Pablo: 0:00

Today I spoke with Ilya, the founder of VanHack. It was a really interesting story. I mean, he started this business 10 years ago. It's been actually a really – it's been a long haul, and I think that's the reality for most startups. It’s fun to dive into the biggest successes, and there's obviously a lot to learn from them. I think sometimes it's also, at least for me, good to mix in some of the most realistic cases. I mean, here's somebody who's built a startup for a decade, who actually had to bootstrap most of the time because VCs really didn't get it in the early days. He goes through how he started with a very niche idea and then expanded over time, and now he's helped 2,000 people immigrate and literally change their entire lives. In the meantime, he's built a business that's successful and just spits out cash flow every single year, which honestly, for 90%-plus of founders, that's really what success looks like, and so hopefully, you'll learn as much as I did from from this episode. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo, I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product market fit. Ilya, welcome to the Product Market Fit Show.

Ilya: 1:18

Thanks, Pablo. Excited to be here.

Pablo: 1:19

Really curious to understand how it all started and then how you got to where you are today, so maybe let's really start there. Let’s start at the beginning. I guess the first question and this is what I often ask is how did you come up with VanHack in the first place? Where were you at the time? What was happening, and what was Idea number one?

Ilya: 1:40

Definitely. For me, it's a really personal business. It really connected to who I am and my background, so I think it's important to note or start with the fact that the first memory of my life was actually immigrating, was getting on a flight to – from the city I was born in Siberia, flying to Moscow, then fly to Tel Aviv to move from the Soviet Union to Israel in 1991. It's literally the first thing I remember in my life, so immigration and me moving…

Pablo: 2:05

How old were you at the time?

Ilya: 2:06

I was 2½ , so I was pretty young. I remember I've been an immigrant, and it's been a big part of who I'm and what I believe in. Fast forward two decades later, I got a – I graduated from university and got three job offers; one in Brazil; one in China; one in India. I ended up going with the one in Brazil because, that one, I had been there before. I really enjoyed my time there, and it also was the best paying offer. I went to live in Brazil and that turned into this four-year journey where I ended up joining a startup accelerator in Rio, the YC or Techstars of Brazil back in 2012, and was the token foreigner who was doing the sales and marketing and talking to investors while all the – most of the other guys were on the tech side, CTOs and software engineers.

Pablo: 2:57

First of all, you mentioned, 2½ years old, you move from Siberia, ultimately to Israel. Is that right?

Ilya: 3:02

Yeah, we lived in a little settlement in the West Bank, so it's timely now with everything going on in the world.

Pablo: 3:07

Wild.

Ilya: 3:07

Yeah, it's called Offida. It's outside Jerusalem.

Pablo: 3:13

Now you live in Vancouver. You also lived in Brazil. What's that story? Did you go from Israel to Canada?

Ilya: 3:18

Yeah. When I was 5, we moved to Vancouver, '93, right before the Canucks Stanley Cup run. I remember the riot happening outside, anyway, so diehard Canucks fan ever since then.

Pablo: 3:35

Did you say you'd been to Brazil before? I mean, it's not normal to get a job offer from – it’s more normal the other way around, right, than to go to Brazil? What was the tie there to Brazil? I think it's important with what you ended up building.

Ilya: 3:47

Yeah. I was doing undergraduate business at Cornell and a lot of my friends were going to work on Wall Street or consulting. I really wanted to get an international opportunity. I thought that'd be a differentiator in my career, and the time to go abroad is when you're young, at least for a short amount of time to try it out. I was part of this – I was on the swim team; I also was – worked, and I was part of some leadership groups. I got this scholarship called Cornell Tradition, which gave me $4,000 of credit towards any travel volunteer work that I did. Usually, people get that in their first year of university, and I got it in my senior year. Instead of having four years to spend, I only had one so basically did everything I could that year. On winter break, I went to Africa, and then spring break, I went to Brazil. I actually vividly remember in – I think it was December or January of my senior year. It was snowing outside, Upstate New York, freezing cold, and I was like, “Hey, I have this opportunity to travel abroad. Where should I go?” My buddy's like, “Dude, you got to go to Brazil. You got to go to Florianópolis. It's where all the supermodels from Victoria Secret are from. It's a great place and you'll love it. Then I realized later doing research that there's no volunteer jobs there because it's a pretty well-off part of the country, so I ended going to Rio de Janeiro and doing volunteer work there with an organization called Hillel.

