In this episode of The Next Next, Jason Jacobs hosts Max and Adam, co-founders of Telescoped, a company facilitating connections between top remote software engineers in Latin America and U.S. tech startups. They discuss their previous venture, ThriveHive, and the unique trust network approach Telescoped employs to verify and streamline hiring. The conversation delves into the inefficiencies in traditional recruiting, the impact of AI and automated agents in their hiring process, and the potential future of remote work. The episode emphasizes the importance of balancing ambitious business goals with personal life and the changing dynamics of the hiring market.
Building an Efficient Remote Talent Network with Telescope Co-Founders Max and Adam
In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs welcomes Max and Adam, co-founders and co-CEOs of Telescoped, a company connecting top remote software engineers in Latin America with U.S. tech startups. They discuss their journey, the problems they identified in the global talent market, and how their unique business model and trust network address these issues. The conversation also covers the impact of AI on recruiting, how they leverage AI agents, and their approach to work-life balance and building a sustainable business. The episode concludes with insights into their company culture, future goals, and the broader implications of their model for the tech industry.
00:00 Introduction to The Next Next
03:33 Meet Max and Adam: The Minds Behind Telescoped
04:59 The Genesis of Telescoped
09:00 Challenges in Remote Hiring
12:29 Telescoped's Unique Business Model
20:25 The Role of AI in Recruitment
27:59 Collaborative AI Agents for Better Outcomes
28:47 Building the AI-Powered System
30:25 Challenges in AI Implementation
32:04 AI in Go-to-Market Strategies
36:30 Future of Work with AI
42:33 Global Network and Impact
45:34 Work-Life Balance and Company Culture
52:06 Conclusion and Call to Action
Jason Jacobs: on today's episode of The Next Next, our guests are Max and Adam, co-founders and co-CEOs of telescoped. Now Telescoped is connecting the best remote software engineers in Latin America. With tech startups in the US and this is not Max and Adam's first go round. They were co-founders of, uh, thrive Hive, which is where I first met them.
But this was back in kind of the 2011 to 2019 timeframe, and they got back together on this one. Uh, max actually has family in Latin America and is very well connected there in terms of the best talent. And meanwhile, as entrepreneurs, uh, here. In the US they saw the mismatch where the best companies, uh, are oftentimes seeking talent in the same pools.
But there's these rich pools of talent in other places like Latin America, but they don't have access to them. They don't know how to assess them, and those connections aren't being made nearly as efficiently as they could be, and it's [00:01:00] not a recruiting firm. They actually came at it a different way where they have this invite only community.
Of the top talent. And then they have a bunch of signal to, uh, to, to detect, um, who the best talent is within that community. And they make those connections with the companies. They don't take any fee on that placement. They're not a recruiting firm. They then make it really easy for employers to, uh, to hire those people and provide the, um, the benefits and the payroll.
So that's where. Telescope's business model comes in and they were talking in a recent investor update about what's happening on the candidate side using AI to spam a bunch of employers and then. What's happening on the employer side using AI to filter through a bunch of these AI generated spam applications.
And in their view, it's just not sustainable. And they're using AI agents in a different way where they're almost enabling [00:02:00] a, um, uh, a personal concierge, uh, that represents. The candidate and then a personal concierge that represents the employer. And then, uh, really using the agents to talk to each other to make these matches in a way that has far less slop and far less inefficiency and is much more like a surgical strike.
At any rate, I thought that was an interesting topic and wanted to learn more about it. So these guys came on the show and talked to me about what they're seeing in the recruiting market. What they're seeing with offshoring, what they're seeing with AI and how they're using agents, what they've learned along the way, what stack they're using to make this possible, what some of the challenges are, and what the future holds.
Anyways, this is a great one and I hope you enjoy it. But before we get started.
I'm Jason Jacobs, and this is The Next Next. It's not really a show, it's more of a learning journey [00:03:00] to explore how founders can build ambitious companies while being present for family and not compromising flexibility and control, and also how emerging AI tools can assist with that. Each week we bring on guests who are at the tip of the spear on redefining how ambitious companies get built, and selfishly the goal is for this to help me better understand how to do that myself.
While bringing all of you along for the ride, not sure where this is gonna go, but it's gonna be fun.
Okay, max and Adam from Telescopes. Welcome to the show, guys.
Max Faingezicht: It's great to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, I've I've known you guys a long time, but it's been many years since we've caught up, and I'm actually a little tiny investor in your company, although, I must admit, it wasn't like, oh, like I'm so passionate about the space, or, oh, their vision is genius, or it was just like. I like Max and Adam and believe in them as founders.
I don't even need to see a deck. Here's just [00:04:00] a little check so I can go along for the ride. And and and I saw you sent an update recently and in it was talking about a bunch of areas that I'm interested in and been thinking about. One is just around recruiting and how AI is affecting the.
Recruiting market. One is around offshore engineering, since that's a portion of what you guys do and just what are the implications of AI on. Offshoring and on human engineers. And then you guys are also starting to do some interesting stuff with agents, and it was like, you know what it'd be good to catch up anyways.
And also it'd be fun to hear more about how Telescope is doing since, I guess technically I am an investor, albeit a tiny one. And yeah so here we are. I'm really appreciative that you're making the time to come on and talk to me about these things.
Max Faingezicht: Fantastic.
Adam Blake: to be here.
Max Faingezicht: to be here. Yeah, so where do we start?
Jason Jacobs: For starters and I dunno, if you want me to, since there's two of you, do you know, do I call on one of you or do you wrestle over it when it comes to these questions? We'll have to see, but I'm gonna start with a jump ball. [00:05:00] What is telescoped?
Max Faingezicht: All right, I can get started. Telescope is a network of the best remote software engineers in Latin America. Eventually, the whole globe. And, this idea came to us 'cause we actually traveled to Costa Rica after we had sold our prior company and talked to these amazing engineers.
Like people that
Jason Jacobs: Did you, you go there? Was that a pleasure? Trip Max.
Max Faingezicht: It was back then. Now we'd go for pleasure and for work. And it's the best excuse to get out of Boston in a January cold winter,
Jason Jacobs: so you went to Costa Rica pleasure trip and you thought, oh, on my vacation trip after selling my company, I'm gonna talk with engineers.
