In this episode of Firing Squad, Josh Sklüt, co-founder and Chief People Officer of My Standard, explores his company’s pioneering approach as a Web3 alternative to traditional job platforms like LinkedIn. He shares how My Standard empowers users to take control of and monetize their professional data while tackling the limitations of current recruitment practices.
The discussion dives into the app’s unique features, the challenges of candidate matching, and the evolving landscape of job searching in a decentralized world. Key topics include client success stories, the competitive environment, and a targeted go-to-market strategy with a focus on AI roles. Sklüt also addresses challenges and questions from the hosts around the complexities of blockchain technology and the critical need for effective education in the HR space.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Joel (00:22.545)
that intro never gets old. Let's do this. are the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman. Everybody Chad. So wash is in the house and it's time for firing squad as we welcome Josh scoot, chief people officer and co-founder at my standard Josh. Welcome to firing squad.
Chad (00:38.272)
CLEWT!
Josh Sklut (00:43.47)
Thank you gentlemen and thank you sir for pronouncing the name properly on the first try. Love it.
Chad (00:49.046)
Das Gut!
Joel (00:49.169)
I know the umlaut. I know the umlaut. Very nice.
Josh Sklut (00:51.438)
The Umlau is my best friend. Absolutely.
Joel (00:55.897)
Boom loud is the boom loud. Thanks for dressing up for firing squad. By the way, you look very comfortable in your outfit. Aside from, aside from great taste and clothes. Let's introduce our audience to to Josh and what makes Josh tick. Give us your elevator pitch.
Chad (01:00.044)
appreciate that, Sexy.
Josh Sklut (01:00.256)
You're welcome.
Josh Sklut (01:13.262)
Thank you, sir. Yeah, my name is Josh Scloot. live in Maplewood, New Jersey, which is a suburb of Manhattan, about 15 miles outside the city. I have a wife, two boys, two teenage boys. And as you saw earlier, I couldn't make it work technically, but I have a large sneaker collection. It's very much a part of my life. I like to go to the gym and work out. I do a lot of stuff locally with my kids in the neighborhood. You know, I'm just suddenly a very suburban
New Jersey dad in every way.
Chad (01:45.536)
with a gamer, with a gamer headset. Cause you can, you can hear that mic is like a gamer headset mic. So when you're, if you hear, if you've heard that voice after somebody just killed you during one of those first person shooters, was probably Josh.
Josh Sklut (02:00.206)
There you go. you see. Exactly.
Joel (02:04.721)
So you're a gamer, a sneaker head, and you hang out in your sweatsuit all day. You are living the dream, my man. You are living the dream.
Josh Sklut (02:09.902)
I'm yeah, living the dream, exactly.
Joel (02:15.633)
All right. Well, don't get too comfortable because you were on firing squad and Chad is going to let you know what you've won today.
Chad (02:23.05)
Mm-mm-mm. Well on this Halloween edition, Josh, welcome to Fire and Squad, and this is how it's gonna go. At the sound of the bell, you will have two minutes to pitch by standard. At the end of two minutes, we're gonna hit you up with about 20 minutes of Q &A. Be sure to be concise, you're gonna hear those. If you hear those crickets, that means you need to tighten it up, my friend. At the end of Q &A, you're going to receive either big applause,
Josh Sklut (02:28.75)
Thank you.
Chad (02:50.174)
Scary light shows, 10 foot skeletons and a full size chocolate bar in every kid's bag. My standard is definitely the neighborhood standard. Golf clap.
Mini bags of candy corn and generic Twizzlers? I don't think so, my friend. Okay, I can see where you're trying here, but you're not quite on the right path. And the firing squad!
shit, you're that neighbor giving away his apples. Okay, that's a no-go. Turn off the lights, close up shop, and try again next year. That's Firing Squad, my friend. Are you ready, Josh?
Joel (03:28.315)
That is a caramel covered apple with a razor blade in it, if you get the firing squad, my friend. Josh, are you ready? You ready to pitch this thing?
Josh Sklut (03:28.525)
Yes, sir.
Chad (03:32.714)
was not. Yeah, it was not. It was a healthy one. Organic.
Josh Sklut (03:38.881)
I am indeed. Thank you.
Joel (03:40.261)
Let's rock in three, two.
