End $2 Trillion Government Waste

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal. Born and raised in Silicon Valley and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder. The journey they're on, the problems they face, the products they build in an effort to make our lives better. I'm excited to have with us today August Chen, co-founder and CEO of Hazel. August, welcome to the show.

August Chen: Jake, thanks so much for having me.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, I'm excited to have you. I know we spoke a while back and your story, I think, is amazing based on where you're at and what you're building. For the listeners that don't know, um, Hazel is fixing the broken process behind two trillion of public spending with AI custom-built for government procurement teams. And if you don't think this matters to you, it does because anything the government spends money on could at some level impact you. So this is a great story. We'll start at the beginning, listen to the end. There's a lot of insightful stuff that will come out of it.

So before we jump in here and talk about Hazel, August, give us a little background of yourself. You went to Harvard, but prior to that, you know, everyone comes from a different beginning. What shaped you into wanting to get into technology and what was your path so far to get up to where you're at now?

August Chen: Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Jake. You know, my fun fact is that I was born in Alaska and I've been moving around a lot my entire life. But before I got into...

[August's Journey: From Physics to Technology]

...Harvard and before I decided to, you know, build Hazel or go into business or do any of that stuff, I was actually an avid, avid researcher and all I wanted to do was study physics and study astrophysics. And for the longest time, I thought, "Man, this is the greatest thing in the world. All I want to do is solve some of the hardest problems." And then when I got to school and I instantly was exposed to so many more people out there who was trying so many different things and got my first hand at joining a club that allowed me to actually run a real business, helping real people, trying to make a difference in someone's life that you can actually go talk to in real life.

And that's when I started shifting my focus away from studying galaxies to then actually focusing on like, what can I do with my time and my expertise and my intelligence to help everyday people? And so a lot of my track for what I was doing in terms of switching from physics to mechanical engineering, which then led into studying computer science, which then led into studying economics. I did a whole lot at school. A huge combination of that gave me massive exposure to just what exactly is happening to everyday people. What is happening here in society that we live in? And that sort of became the huge fundamental basis as to how I looked at anything that I wanted to do from there on out.

Uh, I started off my career in a little bit of consulting but immediately went to Palantir where I got to work on some really cool problems. Uh, being able to solve for both public and private sector. And the main thing that I first got to work on when I got there was solving the wildfire crisis in California, you know.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.

August Chen: Yeah. It's obviously devastating problem that you know caused billions of dollars in damages across the state, you know, led to the loss of life and etc. Making sure that for the first time we can use software to go solve real problems, that I mean, instantly hooked me. And throughout that entire journey and process of you know, building actual operational software to solve obviously such an insane problem got me thinking, you know, why does this exist? And that's actually the first time I heard more about procurement, first time I learned more about supply chain issues, first time I heard about really anything in the space where wow, something that's so behind the scenes is actually causing wild, drastic effects downstream of it that is obviously affecting everyday people.

You know, not too dissimilar from obviously a lot of the work that I do when I was younger. How do you fix fundamental problems to get to something that's even more insane on the other side of it? But that's, I mean, got me thinking a lot, is exactly what makes my co-founder and I—and we're both engineers—like, tick every and like get up every single day to go solve these problems. Yeah. We'll obviously talk more about Hazel, but that's a little bit of where I came from and a lot of what drives me on a day-to-day basis.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, I, I love the fact that you came from, you know, Alaska and that transition over to the mainland and what you're doing with, you know, the areas of focus with your current company. But Palantir is an organization that a lot of really smart people join. They do a lot of work there. They learn a lot and then they go off and they build their own companies. What is it at Palantir that kind of breeds that type of entrepreneurialism?

August Chen: You know, and this dives into a lot of the theory behind recruiting. I think the number one thing that Palantir was always really good at was attracting the best possible talent to go solve real problems that people can define really clearly. And there's levels to it. I think on the one hand, obviously the interview process itself is a funnel that allows some of the brightest people to understand this is a place that I'm going to go work at where I'm going to be surrounded by other incredible intelligent people really, really easily. And that was like the first main attractor.