Pablo: 5:11

Once you're in Brazil, you decide to join this accelerator. Did you have a startup idea at the time, or how did that even come about?

Ilya: 5:19

No. That was another random thing. A friend of mine from university posted on my Facebook while I was back – dating myself, how old this is, about this accelerator. It's called 21212. They since shut down, but basically, it was 21 is the Rio area code and 212 is for New York. It was an American guy from New York and a Brazilian guy from Rio who started it, and it was connecting American investors with Brazilian startups. They're way ahead of their time, actually. Right now, lifetime investing is huge. New bank, a lot of other startups have come out since. A friend of my sister told me that they're having their angel day on a specific day and gave me the address. I just showed up, and people just assumed that I was an angel investor. It was pretty funny because I was just broke college student who had just quit their job. I look like I'm a foreigner. I don’t look Brazilian, so people just assumed that I was one of those American investors that came to invest in their startup. They started pitching me, and then one of the guys there had done an internship in Vancouver or studied English in Vancouver. Him and I became friends over that. He's like, “Yeah, anytime you want to come by, just swing by the accelerator and hang out.” I was at the time volunteering for a nonprofit, and so I was looking for a real job. Then, one of the guys who’s an accelerator, I got wind by hanging out with them that he was going to get kicked out because he was just a technical guy and he didn't have any business acumen, at least at the point, not that – I shouldn’t say it like that, but he didn't have the strong business side. I actually randomly ran into him and a few of the other guys on Ipanema Beach on a Sunday, and I just turned to him and said, “Hey, I think what you're doing is really cool.” It was a social network to help students get jobs. I was like, “Oh, I think what you're doing is really cool. Could I join as a co-founder? Give me 10% equity.”

Pablo: 7:14

Once you're in this accelerator, really what you start doing is, besides working on the startup, you start helping a bunch of different people who are more technical types that don't – certainly not strong, let's say, in English and so selling into and pitching into that investor audience, and you're helping them bridge that gap. Is that what…

Ilya: 7:32

I was just focused on my startup. When I was in the accelerator, I was just like, okay, we got this – we have this company. Let's raise money. I remember learning what a pivot was and learning about Y Combinator and drinking the startup Kool-Aid back then when I got my exposure into the world, like what an MVP was, lean startup, Eric Ries, Steve Blank, all those, learning all that. It was like drinking from a fire hose there. People think you lived in Rio de Janeiro. You must just party on the beach all day, but it actually was the hardest I've ever worked in my life. One of the hardest times I've worked in my life was when I was living in Rio. I was in an office the whole day up until 10:00 p.m. or later, working on Saturdays.

Pablo: 8:08

You’re doing Brazil wrong, man.

Ilya: 8:10

Yeah. I had fun too. I won't lie, but it definitely was in the demo day. There's a countdown. I remember I was – they had a countdown on the wall, days left to demo, even hours left to demo day. I forget exactly what.

Pablo: 8:24

Then you go to Canada. You're talking about, once you go back to Vancouver, you put up a landing page. What is this landing page about? What are you even pitching at this point?

