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Then you wanted to talk to an expert about this pen and you don't know even what this pen is and you go to the expert and when you talk about it and when he speaks literally all those things what you're gonna say gonna shoot out of your head like this because you don't know anything about it. But this AI I believe is can give you the basic knowledge which you can take and then talk to. Welcome everybody to another episode of Strugbits Unplugged.
Today I had the opportunity to speak with Matt. He's someone who has taken a fascinating journey from corporate offices to construction sites and today he's here to share how he changed recruitment in the energy and infrastructure sectors. Growing up with a mix of cultures he developed a passion for understanding why people make the choices they do which led him to a career in economics tech consulting and product strategy.
But today mostly we're going to talk about his latest venture Kablio that's really making waves connecting top talent with the industries that build our world. So let's give a big welcome to the founder of Kablio Matt. Thanks for joining in Matt.
Great to be here. How are you? Yeah doing fantastic currently in Paris for my brother's wedding ceremony. So sat in the Airbnb.
I was just saying earlier on I've turned around the Airbnb owner's photos to protect their privacy. But yeah doing great. Maybe you can tell them later on that you know we intend to make them popular.
Yeah yeah yeah. You never know. You never know.
They might appreciate that. Yeah. So what's the temperature in Paris? It's currently very cold and rainy and very gray which is a very standard weather both in Paris and in London where I live.
So fantastic cities but if weather is important to you I definitely would advise moving there. It does really affect some people. I know lots of southern Europeans who had to move out of northern Europe because they just couldn't take the weather.
Okay. So Matt what initially drew you to infrastructure and how did that lead to the founding of Kablio? Yeah. So those are two separate questions actually.
But I'll start off with what drew me to start. How did I think of Kablio as a jobs platform? So as I mentioned my expertise has mostly been in what I would call platform strategy and a few years ago this new jobs platform called author.com jobs platform focusing on tech came onto the scene in London and I was super impressed by how well they'd applied platform strategy best practices and learnings that I'd made throughout my career and that I read about. And I started asking myself what other sector could this concept be applied to? And one sector I was super interested in.
What was the platform name? Could you could you repeat that? It's called author.com. O-T-T-A.com. Okay. Jobs platform focus on the tech sector. All right.
Very impressed by them. I asked myself okay cool what other sector could this be applied to? I've always been fascinated by construction and energy and after doing a bunch of user prospect user interviews I realized that the same problems that inspired the other founders were very much present in the construction and energy sector. And the idea sort of snowballed ever since right now.
It's not my it's Kablio is 100% not a copy and paste of Alta. Construction energy has all these additional nuances which I've had to account for. I mean the big structural differences I've had to account for so now it's completely a different product vision but author.com was very much that initial inspiration.
Now as for why I'm interested. But they are working on the tech sector right? Just focus on tech. So are they only focusing on tech sector or some other sector as well? Just tech.
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Interesting. Very interesting. What were some of the biggest hurdles you faced while building Kablio and how did you overcome them? Yeah so I would say one of the biggest hurdles is not having a co-founder.
A technical co-founder maybe?
Because you're good with the business side I see already that. Yeah yeah I mean technical co-founder for sure but just co-founder in general because yeah obviously having a tech co-founder can help with what's great for the execution etc. But also because it's a lonely journey right? So it really helps to have a friend.
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You know when you're working on that. I agree on that. Yeah.
I'm a founder I know it you need someone. You need someone more than your girlfriend sometimes. For sure for sure.
It needs to be your co-founder. Yeah you know because nobody cares like you do right? So you're gonna be you're alone on the Saturday nights where you're working like you're all alone and that's difficult. But also having somebody to ideate with right? Somebody who really cares right? Because Kablio so much of Kablio my product vision for Kablio was built up by drawing inspiration from so many different platforms from so many different like businesses right? And this ideation process will only ever stem from somebody who's really involved and who really cares right? So I haven't had that person that can be constantly thinking about it and who I can bounce ideas off right? So everything about Kablio every aspect of the product roadmap of strategy has been thought of by me right? And I would love to have somebody yes a technical founder who can do all the tech stuff but also just somebody I can have by my side and I can bounce ideas off.
I think another big challenge has been a lack of like mentors right? I haven't really had I really haven't really found any close mentor that can give me good advice and that just means that I've wasted a lot of time on stuff that was not very effective right? But that those were lessons in themselves. If I say redo everything I've done past year again I'd do it in like a couple months right? Just because I've learned so much and maybe a lot of those mistakes love a lot of that time spent doing stuff that could have waited or maybe I shouldn't have done could have been avoided had I had the right mentorship. Like sometimes when you are investing effort and you know you think that that's okay to put the effort in but am I putting the effort in the right direction?
Because after spending a lot of time when I come to know that oh my god the time I was invested I was in a wrong direction now I have to pivot to another direction.
