In college, I was spending money on like the dumbest things, you know, going on dates with people that you would never see again after a couple of months, alcoholic beverages with your friends and these sort of things. I was not

16:04 thinking about buying assets at all. That's amazing. So you're putting money in NVIDIA, you're learning. At some point, you got to graduate, obviously. Most people that start companies that are successful, we got the college dropout from Stanford, right? You go for a year. You

16:20 actually graduated. You then go on to University of Texas, I believe, at Austin, awesome place. I love Matthew McConaughey. I know he's a huge, like, if you haven't read his book, Green Lights, it's amazing. You drop out

16:35 getting your doctorate. Why'd you do that? As I said, from a young age, I knew I wanted to start a company and then get to Stanford. And you know, I had never met the only doctors I ever knew were medical doctors. I had never heard a doctor being a PhD. It was hilarious. I

16:50 think the superintendent maybe of my school system was a doctor, right? But other than that, I didn't know anyone that was a PhD. And so I got really into AI and everyone that I was working with and self-driving because I was doing some work there and everything, everyone was researchers, right? And so I got really into research and I thought, wow, that's really cool. And

17:08 so kind of on a whim, it was actually one minute before the deadline. I applied to UT Austin. There's a professor there. I found really interesting and I applied, ended up getting in. But I don't think I really knew what it was like to be a researcher full time as your job. Again, I did

17:25 research in college, but I met everyone else in the program and I saw, oh, yeah, we are different, right ? All of you, you're dedicating, you want to spend the next seven years researching this one area that gives you so much kick out of learning. Be the foremost world expert

17:41 on that one, you know, frankly, somewhat niche topic, but you want to be the expert and that drives you to me. That wasn't what was driving me and I kind of lost my way a little bit. You know, after college, I actually bumped around a couple things, did kind of lived a couple lives. And what I found

17:56 though is, no, no, back to my roots, I do want to start a company and frankly spending the next seven years on a PhD to then spend two years on a postdoc to then spend seven years trying to get tenure, whatnot, was not where I wanted to spend time. And I have an immense respect for those that go through it and do it. But for me, that just wasn't the path I wanted to

18:13 do. I wanted to get back to build a company and I saw, frankly, and fortunately, it's extremely true now that I did not need a PhD to start a company. I think that point, I want anyone who, if you're over the age of 30, I think you've probably realized this, but anyone who's under that age, you're

18:29 not supposed to have it all figured out. Like what Mason just underscored is so important. You got to try a bunch of stuff, say yes to things. Once you realize, you know what, I thought I wanted to do this. Maybe this thing isn't for me. That's not a failure. That's not a loss. That's just

18:46 realizing that something that you thought was important or exciting to you just isn't as important or excited to you for you and your heart is somewhere else. But that is key. I think a lot of young people think they need to have it all figured out or they're supposed to be at a certain place by

19:03 25 because that's what it looks like on Instagram or TikTok. That's not reality. So don't be afraid to be a beginner. Again, don't be afraid to try stuff. I know me personally, I was a financial advisor for five years. I started a bunch of different companies before this one, before Hubble.

19:20 And Steve Jobs famously said, you know, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You have to look backwards, right? And that underscores it and poodles to you for going for it. Most people , once they get into a program like that, it's hard to stop, right? Your whole identity is kind of

19:36 wrapped up into this like, I'm going to be a doctor, right? And it's not easy to pull the plug. So you dabble into a couple of things. Tell me about the moment you started your first company. So you've worked for other people, you slang gumballs early on. That was success. You made some

19:53 crazy stock trades fidelity to try to get you for insider trading because you're like, no way. What was that first insight along that journey where you're like, you know what, I'm ready to start a company. I'm ready to do this. What was the idea? And maybe like in that moment, how did

20:10 what led to you kind of jumping all in on this thing? I had dabbled with, I would say a few companies along the way. When I was in college, while I was working at Jobs, like never really formally kicked it off, but talk to experts, started doing research, built prototypes, that type of