Ilya: 8:33

Yeah. The original idea I had was to help people because I was really working in the tech space in Brazil. I didn't know that you can actually get paid to do recruiting. I knew of job boards and I knew of online schools. I really liked the online school model where you can create content once and sell it many times. We were like a unity model. I moved back to Vancouver Canada Day, actually, July 1, 2024, sorry, 2014. I just start getting a lot of messages on Facebook because I post pictures of – I’m pretty active on social media, and so I posted pictures on just saying I'm super happy to be back in Vancouver, really nice picture of the False Creek and stuff. People start commenting on those and be like, oh, this is a so beautiful. One day, I'd like to be there, like in Portuguese, and some people DMed me about it. I thought maybe if we can help people learn how to code – come to Vancouver, learn how to code, and then that way they can move here or improve their careers. That was the first idea of the landing page. I just threw it up on a lot of Facebook groups, and people started signing up. I think we got 50 signups on the first day. The pitch was come to Vancouver, learn how to code, something like that, and move to Vancouver. I originally thought the people who would first want to come to Canada to buy my course or take the program – actually, originally I thought it would be like an in-person course. People would fly here, which then we just realized it's super expensive. Getting a visa is a challenge.

Pablo: 9:59

I was going to say – I'm like, really? That's a big ask. Okay, that makes sense.

Ilya: 10:03

Yeah. Cool. I don’t know you just – I just threw something against the wall.

Pablo: 10:05

That's right.

Ilya: 10:05

I had an inkling, though, that there was some – there was something there. I didn't know exactly what it was.

Pablo: 10:11

If I remember correctly, when you were helping people with the resumes, you were unemployed, right, at that time? It’s just a memory I was just thinking about it.

Ilya: 10:21

Yeah. That's actually funny so, yeah, this other detail. I ended up just not – the Brazilian startups didn't work out. That's a whole other long story but ran out of money. Yeah, I just didn't get along with the co-founders. I ended up getting another job, moving to São Paulo. I got let go from that job, and I came back to Vancouver with my then girlfriend, now wife, Giselle, and her and I were living together with my parents at 26 years old in my back – in the room that I grew up in. I was also like looking for a job because I was thinking I want to marry this girl. How could I marry her if I don't have a job? I went to all these meetups, and I started looking for roles, applying to jobs. It's funny. A few of the companies that I applied to ended becoming customers of VanHack, like Mobile [ unclear] , Hootsuite, and on Bounce too. I actually applied to work there.

Pablo: 11:15

What ends up happening? You get this first – let's say first customer, just a huge deal, $40. Does that become a real business? You ended up, I would say – let's say pivoting or evolving maybe into something bigger around recruiting, which is what we're doing – what you're doing now and what we'll talk about shortly. How long were you running this kind of career coaching service, and how did that grow?

Ilya: 11:42

Yeah. I think we launched the official website in January of 2015. It wasn't incorporated, and it was still a side project I was working. I ended up getting a job at Best Buy in the analytics department, not in the store but in the headquarters in Vancouver. Then, afterwards, I left that job to work for a startup accelerator, which is more my thing. VanHack was a side hustle for the first year doing this English course. I quit my job and went fulltime December 31, 2015, so since 2016, been working on it fulltime. Yeah, the English course was good. I mean, it was definitely, to me, a real business. It wasn't, I don't know, making millions of dollars, but I ended up making more money from the English course than I was making in my day job, not that I had a very well-paying day job.

Pablo: 12:32

You started off with the resume builder. By the time that this was – you're making more from this, let's say, “side hustle” than you were from your job. What was the full offering? You’re talking about English courses? Is Was that part of it at that point?

Ilya: 12:45

Yeah. That became the main thing is we would do group English courses for software engineers, and we called it tech English. There was a lot of business English out there where you can learn about how to do English in a business environment, but there was no English for software engineers where you can learn how to pronounce PHP, Ruby on Rails, MySQL correctly, answer common interview questions, talk about just general software engineering terms. I can share a funny story. One of the students – or I used to go on sales calls for that or a lot of sales calls for that program, and I had a call with one guy. I was like, “Hey, tell me more about yourself.” He was like, “Yeah, well, I'm software engineer. I have 10 years’ experience. I work with HOR.” I was like, “Sorry, what'd you say?” He’s like, “Yeah, I work with HOR.” It took me a while, but then I realized what he was saying is R-O-R. In Portuguese, you don’t pronounce H’s or R's are H’s, so he was actually saying Ruby on Rails, just R-O-R and then with the Portuguese accent. I was like, “Man, just – let's stop right here.”

