 Hello, hi everyone. Good morning still So I'm Adam. I'm a product manager at Credex and we'll be covering the topic of hiring for financial technology companies because if you're coming from a pure like tech product background or a pure banking background the experience You'll find in working at a financial technology company or starting one is that the culture is very different, right? And that will impact the recruiting for your company. So first like to introduce Chaitra and Lucas and Aditya who is the head of engineering at Instamojo will be joining us in just a few minutes So to get started maybe Chaitra You could give a little background of your startup simple as well as maybe tell us what you were doing just before You had started the company Thanks Thanks Adam So I am the co-founder of simple simple is a fintech company. We like to think of ourselves as selling peace of mind to customers What simple does is our model is inspired by the Kirana store Kata So we work with online merchants to give them the capability to provide a VIP checkout experience to their best customers And that is powered by a line of credit Which is what simple provides and it's an end-to-end platform So we take care of the invoicing the billing and the settlement everything The idea is to eliminate friction at the point of sale and also post-purchase My background before starting simple was so I by training I'm an engineer and I also Got a business degree I've worked as a software engineer long back, but it kind of feels like in my past life For the most part after business school, which was about 10 years 11 years ago. I've worked in launching new business initiatives For small and mid-sized companies. So that's been my main background. I would qualify myself more as a product manager Before I started simple. Thank you and Lucas why don't you tell us a little bit about your company namaste credit and your background. Thanks. Hello Okay, so Lucas Pianchi. I founded namaste credit or co-founded namaste credit, which is an online marketplace for For loans. We're very focused on SME Loans and I think what kind of differentiates us Is the fact that we do all kinds of SME loans often when people think of SME loans They think of unsecured SME loans, but we do all kinds And and so we've we've developed a platform that speeds up the process improves it engages All kinds of different parties from the lenders to channel partners to the borrowers themselves Before namaste credit. I had helped build a company called couple partners, which Which we sold to Moody's ultimately So it was a financial research and analytics outsourcing firm not very tech oriented at all really but but I helped build it and bring on clients in the US as a Head of BD in the US and and we ended up selling it For about 500 million dollars to Moody's so after that wanted to find something more exciting to do than work at Moody's for while Before that I was actually an equity research analyst So my background is in finance and I'd worked at several banks before and So myself and my co-founder actually brought the finance experience that That Adam was speaking about just a minute ago and then we partnered with a CTO based here in Bangalore Because this is where all the best tech is built, right? So that's it. Thanks Lucas and did you have welcome. Thanks for coming So did he has the head of engineering at in Simojo. So maybe if you could tell us Maybe a little bit about what you do and then maybe what you were doing just before in Simojo Although I know you're part of the founding team the company, right? So So I'm Aditya Sengupta. I'm one of the co-founders of Instamojo. So I take care of engineering risk and compliance Before Instamojo, I was a research fellow at IIT Bombay Which was essentially the first position I had after my engineering At Instamojo, we help small merchants accept payments on the internet We try to make it so that they don't have to deal with banks. They don't have to deal with paperwork If they don't need to they don't have to deal with Integrations at all, right? So we like so for instance if you're a musician and you just want to sell some music online You shouldn't have to set up a website Host your music somewhere then integrate with the payment gateway talk to a bank So the idea is that you should be able to come to us upload your music to us Get a link and share that with your customers. It's as simple as that, right? And we try to do this for a wide range of use cases not just obviously not just files of music, right? So yeah, the key objective is to make it easy for small merchants to accept payments on the internet Thanks Aditya So I'm gonna follow up a question with you about how Engineering at your organization is impacted by just the nature of being a payments company Where you're obviously regulated, right? But your core product is a software product, right? So if you could share a little bit about how that's impacted the way you think about recruiting at your company as well It's just sort of the the DNA the the mindset of the organization when it comes to product Yeah, so an important part of being in the FinTech space is to make sure that there are certain Attributes or aspects which you take care of very carefully, right? So for instance securities paramount you if somebody enters their card number on your page You don't want that card number to get leaked and be used by someone else You have to have a very strong bias for correctness, right? I mean if your bank showed you the wrong balance you would completely lose faith in them