No one in the world of work likes form-filling, complex systems and bureaucracy. Yet, teams need to feel motivated, aligned, and accountable on the job, which usually means a lot of that stuff we hate. So what's an employer to do? OnLoop is here to turn every manager into a supercharged coach, and CEO and founder Projjal "JJ" Ghatak is on Firing Squad to try and prove his company has the juice to fulfill that promise and take it to established players like Lattice, 15five, Culture Amp and others. Does this former Uber executive's startup have what it takes to survive Chad & Cheese? Gotta listen to find out.
TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level.
Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids, the Chad & Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level.
Joel: Oh yeah, what's up everybody, it's your webmaster's favorite podcast, AKA The Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman, joined as always, the Luigi to my Mario...
Chad: Hello.
Joel: Chad Sowash is in the house, and we are happy to welcome Projjal JJ Ghatak, CEO and founder at OnLoop to the Firing Squad. JJ, welcome.
Projjal Ghatak: Thank you for having me.
Chad: All the way from Singapore. It's midnight. It's midnight in Singapore. This is what JJ is doing for us.
Joel: We are building bridges around the world. Our first Singaporean guest. So we are excited about that, for sure. So, before we get into the nitty-gritty of the business, let our listeners know who you are, what makes JJ tick?
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah. So, I live in Singapore with my wife where, we both grew up in Asia, so I grew up in India, and she grew up in the Philippines, but she's American, I'm Singaporean. We have our first child on the way and that's going to be one confused kid with Filipino and Indian parents and a US and Singapore passport, so we'll have fun with that. I've been to 49 countries, I have a weird accent, which is probably 75% American and 25% others. And I think what makes me tick is a general curiosity about the human condition. And in a world where Elon Musk is trying to take us to Mars, I'm trying to make humans better. And I think economies...
Joel: Good luck with that.
Projjal Ghatak: And technologies exist to make humans better, and so making humans better is what makes me tick.
Joel: Well, that is a lofty goal. That is a lofty goal, well, Chad...
Chad: The human condition. [chuckle]
Joel: Yeah. Chad, why don't you tell him what he's won by being on the Firing Squad today?
Chad: Alcohol helps the human condition. Welcome to Firing Squad, JJ. Here's what's gonna happen. So at the sound of the bell, you're gonna have two minutes to pitch OnLoop. At the end of two minutes, we're going to hit you up with about 20 minutes of Q and A, be sure to be concise or you're gonna get hit by the crickets, which means tighten it up. At the end of Q and A, you're gonna receive either a big applause, which means you've nailed it just like the Baltimore Ravens blowout playoff win. Get the bubbly ready because we're predicting a championship. Golf clap. Well, you squeaked one through like the Kansas City Chiefs did against the Bills. Be happy, but you still have a ton of work to do. Or, oh my God, the Firing Squad. This is worse than a Buffalo Bills wide right field goal or a Ron DeSantis smile, kids. All you can do now is hang your head, pack it up and go home. Get ready for some Firing Squad. Are you ready, Joel?
Joel: Are you ready, JJ, is the better question.
Chad: Let's go.
Joel: Two minutes starts, now.
Projjal Ghatak: Hey folks, I'm Projjal and I'm the CEO and founder of OnLoop. OnLoop is a gen AI company that is focused on increasing the effectiveness of managers globally. The company was born about three years ago in 2020, right when the world was moving from an in-office workplace to a remote workplace, to really redefine how teams of the future are assessed and developed. I spent many years at companies like Accenture and Uber running very large organizations and were increasingly frustrated by manual bureaucratic processes like performance management and a ton of learning tools that were, at best, never used, at worst, hated, by me and my teams. And through the process of the last three years, we've really come up with our own proprietary framework that we call collaborative team development.
