Pretty standard stuff this week: Industry layoffs at Eightfold.ai, Jobcase, and others. Unicorns. The Indeed Cartel. Buy-or-Sell with Moonhub, Listo, and Disclo. Workday's sugar daddy complex and pushes toward a 4-day work week. But while the menu is a bit vanilla, you can rest assured the spices that Chad & Cheese mix into this dish are guaranteed to leave you with a horrible case of heartburn. You have been warned, even though you know you can't look away.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
INTRO: Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.
Joel Cheesman: Oh, yeah. Pat Benatar, Deep Purple, and James Taylor have announced summer tours. Someone passed the Cialis and the Liquid Death. Hey kids, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel, ready for some football, Cheesman.
Chad Sowash: And this is Chad. Are they really calling it Bard? Sowash.
Joel Cheesman: On this week's show, in Deeds Monopoly, Workday wants to be your sugar daddy and a little buy or sell. Let's do this.
Chad Sowash: Welcome back. Welcome back, brother. So, how many six packs of Lone Star did you actually go through this week?
Joel Cheesman: So, there's really only one evening where drinking made sense and no one else drank. So, I found it hard to do a whole six pack. So, I bought one of those super-sized Coronas. I don't know if you can find them in Indiana, but in Texas, they're everywhere.
Chad Sowash: Yes, go figure.
Joel Cheesman: A lime and a big Corona was all I needed for my little trip to Texas. Sorry, I couldn't be there for the European show this week, but I hear it's awesome. You should check it out.
Chad Sowash: Lieven and I held court, and it was all good. It was all good. Fun stuff. Fun stuff.
Joel Cheesman: Lieven is blossoming on that show. It's a lot of fun to watch.
Chad Sowash: He misses you, though. You should have seen the tears in his eyes when I told him that you weren't going to be able to make it.
Joel Cheesman: Well, speaking of Texas, I should see him in Texas for TAtech in a few months.
Chad Sowash: Oh, nice.
Joel Cheesman: So, we'll have to get some good barbecue and Sixth Street time with Lieven.
Chad Sowash: Austin.
Joel Cheesman: Austin.
Chad Sowash: Good times in Austin. So, let's hit some shout-outs.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, let's get to some shout-outs. So, you mentioned Google a little bit. You kind of teased it there. So, Bard, not as in Simpson, but as in just B-A-R-D, it's Google's answer to ChatGPT. I didn't think anyone could do a worse job of branding than ChatGPT, but Google said, hold my beer and name theirs Bard. Anyway, things are off to a bad start, Chad. After making an error in a recent public demo, the stock took a hit to the tune of 7% and $100 billion in market value destruction. Ouch. Holy innovator's dilemma. Come on, Google.
Chad Sowash: So, I mean, I don't think Bard's a bad name. I mean, it's short. It's easy to remember, and anybody who understands what a Bard is just kind of makes sense. You think of a poet or a singer, a Bard, per se. So, yeah, I think it's better than ChatGPT.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, here's my fear. They fucked it up on the demo, so they're going to come out with a new version. It's going to be Bard Plus. That'll be the official brand.
Chad Sowash: Here's the thing is that fucking up a demo or the product not being 100% ready, right, it's not fully baked, in this situation doesn't mean anything. I mean, you take a look at OpenAI. They put out ChatGPT, and it starts putting out some really cool shit, but a lot of it was bullshit and not real information. It was actually learning off of disinformation. So, it's one of those things where we're starting to evolve, I think, in seeing that we understand that as we've talked about on the show, AI is a puppy. You got to train that puppy, right? Well, this puppy is bigger and it's been trained well. Imagine what ChatGPT 4 or 5 looks like. It's going to be amazing. So, this is evolving.
Joel Cheesman: You can't mess up the demo, man. You can't mess up the demo. You know the questions.
Chad Sowash: Not that big of a deal.
Joel Cheesman: It's all staged and they fucked it up, man.
Chad Sowash: Not a big deal. Not a big deal. My first shout out goes to Hubert Wartza, who apparently is our new Polish hype man. Hubert is a listener, loves the podcast so much that he had to sing it from the highest peak, AKA his LinkedIn account. We do appreciate the public demonstration of affection for the Chad and Cheese podcast, where PDA is always welcome, kids. Shout out to Hubert.