Max Faingezicht: I happen to be from Costa Rica. We got a, I got a longstanding relationship with a bunch of people in schools and I thought, it'd be cool to catch up with some smart kids and tell them, some of the ideas we've been thinking about starting a company around and after a few years, half of this is again the most talented engineer you ever spoke to. Were willing to quit their job and join us. And Adam and I were like whoa. We don't have, we haven't incorporated, there's no company that don't quit just yet. There's there there's gonna be a time and place for that. And then we came back to Boston and we ditched all [00:06:00] the ideas and just realized there was this asymmetry in the market where the best talent was just not getting connected with the best opportunities.
And, CEO groups from Techstars and MIT, everybody was just looking for talent. And they just didn't know how to tap into this small pool of this networks of engineers outside of the US. 'cause it's really hard. How do you vet someone? How do you find them? And if you do find them, how do you actually test to make sure that you know they're trustworthy, that they're the people they say they are, and how do you actually hire them in a compliant way?
And so telescope emerged to solve this based on a trust network which is at the core of what we're building. The text the network is exclusive. You can only get in by invitation. And we use that peer signal to identify the best and strongest engineers within a community. And then the business model is basically we make it easy to hire them in a remote way.
So we provide benefits payroll and other services to the companies that want to hire them.
Jason Jacobs: Did you ever pay much attention to what Ryan Durkin was doing with the operators locally?
Max Faingezicht: We did, we actually spoke [00:07:00] with him at some point. So some parallels there for sure.
Jason Jacobs: Hey, he is not doing it anymore, but he was just it's not published yet, but he was on the, I recorded with him the other day and he was telling me about that. Yeah. And it sounds like there were some similarities. Obviously his stuff was local, but,
Adam Blake: right.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah,
Max Faingezicht: focused on remote software engineers who were doing more like the broader higher level hires that you wanna bring onto to a company, but very similar in terms of finding the rock stars, like building teams that are highly cohesive and productive. So similar thoughts there For sure.
Jason Jacobs: and we're gonna dig in on that. But first I have to ask you guys are, is this the second company that you guys have founded together, or number two?
Adam Blake: It is. Yeah. So we started our first company in 2011 that was Thrive five, right out of business school, and built that company. We worked together for how long was it Max? Like including post acquisition? I don't know. Was it eight years? Yeah. And we didn't hate each other. In fact, when we left Thrive Five, that was the first thing we said is like, Hey, we wanna build another company and we want to do it together.
And so the goal,
Jason Jacobs: what point into telescope did you start hitting each other then?[00:08:00]
Adam Blake: we started hating each other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: I'm just joking.
Adam Blake: Hate this guy. No. Yeah, no it's been great. It's been awesome to, to build together. Again, I don't think it's that normal to see, and it just gives us a level of comfort with each other that, we can be so candid with each other. We can, talk about anything.
We can talk about the hard stuff, the easy stuff, and it's just more fun.
Jason Jacobs: So how do you guys break down responsibilities between the two of you? I know, I know there's a broader team but as co-founders.
Adam Blake: Yeah. Go ahead, max.
Max Faingezicht: Yeah, so I think, historically I've always leaned closer to the engineering side, the product side, and Adam's been closer to the go-to market side. And, I think the interesting thing is even though we do have like very clear lanes, we in the strategy piece. Extensively. We're talking about all sorts of stuff all day, every day, and it just doesn't, it doesn't get old, right? We're always like coming up with ideas where I might have a go to market idea. Adam's got like a product idea and I think that collaboration is what makes it fun for us.
'cause we can just move across pretty seamlessly.[00:09:00]
Jason Jacobs: So when you were coming back from Costa Rica and thinking about this market you mentioned that there I. Was a mismatch between the best talent and the best opportunities. What was your assessment of the reasons or root causes of that misalignment?
Adam Blake: I, I think I, I can take this one, max. So we started just before Covid, right? And so when we first started, I remember in our sales deck, we actually ta would talk about like why remote engineering was a, like a good thing. 'cause some people still objected to remote. So we thought initially, Hey, this has gotta be a large part of it.
We also knew just from our own experience, how hard it was to find people and Pam and all that, those sorts of things, right? So then fast forward Covid happened. We removed the objection handling slide on, why remote work, right? That was out the window, especially for engineers. But what has shocked [00:10:00] us is, 'cause we've done testing on this, how broken it still is today.
If you wanna hire, if somebody from outside the US, an engineer. Wants to apply for a job in the US they have virtually zero chance of even being considered. We've tested in less than one in a hundred. We'll even get a call back or an email back, let's say. And these are the
Jason Jacobs: E even for jobs where they're open to remote employees.
Adam Blake: Yes. Yeah. This is we've done tests where they're open to remote. And we've tested this with emails that we could monitor, so we could see the responses. And these are some of the most incredible engineers that under our normal process, they do three interviews on average to get it hired, right?
The same person won't get a call back more than one in a hundred times. And so I think at the end of the day, they're, they apply for these jobs and they just get put in the too hard pile. Hiring managers are completely crushed with resumes right now. And you get this resume. It starts [00:11:00] off with like personally identifiable or stuff you're not supposed to disclose.
I'm married and I'm this age with three kids. You don't recognize the university, you don't recognize any of the companies. You're, you don't even know where the country is. Maybe if your geography isn't that good, you're like, I don't know, too hard, right? Like, how am I gonna talk to this person? I don't, that's our assessment. But at the end of the day, of course we don't know for sure, but that's what we see. And the reality is it's really still totally broken. The only way that seems to work for these engineers to get good access to high quality projects is to work through outsourcing firms.
The problem with that is that then their future is with the outsourcing firm. 'cause you've got this whole middle layer of management that creates all kinds of problems. So they can literally be working for Facebook. But they don't have any stock options. Their career trajectory is completely different 'cause they're doing it through an outsourcing firm.
That's what we're trying to fix by connecting them better and paying them in a way that, there's no career for them at telescope. Their career [00:12:00] should be what the company that they're actually coding for.
Jason Jacobs: And when you first set out, what was the initial hypothesis for how you would address that? And then what was right about that? What was wrong about that? And how has it evolved over the last several years?
Max Faingezicht: I can take this one. So I think that
Jason Jacobs: So are you guys just gonna alternate? Is that the
Adam Blake: Yeah, dude, we've been doing this a long time.