Projjal Ghatak: That's a hierarchical framework of managing each person's energy, their goals in terms of targets, projects, and skills, celebrate and improve feedback to identify superpowers and blind spots. And then finally, ongoing personalized learning based on specific goals and specific feedback. We then take the friction out of that by using AI to rewrite feedback so we can take people's raw observations, rewrite that using a standard situation behavior impact framework, as well as extracting behaviors from it, as well as make it much easier to take simple goals and sort of flush them out in terms of milestones, et cetera. And then we run a habit loop through a well-designed product and sort of formulating what we call a clarity score that takes everything that's happening around those five layers and help managers take next actions for every team member. We started with a problem and we set up the software...
Joel: Your time is up, JJ.
Projjal Ghatak: That's it. That's where we are.
Joel: Thanks for the pitch. All right. We always start with the name, OnLoop, it sounds like a new Keanu Reeves movie. How'd you come up with it? You started with io, I think. Now you have a dot-com. Tell us the story about the name.
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah, so actually, I'd come up with a company name called Curate about three and a half years ago, and so we used that when we first started. But Curate was impossible to ever get curate.com. And if people can't find you, that's a problem. And so as we thought about renaming the company, I think being able to get a dot-com was a huge factor. And in the early days, we talked a lot about fixing broken feedback loops in organizations and helping sort of managers and teams stay on-loop. And so through a narrowing process, we landed on OnLoop, both from a logistics perspective around digital identity, as well as a correlation with what we were doing with companies.
Joel: Okay. So you were at Uber before OnLoop. It seems like a bit of a stretch, we usually have startups that have some recruiting experience or had a startup in recruiting before or worked for an employment or work related company, how did you make the leap from Uber to OnLoop?
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah. So I think the common thread that goes through my entire career, starting right from Accenture back in the day, was that developing people around me was just something that I naturally did. And then while I was at Stanford doing a two-year MBA, we spoke so much about feedback and leadership being the core components of what builds great organizations. And so this sort of, this sort of aspect that people drive business outcomes and that sort of being a core job of an executive was something that was pretty ingrained early on in my career. And seeing Uber go from 9,000 to 27,000 people personally leading teams of 50-150, having to do calibrations every six months and seeing sort of the time inefficiency as well as the bias and injustice in those conversations led to a level of frustration that led me to solving this problem.
Projjal Ghatak: So two weeks before... Two weeks after I left Uber, I wrote a two pager call TalentTech in terms of everything that I felt was broken from the lens of an end user leader or a manager less from a functional org like HR, and I think we've seen this in IT happen in the last 10 years, where people sort of build tools for engineers, designers, product managers directly. And unfortunately all the tools have been built for an HR use case versus a manager or leader use case. And so, you know, I decided we need to sort of tackle all of these talent problems primarily from the lens of the manager or the leader, and then secondarily from the lens of HR, which is something that we've seen happen in IT in the last 10 or 12 years.
Joel: So you launched in 2020, and 2021 you raised $5.5 million it looks like. What have you done with the money? When is the next round of funding if there is gonna be one? Like talk about the investment.
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah. So we actually raised the pre-seed of two and then sort of stayed in stealth until we got to a product that we wanted to talk about. And then sort of, we started working with GPT3 back in 2021. And one of the first prototypes we built was taking small bits of bite-sized feedback and sort of putting that together in a coherent summary as our first iteration of an automated performance review. And we saw pretty early that that tech was gonna get mainstream and that's when we raised our three and a half, and sort of started talking publicly. And we were the first company in the world to have our automate performance reviews. And actually, if you look at McKinsey data around managers and how to make their lives easier, performance reviews comes up consistently as a use case where sort of AI is deeply helpful if it's used the right way.
Projjal Ghatak: Unfortunately, it's used in the wrong way today where people just make up stuff in ChatGPT, which is not helpful. But taking sort of continual observations and sitting them together with AI in a consistent manner is actually pretty powerful. And so we sort of, sort of did a wait list launch in September, 2021. Over the course of 2021 and 2022, the platform got a whole lot better, the tech got a whole lot better. Our sort of core application got a whole lot better and really started monetizing, sort of at the beginning of 2023, we sort of 6x the business. We're sort of at about 200-300k in ARR today. We will 5x the business over the course of 2024. We are in the process of raising a $2 million round to sort of get us way past PMF and sort of build repeatability. And so we're at a stage where we've identified creative agencies and sort of post PMF impact tech companies as sort of target markets where we wanna build repeatability around. We sort of serve customers globally, but our, our core markets are the US, Singapore, Japan, Australia, and the UAE.
