This 26 y/o 10x'd Revenue Doing the Opposite of Every AI Startup | Paraform, John Kim

1. 0:00 – 0:55

   Intro

   1. JKJohn Kim0:00

      Recruiting, it's the most important thing you should be doing as a leader, as a company, yet it's so inefficient. And I heard from a recruiter that, well-respected in the industry, that five years ago, if you reach out to 500 to 700 engineers, you could probably make a hire as a recruiter. Two years ago, that number jumped to 1,500 engineers to make one hire, which was already so difficult to manage. With AI, recently it's 5,000. So essentially, AI is actually making hiring a lot more noisier. It's bogging us all down. If you get reached out about 1,000 opportunities, it's not special anymore. Meaning comes from scarcity. So I think even more in the future, if it takes 5,000 emails to get one engineer hired, trust, relationships, and access, these things become more and more important. So I think that was our deliberate decision to work with recruiters rather than replacing them. Yeah. We paid out $50 million, soon much more, to our recruiters.

2. 0:55 – 1:23

   The AI Startup That Pays Humans $50M

   1. JKJohn Kim0:55

      Hey, guys. I'm John Kim, one of the founders and CEO of Paraform. We, uh, raised $65 million, uh, to date, and in 2025, we, uh, 10x'd our revenue. We work with customers from early-stage startups all the way to public companies, uh, like Palantir, Rippling, uh, Decagon, Abridge. Paraform is a agentic hiring platform that makes hiring exceptional talent as easy as pressing a button. [piano music]

3. 1:23 – 2:10

   How to Find What Truly Matters in Your Life

   1. JKJohn Kim1:26

      Ever since the age of four, I sort of moved around a lot, uh, because of my dad's job. So yeah, I lived in Singapore, Australia, LA, uh, and Korea as well. When I was 11, 12, in Australia, like entrepreneurship and going out on your own is not very celebrated. You're sort of told to stay in your lane, like do what's sort of, uh, comfortable. My grandpa encouraged me, uh, to go to law school. He went to law school, and he really wanted to be a lawyer, but, uh, he, uh, had to sort of take a different path 'cause of, uh, his family. And so growing up, I always thought, you know, that was the goal, and I, I did. But, um, there was definitely a moment, [chuckles] uh, that I remember that I, um, you know, started, uh, living my life and treating my time and, and what I'm going to do very, very differently.

4. 2:10 – 3:00

   The Hospital Visit that Changed Everything

   1. JKJohn Kim2:10

      I think I was 18 back then. I, like, was very sick for, like three months, and so, um, you know, I went to, like, the hospital to get something checked up in Korea. I walked in, and, uh, I was the only, uh, young person there. I remember a lot of people there were quite old, like maybe in their 80s and 90s. Uh, so it felt very out of place. I obviously didn't really think that anything could go wrong. I just thought like, "Oh, I'm young. I'm, you know, I'm invincible," uh, that type of mindset. And when the results came out, the doctor sort of said like, "Hey, by the way, there's, like something in your lungs, and, um, you know, it could be something really bad." And I think when I heard that, everything changed. I started thinking, "Oh, well, in the most extreme sense, if I have only one year or three years left to live, uh, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do differently? How am I gonna spend time?" And that actually really changed, I think, all

5. 3:00 – 4:07

   Living on a 3-Year Timeline

   1. JKJohn Kim3:00

      of my brain chemistry and what I decide to do. [piano music] Back of my mind, I always wa- knew that I wanted to start and build my own company. When it comes to thinking that it's a big decision to start a company, it's what I always wanted to do, what I wanted to dedicate my life to. I thought that, okay, when I'm like 75, 85 years old, that's like my timeline, so I have, you know, 65 years to figure something out, right? So if you think about it in your 65-year timeline, then all of a sudden you push things back, right? If you wanna do something, you push it back. If you wanna try achieve a goal, you think you have 10 years, 20 years. But, um, if you think about that 65 years in three-year terms, you are sort of forced to prioritize and then think about what you really want. I think maybe that event made me think, "Okay, I have three years to make that happen, so let's do it now." And I think it added that urgency to start. For the next three years, every six months, I had to get it checked up to see if it's anything bad. So there was this sort of anticipation every six months of like, "What's gonna happen?" And turns out it was, uh, uh, sort of like a false alarm. But I look back to that moment, and, you know, although it felt pretty terrible, maybe it was actually a blessing in

6. 4:07 – 4:44

   AI Moves Fast, It Breaks Trust

   1. JKJohn Kim4:07

      disguise. I was actually on a business trip to New York, and that's when I met my co-founder, Jeff, at Paraform. So I went around asking, uh, other people around us, uh, which were mostly founders, asking them, "What is your number one problem right now, and how much would you pay us to solve it?" Uh, and almost all of them said, uh, "Hiring." And they said they would pay us 40K per hire. So we were like, "Hey, maybe if we make five hires each this year, you know, that's like maybe equivalent of, like a salary, so maybe this is a good business to start." So we set out on a journey to make five hires each. So the first thing we did was actually become recruiters ourselves.