20:27 thing, but really Tenzo, you know, the company that I'm going to say, and really the first version of things even, you know, our original name, Salve, was the first company that I've really gone all in, you know, and done for a full time. And what I did is actually explored for about a year. So it was

20:42 2023. Everyone else in the world had just learned about AI from ChatUET, right? Begin in 2023. I was building coding agents. I was building legal agents. And this was early days, right? You know, everyone knows maybe a lot of people know cursor and Harvey today. Those

20:57 companies hadn't raised seed rounds. I had a coding agent that at the time had more users than cursor. And, you know, I'll give that to you a piece of advice as I'm doing this, which is I think my whole life, I've always thought, you know, other people have things figured out. There's

21:13 other people that are smart in the world. And I don't think I, you know, when I came to Stanford, I thought, well, you know, I was the smartest person in my high school, but now I'm at this school with all these kids that grew up in, you know, the coast and they're there. I'm going to get my butt kicked. And so I didn't take as hard a class as I should have at the

21:28 beginning. And my advisor there told me, Hey, you know, take, take these easier classes. You're coming from a large public school. You think you can really compete with these kids from these elite institutions and whatnot. Turns out, no, like, take the shot, right? And so when I was building my coding agents,

21:43 I thought, wow, Microsoft with GitHub co pilot and what they're going to steam roll me. There's no shot. They already have distribution. They have all this stuff. So I didn't, I didn't keep working on it. And kudos to the cursor founders, whether it be, you know, naive

21:58 te or intelligence, they knew that if they built a better product, they would eventually went out. And so that's a mistake that was costly for me. You know, many times I've again always thought, Hey, these other, these big companies, big institutions, these people that have all the things on their resume. No, if you just have the grit and you just say, I'm going to do it and you push

22:14 forward, you will often do it. That is such a great point. It's like even you could have a competitor raise a massive round and instantly you get discouraged, right? Or Google replicate something. It's never a reason to stop, never a reason to stop. And actually, I would argue it's a reason to

22:30 go harder because it's a signal that there's something there. 100% right? It's ultimately best distribution, best product will win, right? And you need to, you need to potentially improve your distribution, improve your product, but don't be discouraged because someone else on paper

22:45 seems, you know, better fit for something. You have a history of proving people wrong. Exactly. And so now, finally, though, now I'm willing to better myself and do that because I don't think I had the confidence before. That was the issue is I think if I had gone down those routes, you know, I could have done those things, but I listened to experts.

23:03 Experts don't know anything. Your job as a founder is to become the foremost expert in whatever you're doing and then have conviction. I now read all these stories of, you know, the Airbnb founder got a thousand nose people saying, you think someone's going to ever let you, you know, stay in someone else's

23:18 house? That's crazy, right? But he had conviction and he just said, I'm going to do it. And I have an inkling. I know that it will be true. And so, yeah, mad respect for the for the founders that do the things that they get rejected on. What do you think that conviction comes from, you know,

23:33 because just like you, I didn't, I didn't immediately have that either. Where do you think a founder like Brian Chesky or even Travis Callen like people saying no one's going to ride in the back of a stranger's car? Like, where does that conviction come from, from the

23:48 journey that you've been on? It's funny. I think it is what makes, I don't know what you were like as a child, but I imagine Travis and Brian, they were headaches to the parents and I was a headache to my parents. Founders, I think are generally headstrong, right? We

24:03 are stubborn. We ask questions. I think that's important. You have to question the status quo . The thing that everyone else holds. Oh, that's just the way it is. Founders are the ones that say, but it doesn't have to be. There's a better way, right? And then I think you have to be stubborn. You have to be willing to just say, no, I'm going to do XYZ, right? I believe this the way it

24:23 should be. And that's why also founders can be great employees because they will challenge status quo and horrible employees and say large companies that don't allow you to challenge a status quo. So my guess is it just comes from, yeah, an innate unwillingness to not do what you think is right.