Max Faingezicht: he can finish my sentences if you want.
Adam Blake: We're just gonna mess with Jason. We'll change it up and yeah.
Max Faingezicht: Yeah, perfect. Yeah, so I think at the core of it, why do you go with an outsourcing firm, right? The first thing is you have like recognizable brands. You've got somebody that you can go and chase if things don't go well and I think it comes down to trust, right?
How do you trust a, an individual? It's really hard. And so that at the core of the telescope network is this concept of trust, which I mentioned briefly in the intro. This signal between peers you probably know from your runkeeper days oh my God, she was the best at filling the blank. And this other guy was like, the best at, fill in the blank.
You know who those people are and what if you could capture that inside of a [00:13:00] community, inside of a network. So we've got inspiration from the patriarch algorithm from Google where, you know, a big node that has a lot of weight probably has much more influence on. Telling us who the best engineers are, if we already know that this person is highly regarded by the network.
And so we're using this trust rank algorithm to identify the top stars. And this was from inception. We knew this was gonna be important, the idea of peer signals. Then the second part is, how do you take an industry where I. The business model is misaligned with any sort of startup work, right?
Like a startup founder. I hated, writing a check for $40,000 to, recruit someone. So what we did is like no upfront costs, no big recruiting fees upfront. What we changed it is into a recurring revenue stream, which is a partnership Now. You get to interview these people directly, make a determination how much you want to pay them.
And out of however much you end up paying telescope, you know exactly how much goes to the engineer, what's going to pay for benefits, what's going to pay for the payroll services and so forth. And so you can actually have this direct relationship. So you break the model by turning on its head.
And then the [00:14:00] last piece, which I think is also non-obvious and important we actually are engineer centric, so we're trying to change the careers and the lives of these engineers. By focusing on the talent on the most important part of the network, we actually end up becoming a much better solution for the companies.
'cause they want the best engineers, like the people in Telescope Network are not on Upwork or they're not freelancers. They actually want a stable job. They wanna be part of a team. They wanna work on the best and most interesting challenges with amazing teams. They don't wanna just do like a, three week project.
Jason Jacobs: I think it's interesting. So you framed it that you're not outsourcer, but technically are you still an outsourcer, but just, an outsourcer that puts engineers first and provides them a career track and, but from a business model standpoint, are there are there differences from a structural standpoint to the outsourcers?
Yeah.
Max Faingezicht: way to understand that is we're not an outsourcing firm because they don't have a career path with Telescope. It's like Justworks or any of the payroll companies here in the US that do your [00:15:00] PO services they're not your company, right? Like they're just running payroll on, on, on behalf of your company.
So that's what we do and that's the basic parallel, which just breaks the, this concept of an intermediary. We're just doing the logistics for you.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. And the, when you say a career with the outsourcing firm as opposed to what, like in the outsourcing model, what does that path look like?
Adam Blake: So in the outsourcing model, you have a boss at the outsourcing firm, right? You your boss and your outsourcing firm set your pay. And then the outsourcing firm marks it up. They typically double, can be even higher, right? And that's what they charge the client. All kinds of problems arise from that.
So for example, let's say the engineer who's been working for two years on a project wants to get a raise. They have to ask their manager at the outsourcing firm. And the outsourcing firm. I. Will usually say okay, I have, but I have to consider this with the client. I don't know if the client can afford [00:16:00] that.
Right now it becomes this whole question of is the outsourcing firm willing to accept a hit to their margin? So you have this, these sort of like misaligned incentives. The client maybe has no idea any of this is going on, the outsourcing firm then. Loses the engineer because the outsourcing firm, let's say, doesn't agree to this raise.
And meanwhile, the client had, just all of a sudden loses their best engineer and they didn't even know anything was going on. There, there's just all these sort of externalities that happen there. The outsourcing firms end up getting access to the best projects. So that's why, and they provide a stable environment for the engineers.
That's where they, the best engineers end up eventually. But what they really would want is a more traditional working relationship where their boss is at the company that they're coding for. If they wanna get a raise, they've got a. Deal with the person that you know they're coding for, right?
It's just more aligned. Giving them a better career path. They can give stock options. The, an outsourcing firm could never [00:17:00] do that.
Jason Jacobs: So I'll ask slightly different question than how does the telescope model structurally compare to a PEO or a Justworks?
Adam Blake: It's really the same. You pay a percentage in this case, with telescoped of the money that is going to the. Telescope gets paid, then we pay the engineer and we take a percentage of the payment to pay for payroll services. Most importantly, benefits, and of course some for our profit.
Max Faingezicht: A couple of changes too, is that one we do provide the talent. So we've got this network that the client gets access to,
A, a DP or
Adam Blake: right.
Max Faingezicht: you would never get the talent. But then the other piece is that the percentage we take is much smaller because we're thinking of higher volume.
I. automated. 'cause at the core of this is how do you scale trust, right? Which we, where we started and what we've built is very scalable in terms of this peer signal can be scaled within a community and within multiple communities. So you can actually have much higher volume, even if the margin is much, much smaller.
Like we're [00:18:00] not even close to the two x markup that Adam was talking about on our take rate. And yet we can scale that at a much higher volume and still make a very large business work.
Jason Jacobs: And so is that the type of client that you target? Ones that hire a lot of people?
Adam Blake: It doesn't have to be. We've got. Tons of companies that we work with that have just a single engineer with us. And then we have many that have more. Of course. We tend to. Skew a little bit smaller on the tech company side. Because what we find is once a tech company has a dedicated recruiter in-house or external, doesn't matter we become a threat to that recruiter.
And so they tend to not wanna work with us even though we, of course, can we remove. A lot of the need to have that recruiter for a company. So if they've already made that commitment before they started working with us, then it's harder to, for us to get our foot in the door
Max Faingezicht: so we, we really go from seed all the way through [00:19:00] series B or so. So it, it spans the gamut depending on size of company, but
Adam Blake: And we have like unicorns in, that are clients of ours too. It's just less common.
Jason Jacobs: Uhhuh. And and so when you go in, are you competing with the outsourcers or with the PEOs, or are you a new category of spend?