Which and these are aspects which kind of differ from say a very fast-moving product company Whereas I mean you'd really want to be able to focus on deploying things quickly In a fast-moving product company you'd ideally be okay with a bit of breakage a bit of failure Whereas there are many aspects of a payment company where you absolutely cannot be okay with a breakage and failure, right? I mean you're going down could impact somebody else's livelihood entire livelihood, right? So at the company we focus we silo ourselves into like I mean we have several silos so to speak and there are parts of the company which Have a certain kind of DNA and there are other parts of the company whichever different DNA right so for instance our payment and platform teams Have all these DNA attributes which I just spoke about whereas our growth team has a very different DNA Right, so if you're setting up a landing page if you're setting up the registration process That we're okay with like a much more fast-moving culture which where we're okay with Breakage once in a while, whereas on our payment looks workflows. We are absolutely not okay with that, right? And how does that impact your release cycles? So typically in a day we do like maybe five to ten releases at the high level we're still we still move pretty fast What we do is we try to take the best of everything that we know of that We are aware of as an engineering culture and we try to amalgamate that right so a Lot of folks in fintech are used to very large release cycles where you take a like say an extremely large feature You build the entire thing out get it wetted by compliance legal operations and then you And then you release it right there are security audits in certain industries that you have to take care of so There's a lot more to do to get something out to a production server in fintech typically Whereas in Like one of the best Workflows in product companies is that you do a very iterative release cycle where say you take like a large feature down break it down into weekly sprints Then you take small components of that and just keep deploying those to production, right? so we try to take a mix of both and So we make sure that what's going out is secure. We have a very strong review peer review process I mean you cannot so nobody can merge their own code in You have to get it wetted by someone else We make sure that the people who are at least wetting the code they have background checks Which you have to do for instance if you are on the PCI compliance you cannot push Something like not everyone can push stuff to your servers, right? So we try to make sure that we amalgamate various best practices and get the best out of that Okay, thank you very much So I have a question for you both um Have you found that as Awareness and as people move from more offline activities to online in their discovery Right of products and maybe maybe your companies haven't been around long enough But maybe you have seen a little bit of this how that's impacted the culture of your organization where maybe you had more of an Outbound activity initially and now you have more of an inbound one, right? And maybe Lucas you can speak a little bit about this because most of your clients right are more Offline is that would you is that fair to say? Yep? Okay great And maybe if you could talk a little bit about that how that's maybe impacted So if you're thinking about things from a business development perspective how that's impacted the the culture of your organizations Sure So I'd say our core customer said it's still largely offline What types of businesses do you work with all kinds of SMEs? Okay, you mean example the board from you know Schools educational institutions retailers wholesalers of all kinds of things small manufacturers Etc that basically any company that That has turned over between one and fifty crores That's kind of the core customer set. So So the very end customers which are the ones getting loans through us basically are largely still offline and and In our space, they tend to work with intermediaries right have channel partners They have people that they trust and know That do things for them and that goes for loans as well as many other things, right? So What I found is especially in India people tend to have you know, other people do things for them And so that goes very much in our space and so what we've done is Engaged a number of the channel partners some of which are offline, but a number of which are also online and and To a certain extent train them to work with us online And so that's how we have worked kind of having champions if you will that have broader reach out into the broader say Indian community of Businesses, but that they themselves are fairly adept at At doing things online. So that's kind of been the strategy that we've deployed. We continue to do that. I'd say There's been maybe a minor shift of even the channel partners coming online Or yes somewhat more significant shift in the channel partners coming online These are people like chartered accountants, right that tend to have to do things online anyway Like file taxes for their clients like file compliance paperwork for their clients And so so that shift has been happening kind of naturally But we have been pushing it a little more through again kind of training them on it Asking them to do this stuff and ultimately showing them the benefit, right? When you get a big benefit out of doing something in a particular manner Then you'll continue doing it in that manner You'll start doing it in that