24:43 And it grinds my gears. I don't know about you, but it physically pains me to do something that I think is stupid, or because I said so, right? It physically pains me to have to do something because that's the

24:58 rule. So that's the way it is or stuff like that. Yeah, I think that's a great point. My conviction, it's hard when you just have an idea in your head to have true conviction. Like you either have to be delusional or like slightly like a con man or just

25:15 insanely brilliant. I think true conviction on my journey has come from like when you build a product in the beginning, almost everyone's first version of their products. And maybe even if the product doesn't suck, it's never going to get adopted to the degree that you wish that it would. It

25:32 takes time. It takes iterations. It takes talking to a lot of customers. And somewhere along that journey, a couple of light bulb moments go off for your customers, and they may have a success story, right? Or they need to write you back an email. And those little nuggets and

25:47 data points over time just build bigger and bigger and bigger. And for me, it was just the collection of those things, the collection of, you know what, this is making a difference. This is making an impact. And that's where that kind of true conviction came from. But I think like,

26:04 you know, starting for any founder out there, this philosophy I love talking about was like, hey, we're not trying to be right. We're trying to get it right. Like with whatever you're building, like the first version is not supposed to be the most spectacular one. Over time, we get it right. We get it right through iteration. So can we talk a little bit

26:22 ? And this is going to be remedial for you, but I just, I want people to grasp this. Sometimes when we get on these tech podcasts, people start talking real fast. And half the audience is like, what the hell is Mason talking about? So let's take a step

26:37 back. Just a little bit about your company. And then even maybe talking about what is an agent? Why are we seeing agents everywhere? Why do startups hire agents? Why are they adopting them? Why are they maybe even firing people? So maybe like talk a little bit about the company, the mission, and then let's

26:55 talk a little bit about agents and what they are and why they can be useful for founders out there that are building. Absolutely. Okay. So let me take that in reverse. I'll first define what an agent is and then I'll talk about how we love a agent . So generally, I think of an agent and everyone, there's no universal definition

27:11 of an agent, right? So you'll have, I think I read an article about agent washing, right? People are calling everything an agent and you'll know that's just basic automation. Nothing could have been built 20 years ago, right? So definition of an agent is a little bit mucky, but in my mind, a basic agent,

27:26 it is taking actions that a human might have, right, that are mimicking a human. And really the word agent comes from agency, right? They have the ability to take actions. And so that I think is the core piece of an agent now, depending on the round

27:42 that you might end, you may be in, you may have more or less guardrails, right? Co-work you could define as an agent, not a ton of guardrails versus what our company does. We came up tensile, we build agents for recruiting, right? And recruiting is very sensitive.

28:00 It is, I joke, I went from self-driving to recruiting, probably two of the most highly regulated fields of AI. I think the only thing else that I could be doing would be medical or maybe finance, but probably medical is the only other area that has the same level of

28:15 regulation. And that matters, right? Because hiring is, and ultimately the job that you do is the most, one of the most impactful things that most people's lives, other than potentially who, you know, their spouse or kids, family, things like that, who they spend their lives with.

28:30 But you spend the majority of your day at work with your co-workers, things like that. And so the government regulates hiring very heavily. So we have to have our agents operate within strict guardrails. But what our aim to do is to do a couple of things, one, free recruiters and

28:45 give them more time back, right? Give them time to speak with the right candidates, help them identify and find those right candidates quicker. So we build a mix of autopilots. Those are really true agents, right? They are, they are taking actions, they're doing things on behalf of recruiters , on behalf

29:00 of hiring managers, and they build co-pilots. And those are assisting recruiters in hiring managers in their conversations. They're turning them into a superhuman. So it might still be a human doing all the work and having these conversations, but an agent in the background is finding information, is searching things, is pulling

29:16 up relevant context for the person so that during their conversations, during their actions , they are as prepared and knowledgeable as possible. It's, how do you turn every recruiter into the most knowledgeable, recruited, the most powerful recruiter? And so what we first came to market with and what we were probably most popular

29:31 for, most famous for, is an AI interviewer. And we started that a little over two years ago. We were one of the first in the space. And now, you know, going back to your thing about not to get discouraged, we probably have, you know, 40, 50 competitors, this is a new company that pops open every

29:46 day, but really the way that we have differentiated from the market is by being extremely compliant serving, can experience driven and customizable. So I believe a couple of things. One, a company is nothing more than a collection of people and contracts.