Chad: Jesus that's broad.
Joel: Are you calling the 2 million a, A round? That's real, that seems more like a bridge.
Projjal Ghatak: In Singapore, it's interesting, like we raise a $2 million pre-seed, that's a Series A in Singapore for a lot of companies. And so, so you know, I think funding rounds and what to call them is [laughter] is sort of not...
Joel: Got it.
Projjal Ghatak: Not a thing that is...
Joel: Different world. I got it. I got it. You're not in Silicon Valley anymore.
Chad: Different world. Different world. Okay. So you're talking about your footprint. Your footprint is, it seems like all over the place. You just, did you just throw the US in there because it's a big pile of money because you're, you're there Asia-Pac, you've got it right there. You can go ahead and nail that and then, you know, expand in the US later. Why are you focusing all over the place?
Projjal Ghatak: Yes, it's funny. So, you know, in many ways, we're primarily a US startup that has a distributed global team. And so I went full-time on the company in April, 2020, Singapore shut down on seventh April, 2020. And we sort of started fundraising largely in the US in May, 2020. And actually got inbound from Square Peg, which is Australia's largest VC who led our pre-seed at the time. And our team right from the get go was distributed across US, Canada, India, Singapore and Philippines. So, and, for me, we actually did not acquire any customers outside the US until we were clear what we were building.
Projjal Ghatak: 'Cause we didn't want to accidentally build a product that wasn't for the US. And once it was clear what we were doing, we then sort of added other developed countries to the mix. And actually over the course of 2023, the US had a really tough year, and we saw sort of our APAC revenue grow a lot quicker than the US revenue and sort of having the US and developed APAC sort of makes a natural hedge one against the other, for our revenue too. So today our revenues are about 35% US, 65% APAC. I sort of expect that to be roughly 50/50 sort of moving forward long term.
Chad: Okay. Okay. So OnLoop on the website it says, "As easy to use as a fitness tracker." Explain how that works.
Joel: What's a fitness tracker, Chad? What's a fitness tracker?
[laughter]
Chad: It's underneath your Lay's potato chips. Your wife got you one, but you've never put it on. Yeah, no, it's okay.
Projjal Ghatak: I saw the Oura ring on your hand and, you know, I think what fitness trackers have done is that it's really demystified what being healthy is and, broken it down into you're either not sleeping well or not eating and drinking well or not working out. And usually you're drinking way too much alcohol and which is why regular drops. And, that's usual. That's usually what happens. That's been the biggest insight from the Oura ring for me is don't drink, but you know, we've complexified what being a manager is whereby it feels like this overwhelming burden that nobody understands. And what we've done is broken it down into five constituent parts that demystifies that and then sort of showing a sense of continual progress that builds habit loops around it.
Projjal Ghatak: So our app gives you a clarity score for every manager in terms of sort of how much clarity you're driving for each of your team members along the five key components and then next actions to take. And a certain team member might need help around sort of motivation or energy levels, but certain high performers might need improvement feedback to get to the next level. And if you're managing six or eight direct reports, many of which might be all over the place, it is practically impossible to keep track of all of it. And we believe that anybody can be a good manager with the right tools and approaches. We've just not given managers the right approaches to be good and therefore we bitch and moan about bad managers all the time.
[laughter]
Chad: Well, they don't get any training and we have shitty managers all over the place. So how does a fitness tracker-esque type of tech help a shitty manager become a better manager? Because a lot of it has to do with just caring, right? And when that's not the focus of the company, they're focusing on revenue, sales goals, marketing leads, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then it's like, oh, well, how does Johnny feel today? That's never a priority. So talk about how you can make a shitty toxic culture into a great culture.
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah. I don't think anybody walks in the office in the morning and says, I'm gonna be a shit manager today. And there might be some, but I think that's the exception about them all.