I think that's where a mentor is required who because when I found Strugbits even right now after four five years I still I talked this with my wife as well sometime that I want someone to be there and tell me look Faisal you are at the right path just keep going on. And she was like just keep going and I was like I'm not afraid of keep going on I'm just afraid of that when I reach at a point and I'm like shit I was walking at the wrong path now I have to again pivot. That's where I think the mentor comes in.
Yeah 100% right so being good at whatever you're doing is not just about knowing what to do it's about knowing what to do but not to do right. So yeah for sure wasted a lot of time doing stuff that I should have been doing myself or should have done at all right. So for instance I was talking about how I think I designed the entire like figma design for my website and spent ages months learning how to figma design and you know I didn't get to get the end result wasn't even that professional anyways and I could have actually outsourced that right.
So if I had had a mentor who'd be like listen Matt like you're completely wasting your time you can hire somebody who's a full-blown professional for like you know x amount of money which is way less money than what you're worth you know like just working at some other job right like you know like so you know it's work one more month at your corporate job and you'll have enough money to pay for 10 designers right like so just stuff like stuff like that right would really really be great to have a mentor. Again like you know still you know not having a mentor means you I guess the positive side of not having mentors you learn from your own mistakes which is which are the best. And you never forget them then.
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You never you never forget those you really you never forget those but still right you know I think that it would have been a net positive if I had not done a lot of these mistakes and not wasted a bunch of my time. Do you try to make books your mentors? For sure for sure right. I think because I personally try to do that yeah yeah yeah I think books and I think podcast I think that we I say we like anybody living in times like this are you're so lucky because you have the best mentors and you have the best advisors who are competing for your attention and it's all on your phone right it's all in your pocket like the most the smartest people in the world in whatever field you're interested in are competing for your attention and people didn't have that before.
This podcasting ecosystem is awesome. You know I always like I always say to people I remember saying this to like like young junior people at American Express it's like don't spend too much time trying to find a mentor right. I think the value of like getting to know a mentor like because whoever like especially if you're nobody like you won't find that great of mentor because good mentors aren't going to waste their time on you right but that doesn't matter right because you got the best mentors in your pocket so just be curious and find people that inspire you to have good learnings there's a million people out there and listen to what they have to say.
Exactly and especially when when this with this AI you know let's let's consider Chatgpt just make him your friend make him your mentor ask him questions questions questions like literally it's gonna brainstorm with you all night without complaining and anything without asking for anything and you know that he won't even ask that I need to go to the washroom he would be just talking to you all night as much as you talk to him because recently I have been doing this. Yeah well actually no I so that's the good advice that's often given it's like make it like make AI like your your business partner and like always be having conversation with them. I've like kind of lent started leaning away from doing that because I realized that it's not that AI gives you bad advice is that it gives you very incomplete advice and so I'm kind of refocusing my efforts on getting like you know one learning I've actually a big learning I've made right is don't rely on chat GPT conversations for advice go out and find experts so I'll give you an example you know I came to you to start bits with like a website that wasn't SEO optimized and that's because up until then I try to learn everything myself without speaking to an expert and I really thought I nailed it I read all the documents I read I had a million conversations with chat GPT this and that what am I missing all that kind of stuff right but then when you speak to an expert like yourselves and like you can quickly point out like okay this is where you do x y z right I mean that is just so much more efficient um remember it's so much more efficient way efficient way of doing it and number two you can provide complete advice which you it's very hard to do with chat GPT conversations that's that's I completely agree with you but I'm just saying that let's suppose if you go back 20 years back you had uh you wanted to talk to an expert about it let's let's let's let's think about this pen you wanted to talk to an expert about this pen and you don't know even what this pen is and you go to the expert and when you talk about it and when he speaks literally all those things what are you going to say going to shoot out of your head like this because you don't know anything about it but this AI I believe is can give you the basic knowledge which you can take and then talk to an expert and then process it for example I was I was doing taxes uh yesterday some taxation documents come into my office uh because this is a year where we have to you know do all the tax returns so I couldn't understand what what it said so I just talked to chat GPT I literally talk I do not chat I use their voice mechanism it's it's fun like it's like talking to a person and I talked to them and I told them that you know make me understand why we do tax returns and according to the Pakistani law and everything so when when it talked to me and I understood the basic concept and then I went through the documents I got everything for sure right but like you know you said you said basic right so whenever you're asking you chat GPT question you always have to think ask yourself what like has it been trained on this topic it's definitely been trained on Pakistani tax law and processes because that's like something that so many people do and it's super well documented however if you're trying to understand this very like innovative new topic that um that's super new well then like likelihood is that AI model hasn't really been trained well on it and it's not going to give you good answers so yeah it's going to work with Pakistani tax processes but if you're trying to like think about what kind of blockchain architecture you need for your like innovative platform