30:04 And frankly, people built the contract, so it's really just a collection of people. And what makes one company different from another is really their culture and who they choose to hire. Right. That is fundamentally why we don't all work for one megalithic company is that some founder has a different viewpoint on who they should hire.

30:19 So we need to make sure that our agents are extremely tailorable and config urable to the organization we work with. But then at the same time, there is a billion in one regulations that we need to make sure that companies follow to ensure that they are not, for instance, causing disparate impact against any protected classes, minorities, et cetera, that they're not doing

30:37 things in a fully automated, illegal way, learning from things that they shouldn't be learning from. There have been a plethora of lawsuits in our field from even Amazon getting sued, now workdays being sued, and there have been lots of things. So I bring a lot of the research I used to do in bias when I was at Stanford

30:53 into this field. And then the last thing being Canada experience. Ultimately, we want candidates to have a better experience than they have today . So many people complain, "I applied to a thousand jobs. I heard back from five. What's going on with the other 995, right?"

31:08 I get a rejection email maybe a year later. I remember applying to that job. That was two years ago. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I got a call from a recruiter. This was the craziest story ever. But I got a call. I applied to an internship when I was in college. And I think I was two years out of college. I got a call from a recruiter saying, "Mason, are you still interested in this

31:27 role?" It was now a very hot startup, Series E maybe. At the time when I applied it was Series A or B. And my application got lost. And he was like, "Holy cow, we need someone with this AI experience." And I was like, "Man, I've got a job.

31:44 I remember applying, but no, I'm not still on the market." I'm actually worth double the salary that you're saying now, but two years ago I might have taken that. Yeah. And so really for companies, they lose out because they're not getting the best talent. And for candidates, they're losing out because they don't get the best people

32:00 aren't being recognized. And when 1,000 people apply to a role, it's impossible to give all of them a human interview. But why not give all of the ability to tell their story to an agent that can have that conversation and then help surface the best candidates for a recruiter to

32:15 follow up with, right? Because from a candidates perspective, I always joke this is when I was in college, I applied to Google for an internship or something. Because as you mentioned, I had a pretty good GPA at Stanford, kind of top of my class. I was doing AI work, not to say that that's all that matters, that I should

32:31 have gotten the job, but I probably should have on a resume review, gotten a call, right? But I didn't. And I don't blame them. It's because they didn't have technology. They weren't able to help elevate, "Hey, this guy, he's probably someone we should talk to." Again, not saying that I deserve the job, but on paper, I definitely looked

32:47 pretty good. I love that you said culture. I feel like nobody talks about this. Like everyone's so focused on work experience, and this matters, but if any startup or founder who has a team under 50 people, I'd say, and I don't know past that, but it

33:05 still is so important, culture is number one. You got 10 people working together, they got to work together well. They got to enjoy working well together. It doesn't mean they agree all the time. It doesn't mean they come from the same backgrounds. In fact, it's actually good if they disagree sometimes and come from different

33:20 backgrounds. We get more perspectives, we get more ideas. But having that tight-knit culture, and that I just read this thing, I'm not going to read it out here, but one of the people on my team earlier today, she wrote this post on Slack

33:35 to all of everyone at the team. It was like such this heartfelt moment, and culture, when you're building an early stage team, if you have a strong culture, the odds of success that you will have, it doesn't mean you will be successful, but you'll enjoy coming to work, startups are hard

33:51 , the first couple years suck, you have like an initial spike of excitement, and then like reality sets in, and then you're like, "Oh my God, I'm about to climb Mount Everest. How the hell am I going to get there?" You got to have that culture. You got to have those other people like kind of going on a war in that boat

34:06 with you all rowing in the same direction. I've never actually heard anybody in recruiting bring that up as like a priority. So as soon as you said that, I'm like, "I got to try your product out." Who's kind of like that ICP? Who's that like ideal customer that you are helping right now?