Pablo: 13:49

That’s not going to help you.

Ilya: 13:49

That's not going to help you. Try and get an interview.

Pablo: 13:53

That's not going to get you a job.

Ilya: 13:53

Yeah. I was like just say I work with Ruby on Rails.

Pablo: 13:55

What were you charging, by the way, at that point, or what was the business model?

Ilya: 13:59

It was a yearly subscription back then. We since evolved it to have two options of monthly and quarterly, but it was, I believe, 500 Brazilian reais was the first price per year. Actually, the first price was one-time fee lifetime. Actually, this is another thing that maybe is a lesson for people is that, in the beginning, actually, I would just charge people very low amount of money for a lot of value just to be able to get sales and get customers and learn.

Pablo: 14:21

I mean, the recruiting business was always right there, I guess, but how did it really happen? How did you specifically see that and start going after that part of the funnel?

Ilya: 14:34

Mm-hmm, yeah. It’s true what you said about it always being right there. I had a notion that there could be this recruiting business because a few people had told me that. Actually, when I was working at one of my jobs before, the job I got actually before going to Best Buy, what was worked as a software development company, and we had to recruit software engineers for that job, and it just ended up being my job to do that. I remember working with a recruiter and learning about that space, but I didn't really understand exactly how it worked. I just knew that there's – there could be something there, but it all started when – we used to go to these TechVibes, TechFest events where recruiting – basically, recruiting fairs where a lot of the city startups and a few of the larger companies would get – go into this big conference room. People would network and try and get jobs. Then every startup would also pitch themselves at the – on stage. We would take, actually, a laptop and do a webinar and livestream the recruiting fair to all of our VanHackers, most of them from Brazil but, at this point, a lot of them from other parts of the world too. I would go to every booth and say, “Hey, I'm not just a crazy guy with a laptop. I actually have a few hundred engineers here who are looking for jobs in Vancouver. Would you like to pitch your startup to them?” The HR person would go ahead and pitch, and then I'll be like, “Hey, what's your tech stack?” They say, “Oh, it's Java and React.” I said, “Okay, well any Java and React engineers here? Please say so in the chat.” Then we had 15 people in the chat say, “Hey, yeah, me, me, me, me, me.”

Pablo: 16:05

I have to ask, by the way, does that – that's not a normal thing. It's really smart. Was that normal idea for you, or how did you come up with – how did you even think about I’m going to go to this career fair with a laptop?

Ilya: 16:17

I honestly don't even remember. I think we just went to one with some of the local VanHackers, some of our community members who are in Vancouver already for the first one. You’re like this is really great, and then we would do a lot of webinars. Webinars were a really large way for us to sell the course because what we would do is we would have a webinar and then be like, hey, everyone who joined the webinar, you guys get a 15% discount if you buy in the next 24 hours. That was a really good sales method for us. We started a lot of digital marketing courses back then, and that was a way that they sold info products. I was like, well, the best content for us is really the companies. Who are the companies? We make blog posts, like the top 10 companies to work for in Canada or something like that, the best startups to join. I don't know exactly how – it’s been such a long time. I don't remember exactly where the idea came from, but I do remember going to two or three of these events. I even went to one in Dublin and did the same thing in Dublin. I was always really interested in this kind of concept of bringing people who can physically be there to be there virtually.

Pablo: 17:20

The East Side Games was your first hire. I'm sure that was a pleasant surprise. What do you do from there? I mean, you're still running the school. Do you start right away focusing on recruiting and earning more from recruiting, or do you have a few of those other kind of serendipity – serendipitous moments that really awaken your – awaken you to the opportunity that exists in recruiting?

