No one in the world of work likes form-filling, complex systems and bureaucracy. Yet, teams need to feel motivated, aligned, and accountable on the job, which usually means a lot of that stuff we hate. So what's an employer to do? OnLoop is here to turn every manager into a supercharged coach, and CEO and founder Projjal "JJ" Ghatak is on Firing Squad to try and prove his company has the juice to fulfill that promise and take it to established players like Lattice, 15five, Culture Amp and others. Does this former Uber executive's startup have what it takes to survive Chad & Cheese? Gotta listen to find out.
[00:00:00] Like Shark Tank then you'll love firing squad Chad Soar and Joel Teasman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest
[00:00:08] Salziest and bad as startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive
[00:00:15] Bigger foxhole and duck for cover kids the chat and cheese podcast is taking it to a whole
[00:00:23] Yeah, what's up everybody? It's your webmasters favorite podcast aka the chat in cheese podcast with with you know Indian parents and a US and Singapore passport. So we'll have fun with that. I've been to 49 countries have a weird accent, which is probably 75% American and 25% others. And I think what what what makes me tick is a general curiosity about the human condition and you know, you know, world wide right field goal or a Ron Santa smile kids. All you can do now is hang your head pack it up and go home. Get ready for some firing squad. Are you ready Joel? Are you ready JJ is the better question. Let's go. Two minutes starts now. Hey folks
[00:03:03] I'm Projal and I'm the CEO of found and blind spots. And then finally, ongoing when we first started, but Curate was impossible to ever get curate.com. And if people can't find you, that's a problem. And so as we've thought about reading the company,
[00:05:40] I think being able to get a.com was a huge factor.
[00:05:43] And in the early days, we talked a lot about fixing
[00:05:46] broken feedback loops in organizations So this sort of aspect that people drive business outcomes and that sort of being a core job of an executive was something that was pretty ingrained early on in my career. And seeing Uber go from 9,000 to 27,000 people personally leading teams of 50 to 150, having to do collaborations every six two and then sort of stayed in stealth until we got to a product that we wanted to talk about. And then sort of we started working with GPD3 back in 2021. And one of the first prototypes we built was taking small bits of bite-sized feedback and sort of putting that together in a coherent summary as our first iteration of an automated performance review. And we saw pretty early that that tech was going to get mainstream and that's when we
[00:08:23] raised that at three and a half and sort of build repeatability. And so we're at a stage where we've identified creative agencies and sort of post-PMF impact tech companies as sort of target markets where we want to build repeatability around. We sort of serve customers globally, but our core markets are the US Singapore, Japan,
[00:09:40] Australia, and the UAE.
[00:09:41] Jesus, that's broad.
[00:09:43] Are you calling the 2 million a round?
[00:09:46] That seems like a, India, Singapore and Philippines. And for me, we actually did not acquire any customers outside the US until we were clear what we were building because we didn't want to
[00:11:01] accidentally build a product that wasn't for the US don't drink. But you know we've complexified what being a manager is whereby it feels like this overwhelming burden that nobody understands
[00:12:20] and what we've done is broken it down into five cost to and parts that demystifies that manager because a lot of it has to do with just caring, right? And when that's not the focus of the company, they're focusing on revenue, sales goals, marketing leads, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then it's like, oh, well, how does Johnny feel today? That's never a priority. So talk about how you can make a shitty toxic culture into a great culture.
[00:13:42] Yeah.
[00:13:43] I don't think anybody walks in the office in the morning and says, I'm going to be a
[00:13:45] ship manager today.
[00:13:46] And there might be some, but I think that's the exception of our behavior. to what the constituent parts of being a good manager looks like. And using tech to sort of drive those inputs continually, you can make a manager better one day at a time. Okay. Now, one of the things that we see with tech over and over and over and over is that great vision, great vision, and kind of, there's a little bit of over-promising that happened.
[00:15:01] So on the site, it says prioritize individual wellbeing
[00:15:04] as the foundation for thriving organization.
[00:15:07] Right.