34:25 So we can just, people that are listening can know, I can know, I think recruiting is hard, it's challenging. No matter how good you think you are at it, you're probably, you want to get better at it. So yeah, who's kind of that ideal customer profile there? It's generally, unfortunately, for probably the people listening to this,

34:42 generally larger employers. So we don't generally work with startups, early stage, generally larger employers, like our largest client has over 250,000 employees. Right? Now you don't have to be that scale to really be someone that we work with, but

34:57 you need to be hiring in high volume. And the reason for that is it takes some time to teach our agents, right? And we work with you and your team works with us, but it's going to take a few weeks of investment of time. Therefore, there's cheaper products, again, in our space that if you're a

35:12 startup, probably makes sense to check those out. Once you scale up and you say, I want something that's really tailored to me, that's not 90% what I want, but 100% what I want, then it makes sense to engage with us. And so companies that are hiring really at least 50 people per year at a true

35:29 minimum is really where we start making sense to work with them. That's fantastic. One thing I think a lot of founders and maybe too many founders always want to know about is raising venture capital. For a lot of first time founders, it's kind of like this world that feels a

35:46 little unknown, and there's more questions than answers. So I love just kind of walking through maybe your first institutional check that you received. What was that like? Did they reach out to you? Did you reach out to them?

36:01 Did you just high level kind of talk about what that DD was like? Maybe how much money you raised and what that process of raising your first institutional round was like? Yeah. So I don't want to discourage other founders because I'll be honest, I had it

36:16 easy. We had it easy. Myself, my co-founder, both came from Stanford. We were kind of part of the network of people. We're, you know, you joked earlier, every VC wants to fund a Stanford dropout. And I agree, right? I say the only thing better to VC than being a Stanford grad is a Stanford drop

36:33 out. And so I'll be honest, we had it very easy. We raised $4 million in a little over a week and had our pick of term sheets from incredible firms to go with. This is pre-idea. This was, we had an idea in 10 slides.

36:49 So we hadn't really built much, but definitely pre-revenue. Yeah, very much pre-revenue. But here's what we did, and this is potentially actionable for people. So we got intros from our friends who are founders. So a couple of my friends from Stanford had started their own companies, had

37:06 become great, you know, successes, the companies I had worked up before. I had the founders of those places intro me to, you know, the VCs that they worked with. And that's really the best way to get into a VC is a founder that they respect. That's the best way to get anything, frankly, is a founder that they respect,

37:23 that they are backing. It says, Hey, Mason, and you know, my co-founder, JC Mason and JC are the smartest people I know. I'm putting money in. I would do anything, you know, for these guys and, you know, the firm, we end

37:38 up going with abstract ventures. They've been awesome partners for us. And my friend that introed us, he had, he had asked me when he started his company had asked me to be his co-founder there and his CTO at the time. So he had a lot of respect for us and he shared that with, you know, the

37:55 abstract team. Like I tried to, you know, have Mason be my co-founder of this company. He didn't want it at the time. But like, that's how much, how much faith they had. And that is the best way to get through the diligence process, everything with the company. Now, if you don't have that, right, if you don't have, if you haven't worked at

38:10 a great company before that you can have the founders there, intro you and you maybe don't have any friends or anyone that can really vouch for you, then it may be harder, right? And you should probably go through something like an accelerator, right? I think YC or those type of accelerators is great.