Joel Cheesman: Holy pierogi. That got me all warm and fuzzy when we got a little love from the Polish sect of our listeners. Shout out to our friend Chris Russell, a super fan of the show. You know, his name used to be CM Russell, and he changed it to Chris. I don't know if CM was hard for people to pronounce or not, but formerly CM, Chris Russell, recently on his job board secret site published the top five Job boards according to traffic. I bet you can guess who number one was, Chad, our friends at Indeed at 250 million.
Chad Sowash: Monster didn't win that one?
Joel Cheesman: Monster did not make the cut. I don't want to ruin the top five for anybody, but this is all based on similar web data. Indeed comes in at 250 million monthlies. LinkedIn, which is it a job board or not, obviously a lot of non-job board traffic, they're about a billion and a half per month. Glassdoor, the sister company to Indeed, is 40 million people. So combined, let's call it 300 million visitors per month between those two. ZipRecruiter comes in at number four at 34 million actives per month. And JobCase, maybe a little bit of a surprise for some people, but not if they listen to this show, came in at 24 million. And that is the top five, which was not the top five 20 years ago. So you got to pay attention, kids. These lists do change.
Chad Sowash: And you wonder how much of that traffic is like bot traffic that is all arbitrage.
Joel Cheesman: Are you saying B-O-T or B-O-U-G-H-T or both?
Chad Sowash: Arbitrage is what I'm saying.
Joel Cheesman: Okay. Okay.
Chad Sowash: Yes, we'll talk a little bit more about Indeed later.
Joel Cheesman: Yes, we will.
Chad Sowash: My next shout out is to Wrexham, who made it further in the FA Cup than Chelsea, Aston Villa, and Everton, all premier league teams. They beat Coventry, who plays three leagues above them, and it took Sheffield United, the number two team in the championship league, two matches to finally put away Wrexham. So Sheffield United will be playing in the Premier League next year, and it took them two matches. So it was amazing watching this little bitty team out of Wrexham, Wales actually come out of nowhere and get this far in the FA Cup. It was pretty amazing to watch. I enjoyed watching every match.
SFX: Europe has a bunch of countries in it.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, I didn't understand most of that, but I will admit to watching a Wrexham match, because the Philly football game had one of the owners from Wrexham at the tailgating with an actual booth, an eight-fold style booth from HR Tech with gear and big screen TV. So I was like, oh, it's on right now. I'm going to go check it out while I'm waiting for football to start. And it was entertaining. They took a lead, and then they got tied, and then Ryan Reynolds is there. It's kind of a fun thing. I'm glad that you enjoyed it, but I didn't understand much of anything that you said in that shout-out. However, a lot of our people hopefully will understand this.
[music]
Joel Cheesman: Our friends at Shaker Recruitment Marketing, at shaker.com, make one hell of a sexy career site. Chad, like me, you've probably ordered lots of food on DoorDash late at night.
Chad Sowash: No.
Joel Cheesman: But if you haven't checked out DoorDash's career site recently, you should. Shaker crushed it. This is from their Instagram account, their being Shaker, "We wanted candidates to feel the culture through the site experience. This web flow built and hosted site is not only dynamic and efficient, but this new design also provides a significant reduction of annual back-end tool cost." They also increased the overall site performance by 70%. Shout out to our friends at Shaker who know how to build a pretty good website. And DoorDash is a good example of how to do it.
Chad Sowash: A couple of quick shout-outs from me. Bill Fanning, friend of the show. He is the new CEO of a newly hatched startup called Greetr. That's G-R-E-E-T-R.
Joel Cheesman: Like Flickr.
Chad Sowash: Exactly. But Greetr. And then congratulations to Omar Khateeb, CEO of JobPixel and his lovely wife for bringing in Gianni into the world. That's right. She did a lot of work because that kid was over nine pounds.
Joel Cheesman: There you go. There you go. My first was 10.6 pounds or 10.6 and Stella was 9.6.
Chad Sowash: Wow. Jesus.
Joel Cheesman: Jeremy was a month early. He was like seven something.
Chad Sowash: Oh, my God.
Joel Cheesman: So he was small. But he was a month early.
Chad Sowash: That's the land of C-section right there.
