Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani (Part 6)

SM: When did you start playing with SimplyHired?

GG: After I left India Community Center I decided to take another trip back to India. I went through another 10 states. I went through 15 cities and a couple dozen villages. It was part of my continued effort to get to know India better. By the end of that trip I had gotten through all but 10 states, and I will get through those in the future, it will just take some time. Exploring India is a passion for me.

When I returned from that trip I knew I was ready to start a business. I came back on a Tuesday and by Friday my partner Peter Weck and I were looking for office spaces. Anil, my brother, was working with us part-time at that time; he is the third co-founder. I think there are probably a lot of stories about folks who saw something that they really did not like and they moved into a business because they were trying to fix some problem. For us this project was very different. It stemmed from a desire to start a company because we loved working together. We loved the process of building a company and the learning that came out of it. I think the process of looking back on something we have created is a real motivator for us. We were not motivated by a problem.

Ultimately we decided to work out of Peter’s home. We spent the next six months looking at different ideas. We probably went through more than 100 markets, both inside and outside of technology. We decided on the employment space because it just seemed to have the favorable characteristics we were looking for.

SM: What timeframe was this?

GG: By the time we had settled on the employment space it was the spring of 2004.

SM: What were the characteristics you were looking for?

GG: There were a few things. What we saw in the employment space was, first and foremost, an incredibly large market. You are talking about a market that is about $100B in the US alone. You are talking about almost 1% of the US GDP.
At the same time, the market had services that we called pain killers versus vitamins. If you needed a job, you really needed a job. If you had to hire someone, you really needed to hire someone.

SM: It is basically the classified business and the recruiting business.

GG: Yes, it really is that business.

SM: Is that what adds up to $100B in the US?

GG: Yes, offline and online it does. The other characteristic we saw was that when we talked to both employers and candidates almost everyone was universally unhappy. It was an amazing for us to see that. Candidates hated finding jobs and employers hated finding people to hire. Finally it was clear to us that technology could play a disruptive role in this market. In a nutshell, anytime you have a very big market with critically important services and deeply unhappy customers, and it is a space where technology can make a difference, we get very interested. That is why we looked so hard at the employment space.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani
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