or at least I hope innovative platform well then just chat GPT is not going to give you that answer of course of course here's a funny story I won't mention the person name of course we have a we have we had a client actually and literally you know what he used to do he used to talk to the chat GPT and then he used to come to my project manager and he used to shout on him that chat GPT is saying this is possible and why you're saying it's not possible yeah yeah and then we have to explain them everything again that the chat GPT didn't mean this it was like this so we had this nightmare for two months literally I'm sorry for calling it a nightmare but it was really a nightmare because literally he was not uh you know considering us expert he was considering chat GPT as an expert and he used to come in and and in the start we didn't know we thought he is talking to someone else at any other company so we start questioning ourselves as well that are we doing something wrong and then we used to cross-check and we're like no we are confident and then he said okay I was talking to the chat GPT yeah I know for sure right I mean everybody knows that uh chat GPT makes up stuff uh right because you even get like the warning thing like oh you know it's not you know it is AI is not accurate but people forget it all the time and part of the reason why it does forget it is because it shares answers with a lot of confidence so it's your brain always forgets that it's misleading a lot of time I think that's why there's some AI models uh that are I forgot which one it is but I know I know there's one AI model which has been trained to give you answers with low levels of confidence or varying levels of confidence I think that is super useful because you can avoid problems like you know like if that guy had been talking to an AI model which had expressed doubt well then maybe he wouldn't have come in screaming in his meetings saying the stuff he did okay this this one is there's something I want to discuss but let's let's let's go for it later on I would like to go on a segment which is a rapid fire segment so basically I'm going to throw questions to you and you need to answer to me uh short precise where's the most exciting innovation in the clean energy sector right now I think nuclear um I think nuclear is the future all right one habit or routine that has positively impacted your life the most I think playing sports uh not just gym but some kind of team sports where you have human interactions which sport do you play I like a bit tennis and football uh with friends so it's great to I'm not that good at either of them but it's fantastic to get physicalized and just to see friends amazing okay so if there would be one skill which you could master instantly like this which skill would it be yeah I would say it's communication skill biggest myth uh biggest myth about starting a startup that I think that everybody can do it okay so for this segment is the last question what's your favorite place to unwind after a yeah I would say just I mean at home right like nothing special just at home and also I like going to the pub right but it's a very British thing to do but I like going to the pub with my friends I'm just having a pint what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs starting in niche industries like construction yeah I would say um I mean I would say I don't have any advice specific to construction energy but I do have a lot of advice for any young entrepreneurs who are thinking of starting out I think one advice I would I would give is that scrappy MVPs and landing pages don't work anymore right there's this advice that's often given out which is like oh yeah just launch a super scrappy MVP in a landing page and you're gonna get a bunch of early adopters they're gonna come to you and you're gonna learn a lot from them and then then you'll know what to build next that's a classic story that comes from Airbnb like lots of success stories like like Airbnb right Airbnb is known it's very famous for having launched a landing page where people could just manually sign up and exchange um you know rent their rooms out that doesn't work anymore right because there's too many people trying this stuff the bar has been raised considerably if you launch an MVP uh so so landing page forget about it to get a have an MVP that makes noise you have to provide tangible value to your users from day one and even then it'll be hard to like talk to them but the good news is that it's easier than ever to provide value from day one because of all the technologies we have now and all the deployment infrastructure that we have now right uh it's easier than ever to launch a startup think about like 20 30 years ago launching a startup you'd have to like run your own servers like do a whole do everything yourself now you've got all these SaaS companies and all this infrastructure that you can build upon and you can launch stuff and deliver value much more easy so bad news is that like you're not going to be able to get away with like a super scrappy MVP you have to provide value from day one but the good news is that it's easier than ever to do that the second advice i would give to like aspiring founders is you don't have to find the perfect co-founder from day one that's a mistake i made right so that's standard yc devices like don't ask for this tech find a tethered co-founder find a co-founder you're need them right the thing is if you're somebody with no track record um no experience domain domain expertise well then the right co-founder isn't going to join you the person that you want by your side in a few years time when the company's scaled well you don't want to give that like that's not going to be that person because the best people aren't going to join you at that stage and you don't want to give 50 percent of your equity to some loser right you don't want to give it to your to your cousin's friend who is a junior software developer right yeah yeah the person if you're gonna have a cto well then you want like a fully fledged cto who can grow into the into a leadership position when the company's scaling and you're growing and that can be by your side and investor meetings so if you're not super lucky and you don't have an initial co-founder well then start the journey build out your product go out get those learnings you know build up build up that story and put yourself in a position where you'll be able to negotiate and secure a much better co-founder further down the line amazing man amazing and i would really like to thank you it i personally enjoyed a lot talking to you and thank you very much for your time uh and we really wish uh good luck for Kablio and i'm really excited to see what you're going to be doing in next year and especially with this fundraising thing i i really wish and i pray that you raise millions and millions of dollars and so it's going to be fun!