And then the second main attractor is Palantirians. And I think the work that the company was doing when, at least when I was joining the company, uh, the folks who are solving you know different types of challenges for their customers, be it in both public or private sector, were very much so able to break down exactly what it is they were solving for anybody, which is an incredibly underrated skill. And obviously something that's so fundamental to being a founder, that hearing so much clarity about what it is that you're actually going to go do in the next six months to a year to two years is a transparency and a sort of intellectual attraction that draws a lot of people into the system. But so the combination of the two is just so powerful that actually is what allows people to join the company in the first place.

And then obviously when you're in the mix of it, you exchange so many ideas, exchange so many great people. They then go out, make friends, and then to build their own companies. So a really great environment overall. I'm actually really grateful for my time there. Did a lot of obviously really cool things, but at a certain point also knew when it was time for me to move on and build my own thing.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Well, let's talk about the inspiration behind what you're doing because at some point there's a moment for everyone. They notice that there's something that they see as a problem that could be fixed, and maybe you have the tools to do it or maybe you need to find the right people that can help build those tools for you. What specifically did you notice in government and how it operates that you sat down and said, you know what, there's a problem here I think we could figure out how to help fix.

August Chen: Great question. I mean, it really started off with just trying to be observant in what was going on around me. I live here in New York City. This is also where the company is based out of. My co-founder, his name is Elton. He's our COO. He's based out of Boston. We live in obviously massive metropolises. And we also travel a lot and we see a lot of what's going around us, and we begin to notice things how, "Hey, I went to Japan and I really like this," or "I went to Spain and I really liked how they did this." And then you come back to your own city and you start observing tiny things as well, such as in New York City, why is trash collection such an issue? Or hey, you know, this library AC unit has been broken for a year now. That doesn't seem like a hard thing to fix. Why is it taking so long?

You begin asking a lot of these questions and in order to be a very curious person, I think most founders in general have this tick where they go, "Hey, this thing seems a little broken. Why is it?" And it doesn't take a whole lot of digging into, at least in the government space, because anything that goes wrong in the public sector becomes a headline. The same way with the wildfires and you know PG&E going bankrupt but also its inability to maintain its grid and upkeep materials and wooden poles causing major headlines saying, "Hey this is a problem."

But what people I think don't really dig into is hey, we have these headlines. People in public sector maybe think, "Okay, well, we're doing as good of a job as we can. Let's just squash the headlines and appease the public or do whatever that makes my image look better." And to a certain extent, I don't really want to accept that because I live here. This is the city. We all live in our societies and public areas and public places. If you want to live somewhere for a very long time, then you probably want to see that place become better. And I, for one, want to see New York City become a better place. I for one want to see the entire country, no matter whoever lives in whatever area, feel that the people that they elect or the people that they put into power feel that they're building great communities for them as well.

And it doesn't, it didn't really take us too long, at least for me to look into it and go, "Okay, well, what does it take for government to do these things?" And all they do is just buy the solution. They buy goods to supplement whatever. They buy services for people to fix AC units and HVAC. Um, very boring stuff behind the scenes. And then I talked to my co-founder about it, who at the time was working for BCG. Uh, he ran massive portfolios of work to streamline and to make government defense procurement incredibly more efficient. And together we just started ranting to each other a lot and realize, "Wow, this problem goes way far beyond what any of us expected." And people were trying to build solutions for it, realized they didn't know what they were doing because they're not technologists at heart. They're like from the government or they don't really understand what exactly needs to be solved here. And so it was pretty obvious that this is exactly what we had to go build after, after a long night of conversation. Uh, and then we've been sticking to it for the longest time and have been achieving some success so far.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. Well, DOGE came out and helped really put light onto what the government was doing and the spending from services to staffing to really everything. And I know there's a lot to look at to try and maximize value and reduce cost and overhead, but for those that don't really work or connect with the government at all when it comes to procurement, what does the procurement process actually look like today? And, and why does it take so long? I mean, you're talking about it about fixing things, but what's the challenge behind it? What's, what's going on there?

August Chen: I mean, like anything in government, it's a government is designed to serve its people, protect its people, to make sure...

[Identifying Problems in Government Procurement]

...that there's fairness and transparency in whatever public service that needs to be brought out. And for procurement specifically, you know, a lot of folks in the past, especially my small business uncle who runs a car shop in Brooklyn, always thinks that the New York City procurement system is like the most, most corrupt thing for like the last 20 years. Maybe 20 years ago it was. But because governments want to mitigate that, they don't want a new headline every year going, "Hey, like my procurement officer embezzled millions of dollars from the system," they invented a lot of rules and regulations in place.