38:28 If you don't come from, you know, the valley, you know, I think that this might be get into dangerous territory, but it's obviously extremely expensive, right, in terms of how much equity they take and whatnot. But it can be great learning. And I think that if you are a first time founder that doesn't come from within

38:45 the network doing something like YC is a great way to then get the interest, because then the partners can intro you and say, hey, here's the top three companies from my batch that I want to intro you to. And really, that's what you need is you need someone to vouch for you to put their reputation on the line a little bit that, hey, this person, this company is going to do

39:02 great things. You just dropped a bunch of golden nuggets and pearls of wisdom, even though you said you were going to this idea of getting founder intros into investors, even though I feel like people talk about this, nobody actually, the amount of people that

39:17 actually put that to practice, they'll pitch a VC, the VC will pass, and then I see founders all the time, or they'll tell me, hey, I asked that VC to introduce me to somebody. That's not the way that the person just passed on your deal, or if I'm an

39:33 investor and another investor says, hey, check out the start of the first thing I'm thinking about, well, why didn't you invest it going to the founder is by far the best thing that you possibly can do. So, that was great advice. Thank you. And it wasn't like you had it easy.

39:48 You had to build up your resume. The reason you had it easier is because of all the work you did since you were 14 to even get into that institution, right? So it's from the surface, it might have looked like a week or two weeks raise. It was the credibility that you had built up as a person years before that.

40:06 That's what most people don't realize is this is why your career, you know, hey , don't go into a company. You come out of college and you go into a company and you coast, that's going to follow you, right? Your career follows you, frankly, for the rest of your life. And obviously, you can always change things, but everywhere I worked, people do

40:23 back channel references, right? Whether you're looking for a job or you're looking for investment, people do back channel references and they ask, you know, how was Bob, how was Sally at that place? And you want whoever's the CEO or, you know, whoever's your manager, et cetera, to say, oh, my, if I wish I would have met them five years earlier, right?

40:40 And that's the references that we got from where the places that we worked, where, you know, them saying, you know, gosh, this person is the rising star in our organization. What does the hiring market look like in five years? When Tenzo is a deca corn, everyone's using it, not just enterprise level

41:00 companies or larger growth stage companies, what's the hiring market look like? It is something that I think about all the time, right? And it's funny because at that point, we're going to have a mix of humans and agents and it's going to be very interesting to see how everything has evolved. But really what I fundamentally believe is that the job of a recruiter as a sc

41:20 reener is done, call it, you know, I might get some hate for this, but maybe 60, 70% of recruiters today, people that call themselves recruiters are not recruiters. They are screeners and they feel attacked by AI. They feel that AI is going to take their job because that's what they're doing.

41:37 They're screening people out to recruit means to convince, right? You are pulling someone and you are recruiting them in. And so the job of recruiter, I know this was exactly what you asked for initially, but the job of recruiter is changing a lot because we at Tenzo can screen more

41:53 efficiently for lower cost, more consistently with better can experience, right? A recruiter could do the same interview with the same candidate today and a year from now and have different decisions. We won't. Right, we're eliminating that human bias, a human judgment, the human that says

42:08 , ah, you went to my same high school, you also played football, you're also a big Eagles fan. All right, I'll let you in, right? You don't want that human bias because ultimately that's why companies end up hiring people that look like and sound like the same people that are currently in there, right? That's one of the big, you know, frankly issues we have in a society.

42:24 So recruiting is going to become much more unbiased for the beginning. What recruiters will do though is they will sell candidates. There will sell candidates on why their company is the best. They will get to know candidates. They will get to know the hiring managers. They will be better advisors to their company and they will ultimately be the

42:40 ones orchestrating agents. And then what the agents are going to be doing is making those connections. So I think that in a few years, what it may be is that you have a conversation with an agent. So we have a, we have an agent we call the candidate concierge. And what you can do with the candidate concierge is you can now on your website

42:57 , let people have an open ended conversation with an AI agent. That agent will start searching every available role that you have at that organization, imagine them to the perfect role and to their questions. You know, Kevin, imagine if you spent an hour talking to a recruiter that knew

43:14 every single role at, you know, I won't name any companies, but, you know, at, at, at Acme Corp, right? At Acme Corp. They know every role. They know the software engineer, the finance, et cetera. And based off your wants, your desires, your experience, where you want to be

43:30 in 10 years, they say, Kevin, here's the three roles that I think are best fit for you. Let me tell you about them, right? And then they can help you through the application process, they're your advisor. And so what recruiting will look like is you're just going to have conversations with the agents who are then going to match you up into the right roles. And then ultimately it's going to be based off of, okay, you're going to have

43:47 three conversations set up, you know, no more back and forth, apply to a thousand things, decide the company, decide the types of roles that you want, have those conversations, and then now go through the process. That is music to thousands and thousands of people's ears. I'll tell you that that's, that sounds like a world that I want to live in.