Joel Cheesman: You've seen Cole recently, right? Maybe you haven't. He's eating Fishers Indiana as we speak. And speaking of eating, let's talk about drinking because if people have signed up for our free shit, if they've gone to chadcheese.com, click the free link, they could win free beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs, whiskey from our homies at Textkernel, or if it's their birthday this month, they could win rum from Plum. And they can do it while wearing a fashionable Chad and Cheese T-shirt sponsored by our friends at JobGet. But you have to play if you want to win. Go to chadcheese.com and click the free link.
Chad Sowash: So Sarah Berlin won beer courtesy of Aspen Tech Labs this week, and that was pretty awesome. I was making fun of the boys over at FactoryFix because they didn't win. But speaking of Aspen Tech Labs, you don't know how many startups I've talked to who have full teams. I'm going to talk about startups. They're spending a lot of resources on spidering jobs. And I tell every single one of them, it's a waste of your fucking time. It is hard, there's a lot of maintenance. Call Aspen Tech Labs and have them do that hard, heavy lifting for you. So if I got to put any type of shout-out out there, it's for Aspen Tech Labs and doing some of the hardest work in the industry for some of the biggest vendors in the industry.
Joel Cheesman: Speaking of FactoryFix, Mike Schaefer, I think, celebrated a birthday recently.
Chad Sowash: There we go.
Joel Cheesman: He was highlighted on the show, which brings us to birthdays.
Chad Sowash: Yes.
SFX: Happy birthday.
Joel Cheesman: The week is the second week of February. All right. Again, friends, this is sponsored by our friends at Plum. Celebrating a birthday, we've got Andrew Moll, Jennifer Kangas.
Chad Sowash: JCK.
Joel Cheesman: Jonathan Zube, Saheed Ahmed, Charles Bratz, Jim Kurtz, Jim Carragher, Brian Ravina. Coley Nichols. That sounds like a spell check change. Sorry. Sorry, Coley, if that's not your name. Matt Reardon, Nicole McKeon, Jackie Scherenberger, Brett Minchington, and my favorite Indeed employee, Scott Stum, all celebrating...
SFX: Happy birthday.
Joel Cheesman: A birthday this week. Happy birthday, kids.
Chad Sowash: That's right. Chadcheese.com/free. Get in there. Put your birthday in there. You never know what you might win. And you can win right now if you go to Plum.io and you take their assessment. It's kind of gamified, kind of fun, kind of cool. Check it out.
Joel Cheesman: Chad, it feels like we're getting close to travel time. What's going on with our travel schedule?
Chad Sowash: We are. And I'm pretty fucking excited because UNLEASH America is coming up in April, and they are switching forums. We've talked about this before. They're usually at the MGM. They're going to be at Caesars Forum, a much larger area, which is amazing. Then you and I are heading off to iCIMS at the iCIMS INSPIRE in May at Coronado Bay. That shouldn't suck. And then last but not least, it's time to go back to Europe. Yes, in July. RecFest.
SFX: Europe has a bunch of countries in it.
Chad Sowash: In London. We've got a long list of events that we're going to be at this year already at Chadcheese.com. Go to the upper right-hand corner. Click on events. Register. Go to UNLEASH America in Vegas. Go to iCIMS if you're invited. I think that's a velvet rope kind of thing. And last but not least, RecFest. You got to go to RecFest. That's a fucking party, too. So we'll see you there.
[music]
Chad Sowash: Topics!
Joel Cheesman: All right. As is the tradition recently, we've got...
SFX: Layoffs.
Joel Cheesman: Layoffs. That's right. A little bit of a layoff update. Okay. Gusto, in our industry, had a 5% haircut, roughly 126 employees. Sana benefits, 19% cut. Omnipresent, Eightfold, one of the big ones recently, rumored at 20%. Chad, you had a little exchange with Alexander Cohen, one of their comms guys. How'd that go?
Chad Sowash: So I reached out to Eightfold CEO, Ashu, for a comment and received the following response from Alexander Cohen, Director of Corporate Marketing over at Eightfold. "Eightfold AI does not comment on HR-related matters." Let that sit for a second. "Eightfold continues to focus on capitalizing on its enormous market opportunity. As part of this process, Eightfold maintains an unwavering commitment to ongoing customer success." Your thoughts on that? What do you think after hearing messaging going public, knowing that Eightfold did not go public with any messaging whatsoever? This is the second time they've not, right? What are your thoughts?