[00:15:07] Totally get that. organizations and in many ways we feel that we've built the OKR or agile off today of What exists in a hybrid generative AI world to give people a way to think about sort of overall performance and for me Well-being is a high ROI activity to drive performance because I went through clinical anxiety in 2022 as a founder and I saw what that did to my productivity and performance as a professional and so I
[00:17:22] reviews does not lie with HR, it writes with managers. And the other ones who suffer in the process.
[00:17:24] And because we serve managers above all else,
[00:17:27] we are maniacally focused on driving an experience that
[00:17:30] lead to consistently positive and fair outcomes
[00:17:34] while taking the friction out.
[00:17:36] Gladys, on the other hand, is building an HRIS,
[00:17:38] because his HR customer wants one system.
[00:17:40] And so ultimately, what you build
[00:17:43] is a factor of who your customer is.
[00:17:45] And my competition from a performance management lens who runs an org of 50 plus people, we work with the supply chain or get beyond meat for a long time, instead of driving motivation and outcomes at a time of rapid change. And so typically it's someone that themselves run an organization of 50 plus people, they can either own a full P&L or owner department or a full company. So as someone, a proud member of the generation that said rub some dirt on it and shut the
[00:19:01] hell up, this feels very warm and funny, very, very millennial, Gen Z. So for us, in an organization we serve, the leader we sell to is typically sort of in their late 30s to early 40s, but the orgs that they run are anywhere between sort of people in the early 20s to ranging all the way. And so as a business, we do need to think about experientially who that applies to. And frankly, a huge benefit that we have is that we have a global diverse team and we
[00:20:21] are building for ourselves.
[00:20:23] And ultimately, we are representative of our. But we have a set of customers who are not hybrid, who equally see value in the work that we do. So how do you collect the performance data? So are you integrated into Salesforce, HubSpot, human capital management platforms?
[00:21:41] Where are you getting your data?
[00:21:42] Because I'm gonna need sales data,
[00:21:44] marketing leads data, attendance, promotion data,
[00:21:47] that kind of stuff. eventually by directionally connect with every HRIS, whereby we'll pick up some employee data as input in the only part, and sort of be able to then push outputs on the other end, and then sort of being able to pull in targets or tasks from other sort of tools that people use on the other side. So it sounds like right now, you don't have the bidirectional that's going. So how often does somebody have to manually enter
[00:23:03] the information through spreadsheet, or what?
[00:23:05] I mean, if they get it, they've got to pull it,
[00:23:07] they've got to manually observations on a regular basis, which is as simple as an unstructured voice note, which we then convert to structured feedback
[00:24:20] and then a patch into a particular goal.
[00:24:22] Why aren't you guys focusing on the enterprise?
[00:24:24] Because the enterprise is going to ask you to do.
[00:25:41] And we are fundamentally changing how companies operate. And therefore, there's a sequential
[00:25:45] sort of process on how you go about. Time to face the firing squad. Are you ready, my friend? I am ready. All right, Chad, get him. All right, JJ, I gotta say, so performance management is broken. You are 100% right, but it hasn't been fixed thus far, and you gotta ask yourself why, right? You gotta ask yourself why, but it's broken. Totally get it. So I understand where you're going,
[00:27:01] because I've been in management leadership position
[00:27:03] since I've been in my early 20s.
[00:27:05] And do you know what sucks about that position?
[00:27:08] Performance review. all of it. It feels like you're still litmus testing, right? And I get that, but my friend, you've been in this long enough. My advice is you pick a target, you hit that target over and over and over until you hit that 2 million, 5 million, 6 million, and you sell this. Disappoint my friend. That's one of the things that i think this is where companies are moving and this is where the world is moving i think from a generational standpoint younger people want that constant contact they want that feedback loop they want it all the time and if you don't do that as a company you're going to fall behind like there's just no way
[00:29:40] around it i think from Chad's point managers want, take that for what it's worth. But you come out of the firing squad with your dignity intact and your face is not bloodied or
[00:31:03] scarred. So how do you feel?
[00:31:05] That was great. I had a great time. Thank you. You'll not brutal