Josh Sklut (03:44.462)
So my standard is that Web3 alternative to LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, any one of the various job sites. What we do is you download the app, which are in both app stores right now. You put all your professional data, it goes behind a wall. It's protected. You have sovereignty control and you determine who you share your information with. Company X, IBM, who's on our board of directors needs a software engineer in New York who makes 150K. You're one of those people. You get a notification on your phone. It says,
IBM would like to talk to you about this opportunity. They see nothing about you. It's completely and totally unbiased until you send them your information. If you say yes, you always have the option to say no. But if you say yes, you send your data over to IBM. IBM then pays you directly for access to that data so you get to monetize that data. So instead of giving away your data for free, which we've been doing with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook for the last 20 years, you have control of your data. You own that data so you get to monetize that data.
And what IBM receives is a vetted candidate who is very interested in the opportunity who they've actually paid directly for that data as opposed to paying that third party vendor where it's basically, you know, there's nothing at stake on either end. And the likelihood that this person is a better chance to have an unbiased more diverse hire goes up because you know nothing about them until after you've paid for their information.
Joel (05:09.339)
Are you done?
Josh Sklut (05:11.053)
I am indeed.
Joel (05:12.289)
All right. We'll close it up early, Chad. He's a man of few words. All right. Let's get to the name. Let's get to the name, Josh. My standard is pretty, pretty boring. pretty lame. it's a, it's a consumer brand. You're a consumer play. You're not a, you're not a SaaS business per se. So the IO, the IO is a little bit, weird. you should have the.com in my opinion, if you're a consumer company.
Chad (05:16.95)
Love it.
Josh Sklut (05:25.208)
Thank you.
Chad (05:25.388)
Standard oil.
Josh Sklut (05:31.01)
Hmm? Mm-hmm.
Joel (05:38.563)
Am I wrong in saying that you're a consumer company? You did say LinkedIn was a competitor. So what's up with the name? What was the Genesis? The dot com looks like it's parked. Did you try to buy it? Talk about the brand.
Josh Sklut (05:51.342)
Fair enough. We were originally, were my block, BLOK, obviously because it's a blockchain company, it's a Web3 company. So that was the original premise. What people are buying is data blocks, what the users are buying are data blocks, so we went with that. We decided it was a little bit of a larger play than that because we're talking about the standard. This should be the standard operating procedure for all data. You should be able to control all of your data. So we rolled it into my standard.
So you should have standards for yourself, but it also is the standard operating procedure for all things data associated with your profile.
Joel (06:29.573)
And you were, looks like you launched in 21 according to the internets and you've raised around a million, a million three back in 21. Little more than that. Little less roughly. Okay.
Josh Sklut (06:38.638)
Yeah, correct we recently. We raised yeah, yeah, we raised a million three initially all in thus far We've raised about two point two million the second half of that is because we are a cryptocurrency We have a token we're actually selling and sold in private sales tokens as well And also since 21 we've added a couple of institutional investors that were not in the original that were not in the original What do you call it?
Joel (06:48.528)
Okay.
Josh Sklut (07:07.668)
in the in original seed rounds that were sort of secondary seed rounds investors.
Joel (07:11.537)
Okay. So what did you do with the money or what are you doing with the money or plan to do with it?
Josh Sklut (07:17.486)
We built the app and we built it in web 3. that was more expensive, more complicated, and took longer. But there's value proposition in doing that because we believe that with our app the way it is right now, it acts seamlessly as if it were a web 2 application. We've had zero crashes on the app in the last four months that we've had it launched. So we spent the money to do the engineering properly. And that's where the bulk of the money has gone, obviously.
We have six employees, so we had salaries as well on top of that. But we've been pretty lean, to be perfectly frank. We didn't really spend, haven't raised an insane amount of money because we've been trying to make sure that the tech was really supported as well as we could.
Joel (08:04.356)
And what problem are you solving?