And which sounds on the surface level really great. Your, the law, a procurement law specifically, should be designed to keep your tax dollars safe and deployed in a reasonable way. I mean, when you mention DOGE and a lot of DOGE's thesis, which is really simple, is you pay trillions of tax dollars to the US federal government, and the federal government has broken your trust because we are deploying that money to companies that don't necessarily deserve it or to whatever who don't, who don't necessarily deserve it, and they think it's a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse. I could agree as well. But at the same time, the reason why the procurement process is so challenging is not just because people always try to game it, is that it's become also impossible to maintain the system when there is so much regulation behind it.

Don't get me wrong, I do still think regulation is required for, to like protect people and to protect your tax dollars, but it has gotten in the way for everyday public servants to navigate the process such that they spend way more time navigating compliance and regulation than they actually do thinking about the thing they're purchasing. Procurement folks in government are not experts in buying really too much, ever. They're experts in navigating their laws, their systems, their process so that they can avoid a future headline that says, "Look at all this new waste, fraud, and abuse uh, that was so obvious to all of us all along and these gang members did X, Y, and Z."

Uh, and that's why AI, LLMs, all of these tools today is precisely why everyone's getting into it, is because they are able to help our frontline officers, who is in charge of buying trillions of dollars of goods and service every single year, actually get through that faster so they can make better decisions downstream of it. Like don't blame them for not being able to understand how to buy something or what to buy it when they don't even get the chance to navigate their own laws and procurement in the first place. So that's like my two cents there.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. So talk about your product. What exactly do you do that helps them do it faster or better or more efficiently?

August Chen: Yeah, of course. So, Hazel is an AI-powered procurement platform and we help our users and our government customers understand what to buy, how to buy it, and why they're buying it completely, compliantly, and efficiently as possible, right? Because the ultimate goal for procurement really should be to buy the best possible thing at the lowest possible price. And yet, they are overpaying 20, 30, 50%, maybe 100% markup on lots of goods and services, and are still getting dinged with billions of dollars of protests all the way from local to federal government where vendors know that government made one tiny regulation mistake and they can just get to sue them for whatever, um, that they did. And so our goal is to usher our users who have to make very complicated decisions and also many, many decisions on a daily basis from building RFPs or RFQs or solicitations in general, which are just legal documents wrapped...

[Challenges in Government Procurement Processes]

...around a set of requirements for what it is they're trying to buy. So let's say you're trying to go buy consulting services for IT. You know, like one page of an 80-page document is just, what do you expect the IT consultant to do? The other 79 pages of it are boilerplate and legal work. Then you have to actually understand who you can get that service from. So be it from your local area or entire country or nation. Um, you have to make sure that these are compliance, ready-to-go vendors who are actually ready to serve you, and a means to actually understand who your market really looks like and why you should be buying from them. To the actual last step, which is evaluations, and people don't actually know this. Evaluations is way more about compliantly evaluating and understanding why you want to buy somebody than actually picking the best possible person. So being able to draw out a report as to the exact details of why he's talking to somebody, that's the last stage of the process, and that in total encapsulates how Hazel helps its customers today and will do way more beyond that in the future.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So just for the procurement officers or someone on the procurement side, what's the time savings that your product saves them today? Like what's the, what's, give us a use case?

August Chen: Sure. So we actually just fully rolled out to a massive state. And when, when we were going through the pilot process, we measured this baseline where they are literally taking three, four, maybe six months to do an entire procurement from beginning to finish. And after 2 months of beginning to onboard some of the users in the state to using our platform just to like write better solicitations, writing better RFPs, writing better requirements documents, like text of that, we were able to reduce the entire timeline of that procurement by 33%. And this is legitimately just from writing a better first document, right? Which prevents downstream mistakes, gives clarity to vendors, and in general protects everybody from any legal headaches that might have before caused way more bureaucracy and you know, uh, just confusion around who's handling what and whatever.