Ilya: 17:42

No, we went – started going pretty strong on recruiting because realized – because we were making, I think, at the time – I forget exactly how much it was, but I remember the Thinkific hire. We made more money that – from the Thinkific hire than all of the new ARR that we added that month for the English school, and there was a lot more work for the English school. I was giving all the classes. I was doing most of the sales. I was in Slack 24/7 chatting with people on DM. It was a lot of work to service that, but to hire, we just did a webinar. Then the money came and then that's it. There wasn't any other work there. I was like, you know what? Let's go all in on the recruiting side. Then we also changed the price to 15%. We since changed it to 20% of annual salary per hire. I remember making our first 15% hire, happened really in a funny story. I was just waiting for my wife to get ready on a Friday night to go for dinner, and I was like, huh, I got some time. I remember there was a Java developer I just met and this company Traction. The man was hiring Java developers, so I just sent an email connecting Anthony and Fernando, didn't think much of it. A few weeks later there's – they said again, “Hey, we hired Fernando. ” The salary was 100K, and so we made $15,000 from that. I was just like, damn, this is incredible. Yeah, it just opened my eyes. This is a big side of the business.

Pablo: 19:04

What were some of the unique things that you did? I mean, recruiting is an old business, and one of the challenges with it being a services business is it's pretty hard to scale. You’re only as good as the recruiters you hire and these sort of things. What were some of the things that you were doing that were unique that you felt like were maybe either more tech enabled or, at the very least, more scalable?

Ilya: 19:28

I think the biggest thing for us was the community side of things so building the community. For example, I think I mentioned this a few minutes ago, but our candidates, they call themselves VanHackers, so there’s really this feeling of we’re in it together. I think that started because we have that English school or education in our DNA of we're all students in the same classroom working together, friends, and trying to learn and get to the same success outcome. What I think that did is that made people really want to invite their friends to VanHack, tell them about us, and believe in us. We have a Slack group with about 90,000 people in it where we chat with our engineers and candidates pretty often, education content. Creating that community vibe, which makes it so that candidates are applying to jobs quickly, and we can get candidates that are really good. Yeah, I think that's a big thing. Another thing I think that's important is we did build a software platform, right? We ended up hiring from ourselves. Our CTO Tiago was actually our first employee still with us today, built out this combination of a learning management system and an application tracking system and did a lot of tech work to automate the processes.

Pablo: 20:39

Yeah. Tell me more about – so the candidate side, I think that's a clear edge in the sense that, if you're going to developing countries, there's going to be way more engineers or just high-quality candidates in general that will resonate with the value prop because they see the opportunity of living abroad. Maybe they specifically want to learn abroad, they want to make more money, whatever it is. The ROI for them is pretty clear. What was it like, though, landing on the customer side? There you're competing with just about any other recruiter who also charges 15 to 20%, who also promises great candidates. What was that part like? Any stories to share there in terms of how you got these customers to try you and then to continue to rely on you to make hires, which is not easy?

Ilya: 21:28

Generally, the biggest thing was just that we had a lot of senior candidates available, and then we could provide them very quickly, right? Other recruiters would come in and say we can probably send you some resumes in a few weeks, and they're probably sending the same resumes as everyone else because there's not – just not that many people who are looking for jobs inside the same city, whereas we had new fish that we can bring to the pond, if you'll, so we had this talent pool. I always say this and it's true that there's more engineers who want to move to Canada than there are in Canada right now. There's just probably 10 times more and especially if you're looking for the ones who are looking to work. Also, it’s you have to say that, for startups, they're budget conscious, so they can find a software engineer who's willing to work at a little bit lower rate. That's important too. Then over time realizes, our engineers as well, they stay longer, stay for about three and a half years. We didn't know that in the beginning because we just – we’re just getting started, and the beginning was all about like, hey, I have this Ruby engineer. I would literally edit resumes and remove contact information. We also used to send out Excel files where we have skills of people. Here’s Engineer 1 would have five years of experience overall and worked with Ruby, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Engineer 2 and 3 and 4. We just had what people wanted, supply and talent, whereas other recruiters, I mean, I'm sure they were also great, but they just maybe didn't have as many. Really, I think when we hit product-market fit on that side of things was when we started getting customers asking us for a lot of engineers.