Josh Sklut (08:07.502)
Well, all of us are on LinkedIn, and know, especially in the last night, say, eight, 12 to 18 months, it's pretty apparent that LinkedIn, from my perspective, from our perspective, has become the Tinder ization of recruiting. Basically, recruiters spend between five and 10 seconds on every profile, and they disqualified candidates straight out of hand. They don't like their picture, they don't like their name, they don't like where they went to school, they don't like the companies they worked for. But they're not really doing the best job that they can to qualifying candidates. On top of that,
when you're applying for a job on LinkedIn you're oftentimes competing against five thousand other people for the same job which we think is a giant mistake because A. you're never going to get no one's getting that job and what most companies are doing when they're putting these jobs up is just doing one form or another of data mining they're not actually looking to hire for those positions they're looking to build an applicant tracking system with candidates or they're just looking to get something and glean something you all know
that like LinkedIn you have that toggle button where you have to toggle off of the AI projects that they're running. They're just using your data for their own purposes as well. what LinkedIn has become is much more of a social media site. boring. Okay. LinkedIn's become.
Joel (09:16.945)
No, we're good. We know there's problems with LinkedIn. would be here for a while if you listed all the problems with LinkedIn. So I got it. You're the anti-LinkedIn. OK.
Josh Sklut (09:21.898)
understand fair enough so that so that's it. The problem we're solving is let's find people jobs let's give our clients an opportunity to look at a qualified amount of candidates instead of 500 let's get that number down to 50 let's make sure that the candidates are qualified for the positions and what's reduced bias and higher.
Chad (09:40.844)
How do you upload the data into the system?
Josh Sklut (09:43.468)
Real simple, this is your server. There is no central location. It's a decentralized solution. you download the app. What the app is when you download it is actually a crypto wallet, but you're putting all of this vital information about yourself into that wallet. The reason it's a wallet is because now you can accept crypto transactions. But it runs so seamlessly that it acts like any other wallet. I mean, it acts like any other app on your phone that you're entering data into.
Chad (09:54.539)
Mm-hmm.
Chad (10:10.073)
You can have a blockchain app without including crypto, correct? Okay.
Josh Sklut (10:14.552)
That is correct. We've included it. We've made it so that you can't accept crypto-check transactions. That's part of the process.
Chad (10:24.062)
Okay. qualified individuals, how do you deem? Cause matching is not as easy as everybody thinks it is, especially when we're trying to match garbage data, which is a resume and the information that you could prospectively have in my standard against a job description, which is garbage. So how are you going to match garbage against garbage to ensure that you are giving them that, that 50 qualified candidates, not just 50, that kind of.
Josh Sklut (10:32.224)
It's very difficult.
Chad (10:54.398)
kind of meet the qualifications.
Josh Sklut (10:56.75)
Fair enough. You know that that technology is evolving in that respect. What we can do initially right now is offer them the opportunity to verify work email. So if they say they worked at Netflix, we know that they actually work in Netflix because they verified that. We also give them the opportunity to upload and connect to their any degrees or certifications that they have before the information is sent over. So initially, at very least, you know they work where they say they're going to work and they know they have the degree that they say they have. So.
In a lot of ways, the credentialing piece takes out the background check concept. We're asking people to still put in all of their skills and experience. Down the road, what we're going to have is an opportunity for companies who are also on the platform that they formerly worked for to verify that that data was real completely anonymously. So we don't have that in our version 1.0, but in 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, they'll be able to get verification from former employers.
Chad (11:34.209)
Mm-hmm.
Josh Sklut (11:52.13)
that they did the job they say they did and that gets minted to their profile. when company X, go ahead.
Chad (11:57.765)
And as an employer, what motivation do I have to do any of that? If I just get a shit ton of requests, why am I gonna take any of the time off of my currently daily date to do this?
Josh Sklut (12:04.002)
Right. Right.
Because
fair enough because what because we're dealing in cryptocurrency and you can deal in fractional transactions we make it worth the while of the company to verify data by giving them a piece of transactions that occur so if company X. Verifies all your data and then you end up getting paid for you know I. Data share we can actually. Chop off a piece of that transaction and send it back to the company that supplied the proof of data. So you can create a you can monetize it.
Chad (12:36.588)
So where are you monetizing mainly from? Sounds like you're actually charging users, being the candidates.
Josh Sklut (12:44.366)
not not not exactly what we do is company X. pays for X. amount of data searches. And when they make the transaction we actually. Cut off a piece of that transaction so we take a twenty percent. Fifth on every transaction that goes down. So if IBM again these numbers mean nothing but if IBM. Once spend ten dollars for someone's resume. The candidate received eight dollars my standard receives two dollars for every transaction.