7. 4:44 – 7:12

   The Two Pivots That Failed

   1. JKJohn Kim4:44

      What we started doing was, like, we scraped the web. We looked at, you know, your Twitter profile, your GitHub profile, like everything really online about you, and we sort of try to combine that with, like, your professional experience, like your LinkedIn, your resume. And then, um, you know, three months, four months in, we were not even close to making five hires, let alone one. And so we were like, "Okay, like clearly this is, like super inefficient. What should we do?" While we were exploring the problem space, we realized, like it's actually, like trust, access, and relationships. I could find, you know, a great engineer at Facebook or OpenAI right now, but doesn't mean that person will respond to me or know me or even interested in the opportunity, right? Whereas, like maybe if your friend reached out, you might consider the opportunity, or someone you respect, right? So the next idea we pivoted to was a referral marketplace, referral platform, where essentially our startup customers could post bounties, referral bounties, like 5, 10K for the engineers they were trying to hire, and turn anyone in the world to your recruiter. But there was not much retention. Um, I think we overestimated how many people each person knows, how well-connected someone is, and, um, it wasn't, like their main profession and job, so they, um, didn't come back to the platform. You release it to the market, and no one wants it. I think that, you know, it wasn't great. We were sort of hitting a dead end for three, four months. Nothing was happening. And then, um, one user group started, uh, using it a lot. We saw that, uh, user group growing, and these were, like, independent recruiters, recruiting agencies, headhunters, and it made so much sense. They're very well-connected compared to most people. Uh, it's their job. It's their profession. They're financially incentivized, so they started sort of, um, coming back and using the platform continuously, and I think that's when we realized, oh, we, you know, built something people want, and then it scaled to where Paraform is today. We're really focused on: How do we match the right person to the right opportunity? That's done not by giving them a thousand options and telling them to choose, but giving them, you know, three or four that actually really match what they're looking for. When you don't use AI correctly, I think it loses meaning and makes things not special, if you will. I think the word special is basically directly correlated to scarcity and directly correlated to quality over quantity. I think maybe AI can make, you know, 70, 80% of what recruiters do and automate that, but I think it's, like, the last sort of 20%, like, the human touch, I think, is, like, very, very important. Meaning comes from

8. 7:12 – 8:12

   Everyone Has a Night They Want to Give Up

   1. JKJohn Kim7:12

      scarcity. So, uh, at the time, um, I was actually in Australia trying to get my visa to come back to the US. The time zone is, uh, obviously really difficult. I remember my routine was sort of waking up at 11:00 PM and then, um, working throughout the night to overlap with San Francisco time and then going to sleep at, like, maybe lunch or after lunch and then repeat. And we didn't even have an office, so I used to go to my old, uh, college, uh, library to work there, um, just in a booth. So when people saw me, they probably thought I was just, like, a student. It was, like, a weird f- feeling because it was a school that I dropped out of, and I'm, like, in the library, um, [laughs] trying to build my company. And I remember the way we got customers, because we had no brand name, was just pure hustle, like, just going door to door, uh, emailing people one by one, no, like, email automation tool or anything like that, just reaching out. And so each customer was very, very valuable. Like, uh, when they said, "Yes, I wanna try it out," it meant the world to

9. 8:12 – 8:55

   The First Big Customer Who Almost Dropped Us

   1. JKJohn Kim8:12

      us. And there was this one customer, uh, called Hightouch. Uh, they're, like, a AI marketing platform. I remember they were the first sort of, uh, company that w- it wasn't our friend or some connection. It was, like, s- a company that, through our own effort and hustle, we got. They were hiring, like, a director of engineering, which is, like, a very important hire, and we felt very grateful that they trusted us to do such an important job for them. And so we got started, but, um, I remember, like, it was, like, 3:00 AM at the library over and over again every day trying to make it work for that customer. One of the recruiters messaged us saying, like, "Hey, we haven't been impressed with the quality of candidates, uh, and the experience. If you guys don't turn this around in the next 10 days, we, we can't be a customer anymore."