Pablo: 22:58

At that point, what were some of – especially in those early days when you still – now, I think VanHack is a pretty known name, certainly in Canada and probably abroad. In those early days, what were some of your best tactics to land customers, and how much was inbound versus outbound and specifically on the – and on either side, what were some of the things that were working really well in those early days?

Ilya: 23:19

Yeah. It was all outbound. It was all outbound, just cold calling, cold email, LinkedIn, going to tons of meetups, tons of events, hiring fairs, startup events. I think you and I met at SaaS North, I believe, just going to events, so really just, again, hustle. One of my favorite tactics to get people to believe in what we're doing is, when I meet someone on a sales call or go into their office and have a meeting or run into them at an event is I got to ask them. Tell me who you're looking to hire. They say I'm looking for a Ruby developer with 10 years’ experience. Then I would go to the Slack group that we have and say, hey, I'm here with CEO of X company, and they're looking to hire Ruby on Rails developer with 10 years’ experience. Anyone here with that description who wants to move to Ottawa, please comment here, and then we would continue the conversation. Then maybe 10, 15 minutes later I'd be like, hey, let's check if anyone commented on the post, and then I would pull out my phone again and open Slack. There’d be 10 people who'd say, hey, me, me, me, me, me.

Pablo: 24:20

Love that. That's great.

Ilya: 24:20

Yeah. It just was real – hey, this is actual people, actual talent who actually want to work for this company. It's not about just me talking. I can talk all day but if I can show you on the phone here’s real people. I would open up their profile on Slack with their profile picture. Here’s Pablo. He wants to work for you, right? Actually, we have a lot of people named Pablo get hired, sorry, anyway. Yeah, that was, I think, probably one of the best tactics. Referrals were really good as well as businesses started. I think, with recruiting, it's a double-edged sword. There's a lot of players out there. There's a lot of not so good reputation players out there. There's a lot of noise, and it's hard to gain trust. Once you do gain trust and maybe have a few success cases with a company – think of the interest is to Article [ph] and Article ended up hiring 20 people from us over the year. Yeah. It’s just a lot of that. We also would do a lot of work with accelerators. Then one thing that we did really well and then maybe we should bring this back, actually, is we had these events called Leap where we would have engineers fly to cities that they want to move to and spend a week living there and going to – and we would set up a recruiting fair with our engineers. This was really good because all we would have to do to a company to get them to take a chance on us and say, hey, come to this meetup on Monday night at 5:00 p.m. at Mars. There's going to be some beer and food, and there's going to be 15 engineers who want to move to Toronto. Would you like to meet some of that – some of them, no cost? Just go there. You only pay us if you hire someone. Those were really, really good because we would end up creating a little mini marketplace where we'd have 10, 15 startups from Toronto; 10, 15 engineers. Then the best two would get two or three, five job offers. We had this one lady from India, Pritika, who got five job offers. A few people got five or six job offers during those events.

Pablo: 26:15

That’s helpful. Then you went through Techstars, so you kind of went through the accelerator. Obviously, you took some money from them. Did you end up raising VC? Did you try to raise VC, or did just go more the the bootstrap route?

Ilya: 26:27

Yeah. We did Techstars. We did a few other accelerators too that were equity free, one called Start-Up Chile, the other one called Fit 4 Start and then Luxembourg, and after Techstars – and it just general all the time. I mean, I’ve always like wanted to raise money, especially since being in the accelerator back in 2020 at 21212. There's that demo day, and then just I’ve always wanted that dream of the TechCrunch….

: 26:47

Hype.