matter and then do it even more so in our case the big benefit of Working online is that you're actually able to apply with many different lenders at the same time Right if you try to do that in an offline fashion It's kind of impossible trying to approach 10 different lenders at the same time is not really feasible And so doing it online is the benefit that the channel partners get okay And so has there been learning, you know over the last what it's been about three years that since you started the company Almost three years. Okay. And so when you first started in how you thought you'd go about Sales, right and what channels would would work How things had changed and how that's impacted your recruiting so say from maybe it was more of an outbound strategy to now More of an inbound one maybe more offline versus online. How has that affected things in your organization? Well, we actually try to push the online element with channel partners from the beginning Okay, so we actually haven't changed that element too much. Okay. I'd say the type of channel partners that we've engaged has changed somewhat Where today we're working more with Channels that were ready in the loan facilitation business before and we have just trained them to do the online portion of it Before you know when we started we were a little bit more focused on folks that had never done loans before type of thing And and so that was the shift, but maybe they were really active online already doing other things. Okay, right? So I mean so there was a little bit of a behavior already As far as doing some activities online that that's again. We started with those types of folks, but we found that Some knowledge of the loan process is important to set expectations with the end clients as well and And so so again, we've focused a little bit more on folks that are already in the Loan business or loan facilitation business, but hadn't done anything online before as such So we've trained them to come online to do things shown them the benefit of it, etc. Got it Okay, makes sense and check threads. You have anything to share on this topic as far as Sales and marketing how things have changed in your expectations when you're first starting the company Mm-hmm, and and maybe also if you could speak a little bit about Is there a regulatory aspect that you have to be concerned about with your business? Yes, absolutely Okay, yeah, so if you could share a little bit about that as well with simple sure So I think for simple when we started off the nature of the business that we were in we were planning to Provide credit as a convenience to our customers. So naturally regulation was a big question mark in front of us and So for us me and my co-founder, we had to address regulation even before we were able to raise the seed round Right, we had to figure out a solution there And the way we went about it was one is, you know, we spent a lot of time ourselves trying to understand what are the Possibilities under law, what are the do's and don'ts that are clearly defined? What is the gray area? And where is their room for creativity? Right, so when you're trying to invent something very new, I think the whole like for us the entire approach was we were We were like the entire traditional payment infrastructure is a legacy of the Mastercard visa era And we thought that that needs to change right and the only way that will change is you to create something new from ground up So when you're creating something new from ground up your There are two there's one advantage that you know, it's it's new. It's so you're reimagining the world So you have a lot of flexibility in that sense But you also need to operate in the real world and therefore you need to Understand to some extent what are the boundaries of the actual world that you're operating in so we spoke to You know, we will be reached out to advisors people who are experts in this space Some of you must have heard of Shinjini. She used to be the CEO of Ptm Payments Bank now. She's the head of Citibank retail in India. So she was our advisor She at that time she used to work with PWC. She's X RBI So we found a great mentor in her and she really helped us figure out the compliance Structuring for our business. We had to do that before Going to you know, even raising our seed round because that was the first question that was asked of us once that compliance piece was figured out then it was about You know going up and going ahead and setting up the team and I guess for us what our approach to hiring where it Differed especially in the early days to now So we are about two and a half years old now in the early days The most important thing for us since we were reimagining the future was the ability to think Based on first principles. So the if you look at that first set of people that simple hired the first 10 people It's that was the single most important criteria for us being able to think on first principles not being Blinded by how things are being able to ask why not and what else? You know, what what would the ideal solution be? right, so that was important and Of course now things have changed, you know, two and a half years in I guess the way things have evolved for us in the beginning from a sales perspective the way We were very clear that the nature of the business that we were in going after the long tail would require a lot of feet on the street and You know, that was not the model. We wanted to go after so in that sense. We are different from insta mojo, which is You know, you cater more to the long tail So we