The ability for us to actually use a simple tool to cut across all red tape is pretty incredible. And you know, once they start adopting new tools, uh, across the board, which we're seeing with other customers for instance, who are spending let's say like what, like 30% above market rate on some of these goods and services, already seeing that cut down on cost has been pretty incredible.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's really cool. Well you know, anytime you're creating a product you are hoping the demand is there and you got to sell it. And you know, we talked and you, you were talking about early on, you know, it wasn't just here's the North Star, we're going to go achieve this goal. It was you have an idea, you build it, you think about it, try and take it to market. You don't always get the response you want. Give us a little bit of insight around where you started there on the product side and where you're at today. And what were the shifts that you had to change or pivots you had to change to actually hit the target?

August Chen: Building product is the hardest thing. And I thought I was good at it because I was good at building product at Palantir. It turns out for sure that there's an element to this where you...

[Hazel AI: Revolutionizing Procurement with AI]

...have to understand and meet your customers where they are in their technological journey, right? You can't just hand somebody this brand shiny new thing and expect them to say like, "Hey, this is going to totally transform my life." Uh, when we first got started, we actually couldn't really get customers pretty much for more than a year. It was very, very difficult. And every single time we thought, "Hey, here's a game-changing new product with a swanky new GUI that does new XYZ things for our customers," we just kept adding more and more features to it. We thought, "Oh, this is exactly what's going to get them."

But once in a while, once we want to go back and get feedback from them, they'd always said, "We tried it once and we thought it was cool." And I said, "Have you tried it again?" And they said, "We haven't gotten the chance to, but we really should use it again." That's when our team came together and realized something was wrong here. People can sign off. They can buy the thing that they want. But if they're not actually consistently using it, even though they can tell you that this is a burning problem or they can tell you that this is really cool and that they're going to use it a lot, you know, real behavior is rooted in actually them using it. So when they didn't use it, we realized, "Okay, we need to really figure out what went wrong here."

And we started just really hammering in, sitting down with them in person, flying the entire team to shadow one person behind their computer and saying, "Hey, wow, why are you doing this?" I know. And then we realized, "Wow, we've been asking all of the wrong questions." It turns out in government everything is a burning problem because everything sucks. But figuring out what the first problem to go solve is is actually what led us to basically the fifth iteration of our flagship product which actually became the best-selling hit that we have today. Uh, and that is just how do you exactly write better solicitations. Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. Everything still exists in Microsoft Word, for instance. And we were trying to build new word editors and new text editors with fancy AI feature, with like Grammarly 2.0. But for government procurement, none of that is exactly what they want. What they really did want was a better document manager at first to just manage different sections of the very complicated procurement facilitation process exactly how they do it in Word. So, we started there and it's been non-stop flowing products since then because we've actually gained their trust by building the right thing that no one thinks about or they think is too...

[Transforming Procurement Processes]

...boring or uncool. So, a bit of a roundabout way of just saying it's like listening to your customers uh, can sometimes just take so long, but once you really hit it, you'll know. And you really do have to keep challenging yourself and ask yourself, are you building the right product? Which, yeah, it took us a while, but we got there.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really cool. When you do that with flying a team out and sitting down and shadowing somebody, do they know the intent behind the shadow? Do they know that you're there to understand what they like, what they don't like, probing them on what they'd like to see, like really interviewing them about their experience, or is it more just assessing based on observation and coming back and making changes? How, how did you approach that?

August Chen: They love it when we fly out there [laughter] and sit down and just totally absorb their entire world. Uh, my co-founder recently just flew back out to Dallas for one of our customers just because he was in the area, like actually in the area when we, when he went to go visit in person. We were talking about what other tools they use in their tech stack to do procurements and they said offhand that you know what, now that I think about it, I don't think any of our other tech vendors have ever come to visit us in person, and we keep asking them for features all the time, but I guess they'll never build it, but I really hope that you guys do for like, for XYZ reasons.

So it does work. It's so important to go visit them. It's an incredibly special experience, not just for you as a founder to go visit your customers. Also, don't, don't underestimate how special it is for your customers to receive that sort of, uh, care and attention from a vendor who is trying to grow their business obviously, but is actually trying to help you buy the right tools to help make their lives better. And if you truly do that, right, it's not a sales strategy. If you truly do that, then you're actually going to unlock something pretty special. I can't, there's nothing much more to say except...

[Navigating Product Development Challenges]

...please go visit your customers.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I love that. Visiting the customer is great and making changes helps, but you also have to have the right model in place to buy your product. Talk about how you, what's, what's the business model? Are they buying a product? Are they buying a service? Are they buying a combination? How does it work?