Ilya: 26:47

Right, the TechCrunch hype. I've yet to get a TechCrunch article, one day, anyway. No one would invest in us because they're like this is just a lifestyle business. It's services company. I got a lot of the same thing. It's not a SaaS, so it's not scalable. After demo day at Techstars in Germany, Berlin, we tried to raise half a million euros, and it just didn't work at all. Everyone said no, so we decided to focus on customers. We made more than half a million euros in revenue in the last three months of that year. That was just a moment for me to be like you know what? Let's not raise right now and just focus on customers and growth. We did since end up raising – last year, we raised from a firm from Houston, Texas called Golden Section, which has been great. They're much more capital efficient, not so much Silicon Valley VC style.

Pablo: 27:42

That's great. Let’s stop it there. Maybe we'll just end on the two questions that we always end on. The first one, yeah, I think you touched on this a little bit, but when did you feel like you had true product-market fit?

Ilya: 27:55

Yeah. I think it was when they did the recruiting fair for SkipTheDishes in Brazil. They came to us. I think it was either right before or right after they got bought by Just Eat. I think it was right after, and Just Eat told them scale as much as you can. They had this really big problem of Friday and Saturday nights having huge amounts of traffic. They didn't have that much traffic. You think a food delivery app, right? They don't have that much traffic on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Then Friday night comes, and everyone's ordering food. Saturday night, everyone's ordering food. Their traffic got so big that they ended up crashing. Daniel, one of the co-founders, was telling me that, if they crash, they have this huge – because they're a logistics company, and so everything gets out of work and out of order. It takes them forever to get back. Anyway, it's a big problem for them that they can't have, and at the same time, they were hiring basically every engineer in the prairies. They'd started poaching from their friends startups, and they just became this upward spiral in salaries. It was a big problem for them. We helped them hire, I think, five or six people in a couple of months and realized that we have – we had a good talent pool. They asked me, “Hey,” they’re like, “what can we do to hire as many engineers as, as fast as possible?” I gave them a list of all these things like doing the webinar and a couple other things that I was thinking we could do. Then, as a throwaway at the end, I said, “Well, why don't we fly to São Paulo, which is the biggest city in Brazil, and we can rent a conference room and do a hackathon over a weekend? Then you can interview a lot of developers in person that way and make a lot of hires.” They actually went for that, and we did a hiring fair in March 2018 where we had about 300 engineers come in over two days, work on a hackathon project, and then do speed interviews with their tech team as well as their HR team and end up getting 72 engineers hired from that event. Yeah, this is product--market fit right here.

Pablo: 29:45

You’ve helped now 2,000 people, over 2,000 people. Really, you could say find – get a job, but it's much more than that, really. It's like change their lives. It sounds cliché but it’s actually – it's real. As somebody whose parents – for me, my parents moved from Argentina to Canada. Getting a job that enables you to make that transition really does change your life, so the impact that you are having is hard to overestimate. Maybe the last question then, which is, if you could go back to your younger self starting VanHack around 2014 with one piece of advice, what would it be?

Ilya: 30:25

For me and it still applies today is I'm very much in my head and always wanting next step and thinking the – how's the future going to be? I think the biggest thing is just stay in the moment because you can only really control what you can. The future is never as good or as bad as you think it's going to be. I remember early days and still to this day thinking about what it’s going to be like in the future, how it’s going to – how are we going to solve this problem, etc.? I think just being grounded and stay in the moment is a big one. Yeah, I think that’s the biggest thing. There's a bunch of other stuff too.

Pablo: 31:01

I'm sure. I mean, after 10 years, a lot of things to learn, man. Look, Ilya, this was great, tons of stories, tons of details, and even some outbound tactics that I think a lot of founders hopefully can steal and adapt in their own startups, so thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today.

Ilya: 31:20

My pleasure. Yeah, if anyone wants to talk outbound strategy or anything like that, it's always fun for me to do that so happy to reach – if you reach out, happy to chat. Thanks, Pablo, for having me.

Pablo: 31:31

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