Joel Cheesman: Well, first of all, I'm upset that you didn't ask him if they were going to have another 16,000 by 16,000 booth at HR Tech this year.
Chad Sowash: My bad. My bad.
Joel Cheesman: But secondly, and you underscored this, definite lack of transparency in an industry where we're trying to encourage and highlight transparency.
Chad Sowash: Crazy. I mean, well, first and foremost, they say we don't discuss or we don't comment on HR matters. You're a fucking HR company. You're a vendor, right? You should actually hold yourself above bar and you need to be transparent. So saying Eightfold does not comment on HR-related matters is total bullshit, 100%. Then from a business standpoint, let's jump the fence and go to the business side of the house. Your investors deserve you to stop hiding your fucking tail, being in the fetal position in the corner and not making public comments. You have way too much fucking cash in funding from investors to not say something, not to mention what was the severance, all those things. How did you take care of those people? If I was a company and I was looking for systems in RFP process, I would not include Eightfold because I do not want a company that treats their people like shit. I don't know. They could because they weren't transparent. I don't want them to be a part of my tech stack.
Joel Cheesman: They need a spreadsheet, Chad. They need a spreadsheet of everyone who's been laid off with contact information and a LinkedIn post by their CEO.
Chad Sowash: Was that Oyster? Who was that? I can't remember. That was fucking funny.
Joel Cheesman: It doesn't really matter. It's going to be a trend anyway. We need a spreadsheet, people.
Chad Sowash: Oh, my God.
Joel Cheesman: Spreadsheet with people on it. The layoffs keep coming.
Chad Sowash: I just got a message as well. I got a message as well from an insider that JobCase also had 50 that were... Hit a riff as well.
Joel Cheesman: Okay. Not a huge number. I'm going to guess five to 10 percent-ish of their folks.
Chad Sowash: Good question.
Joel Cheesman: I guess we can look into that.
Chad Sowash: Good question.
Joel Cheesman: Not 50%, 50 people.
Chad Sowash: No. Yes.
Joel Cheesman: Right. Okay. Make sure I get that. All right. Well, yeah, the layoffs keep coming. But let's get to some real news, Chad, and talk some Workday.
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: Well, after a round of layoffs last week, talking about layoffs.
SFX: Layoffs.
Joel Cheesman: Workday has announced a $250 million expansion of its Workday Ventures Fund. They'll focus on emerging technologies like AI and ML. Workday Ventures has already invested in 43 tech companies in our space, including Guild, who we actually just interviewed and published. So you should check that out, kids, if you haven't already. Beamery, JobCase, and Paradox, some show faves. Chad, your take on the news out of Workday.
Chad Sowash: This is a great spin from last week to this. So to try to obviously stamp out the whole layoffs conversation and pivot into, hey, look, we've got money. We're going to spend it. I think it's smart. The three areas that they talk about are AI and ML. And within that bullet point, they mentioned Paradox by name. So hello, acquisition of Paradox. We've talked about this before, right? We talked about they have 43 companies in their portfolio. We've talked about like the Beamery's of the world, who've taken $223 million in funding. Are they a prime target? I don't think they are, to be quite frank. I think they need something like a Paradox. To me, for them to literally highlight them in the AI and ML side, I think that's fairly telling. The intelligent automation piece is around accounts payable, which I think accounts payable for the most part can be almost completely automated. And then, you know, serving targeted markets. I mean, they want to grow the portfolio, but I also see the opportunity for some, you know, obvious acquisitions to happen.
Joel Cheesman: In addition to the layoffs, they have a new co-CEO, and co-CEOs always do so well. So this might have been a little bit of a distraction for that. But why more companies don't do this is a mystery to me. I mean, I know you have the occasional Indeed investment and things here and there, but Workday takes this shit really seriously, and we talk a lot of shit about them. By the way, be sure to watch the Super Bowl this Sunday, kids. Workday has a new ad campaign, which is exciting and we'll be sure to talk about on next week's recruitment marketing show. A little teaser there for everybody.
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Joel Cheesman: But they get this part right. Their business aside from the monetary benefit, it helps Workday get closer to the trends that will help its own business benefit. It gets them closer to acquisitions, like you mentioned, and that isn't just the companies they put money into. It's also the companies they say no to. For every company that they say yes to, there are probably 100 that get a no. However, Workday is able to keep its finger on the pulse of the industry and fill in a product map for trends that they like from the companies that pitch them their businesses. Somewhere in that $250 million investment is probably a billion dollars indirect and indirect ROI. I, for one, applaud Workday for their Ventures project.