Max Faingezicht: We typically compete with the existing pipeline, the recruiting pipeline, right? You might have an ad out there on your website, maybe you have one through your venture capital firm. You probably publish it on LinkedIn or some other places. But we're just, our engineers are gonna compete on an interview process against anybody remote, both us as well as global.
Adam Blake: Yeah, that's one thing to note. When we work with people, we always tell 'em, run your whatever process you wanted to run. Post your job and, LinkedIn, whatever, that's fine. We don't work on an exclusive basis. We'll just run in parallel to that. And because we're, we have a lot of confidence in our process.
It's very efficient, it's more efficient for the hiring manager than any process I've ever seen. And the people that [00:20:00] we're producing that we're, highlighting for these companies are extremely hard to, impossible for them to match on their own, particularly when they're young companies and not with a well known brand.
Jason Jacobs: And have you ever had requests for the companies to run people through your for you to take people on your paper that you didn't provide?
Adam Blake: Yep.
Max Faingezicht: done that.
Adam Blake: Yep. That happens too. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: Okay. I think the natural place then to shift to is the how, because you keep talking about this trust and how it's your core differentiator. So I'd love to understand how it works, but also h. Like how you started it, because I would imagine there's a big chicken and egg there that you have to find a way to navigate when you're getting it off the ground. Yeah. Maybe talk a bit about how it works and also how you got here.
Max Faingezicht: So we started this with the idea that we wanted to be in control. We didn't wanna follow the classic venture capital model. So we raised a very small round actually with a bunch of [00:21:00] people that we trusted and we wanted to, stay in touch. So to have these conversations, you mentioned earlier a small check. We have a bunch of those small checks, but we just raised a small amount early on and that was it. We really wanted to bootstrap it, but wanted the access to, amazing people. And to do that, we said, we're gonna build an agency, learn how it's done manually.
And so that was the, inception of telescope. This, everything was manual. No, no software, no no automation. And then as we learned, 'cause we were new to the industry, right? So we learned, we started building out the network. We did have some advantages. I mentioned, I'm from Costa Rica.
I knew like the head of electrical engineering at some of the, at the best school very large public school. And so we had these people we already had worked with and we had this kernel to get started with community, right? These people we met and had peers with, but as we started scaling, we actually got very lucky with timing.
So our first placement was in February, 2020, and then a month later we're all in lockdown. People are going nuts to find remote engineers and to understand how to make remote work while we've been thinking about it for, probably like a year at that point. So we [00:22:00] scaled up, we got to breakeven.
Say by the end of that year we were already at breakeven and then started just building all the automation behind what we were doing to run a very efficient service business. It's like a tech enabled service at that point. And I dunno if you remember our deck, but we had these three phases of the company.
Phase one is manual agency. Phase two is transition. Phase three is we're actually gonna automate and build a high volume marketplace. So fast forward to today. We actually, scaled that that business. We've got a pretty streamlined kind of automation on the operation side. But then I dunno, probably the middle of last year, this ai train hit us.
And we shifted the whole company's strategy to make AI core to the experience. So now we've been working on kind of angen system. We can dive into kind of how we're thinking about it at the core of the telescope experience. So we've got our network and the way that you tap into the network is through a recruiting agent on the hiring side and through an engineering coaching agent on the engineering side. And I think that's unlocking some really interesting, of dynamics that ha again, happy to chat [00:23:00] more about. But that's basically the story. I think. Adam, did I miss anything?
Adam Blake: No. I think it, it's taken time for our reputation to grow, but now. That reputation is a tailwind for us, and we're just seeing more and more people come to the network, without us doing anything.
Max Faingezicht: that's interesting. So at the beginning we were like, literally Adam and I were like interviewing every engineer who joined the network. You could only get in through an introduction referral from somebody that we knew. And then we would have a conversation, we'd have a technical interview, we'd had take home tests, like a whole slew of how do you get somebody certified? And then over time we started figuring out like, signals and things we could do to actually minimize the amount of manual work. And we're at a point where we're very confident in this trust rank algorithm we're running. In terms of the quality of the people we've got in the network, and then the network is large enough that it's also self-sustaining.
We run community events in person. We've got, probably about a hundred people that attend. Each one of those, they always sell out, and they're probably one of the most highly regarded events. We're very strong in Costa Rica and that's where, we've built a really strong [00:24:00] brand as well, so we attract some of the best talent there already.
Jason Jacobs: And Max, you mentioned that an AI train you. What did you mean by that? What did you see it more as an opportunity or a threat, and in what ways was it an opportunity and in what ways was it a threat?
Max Faingezicht: Great question. So I think that, we were pretty early on, on the, okay, so this GPT thing can be used in ways that are, pretty obvious. We've got a PDF that's a job description. We can take that and parse it. So we're applying like, basic LLM stuff to PDFs and some of the other parts of the workflow.
Again, just automated, automating the simple stuff. But then as the agentic stuff started to pick up steam and started to shape up, it was clear. To ask that, the whole recruiting function was gonna be rewritten, right? The idea of the job of a tech recruiter. Cold calling and using tools to spam more and more engineers.
Engineers using spam to sorry, AI to spam companies. If you're an engineer today, you can for 10 bucks apply to a thousand jobs. You don't read the job description. You've got a personalized [00:25:00] cover letter, personalized resume, and you don't even know what you're applying to. So then you, then as you get responses, you might think through, oh, I wanna, I actually wanna go to this one.
And that interview, and this interview. And that's why there's like this kind of spam war going on the receiving end. The recruiters will use an AI filter. To get rid of all the crap, right? And so it's like a AI is just enabling more and more spam to happen. And then we thought, okay, so if that's the state of the world, how can we use this AI in a way that's more conducive to creating value and high quality connection between humans? And again, this AI agent frame just as that's the answer, right? Imagine that you can have an AI. Work with the engineer to understand where they are in their career, are their aspirations? Who they aspire to be when they grow up. Do you wanna be the CTO or the founder of a company?
Do you just wanna be a staff engineer who heads down working with the coolest gadgets and technologies? And once you understand that, and by the way, that engineer, coach, agent. Never forgets a thing, right? They know exactly who you are, where you are. They keep track of you. They can check in on you. They know how much you're making.