Chad (12:49.397)
Okay.
Chad (13:09.128)
Okay, so the candidate can get paid, the company can get paid. It seems like there's a lot of payments that we're going to be flipping around.
Josh Sklut (13:16.172)
Absolutely, but it's it's it's cryptocurrency so it's easy to fractionalize and as long as company X has a wallet That those those transactions go right inside while it's automated. They don't have to do anything
Chad (13:26.902)
Joel can't wait to use his Doja coin. Go ahead, Joel.
Joel (13:29.815)
Yeah. so your crypto, symbol is NYST, correct? Okay. And its current price is around 25 cents USD.
Josh Sklut (13:30.104)
Yeah
Josh Sklut (13:45.038)
I'm no we haven't watched the token yet there is no token yet the token gets launched in the next it's going to be launched in the next two to three weeks actually
Joel (13:48.42)
Okay.
Okay, well, I'm no crypto expert, but there is a crypto coin, Mysterium, MYST. So anyway, you're not them.
Josh Sklut (13:58.848)
there is in fact you are correct but we're not that but but but yeah no but there's no but there's multiple so there's and there's actually three coins that are considered missed but we're one of them so.
Joel (14:09.809)
Okay. So let's, you're talking to two guys that have talked about this with companies and sort of know a little bit about it and it's confusing. So talk to me about adoption. How is this playing with the world at large? mean, you know, Google play publishes their numbers. According to Google play, you have like less than a hundred downloads. Now I could be wrong and you have the numbers, but publicly available, no one is downloading this on Google. So unless you've got a ton of iPhone people.
Chad (14:17.58)
Mm.
Josh Sklut (14:32.142)
Mm-hmm.
Joel (14:39.589)
This does not seem to be taking off and you've been around since 2021. So help me understand where I'm wrong or where you're going to fix it.
Josh Sklut (14:48.312)
Sure, we've existed for that long, the app has only been live since late June. So it took three years to build. it's not like we've existed three years and bam, there was this app three years ago that no one's using. The app has only been in existence a couple of months. To your point, 97 % of our users happen to be iPhone users. So that is fair.
Joel (15:11.131)
So what are your iPhone downloads? In five months, by the way, not a couple months.
Josh Sklut (15:15.118)
Right. So all in, we've had about 350 downloads. of the 100 or so, people have actually gone through the whole process and filled out the entire form that it takes to fill. It takes about five minutes to fill. Most people, two thirds of the people who have downloaded it have not finished the complete application just yet. In the next iteration, we're going to have a resume parsing feature where you can upload your resume into the app. And you'll be able to go through it that way.
But the point I'm making, is that this is a very new application. We've spent almost $0 marketing the thing. And the reason is because we're still, in a lot of ways, testing it, making sure it works properly, making sure that it's doing what it's supposed to be doing, and also trying to add some companies as clients. Right now, we have four clients, the largest of which is Wipro. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but obviously a large-scale consulting, India-based consulting company, but with offices all over the globe, when you have one of their divisions that we're working with directly.
Joel (16:13.905)
talk about the competition. I'll give you a pass in saying that you will start spending money in marketing this thing. But talk about, you mentioned a customer. Can you give me a real case where a customer is using the service, they found success exactly what they did and then how the transaction and payment happened? Like the whole idea of like job seekers getting paid.
Josh Sklut (16:22.517)
Absolutely.
Joel (16:42.575)
I know that it sounds great, but there was, you know, there was an Andreessen back company called 21.co back in the day, which we'll get to, we'll get to how everyone is pivoted out of this business in a second. But I want to understand how a use case where someone found success as a customer, what's Y pro or whoever. Okay.
Josh Sklut (16:59.564)
Right again we haven't We bro we haven't watched the token yet. So the answer is that we have no there has been no. The technology works we know that it works because we I demoed it at HR tech where I met you guys in Vegas and we've seen it actually work with our clients where we've actually done test transactions and the test transactions have been successful so we aren't we aren't revenue generating just yet.
Joel (17:11.652)
Okay.
Josh Sklut (17:25.272)
And that will change as soon as, again, in two or three weeks we launch the token, and we'll actually be able to do an actual transaction. The reason that companies are potentially interested in using us and the reason we're pro signed up is because they feel like their structure for recruiting right now doesn't work well for them. For all the reasons that we can get to that we all know is wrong with the market in general, they feel like this is an interesting opportunity to improve the quality of hires and also to get a more diverse workforce because of the blind aspect of the hiring process that we offer.