Chad Sowash: Yeah. On the recruiting side, you can't have a worse, more rigid piece of shit platform to work with, which is one of the reasons why I think Paradox moving into that space might be pretty sexy to them.
Joel Cheesman: And we love sexy, Chad. Which brings us to the unsexy. Let's talk about Indeed. What's up?
Chad Sowash: Indeed's shady practices, kids. That wasn't something I said. It was something that actually a CEO said. So on LinkedIn this week, Erin Craven, CEO of an SMB organization, detailed how her $100 per week budget on Indeed suddenly turned into $1680 as Indeed shifted her from CPC to pay per applicant. She said in the post, "In our example, we had 112 applicants, and they charged us $15 per applicant. This change is so shady in my opinion, and will continue to hurt small business owners. Time to rethink where we post." Then a few job board vendors who make loads of cash off of selling Indeed traffic and could benefit greatly from this change, they started immediately carrying water for Indeed by saying Erin and other employers were informed and it was all their fault.
Chad Sowash: Meanwhile, Mitch Gerson over at The Gerson Agency posted the following, "In January around the 5th, they, Indeed, did send out this helpful little 200-plus page, feel the sarcasm there, of terms of service via email in case you missed it. Buried in there, are these changes to PPA from PPC. That occurred. They announced it on October of '22, and laid low until this week as they rolled them out. This appears to be a very uneven roll out only affecting the smallest companies at first from our observations, but we don't know for sure how, why, when all employers will be updated." So that's how Indeed's new rollout's going, what do you think?
Joel Cheesman: A wow. Indeed, price gouging color me surprised. By the way Erin is Canadian and they were able to piss off a Canadian. So congratulations Indeed, you're even ticking off the Canadians, which are pretty...
Chad Sowash: Not easy.
Joel Cheesman: Pretty tough to piss off. Let's go back to my shot-outs for a second, shall we?
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Joel Cheesman: Number one and number two traffic sites in the world, Indeed and Glassdoor, 300 or so million users. They'll probably never get pinched for being a monopoly, but they sure are acting like it. Sadly customers are letting them get away with it. In a traditional monopoly, the company has no check on its power to raise prices or lower the quality of its product or service. Here's the rub though, Indeed and Glassdoor have competition, but employers are apparently too lazy, short-sighted or incompetent to put their money somewhere else. I say quit being a victim of the Indeed cartel and find in other places to spend your recruiting budgets. Vote with your wallets, go somewhere else, let Indeed know that what they're doing is bullshit, and maybe they'll change. And if they don't, they'll go out of business some day.
Chad Sowash: Or they'll fall down the mountain like Monster did.
Joel Cheesman: Sure. There's no newspaper ads, Chad.
Chad Sowash: Exactly, exactly. So this story is not done. Okay, so now we're gonna jump into the land of forced registration. Next is the pure hypocrisy of Indeed's new forced registration process to anyone who wants to apply. So back in 2017, we're gonna go back in time. Back in 2017, Indeed shut down company hiring platforms that we're using Talent Network forms to collect basic data before the candidate was sent to the applicant tracking system to apply. Hiring companies created that process because such high injection rates in the application process. So the hiring companies wanted some form of information to try and coax the candidate back to finishing the application.
Chad Sowash: Indeed said that it was causing market confusion and damaging the Indeed brand, so they actually cut off the talent network forms. And we're talking about back then, companies like SmashFly, they literally ripped SmashFly out of the process, even though that was the process that the company wanted. So during that time frame, high level talent acquisition leaders took months to negotiate Indeed off that ledge. One actually said to me, I quote, "It was like we were negotiating with terrorists." So why does this matter? It provides historical context for what Indeed is doing now. Indeed is now forcing candidates to create an Indeed profile before applying for that job on the corporate career site.
Chad Sowash: Yes, they've created their very own talent network forms of sorts. It's the evil empire, kids. They'll do what they want. They'll call it job seek... It's for the good of the job seeker at every single turn, but they're doing exactly, exactly what they said was bad for the job seeker just a few years ago.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, it sad. A little history lesson for the kids in the mid-2000s when Indeed came out, the job board landscape was riddled with NASCAR ads, not actual NASCAR ads, but sites that looked like cars and NASCAR with ads everywhere. Give us your Social Security Number, making you put in your email address and your contact, you have to upload a resume, and Indeed comes along and it's a breath of fresh air.