They can tell you, [00:26:00] Hey, you should actually be making twice as much as they're paying you. There's this opportunity here. And then on the other side there's the AI recruiting agent who can talk to companies and understand where the gaps are, who the companies are looking for. What are not only the technologies, but the type of people that would succeed in a role.
So it's basically automating the whole sales process end to end that we had done manually. It was just, again, like a in aha moment where we thought okay, an AI agent can actually take these two things and automate them in a way that is gonna be better than the humans.
Jason Jacobs: Adam, anything to add?
Adam Blake: Yeah, no, just the I think, we think we're in a unique position to have these agents communicate with each other because we have both sides of the network. And so by doing that, the experience for both sides can be so much better instead of getting, I. Spammed on your phone by a thousand recruiter agents, trying to sell you a job.
Instead of recruiters looking at hundreds or thousands of resumes and using AI [00:27:00] tools to do it. But they can, the recruiter can just have a few conversations. The we only have to bother a couple of engineers for each job, right? Because their agent can represent them without. External communications to the engineer.
So you're making better decisions with fewer human touch points that arrive at better matches, better outcomes from, for both sides. And I think that's pretty unique.
Max Faingezicht: I think there's a good analogy here. If you've ever read one of these books on negotiation where you know when you bring more value and more knowledge to a negotiation, there's a better outcome for both sides. So I think instead of having the. process be a combative one where like you're trying to spam as many jobs and the recruiters are trying to spam as many engineers. What if you turn into a collaborative one where, of course the objective function of the recruiter agent is to find the best engineer for the job. And the objective function for the coaching agent is to find the best next job for your career path and optimize for the engineer. But if you have those [00:28:00] two agents collaborating. Then because it can be done at scale. Like a human could never keep track of this, and all the matching algorithms that are out there just don't work, right? But if you have two agents that are actually interacting and collaborating around those two different objective functions with, again, context and memory that is just infinite or well close to infinite, then you can actually end up with much better outcomes on both sides where the company's tapping into people.
They could have never gotten any other way. And the engineers find jobs that are just the best jobs that they've ever could have dreamt of. And then the outcome of that is just better productivity, happier employees, better company outcomes, which then is full circle, right? These engineers are part of these companies.
They have hopefully financial windfalls and they'll go to go and do it again, right? So it's just a completely different paradigm from what you could do manually.
Jason Jacobs: So I get the story of it. I'm curious when it actually became time to dig into. The best way to make that story a reality. What tools to use, whether to be off the [00:29:00] shelf, to build it yourselves, what skill sets you needed, et cetera. Yeah. What what did that journey look like? What did you learn along the way?
What, what kind of stack did you end up with? And then how, if you take this point in time, snapshot how's the reality doing ver versus the the pie in the sky vision of where things are heading?
Max Faingezicht: Awesome. Lemme take the first part of this, Adam, and maybe you can,
Adam Blake: Yeah. No, you should. Yeah.
Max Faingezicht: Yeah, so I think that, the first thing is by, we just touched GPT and it gave us the answer right now. I'm just kidding. It's still a work in progress, right? This thing is so slow early. It's insane. We started, like I said, pretty early, applying just basic LLM to, a very straightforward workflow like. The classic is take a PDF and extract, technologies. That's pretty straightforward. Then it was, okay, we've got these thousands and thousands of interview notes from all the certification processes we've done. What if we could have that be accessible to an agent that can actually answer questions about an engineer without you having to talk to them beyond the resume?
So the resume. Gives you pretty basic information, but what about [00:30:00] that story behind the engineer, who they are, who they want to be? So that was, okay, let's apply an agent to this context. And that was just straight up. Again, just use Clotter and we've tried all of them, but we're actually using Clot right now for that specific job.
And that's live on the site. You go in, you upload your job description, we're gonna, match you with the top three. Matches that are part of the telescope network. And then you can chat with resume or that that engineer. But you're not chatting with the engineer. You're chatting with the agent that represents the engineer. So all of this is live as we were building all of this, it took probably 10 times longer than you'd think it take. 'cause you look at this I don't know, we're big fans of crew ai. We've tried all of these little things that when you look at the tutorial, they show you the happy, happy path where like it's a single threaded idea.
And you just implement it with three clicks and a prompt, right? When you actually try to get this into production. Everything is broken. The work, all the frameworks are half-assed. The documentation is out of date and nothing works. And then you're like I'm just an idiot. We don't know how to do it.
And we just better go ask people that are doing it. And you go ask and everybody's facing the same challenges. And I think I was [00:31:00] just today at a workshop at MIT around building AI agents and there's just this is just like blockchain. In the early days, nothing works. Everything is half broken. When you actually get something to work, it's amazing. And so I think that for us, the interesting thing has been it's really inefficient and it's a bet that we can only make because we own our own destiny. Like I don't have to report at the end of the month to Jason, Hey, here's how the profit is doing.
We don't, we are owners of our own destiny. We've got a company that is
Jason Jacobs: I keep waiting for those reports. They don't come.
Max Faingezicht: never come.
Adam Blake: you're gonna be waiting for a while.
Max Faingezicht: We've got. we've got infinite time in, in a sense, right? Obviously like the pluck is ticking because this is moving so fast, but at the same time. turned time into a strategic advantage for the company. And I think if you're trying to bootstrap that should be one of your core goals. When you can have time be a strategic advantage, then you can iterate. And if you have to toss, 10 frameworks and 10 models and rebuild it and make no progress for a month, and then all of a sudden you have a breakthrough, then that breakthrough sets you apart.
'cause everybody says they're doing this sort of thing. Nobody has it in production, right? If you go to [00:32:00] telescope today, you can actually experience it, which I think is pretty unique. But I dunno, Adam, if you wanna add I've said a
Adam Blake: Yeah, just I think we're also using this stuff a lot on the go to market side. There are tons of implications with ai, that of course, and what we're actually doing right now, we have this internal debate about build versus buy. I don't know, I'd call it the first generation of these age agentic tools are showing up off the shelf.
And so we're currently using one of those off the shelf solutions for a chunk of our go-to market stack. We're simultaneously building, competing and or complimentary. Go to market Tech ourselves. And we're trying to see which one is gonna be better, which one is gonna meet our needs. It's probably gonna end up being a combination.