Joel (17:52.753)
Okay. Let's talk about the pivots real quick. So I can name three companies in this space that have had been crypto. They have a coin, some variation of that. The first one I mentioned was 21.co. The other one is Brain Trust, who was crypto, still has a coin pivoted to sort of an all like a platform. And then our friend, CV Wallet has pivoted recently out of sort of the blockchain. how, why is this, why is this one going to work where they didn't?
Josh Sklut (18:22.926)
Right, well, I listened to your podcast on the CV on Rid with Richard. Very fascinating, very interesting topic. He's just more of a job board. Again, our structure is completely different. We're making it so candidates don't apply for jobs, right? There isn't a listing of all the jobs and then they send their resume to company acts. Because ultimately that's the same structure as LinkedIn or any other job board. With ours, the company puts together the criteria that they need.
And you only get a notification on your phone if you match up. So there's lots of people, based on the criteria you set up, that will never receive a notification. On top of that, candidate is not forced to reply. So if they are not interested in the job, they just say no. And IBM, for example, doesn't know that this person said no to them. They only know what they said yes to. So another aspect of the two other things that you mentioned before, I think Braintree is not talent acquisition focused. I think it's more of a data
that data control type thing, they're not paying users the way we are paying users, which is you only receive tokens when you're right for a position and when you accept the transaction. So we've kind of simplified the whole process.
Joel (19:22.737)
brain trust.
Joel (19:34.353)
Maybe I asked, I think all of them had a problem getting the blockchain thing to be accepted. So what I'm saying like, how are you different? Not how is the business model different? How are you gonna get blockchain accepted in this space because it seems to be failing.
Josh Sklut (19:43.384)
Yeah, we don't have that.
Josh Sklut (19:51.726)
right I think the reason that I mean I don't necessarily agree that's failing but I think the technology moves so quickly that we have spent the time and the reasons taken us three years to build this thing is because we wanted to abstract all of blockchain from the app in other words when you download the app you don't under you don't realize you're downloading a blockchain or web 3 application you're downloading a web 2 application we've simplified it so that there's really no abstraction any longer I think the other.
things have failed because A, they were way ahead of their time because the technology hadn't advanced to the level it's at now. And two, they weren't willing to spend the time or the investment of dollars to find the right developers to make a really good web three app that reacts and acts just like a web two app. When you download our app at the very beginning of the process, you create a
Chad (20:37.484)
Okay, enough, enough, enough. That's good, that's good, that's good. We get the simplicity of it, okay? Concise. Now, can you do in Web 2 what you're doing in Web 3?
Josh Sklut (20:49.738)
No, the decentralization, that's what separates it.
Chad (20:53.356)
You can't decentralize in Web2.
Josh Sklut (20:56.855)
Web 2 is everything's on a server, right? LinkedIn gets hacked seven times a year, blah, blah, right? All those issues. With Web 3, Web, Web, right. Web 3, this is your server.
Chad (21:02.262)
Okay. Well, that's the, that's the differentiation that we're really looking for, right? Okay. Is, yes. Right. So now let's go to a go to market strategy. What's your go to market strategy to be able to obviously, you know, marketing, that's an entirely different conversation, but from a sales go to market partnership alliances, what's the strategy?
Josh Sklut (21:24.108)
Right. So our first focus is we're going to be focusing on AI jobs and AI jobs only. So all of our clients, all they're going to be doing is giving us their AI positions. So Wipro, for example, will be able to say Wipro, we're only looking at a Wipro's AI jobs. We then reach out to the marketplace and we say, hey, if you're an AI engineer, AI developer, an AI designer, et cetera, come on our app and let's use that as a use case for both sides. We stay very focused on just that initially with the intent
Chad (21:29.343)
Okay.
Chad (21:38.476)
Mm-hmm.
Josh Sklut (21:51.726)
that the theory works and that these transactions work and that people are finding jobs. We can then go and broaden that and get into obviously other areas that are that that are viable for our for our business model.
Chad (21:56.3)
Mm-hmm.