went after mid and large-sized merchants in like for almost one and a half years Our one year our sales team was just one person. So it was the co-founders and there was one more guy And then we added more capacity Now in the last I would say six months We have started receiving a lot of inbound requests from the smaller merchants and therefore now we have shifted more towards Inbound, you know, we hired a couple of people who can take care of the inbound leads and also reach out to the smaller merchants But our entire strategy again to go after the long tail is partnering with the likes of you know, either insta mojo or is a pay Etc. So a channel distribution Through a payment gateway is what we are looking at as opposed to going and integrating with each merchant ourselves Then I guess the last question that you were asking so in one more thing that Sort of crops up in simple case is credit risk, right? So we are giving we are giving people Credit and therefore risk is a big thing But again there if there are any entrepreneurs in the room the question to ask yourselves is on day one Do you really need somebody who's a risk expert? What will that person even do when you don't even know what the set of customers are going to adopt your service are like How they're going to behave etc. So if that capability exists in the founders, it's great So my co-founder Nitya. He was ex-wall Street. He used to have a credit mortgage back security background But of course it was in a different context in a different country. However, the fundamental vocabulary of credit and the frameworks of credit was kind of covered and we managed with that for about two and a half years However, now in the last three months, of course as we grow up and we scale now We definitely need somebody who's more comes with experience who comes with You know who can give us the clout that is required and the discipline that is required around credit So we are hiring somebody who's experienced So I guess that's just a framework to think about, you know, what what would say the same thing goes to data science You don't think early on. Do you really when you don't even have any data? What will you do with unless as a founder? You're an expert yourself What will you do with somebody who is like a machine learning or an AI expert, right? That person's most likely going to get bored. So it's important to think about I guess what your needs are early on and as they evolve you start adding capacity on that front, right? Okay, thank you and risk. I'm sure is also very important right at insimojo Is there also an element of that for namaste credit Lucas? Not so much, right? You're not you're not the ones with the loan book, right? Okay Great But maybe if you could speak a little bit about that at a payments company because I don't think probably majority of folks Don't realize that that's an element of you know, your business model, right? You end up rejecting certain merchants, right? So if you could share more about this activity and maybe some of the folks who are involved with that activity Yeah, thank you. Okay. So Yeah, obviously risk is one of our most important One of the things we did was focus on risk from and from a very very early point in time, right? Because for us We make a very very very small amount of money in terms of like safe There's a hundred rupees being transacted. We make a few basis like few like a fraction of one percent, right? So a hundred rupees being lost implies that's like the loss of revenue on of like several Like I think a few hundred transactions. It's so one merchant going back and wipe us out, right? So for us, this is something that we focus on at a very early stage. This is some feedback We had gotten from I don't know if you've heard of DJ part of the guy who went on to become the chief data scientist of the United States, right? So he pushed us to focus on risk at a very early point So one important thing about risk is that it's a function of how long you do it and how well you learn Right. So if if you start very late, you're going to get hammered by people who are Because if you already have a lot of money moving in you're going to get completely hammered by people who are already Experienced at pulling money out of you. So this is a function. We started very early and We focused on hiring from Companies which have a very strong focus on risk. So we we'd hired from people like PayPal Amazon in India we hired from people like Flipkart. So the folks we have in our risk team bring in a lot of their prior experience and That's generally our hiring philosophy across the board. We try to bring in people who bring in a Lot of diversity a lot of experience right and We largely give them a free hand and allow them to do like what they feel is right and Yeah, we're still here. So if you've not been wiped out, so I guess we're lucky good You're risk aware enough right to still be here today No, thank you very much and another question We have about maybe five more minutes here and then we'll have another five minutes for question and answer So I'm one to ask the three of you You know some insights maybe for oh, this is included. So we have about one minute. Okay. Great. Thank you So just quickly maybe if you could share some maybe sources for recruiting like Certain industries that you found Fit well with your Organizations DNA my experience has been that you know, we're we're a company that has a financial product Credits, but we found that our sales people tend to the best performers are ones that come from Typically doing