And it's there, there are a couple of things that are fascinating. It's [00:33:00] completely rewiring how I think about who our next hire should be. It becomes a question of, okay, I thought I needed a marketer, but now I don't know if that's true. Maybe what I need is an operations person. Our head of operations has ended up having a perfect skillset that's aligned with this to build these tools in ways that I think would be less intuitive to a marketer, but the operations person.
Jason Jacobs: What's that person's skillset? The head of operations.
Adam Blake: He loves accounting, he loves data. He has a form. He is an industrial engineer and so he loves tinkering with this stuff and he's able to quickly. Spin up new models. Now what he lacks is the marketing context, right? He wouldn't be able to do this on his own, necessarily with the same [00:34:00] efficacy. So there's some balance there.
And I don't have a perfect answer. I think you're gonna need both still, but there are, there's a role for people. That I never would've I think you're gonna end up being higher. Like you'll have more of these operations type people in your company than you otherwise would've at, an early stage.
The other thing that's happening is they're, we're trying to find the right balance between what to use agents for and what to still, hard code ourselves on the one hand. We can use this operations person who's not an engineer to build really cool stuff. But I can give you an but it might be way less efficient and way more expensive to run.
The benefit is he can do it without involving our engineering team. The downside is, so we built this scraper, for example, and the first time he ran it, it's like it's costing like 12 cents per scrape. And we ran it with a different model, 50 cents per [00:35:00] scrape. He was able to build it himself, right?
But if we did this programmatically with engineering resources, it would take more time to build that tool, which we don't even know if we're gonna end up using or not. But it would be like, one, 1000th of a cent or something to run it. So it's interesting to figure out, which, which, way you should build this stuff.
There's a balance there.
Jason Jacobs: As you guys were talking, it triggered a bunch of stuff and I actually took a few notes so I didn't. I didn't lose any of it, so I'm just gonna go in order. One is, when it comes to outsourcing I mean it seems like there's a push, at least here in America, almost anti-globalization, jobs, bring manufacturing home, all that.
Are there any implications, with that trend on the global stage as it relates to remote? Or not just remote outsourcing in other countries.
Adam Blake: That's not something that we've seen. That like certainly and it could just be the part of the world that [00:36:00] we inhabit in tech. And we haven't seen any change at all in the behavior of people wanting to hire. I.
Max Faingezicht: it's just capitalism, right? Like we had, we got like somebody who you could swap out for the best engineering Silicon Valley or New York or Boston for, half the price. Like it's just, I. You gotta make the most with your limited dollars and everybody's gonna try to, maximize the output there. I think if there were some sort of like taxation or something that happened on top of remote work that might change, but that's not the case.
Jason Jacobs: And you guys are seeing firsthand how AI is giving you meaningful leverage, and you could presume that your clients have or will be discovering similar. As AI continues to mature what do you think the implications will be on the need for human engineers? If any?
Adam Blake: Do you want me to go, max? Okay. So I want hear your take too. But all, so we are very big.
Jason Jacobs: you Wait. This is a good test. If you guys
Adam Blake: [00:37:00] Yeah,
Jason Jacobs: finish each other's sentences,
Adam Blake: we're big believers in the power of ai. I believe that at some point humans will not need to work at all. That everything will be effectively free. With AI powered robots, AI powered software, doing any job.
Blue collar, white collar, whatever that we want them to do. I think work will become optional. I think there are a whole bunch of implications of that, that, depression, like sense of purpose. I think lots of people will choose to work lots of issues, but I'm a big believer that we're gonna get there.
So when you look at, okay, do we still need engineers? Do we still need marketers? Do we still need salespeople? Like ultimately, I don't think we're gonna need any of those people. What's the exact timeline? I don't know. And what we're seeing on the ground is, yeah, engineers can build more stuff. I have never met a software founder.
Who ran out of ideas of stuff to build. It's always the opposite. You have this big vision, [00:38:00] oh God, it's gonna take us two years to build this out with X number of engineers, right? Salesforce, they've been around since, what, 2000, 25 years old. They have thousands of engineers. They have it's just.
CRM Of course they've got more stuff now too, but what could they possibly be working on still? But they are, there's always more to build and so I think it's gonna be a while before we're not gonna need engineers. I think that yeah. I Max what's your, what would you add to that?
Jason Jacobs: He was
Patiently like
Adam Blake: yeah.
Jason Jacobs: seat ready to answer
Adam Blake: He's wrong. He's wrong.
Max Faingezicht: The thing that you'll learn from us is that when Adam's talking, I always have a lot of my
Adam Blake: Ideas. Yeah.
He is good like that.
Max Faingezicht: I think that, the first thing is what you were saying, Adam, there will be an explosion of software getting built. So it's like when you have something that all of a sudden becomes more available, you're gonna have a hundred extra software getting built.
Like your little corner store shop is gonna have software that's custom built for them. The manufacturing store is gonna have, or factory will have software [00:39:00] that, it's just too expensive to build to it was like to, at the bottom of the roadmap. So if you have all of a sudden the capability of writing much more software, then more software will be written, right? What changes is, I think the role of the engineer is gonna be different. It's still gonna be a systems thinker, somebody who can design and understand the nuance of a problem. It's gonna be, assisted by AI in terms of defining the problem and the what is the spec and whatnot. But you're still gonna have a human running the show for a very long time.
I, as much as I'm an AI optimist. And believe that a lot of the jobs will be gone. I don't know that I go all the way through no jobs at all. I still think that the creative spark of a human can play a role in creating value. But I think that the software engineer is gonna be a different role where instead of writing code, you are describing exactly what is it that needs to be built. And the coding machine, you know the AI coding machine will code it for you and it'll come up with a plan for the testing. And then the AI testing machine will test it for you. And you're gonna be able to do 10 times as much as you were able to do a hundred times in a few years later and a thousand times later.
But all of that software will be consumed. So it's not [00:40:00] like there's gonna be less demand for software. I think it's the opposite. There's gonna be more demand. So those jobs are just gonna change and shift. think if you're an engineer, instead of focusing on making your JavaScript game a little stronger and becoming like a better web developer, you better focus on better systems thinking, better systems design more infrastructure stuff.
I think the low level stuff is also gonna be harder, right? Like it's gonna be later that it gets taken over. I actually did a LinkedIn post on this earlier today. But I think engineers will always have a job, right? Solving problems. There's always problems to be solved since the tools changed.