August Chen: 100%. Today, our product is pretty good where we get to deploy a product, one, really easily, and two, the value showcases itself pretty quickly as well. For our customers, they just buy Hazel off of a typical software license. I think we're a pretty classic SaaS type of business where their goal is to use our platform to make their lives better really, really quickly. Now, what that means for us in the future, I don't really know. There's a lot of different areas of procurement that we're going to go tackle. But as of today where every single one of our users' biggest pain points is in SaaS, right? They are using Word and Excel, PowerPoint to do all of these, these menial tasks that just take forever. Being able to fix any of that and help them with any of that is our number one goal because then that unlocks new areas of procurement that they're not even getting to yet. Right? So, we're going to figure that stuff out first.

And for them it's actually really, really easy because government typically doesn't like to make complicated decisions if they are going to buy services or buy, you know, you know, very exotic platforms to do work. You know, companies like Stripe or Palantir can typically find themselves into weird holes because government budgets are so fixed that they have to have predictable amounts of spend. And if they can't budget for that, then it's incredibly difficult for the government to go purchase XYZ platform to do something. Um, we want to make it incredibly predictable for our customers as to how exactly they need, be, they can spend with us here at Hazel. And we also just do pilots in the beginning to make it super fast and easy to get on board and see value quickly. And once we kind of get in the door to be able to then expand, do other use cases, really grow the account and the platform. Our customers have been super open to it so far. Yeah, we just try to again, keep it simple.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. Everyone's building agents today and looking to have end-to-end solutions that run autonomously in businesses, and what's your, what's your position behind that? Is that like sort of the end goal for what you're building today as well or walk us through where you fit in that situation?

August Chen: I think filling your internal, we're talking about internal operations, right?

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Internal operations and then when it comes to, to customer products like what, what are they going to get that does the work with them or for them at some level in terms of how they just operate more efficiently?

August Chen: Yeah. I mean talking about external customers and the product you're building for them. It's pretty straightforward. I don't think you need to necessarily be thinking, "Oh, I need to build agents to do stuff." It's like, what problem am I solving? And because this is the problem that I'm solving, how can I take an LLM agent that's well prompted with sufficient data and context to keep doing it on my customer's behalf? Which is basically the same principle as I mentioned earlier about building great product. Basically the same thing in my head. And yeah, I think there's a really huge market in the future for tons of industries to just deploy many, many, many, many this concept of agents to do very small tasks, and then your SaaS platform or your whatever is orchestrating enough of these to go do it. I mean even behind the scenes if you think about for ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, they just...

[Understanding Customer Needs]

...basically invented a ton of mini agents in the back end to do and respond to different prompts that you're asking them to go do in a more unstructured manner, right? And that's the goal for everybody. Internally though, I also think it's pretty similar, but I also view it as much like, very similarly to interior designing. If there's no place in your org to implement an agent, then there's really no need to have it. Right? You should be able to get whatever it is you need internally down to an, a science as to why it is you're doing something.

For instance, constantly organizing feedback and meeting notes into product ideas and cards is an incredibly time-intensive thing that we've been doing for so, so long, that once we realized exactly how to do it repeatedly and in an intelligent way, then we can build AI agents around it that really fit Hazel's needs, right? And that is 10Xing or 100Xing our ability to just get through a lot of these product conversations faster because again, building product is one of the hardest things you can do as part of a company. But I think a lot of folks just kind of jump to the gun too much with, you know, premeditated agents or whatever that says like, "I'm going to like have all these agents just take these different ideas and build whatever." You don't want to be a slop forward company. You do want to figure out where your information comes from with a sense of, you know, vitality and trust and context. The end I think when deployed correctly, sort of the way that you know where to put a lamp or a couch in your room. Um, it's the same way with building AI agents internally for your org and how you want to 10X, 100X your own outputs.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, we're all in that transformation journey. I can tell you, you know, as a company that we're in the...

[Business Model and Value Proposition]

...people business and helping people find companies and companies find people. Um, you know, there's a lot of process within our organization. If we looked at first principles of what we've done for years and what we can really take out of it, and then build, you know, process around that, automating workflows, improving how we go about our business from every aspect, like we're in the middle of doing a lot of that right now. Exciting, and it's also, there's, there's some roadmaps have been created that you can kind of look at and say, "Yeah, I think we could kind of do that very similarly and in some ways differently," but also like the, the roadmap is out there, and just being able to know that it's been done and now being able to execute on that is really cool even if you're not an engineer or a product person. Just as long as you're clear on your business and the workflows of how you operate, you know the tools are kind of there, which is exciting. It unlocks the opportunity for non-engineers like myself. I, I mean, I'm really excited about what technology is allowing everyone to do really.