Chad Sowash: It was.
Joel Cheesman: You don't have to register. It's every job that they can get a hold of, it's not just job board. It was a breath of fresh air.
Chad Sowash: It was Google for Jobs.
Joel Cheesman: While the Ladders and the CareerBuilders and the Monsters of the world, were getting their ass kicked by Indeed. Indeed is now falling back into the trap of acting like a bully, a terrorist, a monopolist, and they should take heed and call their founders and sort of get a refresher on what made Indeed great in the beginning. And it was not this bullshit about pushing people around and acting like you're the only game in town. Ultimately, the chickens do come home to roost, karma is a bitch, and this shit will probably come back to kick you in the ass. Call me Nostradamus, but this is not good for Indeed long-term. I don't think they're gonna pivot and change the best that the market can do again, is take their money elsewhere, but I doubt that's gonna happen.
Chad Sowash: The very high level talent acquisition leaders that I talk to, actually said back then, they knew that they needed to start looking for alternatives. So having that in their brain back then they've been looking and they've been formulating, so whether they can put it in place or not, we'll see. But companies, again, historically have to understand the behavior of the vendors that they're working with.
Joel Cheesman: Let's take a quick break. DailyPay... More news Chad before we get to buy or sell, which I know you're excited about, but...
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: Just hold on a second. DailyPay, a financial technology company has raised 260 million to fund a more growth product innovation and international expansion. This brings total funding to $1.1 billion. That's right, you guys. The funding is divided between a revolving credit facility provided by Barclays and Angelo Gordon and a term loan from SVP Capital and Neuberger Berman. That's complicating. Alright, Kevin Coop CEO of DailyPay says he expects the funding to propel the company's position as the market leader in on-demand pay. Chad, your thoughts on the new funding at DailyPay.
Chad Sowash: Yeah, that's funding. That's not the valuation. The funding is $1.1 billion.
Joel Cheesman: Oh, it's still unicorn worthy though.
Chad Sowash: That's fucking crazy. Oh, well, of course it is. That means that what's the date of valuation, but let's be clear, payment tech in the US is lagging, and that's being nice. People in China are paying with their faces, it's creepy, but it's very advanced technologically. In little old Portugal, we're paying with the QR code from our banking app. While here in the US, we're finally seeing tap to pay as a standard, but we're not quite there yet. So the opportunity here is huge, and then visioning the standardization of a global on-demand payroll system is obviously an enormous opportunity. So in an under-developed market, like the US, this type of tech could help us finally get up to speed, actually pass and leap frog to where we need to be.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, this company is so in demand and so successful right now that Chime, that you've probably heard of, a new fintech, spent much of 2022 trying to buy DailyPay, but both of its offers, they had two, including a $2 billion bid, were rejected. That's according to people with direct knowledge of the deal and talks via story by The Information. Chime offered $1.6 billion in May of '22, comprised of $300 million in cash and $1.2 billion in stock and a $100 million in restricted stock units. It sweetened the deal a month later to $2 billion with $700 million in cash and $1.2 billion in stock and $100 million in RS use. You know, my son Cole, he's working, he's working now. And his money goes into a bank account that I manage. And pretty much regularly he asks me if he gets paid, has money gone on my account? I keep telling him it's every two weeks, every Friday.
Chad Sowash: Does he have an app so he can see it?
Joel Cheesman: No. He's 16. He'll get access eventually. We'll see if he can drive his... Get his license and drive the car. Okay, but anyway, I digress. Cole doesn't have any bills. He's buying camo pants from Finland, that's the kind of purchases that he has to make with his money. So if he doesn't have bills, and he is asking every day, imagine people who do have bills and need cash on a daily basis. Frankly, how soon before employers that don't pay daily, get behind the eight ball and just get crushed by all the companies and employers that do?
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: I think this is gonna be a must-have, a low bar for every employer that's in the service industry to have.
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: And if you don't have it, you're gonna lose a lot of people and prospects. So for me, like it's a trend that's gonna happen almost 100% for those kinds of companies, and DailyPay is in the catbird seat to take a lot of market share, and companies like Chime are willing to write some checks. I see an IPO in the future. Maybe that'll be in '24 predictions, but the future is so bright, they gotta wear shades at DailyPay. You're ready for a little, oh, I don't know, buy or sell?
