Andrew (Aiguo) D.’s Post

Excited to share the recent addition of strong tech talent to our team: * Scott Manjourides – a top-notch engineer with 20 years of experience at top tech companies (Google/VMware/Yahoo) as well as startups (including an autonomous vehicle startup). * Lynn Lin – a strong engineering leader with 15 years of experience, including success as eng leader at large companies (TikTok/DnB) and startups at various stages. * Erica (Toews) Broer - a strong product manager with a wealth of experience in PM/etc & pedigree from (startups + Google, and Stanford + Dartmouth).  We also welcomed two engineering leads to our team in China. Both have been part of the engineering team of two US startups in the past several years and are fantastic to work with. Stay tuned for updates on more heavy hitters joining us in the coming weeks. Btw, we're continuing to seek product and engineering/ML talent across the board. In particular, we are actively recruiting strong product designers and engineers with frontend & 2C product expertise. Interested? Please check out our openings (https://lnkd.in/g9rQR_6s) and feel free to reach out. Referrals will be appreciated too.

Excited to share that I’ve joined Tripalink, a hyper-growth 200-person PropTech startup, to lead their tech team (incl prod/eng/data/ML/etc). Led by visionary entrepreneurs, domain experts & technologists and backed by prominent tech investors & others deeply rooted in the real estate space, Tripalink is on a mission to develop next-generation real estate solutions powered by tech/AI, with a current focus on transforming long-term residential property management to deliver compelling economics for property owners and a frictionless experience end to end for renters. I was introduced to Tripalink by Jim Dai, their investor & advisor, whom I worked for way back when I was a young engineer and looked up to as my mentor and role model since. As I spent more time with the team, I got impressed with their vision, entrepreneurial spirit, drive, how they got the biz to where it is today, and the enormous potential ahead, and seized the opportunity to join them. Main reasons for my excitement: * Property management is a huge & highly fragmented market - ~40M renters paying ~$700B rent per year in the US, and the top 10 property management companies combined have <10% market share. * It’s labor intensive & “old tech”, ripe for transformation with AI. There are many technologies in use in various ways, but adoption is spotty and operators have pockets of disjointed systems, and most aspects of renters’ experience are not much better than decades ago. * It is unsexy to technologists, which is great for Tripalink. * I firmly believe that vertical solutions are the biggest opportunities for most startups in the midst of the AI gold rush. In fact, this was my hypothesis years ago when I started Celential.ai. Those doing the dirty work, getting great at the messy biz of delivering services & scaling it with AI + human-in-the-loop, and eventually re-engineering end to end how it’s done, will emerge as winners with meaningful moat. Tripalink has figured much of it out, and is well-positioned to become one of the big winners. I’m grateful for the trust Donghao Li, Amber Anderson, Jim Dai (Altos Ventures), Paul Yeh (Conductive Ventures), Alex Liang (Oriza Ventures), Curtis Feeny and the rest of the Tripalink team placed in me, and look forward to building a category-defining company together with them.

Excited to share that Celential.ai had joined forces with Wellfound (fka AngelList Talent). We’ve been a huge fan of Wellfound since our early days as we hired a good # of our early team members via their platform. Starting early last year, we spent a lot of time with the Wellfound team to discuss potential partnerships, culminating in our joining forces. Our visions were very much aligned and we were impressed with their team, including Amit Matani and Ves Todorov in particular - great entrepreneur/technologist/leader with a good heart. Look forward to the upcoming new product launches and many other great things coming out of the team. It has been quite a journey. I’m deeply grateful for the support along the way from many great people, including our team, investors, customers and many others. I appreciate, in particular, my cofounder Ilias Beshimov, for his passion, unwavering optimism, integrity and fierce loyalty.

We’re launching the private alpha for our AI-powered “personal career agent”, serving software engineering talent. Join the waitlist at https://lnkd.in/gbhTMQ5T. It’s designed to minimize tech talent’s friction in their job search to start with, and over time it will expand to cover their other career development needs. With no work required of a user, it discovers all the opportunities potentially right for them (with an initial focus on startup jobs), collects insights into the hiring companies/teams, analyzes the mutual fit, and recommends the right jobs to the user. It can also try to connect them to hiring teams directly. The foundation of the product is our talent graph, with deep insights into software engineering talent, their career trajectory and potential, the industry, and opportunities, and a matching engine vertically optimized for software engineering talent/career paths/job opportunities. We’ve been perfecting these in the last few years while building out our AI-powered recruiting solution. With record-high mass layoffs by tech giants in Jan, we hope the product will be a valuable and timely resource for tech talent directly impacted and those passively looking for better opportunities. #layoffs #layoffsandjobreductions #layoff #startups