But let's talk a little bit about people. I know that people are critically important to any organization, especially when you're small and especially when you're building a founding team. What's worked for you? What have you learned about hiring that you've gotten right as you've built your team, even if it's small and mighty or now scaling up? What are some of the things that you can share with others that you know you've learned that have been helpful for you?

August Chen: That's a great question. I recently just had this discussion internally because we're about to probably scale up our team one more time and to bring on new folks who will help us achieve that next level here at Hazel. There's, and I attribute a lot of this to my work at Palantir where I got the chance to also hire new deployment strategists and engineers for the company. There's two real important things to look for when you're hiring. It's number one, how clear can the person across from you that you're thinking about, "Hey, do I want this person on my team?" can communicate to you exactly who they are today and where do they want to be 3 months, 6 months, a year from now, and whether or not that direction and that vector aligns with who it is that you need to be on your team. Right? They don't need to be the perfect person today, but can they be that perfect person for you six months from now? That's a really, really important question to ask. The number two thing that you have to look out for is, is this person a missionary or a mercenary? I really love this idea because I mean, I mean it's also been floating around so much nowadays when talking about...

[The Role of AI Agents in Operations]

...founders, but when you're building a founding team, Hazel today is six people, right? We have me, my co-founder, three engineers and the deployment strategist who helps us out with a lot of stuff. You'd think that at a certain point that when you become like a CEO or a boss that everything becomes about your vision and then everyone around you just has to go execute that. Uh, when you are a small team and you are trying to grow faster than anybody can to accomplish something truly, truly amazing. I mean, our goal is to completely transform the way that government buys anything and how services and goods get delivered to the public. That doesn't make sense for one person to do. And you surround yourself with people who want to help you out with it.

And it is literally impossible for one person, aka me, to tell every person on my team exactly what it is that they need to be doing at any given possible moment in time. Unlike video games where I can just sit there and micromanage everything [laughter] of let's say a civilization to get everything right, you have to be able to parallelize your system of thinking internally to everyone who it is around you. So when my co-founder and I go out into the market and start thinking about who is the best possible person to join us on this journey, who we can convince, one to take an insane risk to do something that's like, one, seems so boring on the surface and two, may or may not even make money in like two to three to four or five years. It's whether or not then on top of that, do they have what it takes to be part of a founding team, especially at this scale?

And they have to align themselves with understanding, "Hey, this is going to take a lot of work. I need to adopt the founders' way of thinking through how we're going to solve these problems. And yeah, I may be a new grad just out of college who doesn't understand how to build real systems or build AI agents or I've done anything meaningful from like a professional context yet in my life and career so far. But in six months, will I accomplish that? I will do whatever it takes to get there." And that's basically like what a few folks on my team have done so far, which is amazing.

And then of course when it comes to the missionary mercenary side, you know, one of the biggest pieces of feedback that I give in the first two to four weeks because we do bi-weekly feedback sessions with everybody on the team is there becomes a very clear distinction between, hey, are you waiting around for people to tell you exactly what it is to do or are you helping the founders figure out our North Star? You know, of course, as the founder, I'm deciding on the vision and the direction that the entire team is heading in, but I call that me trying to tell everybody, "Here's how we're gonna go from A to Z." And the rest of the team's job is to say, "August, we're going to do that by going A, B, C, D, E, and so forth." And that amount of clarity and discussion that we bring to the team has been so immensely wonderful. Uh, and is exactly what makes this team tick so well and one, build so quickly even though we have so few people. So, I think that's like generally how Hazel has at least in my head succeeded as a company in building out its team and its culture.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really cool. Um, you know, I've interviewed 30,000 people. I don't say that to brag. I'm just saying that because that's the reality over 10 plus years of interviewing candidates for companies, and really what we found, and this is really across the board for a lot of the companies, and most of them are startups. The ones that have been been successful and have scaled, they've really got two things right. The first one is they are clear about their identity. They know who they are as a team and a culture, and they're clear on how they operate. That might be at speed. It could be getting things done before you move to the next step. It could be, you know, break things and keep moving forward and iterate as you go. Whatever your culture is, it means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But clarify what that is and make sure you're all aligned with what that needs to be for anybody that joins. And if you can make sure during the interview process that you figure out how to interview for that compatibility, that's the first step. If you get that right, you're almost done.