Chad (22:03.084)
Okay, so how fast do you think you will be focused heavily on AI and then what's the expansion look like? How long do you think it'll take for you to expand? And then when you start to expand, where do you think you're gonna expand?
Josh Sklut (22:15.33)
Wait, wait.
Great question. So I'd probably over the next three to six months, we'll have a decent amount of candidates that are in play that are AI candidates as well as jobs. So there'll be transactions available. Beyond that, we always anticipate that our audience is a crypto audience. That's probably our initial grouping. But I'll be honest with you, if we're thinking longer picture, I like the underserved jobs premise. What are underserved jobs? Fast food workers, retail workers, construction workers, truck drivers. Why?
Chad (22:35.706)
Mm-hmm.
Josh Sklut (22:46.638)
Those people don't necessarily have LinkedIn profiles, number one. Number two, finding a job at a fast food restaurant, how do you think you find that? You walk in and you get an application or you see them on the thing that says now hiring. But those people all move jobs and those people all have phones and all those people would love to monetize their data. So if I'm a ship supervisor at McDonald's and I'm looking for a new ship supervisor at a Burger King, out of one of my direct competitors, the easiest, quickest and most efficient way to do that would be to reach out to them on their phone, pay them a dollar or two for their information.
Chad (22:49.61)
Right. Yes.
Josh Sklut (23:15.734)
and bring them over and interview them there. So we see that as an extremely viable market. Another viable market for us is at the very, very, very high end. So we're talking about C level positions. Same premise, those people don't necessarily have LinkedIn profiles, or if they do, they've got all their notifications turned off because they're tired of being attacked by every recruiter in the world, right? But if you're a company and you're looking for a C cell, right, and you're willing to spend $500, let's just say, for access to someone's data, and you're that person,
and you get a notification on your phone that company X is paying $500 to see your resume, you're going to take notice. You're going to stand up and say attention because you're like, hey, they're obviously super serious about hiring for this role because they're offering an insane amount of money. But the client wins in that transaction too because if you send out five notifications and you're spending $2,500 for access to five CISOs, wow, that's powerhouse because now you have five relationships that you can definitely use down the road instead of paying a corn ferry or a hard working struggles.
Chad (23:48.652)
Mm-hmm.
Joel (23:57.841)
you
Josh Sklut (24:13.294)
for retained search that's going to cost you 70, 80, 90, $100,000. Now you spent $2,500 for five people that are going to treat you completely differently because you just gave them $500. So the next time they call you for that job that's open in six months, they're going to say, yeah, I remember you gave me $500 for my resume. It completely flips the script on what we're currently doing in the marketplace. And it shows that you have some stake in the game. And you care about these candidates where that lacks so heavily now.
Joel (24:43.025)
Tell me about the team.
Josh Sklut (24:45.454)
it's myself my partner Adam Zack who worked for career builder for fifteen years. So he was more of a like corporate sales enterprise sales guy in you know for for large scale like all of his clients were the big you know companies that use career builder. My background is again more on the agency side of recruiting so I'm more of the headhunter type. We have a CMO who is launched several brands Zenni Eyewear worked in fashion high end retail. do we are we have
an interim CTO but our technology is outsourced to a company called Wolfpack Digital. based in Romania. They've been killing it for us. They have eight developers that are on the team and they're just rock stars. We have a chief legal counsel internally named Andy Pierce. He has done all kinds of different IPO level stuff in the California area. He's very, very blockchain strong. And on top of that, we have several advisors. Carol Gordon, who's one of the heads of
human resources IBM is on our board of directors a guy named Jonathan Kestenbaum I don't know if you know him it he's from a from AMS he was he from the beginning he's on our board of directors we have investment from Avalanche which is a large blockchain company level a layer one Winklevoss capital Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss so they invested obviously because of the blockchain premise and because we're also taking out Facebook and you know all the competition there
Joel (26:04.165)
Mm-hmm.
Josh Sklut (26:10.666)
A VC called Gangel's, I don't know if you've ever heard of them, they're the gay angels. They're very interesting. They invested in us because of the, they're all about equality and kind of making things more equal. And because we take the bias out of the hiring, because it's blind, they loved what we were doing. Another venture capital firm called Moon Boots Capital, and then several other angels and friends.
Joel (26:27.567)
Okay.