44:05 If I'm looking for a new career, a new job, Mason, in closing a couple questions, biggest advice for someone starting out, stop planning and start doing, right? Just, just start doing the thing.

44:21 Don't prep. Don't set up your legal entity. Don't do any of those things. Get in front of customers and don't even build. Get in front of customers, which is hard. You know, I as an engineering founder want to build first, but with, unless you 're doing something super deep tech that you don't know, is this even slightly possible?

44:39 Get in front of customers, get a contract, get a POC, get someone that's at least saying, wow, yeah, if you built that, I would, I would do it, right? With Claude these days, you could make a prototype probably of it at least or a wireframe to show them. Do that. If you need to do first, not build the product and then go out and sell it,

44:57 even if it's not a product company that you're starting, you know, I was talking to someone there, they're starting a services form firm of sorts and they have certain ideas and they were asking us for certain things. And I was like, you should be getting customers first. Get a signed contract because what you're doing, you don't need to have

45:13 anything first. You can do it all by hand. And then you can do those automations and those things. So just do the thing. Don't plan. It's planning is procrastination, really. You're afraid of failure is why because you know you can't fail if it's all in

45:28 your control. If it's, can I build the thing? You know, you can build the thing. Do the thing that's scary that you might fail, which is sell into the customer, get in someone to say yes. That's Nike slogan. Just do it. Just do it. Favorite book that's shaped you as an entrepreneur, founder in business.

45:45 This is probably a crazy one, maybe, but I've read a lot of business books. And so I think it's, it's tough. They, all of those learnings have kind of melded together, but my favorite book that I want everyone to read and really internalize is the challenger sale.

46:00 So very sales oriented, I know, but even if you're not in sales, that is the number one book to read. If you're in, because every job, frankly, is sales, especially to move up. If you're in a large organization, it's all politics. And what is politics?

46:15 It's sales. It's understanding in every message what's in it for me, how to convince someone, get them to do the thing you want. And I think that the challenger sale, I've read a lot of sales books and basically get it into starting my company and having to do a lot of sales. The challenger sale is, is by far the best.

46:30 Last question, who's been the biggest inspiration in your life? That if they were listening, you would want, maybe you haven't told them this, but so calling them out and then maybe why they've been the biggest inspiration to you in your life. That's a good one. I mean, I would have to say my parents.

46:49 They, you know, they've given up so much. They've invested so much time into me when I was a kid. And I joked about my dad, you know, putting up with all my crazy questions. Like I, I would not be where I am today without my mom having dedicated so much

47:06 of her life to raising us. And my dad putting up with all of our crazy questions and pushing us and, and really I would say that those, they are, they have been, you know, as an adult now, people ask me questions. And I don't know the answer. I think, how do my parents always get it right?

47:22 And I don't know if everyone has this feeling, but like, I was like, my parents always got it right. There's nothing I look back at. I go, they did it wrong. So if I can just be, you know, half as good a parent as they were to me. And, you know, if, and I run my company sometimes, like, you know, sometimes it

47:39 's kind of like a family, right? Uh, I don't call us a family. We're more of a sports team, right? We're high performance than, than we are. But I think I just look at the way that they treated us, that they treat others . And it's a massive inspiration for me. Hey, shout out to good parents. That was beautiful.

47:54 Hey, I've loved talking to you. This was fun. I'm excited to follow along on your journey and yeah, man, thanks for coming on . Thanks for having me on, Kevin. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to founder and covered. If you found this conversation helpful, please follow the show so you don't

48:12 miss out on next episodes. We also have a newsletter where we profile early stage founders, sharing tactical advice you can use right now. You can find the link in the show notes. I'll see you next time.