AI + biology + drug development could help scientists develop better medicines a lot faster, and improve (& save) millions of people’s lives. AI is everywhere already, but applications of AI with potentially huge impact such as AI for drug discovery is not on many people's radar screen yet (, sadly albeit unsurprisingly).  Join the AI for Drug Discovery seminar by renowned AI expert/professor Le Song this coming Saturday at Stanford. https://lnkd.in/gGmC3NBy

Celential.ai will be hosting a webinar on Wed 12/7 about "Adapting to Pay Transparency Laws to Attract and Hire Great Talent”. Register here: https://lnkd.in/g7JGRTJt Starting 1/1/2023, California and Washington will require companies with 15+ employees to disclose the salary range and benefits on job postings, following Colorado and NYC which already have pay transparency laws in effect, with a good # of states to follow suit soon. This will have broad impact, in obvious ways and likely non-obvious ones too. Pick up relevant insights from the distinguished panel (Morvareed Salehpour, Esq., Mike Wolford, Wendi X. Z.) & participants (yes, we'll have a good crowd): - Ins and outs of the laws & how they may impact your hiring process/practices. - Potential impact on your employees including how they may react to the pay ranges made public and how to address it. Pay is such a complex/thorny issue, and any change to pay practices will inevitably have unintended consequences. I think practice changes due to the new laws can have a significant impact on a good percentage of companies' current employees while it'll necessarily be situational. Good to think ahead a bit and address it proactively if it applies to your company.

It looks like the pace of tech layoffs is accelerating - in Nov, the # of people impacted (45,000+ already as of 11/20 vs the previous monthly record of <30,000, set in Jun as cutbacks among startups kicked into high gear) has increased dramatically as many large/highly visible tech companies have announced mass layoffs in the last 2-3 weeks, and with 10 days left in Nov, the # of tech companies known to have made layoff is on pace to set a new monthly record too.  For those on the receiving end, it can be frustrating and stressful, to say the least. For many of them, especially those on a work visa/OPT, losing their job unexpectedly might have upended their life. My heart goes out to you. Please feel free to reach out to me if you can use some help. I’ll be happy to leverage my network to connect you with companies/people still hiring, provide guidance on your job search, and help in other ways. And I’d like to share some perspectives, as someone in the trenches who has personally gone through quite a few cycles in Silicon Valley. Hope they can be somewhat helpful, especially to those who haven’t been around for long enough.  [Good] The situation is not nearly as dire as the torrent of bad news may make you believe. Overall job market is very strong and there are still many tech job openings. Most tech companies, including those which have recently made major cutbacks, still employ many more people than just a couple of years ago. And the percentage of people who have lost their job this time around is much smaller than in the down-cycle ~20 years ago - in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble burst + 9/11, 20% of the jobs in Santa Clara county (the heart of Silicon Valley) disappeared, and the tech sector was disproportionately impacted.  [Good] The future is still as bright as it gets for those in tech. Software will continue to eat the world, and demand for tech talent will continue to far outstrip the supply for a long time to come. The good days will come back before long.  [Bad] In the short term, it’ll likely get worse before it gets better. Layoffs may not slow down the rest of the year, and hiring among most tech companies will slow down this holiday season much more than in the recent past - not great for those eager to land a new job.  For those looking for a job in tech, you will do just fine, if you have more than a few years of solid experience and/or a decent network, while there will be more pain in the short term for others. In either case, for now, it may be wise to leave behind the inflated expectations we had collectively built up in the boom time and focus on what really matters to you. Plan financially for taking 3 months+ to find a new job, and prepare yourself/your significant others mentally for a long slog. Again, feel free to reach out to me if you can use some help. #layoffs #layoffsandjobreductions #layoff

Thrilled to add to our team Wendi X. Z., an extraordinary leader and outlier, while many startups in our space and tech companies in general have recently cut back/are cutting back. Wendi, look forward to working with/learning from you and taking Celential.ai to the next level.

Candidate experience is critical to your recruiting/hiring success. There are many good reasons for optimizing for a great candidate experience, including direct/immediate-term benefits - in the war for talent, it can be your secret weapon to boost your recruiting metrics including closing rate, improve your empoyer branding and increase your recruiting success significantly and cost-effectively.  We're pleased to host a webinar on Thu 11/18 on this topic, with a panel of accomplished people/talent leaders (Stephani Martin, SPHR Darin Matuzic Noah Wisnia). We have worked closely with them, and I've been impressed with their focus on candidate experience, and how it has made an impact on their success in recruiting tough-to-find tech talent. In particular, Stephani/the team at Affinity.co and Darin/the team at Flock Freight have both achieved an extraordinarily high offer acceptance rate, for which the great candidate experience they have created has been a major contributing factor. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/gRW4en85 #recruiting #candidateexperience #techrecruiting #employerbranding