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: Alright, here we go, kids. You know how the game is played. We talk about three startups that have recently gotten funding, we read a summary and then Chad or I buy or sell the business. You're ready to play Chad?
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: Here we go. Alright, first up is Moonhub, San Francisco-based Moonhub and AI-powered recruiting platform has raised $4.4 million in seed funding. The platform aims to revolutionize the way that recruiters search for candidates by looking beyond keywords and looks at billions of data points from the public web to analyze a candidate's profile and identify their potential fit for a role. The company hopes to use the funding to grow and expand. Founded in 2021, the company employees 17 people. Chad, buy or sell Moonhub?
Chad Sowash: So they go really heavy on the keyword search era kind of thing, which I totally agree it. We're moving away from bullying and keyword search and focusing on contextualizing resumes and backgrounds and those types of things. Makes a lot of sense, but this is too far. This has gone way too far, way too fucking fast. Then they wanna... They wanna slap a ChatGPT on this here sometime soon. And this is my prediction, which is fairly easy. ChatGPT will be the new AI. And what I mean by that is from the standpoint that every company known to human kind will start slapping ChatGPT on marketing and sales pitches. This has gone way too far, way too fast. So this is... Especially when we're talking about auditing and compliance. And this is a hell no, sell, sell, sell for me.
Joel Cheesman: Okay, Chad, tell me if you've heard this one before. Stanford grad, who's done some time at Oxford and worked at Facebook thinks they can revolutionize recruiting even though they're barely out of diapers. I think we've seen this movie too many times for this to be a buy. Founder Nancy Xu or Juh, will be bored in a year and onto something cooler, and also Moonhub, the name blows, it's a major sell for me as well.
Joel Cheesman: Let's see if Disclo, D-I-S-C-L-O, can do better. Disclo an Atlanta-based startup has raised $6.5 million in known funding so far with the most recent being a $5 million seed round. They develop software to assist employees in asking for disability accommodations at work and help employers to manage said requests.
Joel Cheesman: The software anonymize the employee's disability, telling the employer that the individual has filed a notice and what the accommodation request is. The startup hopes its existence will raise awareness about disability and accommodation rights. Founded in 2019, they employ 12 people. Chad, are you a Disclo duck or is this a death by Disclo situation?
Chad Sowash: Such a great song. So I'm close to this one, not Disclo the company, but the actual problem is Julie, my wife, as you all know listening, is the executive director for Disability Solutions, and she's worked for over a decade to build talent pipelines which include training, accommodations, retention, and more for the disability community. Plus working, my work in creating the National Labor Exchange with local, state and federal government, plus community-based organizations who represent a cross-section of workers who are also disabled. Needless to say, Disclo has identified a portion of the real problem that companies need to address on a regular basis. So knowing this is a problem and having a tool to be able to jump in there is somewhat of an easy button, which is exactly what companies want for something they don't understand. Is a buy for me.
Joel Cheesman: So I'm glad I waited on this because sometimes I think you're gonna love something and then you flip it on me, like, "This is some bullshit because of A, B and C." And this is something you're way closer to than I am, so I was kinda waiting to see what I was gonna do before I got you. So I'm glad I was leaning yes, but I'm glad that you confirmed that. So I will also add to Chad's comments that if you go to their website, a big red line with a headline at the top reads the following "North Memorial Health to pay $180,000 to resolve EEOC disability to discrimination lawsuit."
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: Most sites have a streaming headline at the top, it's like, "Hey, we just got money," or "Hey, we just got some... " This is like people are gonna get their ball sack crushed if they don't abide by this shit. So what are three things HR never wants to hear? Lawsuit, EEOC and fines, our industry has a history of giving blank checks to companies that promise to never go to court by hearing words like EEOC, lawsuit and fines. So for that reason alone, Disclo should be staying alive for a long, long time. It's a buy and an awesome set of dad jokes from me. Alright, let's go to Listo. Provider of HR services for globally distributed workforces has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding from angel investors.