10. 8:55 – 10:34

    Visa Rejected, Company Almost Dies

    1. JKJohn Kim8:55

       In the middle of that, I heard my visa got rejected. Actually, m- most people get it approved on the spot, but, uh, for some reason, mine didn't get approved for the first time. It was definitely mental breakdown, not being productive, all these struggles, so I couldn't fully focus, um, because it's almost, like, a company-killing event. What failing a visa interview actually means is never being able to come back to the US. Maybe for some people, it's just like, "Oh, let's try again," but for me, there was so much at stake. It was everything I built for, all the work I put in sort of going to nothing, and then I had responsibilities to my co-founder as well, and, uh, I couldn't tell him the news 'cause it's hard thing after hard thing after hard thing. I think the two things that kept me going was, one, like, this responsibility, this, like, if I don't do this, this company will die. You know, I have this responsibility to make it work. There's no other option than surviving and continuing, so that was one. The other one was actually, a lot of, like, things were going on in my personal life as well, like, um, friends and family. And then I actually realized that, oh, other people have, like, pretty difficult problems, too, in life. I then reflected. Whatever I'm going through right now at the time was something that I inflicted upon myself. Like, I chose to start this company. I could have not done that. I chose to, uh, move here to the US and be based here. You know, I chose to apply for this visa. Like, you know, it's all, like, something that I chose to do, and there were a lot of people in my life who had problems, and they didn't choose that. It wasn't within their control. And so I think that was actually, in a weird way, encouraging [laughs] as well, where it was just like, oh, like, maybe this is actually not that big of a deal. Like, you know, at the end of the day, I, I wanted to try this. Um, and so that gave me the energy back, uh, to sort of stand back up and,

11. 10:34 – 11:50

    Don't Find a Better Problem, Understand Your Problem Deeper

    1. JKJohn Kim10:34

       and continue to go, yeah. You know, turns out the visa thing was, like, some process issue, so it's all fine now. We actually ended up making a hire for Hightouch for the director of engineering. Hightouch told us that that hire took, like, 18 months. That role was open for 18 months. They tried everything out there. They tried recruiting agencies, other tools, job boards, and just nothing worked. And to do that within a month and a half with our product gave us a lot of conviction that this is going to work, and I think our customer actually saw that too. And so they reached out to, uh, one of their investor connections and said, "Hey, like, what these guys are building, I've tried so many recruiting products in the past. I'm obsessed with this problem, and none of it worked, uh, but this is different. This is special." So he introduced us to, uh, our seed round investors. I remember my co-founder and I, the next morning, surprised and, um, all, uh, happy, sort of, like, biking to their office, and we presented for one hour, just, like, our product. There was no pitch deck. We didn't even prepare for fundraising. We didn't even think we were fundraising, actually. We, we just thought we were meeting them. And they texted us saying, like, "Hey, do you guys wanna grab drinks at, at 5:00 PM tonight?" And we were like, "Okay." And then we went, and they just said, "Hey, like, we really love what you're doing. I think you guys are doing something special." Uh,

12. 11:50 – 13:01

    Dig Deeper Until You Hit the Root Cause

    1. JKJohn Kim11:50

       so they gave us a term sheet and led our seed round, uh, that same day. I... Actually, my analogy that I would give is, uh, going deeper and deeper and deeper. Like, you're not going deep enough. You could, at the surface, just say hiring is very difficult, but actually, I think we understood the problem at a very high level and then did something to solve that. It's very easy to go, "Hey, like, doing X, Y, Z is difficult, so let's go solve it." But actually, why is it difficult? Talk to users about it. You know, what they do makes the problem inefficient or difficult, and I think that was the mistake we made first round. And then, like, the subsequent attempts, we dig deeper and deeper and deeper into the problem until we actually found the, the root cause, and I think that's when things started clicking. I see a lot of, um, people when they start a business or a company where they have this one idea. They try it out for a little bit, and they go, "Oh, actually, it's not really working, so try something again. Try something again." It actually takes, like, a lot more energy than most people think to, like, keep switching. Instead, what we did was we had a lot of conviction in the problem space, 110% conviction that this is the problem we need to work on. If you think you're going deep, you're probably still not deep enough, and so encouraging them to do that, yeah.

13. 13:01 – 13:32

    Advice to Myself at 3AM in That Library

    1. UHUnknown Host13:01

       If you could go back and sit across from the version of you who was in the library at 3:00 AM in Australia, what would you tell him?

    2. JKJohn Kim13:09

       I would tell him to keep doing what you're doing. At the time, it's hard to imagine everything we've achieved and everything that we will achieve, uh, in the future. Have that same conviction. And I think that's kind of, like, what I still tell myself. Maybe, like, if I look back five years, 10 years, 20 years from now and look back to this moment, maybe that might feel like the 3:00 AM library situation again. So I think keep going. Uh, have conviction. Yeah.

Episode duration: 13:43