Joel (26:34.115)
Okay, good. What's the exit strategy and what does success look like for those investors?
Josh Sklut (26:40.056)
Great question. So multiple exit strategies. We're in conversations with another, I can't mention their name, large job board where we believe that they could possibly kind of corner the non-biased hiring market and really kind of separate themselves apart. So a good possible exit strategy is either getting a partnership with them and then having them buy the talent acquisition business from us with the technology, with the IP that we have. LinkedIn is another good possibility they could
absolutely take advantage of the fact that we're taking the bias out of hiring and makes their sort of structure right now a little bit obsolete because instead of doing it the way they do it, they do it the way we do it. They could either buy us out, out our talent acquisition piece or just kind of continue to move forward and be the gold standard for having A, monetization of data, but B, for unbiased and much clearer data. Obviously there's other
There's other places that we want to go with this company that can get into other things besides talent acquisition, because if you can do the math in your head, you can see that once we've got fidelity of data in talent acquisition, there's other things that can be monetized in your personal persona. But as it relates just to talent acquisition, we have multiple streams that we can go to. Most places we can go to that companies really want to buy us, partner with us, or give us an opportunity to kind of be their preferred partner for hire.
Joel (28:04.963)
All right, Josh, the Q and A is over and now it's time to face the firing squad. Are you ready?
Josh Sklut (28:12.481)
I am indeed.
Joel (28:13.987)
All right, here starts the firing squad. Chad, get them.
Chad (28:18.668)
All right, Josh. So having the control of sharing your data with only companies you trust puts the power back in the candidates hands because it's the candidates data, not the company's data. So I totally love that. The resume has been around for 500 years. So I love any idea that moves us away from the traditional horse and buggy approach, but we can't go straight from horse and buggy to living on Mars overnight. I love that, you know, you're going at AI first.
Josh Sklut (28:31.32)
Thank you.
Chad (28:47.276)
Here's some of the problems. The problem here is that trying to go too far too fast and you're not ready. And I mean this from the standpoint of if you take a look at crypto where it's estimated 40 % of American adults now have crypto, not a bad number. 62 % are Caucasian, 43 % are male, 18, 1, 8 % female. So number one.
40 % means you're turning off 60 % of the population. Number two, only 18 % of females and a low number of minorities. That's an easy hard stop for most companies wanting to diversify their ranks. And it's not great stats for your friends over at Gangel's. Number three, you paint yourself into the corner by talking about blockchain, but then going into crypto with tokenomics, right? Or, yeah.
Josh Sklut (29:43.808)
There's no joke. mean, I, please, sorry, it's interrupt.
Chad (29:46.809)
So I do, I, do I hate crypto? No, but crypto is new and it's less than 20 years old, which means you have to educate the population. We're talking about the HR population, which is 40 years behind for God's sakes. So educating the population take, takes loads of money, which you currently do not have. Call your buddy at Gaines, Gaines. my big thing is keep it simple, stupid. This is way too complex.
Josh Sklut (30:02.22)
Agreed.
Chad (30:14.304)
Way too many payments, way too many tokens, way too many this, way too many that, you have to keep it simple. I love that you're in this space because I actually advise for Richard and CV wallet. And the beautiful part about it is we need more guys like you out there educating the space so that the space actually changes. Right. My recommendation, my recommendation is you stay with AI in tech, because if you take a look at your demographics in the market, that's your best bet.
Josh Sklut (30:34.36)
agreed.
Chad (30:43.684)
talking to truck drivers and hourly positions, that's going to be incredibly hard. Yes. Every everybody's on the phone. totally get that, but not everybody is again, that demographic who understands tokens, right? So I'm a huge fan of what you're trying to do. I want you to do more about it, but you need to pivot and focus around AI. And until you do that, Josh, you're going to get, you're going to get the guns, my friend.
Chad (31:09.792)
Do it, Josh.
Joel (31:10.201)
Ooh, Chad, I didn't know where that was going. No, no, no, no, it's my turn. It's my turn now. It's my turn.
Chad (31:14.398)
Yeah
Josh Sklut (31:14.968)
Yeah, thought I was going to get at least golf clap, but apparently not.