Jason Jacobs: And you guys talked about AI agents on the company side and AI agents on the. Candidate side. What about AI agents to be writing the code for you in-house? I know that several founders that have come on the show, including some that like Scott Weller have talked about these agent armies that you're, they're building out internally.
I'm just curious if that's something that you guys have experimented at all with or are thinking about directionally.
Max Faingezicht: Yeah, so I think we use, obviously we use [00:41:00] Cursor like all of our code. Essentially all the code is already written by an ai, right? It's just that we've got a computer science major on the driver's seat to make sure that it doesn't the wrong way or do the thing that it shouldn't be doing and whatnot.
And that it pieces together with our bigger code base. I think over time more and more of that will be feasible. Right now we're using it for small prototypes, for things that, I want to pick up and I haven't coded in 20 years. Like I can now do stuff that I couldn't do. Couple years ago. But I wouldn't call those like production ready things that I would launch. We've got a couple of prototypes and, back to the 5 cents versus 50 cents or that spectrum, right? If we're testing something out, we're happy to do it in a kind of more haphazard way using some of these coding agent tools I at least for us, they're not ready for prime time just yet.
They will be very soon though.
Jason Jacobs: huh And I guess this this follow up question, it reminds me of like the Starbucks barista. Like I always wondered, do the Starbucks baristas. a lot more coffee than a regular person. And so I'll ask you the same question about, 'cause you have this network that you keep talking about and the trust and you know [00:42:00] who the stars are and everything.
Adam Blake: Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: do you end up eating your own dog food as it relates to your own internal development? Do you hire from within that network?
Max Faingezicht: yeah. More
Adam Blake: Yeah.
Max Faingezicht: the team is in Costa Rica and in that, it's a good excuse. Like I was saying earlier we do travel there often and it's just that, again, amazing to, to work with these people. They're
Adam Blake: The biggest challenge is keeping maximum hiring them all. He just wants to hire them all. We gotta hire this guy. He is, we've never even seen anybody like this before. Like Max, we can't.
Max Faingezicht: week we see somebody who's even more amazing than the prior week. So I just, I want to hire them all really.
Jason Jacobs: And when you look towards the future is it gonna stay this kind of tight focused approach that you've been describing and there's a lot of headroom there, and so you'll do that for as far as the, I can see. Would you expand in some ways? Like how do you think about the future and what does telescope look like in its most ambitious form?
Adam Blake: Yeah, I can take that. We do eventually see this network being global. We wanna focus on software engineers, but we do [00:43:00] eventually want it to be global. It's a very pro engineer, network that solves a lot of the problems that LinkedIn never solved for engineers. Engineers generally hate LinkedIn.
And so ultimately on the network side, that's where we want to go. I think our approach with agents is then going to enable us to scale our go-to market in a way that will be massively efficient in a way that we couldn't have done. Prior to it, and so we want to be the best place to find software engineers on the internet.
Jason Jacobs: Max, anything to add?
Max Faingezicht: I think that the, the interesting thing is also the impact that we can have, we already see it locally. We've moved, tens of millions of dollars into an economy that get, gets to see the upside of those dollars getting spent locally. If you have a big not an outsourcing firm, but actually like a multinational company that sets up a large operation. Costa Rica, you've got Amazon, Akamai, IBM, Microsoft. Guess where [00:44:00] all those profits go? They go back to, to the home countries versus in our case, it's going directly to the individuals.
So you're like skipping that middle layer which I think is pretty unique and impactful. So I think in, in. fast forward a few years and we're wildly successful. I wanna see the impact of telescope, not just in Costa Rica, but all of Latin America and like Adam was saying, the rest of the world.
'cause there's no reason for this to not scale outside of Latin America. I.
Jason Jacobs: I know that your focus is software engineering for as far as the, I can see. Do you think that what you, the innovation that you have uncovered and implemented with this trust network has applications in other areas of expertise beyond software engineering?
Max Faingezicht: It's a great question.
Adam Blake: Yeah.
Max Faingezicht: if you had asked us this question a year ago, we would've said no, it's software engineering only. And it's the only way that, we can keep it true. I think actually AI is the reason why the answer is changing, right? Once you can automate the certification process, the conversations, once you can automate some of the other things that are nuanced around a vertical, which is what makes us so special, right?
Like we can truly identify the [00:45:00] best engineers in the world. But we actually see a path to expand that to other verticals. Where before I, I don't think we did. So TBD, let's put it that way.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. I could almost envision like a. licensing model where it's not for you guys to go after, but you can power founders applying it in other places.
Max Faingezicht: I.
Adam Blake: Totally. Yeah. I mean we've spent a lot of time thinking about that, and as Max is saying, there are, it's not necessarily something we can do out of the box today, but a lot of what we've built and discovered, and it is absolutely applicable to other industries.
Jason Jacobs: Huh And before we started recording you guys mentioned that the how do I work different piece of my journey is also relevant to you guys. I know, I'm probably a little older than you guys, but we're somewhat similar age. I'm just curious in what ways is that relevant and how are you guys thinking about I don't even know the words, like whether you call it work-life balance or. Culture of telescope or how do you work and how do you envision working and the [00:46:00] team working directionally.
Adam Blake: I'll start and you should definitely fill in Max with what I miss. But this is really important to us. And before we even went down to Costa Rica and before we had any ideas really of what we wanted to build we started with how we wanted to build and what we wanted the company to look like.
This was pivotal to. All of those early conversations, and what we landed on is we wanted to build something, our last company got acquired great for a lot of different people, but when you get acquired, you're, it's not, you went through that too, Jason. It's no longer your baby, right? Like it's not yours anymore.
You literally sold it. And not that's a bad thing, but we wanted to build something that we would be okay doing for a long period of time. That might not happen. We could sell the company, we could close the whatever, whatever there anything could happen. But we wanted to be okay building something for a long period of time.
And we wanted to have. [00:47:00] With that long vision control, which meant bootstrapping. And we wanted the, when you're setting up that scenario, 10, 20 years, that's a marathon. That's not a sprint. In my experience, it's not sustainable to do that without. My kids will, I've got three kids of the what I'm am.
