Happy Monday.

Did you know we hosted over 1000 guests during our SF Tech Week events?

Some facts:

We’ll link our upcoming events in each weekly article, so stay tuned. And if you want to build events with us, just reply to this email!

In the meantime, hot off the press: Jooba just came out of stealth last week with backing from a16z. We’re excited to dive deep into the company and team.

Ethan and Arek 🦄

It's hard to imagine our lives without Wispr Flow. Accurate dictation makes all the difference on a busy day.

Your AI is only as good as what you feed it. Feed it a transcript with your product names, acronyms, and numbers spelled wrong, and you spend the afternoon hand-fixing the output.

Wispr Flow Notetaker uses your dictionary and calendar, so product names, acronyms, numbers, and uncommon names come out spelled right. It pops up when your meeting starts and captures Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and Slack huddles with one click, no bot joining the call.

Then your meetings show up inside Claude or ChatGPT through the built-in connector. No copy paste. Try Notetaker free on Mac and Windows.

Try Notetaker Free

This is sponsored content.

The more a role pays, the more a recruiting agency charges to fill it. Jooba takes the opposite approach, with its pricing getting cheaper the more a company hires. 

It uses AI to manage much of the recruiting process directly for companies, offering an alternative to traditional recruiting agencies. They usually charge placement fees based on a percentage of a candidate's first-year salary. For high-paying roles, that can quickly become very expensive.

Companies start by working with Jooba to define the role and what they want in a candidate. Then, it uses a network of AI agents to search publicly available information across platforms like LinkedIn, GitHub, X (formerly Twitter), and personal websites to identify candidates that match the company's needs. Finally, its AI agents and team of talent engineers handle outreach, interview scheduling, and syncing to the company's recruiting systems.

Interested candidates are sent directly to hiring teams through Slack, where managers can review them and decide who they want to move forward with. This feedback enables Jooba to continually refine its search and identify better-fitting candidates.

Check it out: jooba.com

Jooba operates as a technology-enabled recruiting service. Its pricing is flexible and becomes more cost-effective as a company makes more hires. Companies with higher hiring volume can switch to a subscription that includes unlimited hires, with no fee charged for each placement. This gives companies a more predictable recruiting cost and allows them to scale hiring up or down without having to build a large internal recruiting team.

If you’d like to explore opportunities with Jooba, let us know by replying directly to this email!

Mark Benliyan had a pretty unique path before starting Jooba. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in computer science and linguistics at just 19 years old, completing his studies in only two years. During that time, he completed several software engineering internships at companies such as Figma, Netflix, Tinder, and NASA's JPL. He later returned to Figma as a full-time engineer.

While working in tech, Benliyan started building a large audience online around careers and recruiting. His LinkedIn eventually grew to more than 100,000 followers. That gave him a close look at how candidates were thinking about the hiring process.

Benliyan eventually left Figma to pursue his own startup. To better understand the recruiting industry, he spent several months shadowing a major recruiting agency and learning how it operated. This gave him firsthand insight into the industry's manual processes and opportunities to automate them using AI.

At first, Jooba focused on helping job seekers build resumes. Next, it moved to automating the work traditionally handled by recruiting agencies, offering companies a way to find and hire talent more efficiently.

Benliyan built Jooba around the idea that AI could take over much of the repetitive work recruiters spend their time doing, while humans remain involved in the parts that require judgment. His long-term vision is to make hiring faster and more accessible by combining AI automation with the personalized service of traditional recruiting agencies.

Recruiting is a people-heavy business. Companies either build their own recruiting teams or pay outside agencies to help them find candidates. In both cases, recruiters spend a huge amount of time on repetitive tasks, like searching LinkedIn for potential candidates, sending outreach messages, following up with applicants, and scheduling interviews. 

Much of this work can now be automated using AI.

Instead of following the traditional SaaS playbook and giving recruiters software to improve their productivity, Jooba is trying to become the recruiter itself. Companies tell Jooba who they want to hire, and Jooba handles the rest. This includes identifying potential candidates, reaching out to them, coordinating interviews, tracking recruiting progress, and keeping applicant records updated. Thus, hiring teams have more time to focus on interviewing candidates and making hiring decisions.

A key part of Jooba's business model is how its AI agents work alongside talent engineers. With extensive automation, a single talent engineer can manage more searches than a traditional recruiter.

This means the company can serve more customers without needing to hire employees at the same rate. It’s an example of the growing vertical AI trend, where companies use AI to take on work traditionally handled by service providers. If the model works, Jooba could turn recruiting, a business that has historically depended on large teams, into something much more scalable.

Jooba says it has already worked with more than 100 teams and reports strong improvements in both hiring speed and cost.

On top of that, Jooba’s product fits into a company’s existing workflow. Hiring managers can receive candidates through Slack instead of having to constantly check another recruiting platform. The company also plans to add support for Microsoft Teams. Thoughtful touches like this make Jooba feel more like an extension of the company’s recruiting team rather than another piece of software employees have to learn.

Retention could also be difficult, because hiring is inconsistent. Once a role is filled, the next one is often different, and companies may stop hiring for months because of a hiring freeze or simply slow team growth. Jooba will need to figure out how to keep customers even when hiring slows down.

Competition is another risk. Recruiting agencies can start using AI tools themselves, and a growing number of startups are building AI recruiting products. Because AI models are widely available, Jooba will need to build its moat, whether through a better recruiting process, customer relationships, the data it collects from searches, and/or other unique advantages.

Yet, the large market, costly status quo, and high volume of automatable tasks, combined with Jooba’s remarkable success thus far, are hard to argue with.

If Jooba can continue growing its customer base while maintaining high-quality results, it could prove that recruiting doesn't have to be as expensive or labor-intensive as it has traditionally been.