When Reality Surpasses Science Fiction
By: Adrià Hernández
Tags: Startups, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Recruiting, Founders

When Reality Surpasses Science Fiction

and when it smashes you in the face

One afternoon, I was talking about my startup to a group of some of the most intelligent people I’ve met.

An investor listening next to me, who also happens to be the best QA expert I know, told me what I created was a ‘Cerebro’ (from X-Men) for talent.

It was such a good analogy, I couldn’t believe I didn’t come up with it before.

In the X-Men universe, ‘Cerebro’ is a device that Professor X uses to amplify his telepathic superpowers in order to be able to detect mutants everywhere.

My platform was designed to use AI to identify the potential of every adult with a smartphone within minutes, to build a global map of available talent.

Once identified, the AI would match talent profiles with relevant open positions inside compatible teams of interested employers.

The revolutionary solution

The platform consisted of a free consumer mobile app (data +talent pool), and a B2B SaaS solution.

The main focus was to identify the potential of users (talent) and the teams of employers, by measuring their intelligence, personality and maturity level.

This was accomplished by analyzing the data from user profiles and a set of 12 to 24 multi-answer questions.

The questions were designed to make the users feel at ease (no scores, right or wrong answers), and put them in the right state of mind to answer honestly while being entertained (and also do a little bit of introspection).

In addition to matching talent with employers, the AI could accurately match highly compatible users according to 5 different types of human relationships.

The goal of the mobile app was to free up users from time wasted in job searches, interviews, etc. so they could invest it better (like networking), or simply enjoy their time meeting interesting people in their city.

The goal of the SaaS solution was to completely automate the whole recruiting process, from open position to contract negotiation.

The work behind it

In addition to all the work of running a startup (some good posts by Silvia Li Sam, Tair Assimov & Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit), I did a lot of R&D the previous 8 years before the company was registered.

Since at age 17 I already mastered how to measure human potential (for no other reason than to satiate my own curiosity), I shifted my focus to 3 areas: human relationships, data acquisition and algorithm design.

Human relationships are key to develop our potential, and to understand them you also need a good understanding of human nature.

At university I went to 6 different colleges, but that wasn’t nearly enough, so I spent endless hours every day reading new research and studying the human mind, behavior, decision making, how we think, leadership, organizational structures, power dynamics…

At the same time, I put my knowledge into practice at every opportunity I had, analyzing thousands of people from dozens of countries and from all backgrounds, and hundreds of relationships of all types (with a special focus on work relationships & team dynamics).

The ability to quickly discern good from useless publications, read body language, interview well (i.e. make the right questions, at the right time), and, especially, listen well and empathize with the people telling me their life and work stories, were the key skills in this process.

After this, I studied everything about mobile UX and growth hacking, to design a data acquisition strategy seamlessly integrated in the app, optimized to engage users while providing all the necessary data with the least amount of time and effort from them.

Once the key data and elements were identified, and with the data acquisition strategy defined, I designed the matching algorithms and the algorithms to identify human potential and to analyze teams.

The mission & the purpose

From a pure business perspective, the goal was to make job-hunting & recruiting something of the past, but the mission was more ambitious:

In addition to being key to acquire data, there were two more big reasons to pair a social discovery app and a professional network together.

First, build a complete and permanent pool of talent in the form of a social professional network made of very active and engaged users, that reached everybody (not just active job seekers, recruiters and sales professionals).

Second, build a platform optimized to acquire and extract the most value from data in an extremely efficient and effective way, developing a technology designed not only to disrupt and to dominate the market, but to evolve and to be applied in other businesses, in order to diversify and keep growing.

The motivation & the big picture

From a very young age, I’ve always had a burning desire and a passion to solve big problems and overcome difficult challenges.

As a teenager, I realized what I wanted to do in my life was to make the world a better place for everyone, everywhere. I would become an entrepreneur.

After university, I identified 3 businesses where I could have a huge and long lasting impact in the lives of billions of people, involving 3 key relationships:

Employer — Talent (recruiting, team building…).

(recruiting, team building…). Provider — Customer (marketing, sales…).

(marketing, sales…). Investor — Company (angels, venture capital…).

All 3 are very ineficient, they fail far more often than they succeed, they are easily compromised by human mistakes, and they could (and must) be completely transformed using science, data strategy and artificial intelligence.

Just think about it, imagine how big the impact would be if every company had a software that made it so damn easy and fast to hire the right people and build strong teams, that it was near impossible to screw up the process.

The strike back

What happened when I showed this to the world? The short answer is much curiosity, some hate, but nobody really cared.

Even when both native apps where live on the App Store and Google Play, I couldn’t find neither co-founders nor investors.

What I looked for was simple: intelligence + ambition + empathy for the mission + complementary skills (co-founders) or capital (investors).

From the four above, ambition was, by far, the most difficult to find, as everyone was too scared to put in the hard work or necessary investment.

The second most difficult trait to find was empathy.

Everyone saw the problem and the big opportunity, but very few had genuine empathy for customers, or the mission didn’t have any real meaning for them.

With neither co-founders nor investors, and without enough capital to build the SaaS platform and reach break-even, I had no option but to close down.

The hope

Despite not being able to continue the journey, I still believe someone has to do it.

Whether it’s in a second run in the future, or if I can help another startup succeed, I want to contribute to see this mission accomplished asap.

So, if you’re involved or you care about solving these problems and you have the resources to make it happen (or you can connect me to someone who does), please get in touch.

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Thanks for reading, the 💚 & the shares.