sales Jobs at inbound sales jobs at services companies like digital marketing services versus former bankers So I'd like to hear if if you guys can share Some great sources some tips for the audience I mean, we are still very small. So we're like a 50% team and You know 20 or 30 what half of them are product and engineering. So for us, I guess the main source especially for the product development team is internal referrals, I think the most powerful source has been Using your own initial team and then, you know, like The use the network of the people that are already in your team starting from the founders to start hiring Serendipity has honestly played a very heavy role You know, we've been lucky enough to meet especially in the early days the right types of people at Sort of events like this that we were randomly attending and those right set of people knew on Many right sets of people and we were able to hire. So I think very very important for me personally I would think is especially in terms of your Engineering team is hiring the right Leaders and if you hire the right leaders People with the right networks, you know, they'll be able to bring like the whole queen bee model, right? If you have the queen bee then the worker bees will kind of come That that has been there and another thing with respect to hiring that has changed from the beginning versus now Is it most functions in the early days? We were focused more on generalists because when you're young, you need people who can do a lot of things Well, but I think as you get older, there are certain areas I guess I agree with Aditya like what he was saying earlier There are certain depends on you know, there are certain areas where you need Security correctness reliability, but there are certain need certain areas where you need to build to build fast and break things, right? So depending on those, you know, the nature of Your evolution and your needs at any given stage Specialists start becoming necessary as you grow older. So I guess that's kind of our Okay, thank you You guys maybe give like a few words answer because I think we'll we'll cut to a Q&A in a moment. Yeah I'll be quick basically on the tech side. It's been everything and everywhere referrals recruiters You know, just knockery kind of thing the main thing being you know, kind of a rigorous interview process and and and folks initially Like you're mentioning that have a broad kind of view and vision and capability set and interest level And then as you grow then having more specialized people on the sales side We actually haven't had a great experience with bankers either and have also not had a great experience or done much actually with Digital marketers like you're saying but rather bringing in folks from a diverse set of sales backgrounds that You know, basically know how to engage people and train people like I was mentioning before We were in the business of training people to get online and use our platform and all that So that's been our experience on the sales side. Thank you So of all the functions we have or of all the things we do at Insta mojo I think hiring is by far the hardest by an order of magnitude, right? So to add to what everybody else said, I mean we do all of that Our primary focus is on hiring from hiring from other product companies We tend to avoid so we tend to avoid Services-based companies because we found that the DNA just doesn't like work well with us Apart from that we I mean from like we look at product companies and then we try not to really pigeonhole ourselves into like certain Product companies or certain types of product companies. We try to get as much diversity as we can Thank you. Thanks everyone We have room for two questions. Great two minutes one question Just a reminder this is a panel so it'll be recorded these guys will be available later If you want to have a more candid conversation, you can find them offline Hi, I have a question for Chaitra because she mentioned that you insisted on first principles thinking when you're hiring I think that's one of the most difficult attributes to look for in a person Could you give an example of how you hired somebody who showed these attributes very early on in the interview process? That's a great question. You're putting me in a spot here now So I guess for me there was you know, I have to go back in time two and a half years, but when you I Don't have I did not honestly at that time have a very structured like list of questions that if I ask ABC and D I'll get to know whether this person thinks first principles or not It was I guess the main approach I take that it's twofold one is get them to talk about the decisions that they've made in the past and Ask them why they've made the decisions that they've made and that's been my main window into ascertaining whether this person thinks based on first principles or not and Also, it gives me an insight into their value systems and I think one super critical thing for us And probably true for any startup is you want as I think Aditya mentioned the DNA needs to match I guess the DNA is nothing but a reflection of the operating values that are important to you as a company and the person coming in So asking why behind each decision it could be Changing of jobs. It could be a certain project. They executed in a certain way getting to the bottom of it has helped me Thank you. Thanks guys. All right. I think that's it, right? Okay. Great. Well. Thank you everyone. I'm also Chaitra Thank you so much Lucas. Thank you. Did yet. Thank you so much Thanks, Adam pleasure