The next step is to make sure that you're very clear on what success looks like for that person when they join 30, 60, 90 days. You're very clear and you thought about that. You have milestones in place so they're just not ramping up. They know what they're going to do when they get there and they're going to achieve it. When they do, they succeed. You win, they win. If you don't do that, you kind of just hope you're getting what you think you're getting, and you don't, don't really know until it's too late. So, making sure that they have the competency to come in and do the work that you need them to do to succeed. If you get those two things right, you have one more thing to really think about. It's just that they have the right heart and the right mind to do what you want to do in terms of your vision. And if they, if those three things, and that's really the critical areas get right, you're really about 95% there of making sure you got the right fit. So, we do...

[Building a Strong Team Culture]

...this with a lot of companies, but it's very clear how many don't think about those things before. They just, "Here's a job req, here's the skills, here's how many years they have to have, here's the kind of personality type I like, what's my gut telling me?" But the data will tell them this is the success rates we're seeing and why. And when you follow that process, it's, it's simple, it's easy, and it's teachable, and you'll see the results go up. And this is not just for you. It sounds like you guys have done a great job. It's just for the listeners that are out there, they're, they're building companies, too. So, that's just something I want to share because it's really been fun to see companies scale up and do that.

So, I always like to give some space for any of the guests that are growing and scaling and looking to add people. This is really your time, August, to maybe talk about some of the roles you're looking to, to hire in the future. What's that look like? What type of roles you looking for?

August Chen: Well, we're about to embark on one of the most aggressive uh, rollouts for Hazel over the next six months. And if folks are interested in joining the journey, we're going to be building some of the most insane pieces of procurement software, which sounds boring on the onset, but it's dictating exactly how trillions of dollars get spent, thinking through how do you help these governments navigate thousands of pages of regulation in order to just get to one single decision as to what it is they want to buy. Whether it's just something as simple as just, you know, a new car, all the way to the most important defense systems, uh, you know, protecting America today. And we have those customers all the way from the city of Dallas to the city of Atlanta to, you know, federal government intelligence agencies. So, if you're interested in working through those problems and cutting down all of this red tape, cutting down thousands of pages of context and data into one single procurement decision, which is something that no one's done before, then you should come work at Hazel.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. And is there any specific area? Is it on the engineering side, the product side, the deployment side, the support side?

August Chen: Uh, probably most definitely just on the engineering side. However, what we do here at Hazel is that we're actually incredibly flexible on deploying people. So, when we thought about adding our deployment strategist, um, you know, it was unclear whether or not we wanted that person to be more sales and BD focused or more product and engineering focused. Either way for us would have really worked because when I was at Palantir, I sort of played both hats all the time for different types of projects. And, uh, once we added him, very much clear that our show was going to be much more BD, sales side for us. And so we just sort of all shifted into a different position where we got to work on different things at the company. So we make space for people because it's really important that the best people pos-, the best people possible are just working through this problem and getting us through this, like, challenges and making government better. And so yeah, definitely a lot of engineering, maybe some product or BD, depending on what your strengths are. And well, give me a holler.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: All right. Well if anybody does want to give you a holler, August, where do they find you and where do they find Hazel?

August Chen: Thanks. So, you can find me on LinkedIn. My full name is August Sun-Chen. And you can go to our website as well, hazelai.com.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. There's a couple Hazel AIs out there. So, hazelai.com, not hazel.ai.

August Chen: Correct. Please. Yes. Hazelai.com. I know we will win the domain game at some point, I'm sure.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. Well, August, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story. I appreciate you spending your time with us. And for the listeners, always appreciate you spending your time with us as well. We have extremely, we, we've been extremely satisfied and, and thankful for all the subscribers. It's been like a 10x growth in the last 30 days. So really excited that you've subscribed and continue to listen. So we'll continue to bring you the best stories we can. And I just want to end by saying I'm very thankful and with gratitude, I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you all in the next episode. Until then, August, the world, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.

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