Joel Cheesman: The company's platform automates HR functions for clients with global teams, providing outsourced worker payments and transparent single-line monthly invoices. Listo also offers global recruiting services and assistance with immigration processes. The company aims to "lift people everywhere" by providing meaningful employment and competing against established players like remote.com and Turing. Chad, is it about damn time for a company like this, or does the truth hurt those are Listo jokes, by the way, because I'm hip like that. Chad, buy or sell Listo?
Chad Sowash: Listo means ready in Spanish. It sounds like a stripped down version of what you were talking about, more of the well-funded EOR companies that are out there today, remote.com, Atlas, Deel, Oyster Papaya, Velocity Global, there's a ton of them. But this is a very broad TAM unicorn segment, which is why we're seeing companies jump into it. If there was a segment to get into that will score and deserve high valuations, it's this one. And knowing most of the others have taken large sums of funding, this makes Listo a cheaper option as an acquisition target right out of the gates. But they need to make a lot of noise and punch above their weight. I think they can, and I think... I love this segment, so this is a buy for me.
Joel Cheesman: That's a buy for Mr. Sowash. And we officially disagree on at least one buy or sell company. This one is easy for me. Too little, too late, they're bringing a knife to a gun fight, Remote, Deel, Oyster, Turing, and Andela and others are going to crush them like me with an empty beer can. The rumors are true, this company has no juice. It's a sell. Alright, let's take a quick break. Talk about Maryland.
Chad Sowash: Maryland?
Joel Cheesman: Let's talk about Maryland, I think for the first time on this podcast.
Chad Sowash: We never do that.
Joel Cheesman: Some famous sons and daughters of Maryland, by the way, Chad, Michael Phelps, Harriet Tubman, Babe Ruth, Frederick Douglas and David Hasselhoff. That's right, I need an excuse to say David Hasselhoff on the show.
Chad Sowash: Who's big in Germany, by the way.
Joel Cheesman: Anyway, a new bill called the four-day work week act of 2023 has been proposed in Maryland, incentivizing public and private employers to transition to a four-day work week for at least 30 employees without reducing pay or benefits. Employers would receive a state income tax credit of up to $750,000 per fiscal year for two years if they participate. Yowza. Chad, did you and Maryland just become best friends?
Chad Sowash: This is more corporate welfare for god sakes. It's like, you should be doing this anyway, you're giving your employee's reasons to love you and stay, but yet the government has to subsidize that. So welcome, corporate welfare all around. The International Labor Organization published a study that demonstrated "Americans take fewer vacations and work longer hours than most Europeans, and health problems related to workplace stress kill thousands of us every year."
Chad Sowash: So in the US, we have been pretty much born and bred to live to work, where in Europe it's more of work to live. So we're trying to change our culture after the pandemic, which I appreciate. And then the HR Dive article, which we're talking about here, also states, "Preventing a decline," when we talk about productivity or, well, they gonna lose productivity because we're going from four days to five days. So preventing the decline, the key is to prioritize tasks that deliver outcomes that really matter to company success and dump time wasters like unnecessary meetings. So if you listen to that statement, why the fuck weren't we do in this before? I mean, this is... All this is doing is helping us cut the fat. We had a ton of, let's say, bloat time during the regular 40-hour work week period, sat around the water cooler, BS with friends, took long lunches, had bullshit meetings, that kind of stuff. Now, what we're trying to do is say, look, when you're at the job, do the job, but guess what? We're gonna give you more you time. And I think that's a great benefit. I don't know why the government has to pay for this to happen, because it seems like a smart evolution of work, but here we are.
SFX: That escalated quickly.
Joel Cheesman: So yeah, the marketplace should determine whether it's a four-day work week or not, which brings us back to my old adage of the answer to all of your questions, my friend, is money. I don't know why the government would do this. Is it one day less off or one day more off that they're gonna be spending money and we can tax your sales? Is it because like I just don't know why the government is doing this. And frankly, I'm too sleep-deprived right now to figure it out. So instead, Chad, I'm gonna throw some other fun Maryland facts your way. Are you ready?
Chad Sowash: Okay.
Joel Cheesman: The first successful man to balloon flight in the US was via Baltimore. The Ouija board got its start in Maryland. And the Maryland Blue Crab is the official state crustacean. We out.
OUTRO: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Chase podcast, or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there is no doubt you wish you had that time back, a valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch Big booty Latinos and bug fights on TikTok.
OUTRO: Now, who you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off on the guilt. Let's save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can quit them either. We're out.