Joel (31:19.985)
To me, it sounded like it was going to golf clap, it, he, he let last second, last second, he decided to drop the bomb. all right, my turn. when blockchain became a thing, I don't know, eight years ago, maybe a little more longer, maybe longer for you. thought everyone, you know, like people, people that I assume that I think are smarter than me talked, talked it up. This is really cool. The, the,
Chad (31:20.842)
You might. You might.
Josh Sklut (31:23.96)
I agree, Joel. That's where I thought so, too.
Chad (31:37.462)
Yeah. 2008.
Joel (31:49.937)
Potential is amazing. Yada, yada, yada. I didn't understand it by thought. Hey, I'm going to give it, you know, I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt. And these people are smarter than me and know what they're doing. fast forward to today. I understand it about the same as I did eight years ago. the education, not just you, but the whole space is awful.
It needs a, it needs a chat GPT moment. It needs a like, I'm going to go in and see how it works and go, holy shit. That's amazing. I don't know if that'll ever happen, but until it does, I don't think you or any, anyone that's in this space is going to hit a home run. It's been around for a long time. We still don't have any like big banners to fly, like, you know, blockchain. And then you talk about crypto. If you're not Bitcoin or maybe Ethereum, like
And you could, you could talk about salon and some others, but like by the most part, I think this stuff, I think it's toxic to most people. And Chad mentioned HR. You start talking about crypto to HR and blockchain and like, whoop, you know, I mean, seriously, they are. Behaviorally against change and they're even more so against risk and.
You talk, I mean, you talk about tokenomics on your site, blockchain, crypto, dude, everything about your business to an HR person or a recruiter, unless they are really in need of people and you will get people to pay you money to access your database. Most people are going to be really scared about your business. And then you go into like, okay, do you have people? And you can tell me like, yes, dude, we're going to market. It's going to be huge.
LinkedIn has a lot of users. that's, that's a big 800 pound gorilla that you're trying to dethrone. That is one hell of a competitor that you're taking on. So you don't have the money like Chad mentioned. You don't have like the big pockets, deep pockets, maybe call up the Winklevi, whoever, write a check. Cause it's going to take education. It's going to take awareness. It's going to take just a, like a solid trusted brand. And those like, none of that is going in your favor. So
Joel (34:04.283)
There should be no question as far as where I'm going with this, where there might've been some question around Chad, but I just, all I see is pivots. All I see is failure. All I see is just blank faces when the conversation about blockchain comes up. So for me, like there's gotta be a major pivot in your business. It sounds like you have some smart people that are advising you or they've given you resources. But if you're telling me you're gonna take on LinkedIn,
with not much resources, with a technology that I don't think is very trusted, scaring a lot of your customers, base customers. I have no other grade to give this than to follow Chad's lead and give this the guns. I hope you proved me wrong. I hope blockchain saves the world, but until then, I can't buy it. I can't buy it. How you feel?
Josh Sklut (34:57.09)
Understood. All good.
Joel (34:59.547)
You have, your CMO has his work cut out for him. I'll say that. I'll say that.
Josh Sklut (35:04.576)
I again I've been doing this for quite some time so it's the day I am I mean it's obviously I would have loved if you guys showed it showed it some love but you know it's okay I'm totally over it just a couple points to your points
Chad (35:12.054)
Thick skin.
Josh Sklut (35:21.484)
Nice.
Joel (35:21.489)
I'm totally over it. 30 seconds later. You guys are dead to me. I'm good. We're good. Josh, Josh, let's end this. Let's end this on a good note. Where can the listeners find out more about my standard?
Josh Sklut (35:33.792)
MyStandard.io is the website. The apps are in both the iPhone and Android app stores. Feel free to download the app. We have 95,000 followers on X, so feel free to jump on X. I do a Lunch and Learn every Thursday with HR leaders. We do Twitter spaces. We did a Mario Nafal Twitter space. He's a crypto guy. We got like 60,000 views. So we're out there. We're very much in public eye right now. So definitely you can find us.
hit me up on LinkedIn Josh glue with you and loud so we know where love your comments love your questions love your thoughts and you know again. We're doing this for almost four years I'm not planning on slowing down because you guys give me the firing squad so.
Joel (36:18.619)
So strange to have that many followers on X and only 336 on LinkedIn. Chad, that is another one in the can. We out.
Josh Sklut (36:26.296)
Yeah.
Chad (36:26.422)
way out.
Comentários