I just never gonna see them when they're growing up like that. That doesn't make any sense to me. So it had to be done in a way that could balance work and life, if you wanna use that cliche. And I think we've stayed true to that. I don't know what you'd add, max.
Max Faingezicht: I think maybe the only other thing is as we leaned hard into remote work, there's a flexibility. It only works when there's accountability and where you're actually like outcomes based, right? I don't care if you spend an hour or 10 hours working on this, like what matters is the outcome. But we do have this very long timeframe as how we're thinking of the business. And I think once we turn that into an advantage, it just changed the way we think of how we operate internally. And we do value and cherish the flexibility, right? We've both got young kids, we wanna be healthy, we wanna be able [00:48:00] to run this thing, not.
Tomorrow or the day after, but for the next many years as we build it into a multi-billion dollar company. And so to do that, you just have to have those kind of core values pretty you gotta be true to those core values.
Adam Blake: Yeah, and just going back to that point about the concept of time. We're not the first ones to try to create a new type of network for software engineers. This has been tried a number of times before venture backed models. They've all flamed out, right? They've basically not been able to achieve product market fit before they ran outta money.
And we didn't want to run that risk. And so we figured by enabling ourselves to have more time, it upped the chances of finding product market fit, go to market fit, all those types of things. And so far that's proven to be the case.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, that, that resonates with me a lot. That I think we grew up being conditioned that in order to be. Ambitious. You needed to have this [00:49:00] compressed, go big or go home mindset. But I've come to believe, that's certainly one way. But that in, in some instances, having the of time gives you the ability to ride the swings in a way that you're controlling your own destiny, such that you can. quit. Where if you're on the venture path and it doesn't time right? Then you can't get the next round of funding and you're burning money and you have no choice but to stop playing.
Adam Blake: Right and I think like part of that was early on, I think a lot of us either lied to ourselves or were genuinely convinced that our SaaS companies were winner take all markets. I remember I worked at HubSpot very early on and I remember hearing, I can't remember if it was Dharmesh or Brian.
Talking about how they felt that they were in a winner take all space. And that's why we've gotta go fast [00:50:00] because whoever gets there first is gonna take the whole market. And of course, like that ended up being completely untrue. I think HubSpot has thousands of competitors, right? And and in fact most of the areas of.
Internet software businesses have not been winner take all markets, and so I think we lied to ourselves thinking that was the case and that was why we had to run. Because then if it's a winner take all market, then yeah, the dynamics are gonna be different. But I don't think it has to be.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, that's how I'm thinking too. It's the space is fragmented and how big can it really be? And it if you capitalize it accordingly, it doesn't. Need to be really big. Or you can take what you learn in this space and you can go tackle an adjacent space with the same criteria.
Or you can add other on the stack once you have a, a base that's, secured and well oiled or who knows. But
Adam Blake: and we want to build a multi-billion dollar company. That is still our goal. But if we get to a point where it's. [00:51:00] It's only gonna be a hundred million dollars company. That'll be okay. 'cause we've capitalized it appropriately so far. And you know that we're not opposed to vc. We would take VC if we got to a point where we felt we were in a scenario that was gonna be really important to the future of the company.
But unless, unless we're, we feel like we're in that situation, we don't want to feel like we have to take a bc
Max Faingezicht: Yeah
Adam Blake: we wanna do it on our own terms.
Max Faingezicht: the other thing that comes into play here is the, and Adam and I have built, two mission driven companies where what we're doing is like. The actual end goal is really important to us, and I think that changes the dynamic as well, right? Because if you're doing something that you truly believe in and it's two years, great.
If it's five years, great. If it's 10 years, amazing. If it's 20 and you've like really solved it, best outcome ever, right? Versus if you're just trying to, make a quick buck, build something, two years burnout and flip it, that's a completely different mindset. And I think, it's depends on how you're wired and what you're trying to accomplish. But for us, we're in a pretty unique position that we could take [00:52:00] control of how we wanted to build this thing we did in our own terms. And for us all of these things mattered.
Jason Jacobs: Great guys. I'm so glad you made the time to come on. Is there anything I didn't ask that you wish I did or any parting words for listeners?
Max Faingezicht: I think you know, how can the audience help us if you've got a need
Jason Jacobs: I was gonna, I was gonna add that one after. Yeah. Yeah.
Max Faingezicht: No, seriously if there's any companies out there that you know are looking for remote software engineers and have a hard time finding, the quality of talent that they want we're more than happy to help.
And like we said earlier, there's no upfront risk. There's no upfront payments. We'll just match you with amazing people. Have them wow you in an interview, and then we'll help you get them hired. telescope.com.
Jason Jacobs: Adam, anything?
Adam Blake: No, I'm just I'm excited to watch you on this new journey. 'cause I think there's a lot of alignment between what we've been working on and what you're working towards. And so I think it'll be fun to, to watch, you've producing a ton of content. I can't keep up with all of it, but it'll be fun.
Jason Jacobs: don't care about that because it, [00:53:00] because I'm just trying to learn and if the content's useful to people, I'll
Adam Blake: Yeah,
Jason Jacobs: if it's not, I don't care. I go because it's just, it's like the exhaust from the journey. But really it's about
Adam Blake: right.
Jason Jacobs: relationships.
Adam Blake: Yeah. That's awesome. So I'm excited about this new chapter and to see how it unfolds for you. So
Jason Jacobs: Thanks guys.
Max Faingezicht: Was awesome.
Jason Jacobs: yeah, so nice to catch up with you and in in speaking of kids, now I'm gonna break and go pick up my kid at school and off to sports practice
Adam Blake: yeah, I'm about to do the same thing.
Jason Jacobs: All right guys. Nice to catch up. Next time. Let's do it sooner than several years from now.
Adam Blake: Sounds good, Jason. Great to talk.
Jason Jacobs: Okay. Take it easy.
Max Faingezicht: Bye.
Jason Jacobs: Thank you for tuning into The Next Next. If you enjoyed it, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast player in addition to the podcast. Which typically publishes weekly. There's also a weekly newsletter on Substack at the next next.substack.com. That's essentially for weekly accountability of the ground I'm covering, areas I'm tackling next, and where I could use some help as well.
And it's a great area to foster discussion and dialogue [00:54:00] around the topics that we cover on the show. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week.