Chad: That's behavior. That's behavior.
Projjal Ghatak: Correct. And usually, being a manager means executing with the team that you have and getting the best out of your team. And sometimes there's an issue with someone's motivation or someone's energy level, but usually where there's a huge gap is in people having clarity on what their priorities and goals are. And actually in most organizations, that is the greatest delta we can drive instead of helping every manager break work down into targets, projects, and skills that each person understands and therefore knows how to prioritize. And so in the same way that nobody who's obese wants to be obese and they're not gonna go from being obese to being Usain Bolt overnight, we can give them a roadmap of micro steps to take to get better. And if they then feel a sense of progress, they will get better over time. And so by breaking it down into what the constituent parts of being a good manager looks like and using tech to sort of drive those inputs continually, you can make a manager better one day at a time.
Chad: Okay. Now, one of the things that we see with tech over and over and over and over is that great vision, great vision and kind of there's a little bit of overpromising that happen. So on the site, it says, "Prioritize individual well-being as the foundation for thriving organization." I totally get that. But does the system analyze pay equity, living wages, those types of things? Because those are the things that first prioritize employee wellness. So where do you begin and where do you end with regard to understanding wellness within an actual individual, within an organization?
Projjal Ghatak: It's a great question. And for us, the starting point is understanding where people's battery levels are, right? And being intentional about it. And someone might be operating at 10% battery for a variety of reasons, and that's where, to your point, the skill of a manager and having that conversation and the app sort of would prompt you then to ask the conversation to understand what's going on. And it's impossible to predict what the ranges of those, of those things are. But the first part of it is driving awareness around it. And what we've realized as a company is that tech will not purely solve this problem. We've now built an approach and a framework to drive this in organizations and in many ways, we feel that we've built the OKR or Agile of today of what exists in a hybrid and generative AI world to give people a way to think about sort of overall performance.
Projjal Ghatak: And for me, well-being is a high ROI activity to drive performance 'cause I went through clinical anxiety in 2022 as a founder and I saw what that did to my productivity and performance as a professional. And so, yes, I care about people, but for me, it's about tracking the right things to bring the best out of people. And there's enough research now shows that if your phone or a human being is running at 5% battery, no matter how powerful that battery is, it's gonna lose charge and die out. And burnout is a very specific sort of outcome that takes place. And that very much sits at the base of performance.
Joel: Yeah. Wanna talk about, you had mentioned using AI wrong, but your thesis is basically that traditional performance management is broken, so dovetails into a question about competition. I mean, this feels like a lot of brand awareness with Lattice, 15Five, Culture Amp just come to the top of mind. Talk about the competition and how are they doing it incorrectly?
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah. Jack Altman's got out and said there is no room for generative AI in performance management. So he's being public about it. And that's because the pain of performance management and writing reviews does not lie with HR, it writes with managers and the other ones who suffer in the process. And because we serve managers above all else, we are maniacally focused on driving an experience that lead to consistently positive and fair outcomes while taking the friction out. Lattice, on the other hand is building an HRS because his HR customer wants one system. And so so ultimately what you build is a factor of who your customer is. And my competition from a performance management lens is building for a different buyer who's not necessarily asking for lower friction in how things are done, but their end user, which is the manager is, which is where I'm focused.
Joel: So who's the ideal customer for you?
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah. So it's either a GM or an MD of a business unit. So we love selling to creative agencies where there's an MD that runs an org of 50-200, where they understand that the only two levers to retaining talent is better managers or more pay. Often more pay is not doable, so better managers is the answer. Or it's a COO of a growing organization where strategic people, productivity, strategy and ops is often what it's called in tech. I spent a lot of time at Uber in strategy and ops doing a lot of work. Ultimately, my job was to make people productive. And so that function would sort of takes care of how to think about meeting company objectives from the right people. Or it can be someone who runs an org of 50-plus people. We work with the supply chain org, Beyond Meat, for a long time instead of driving motivation and outcomes at a time of rapid change, and so typically it's someone that themselves run an organization of 50-plus people. They can either own a full P&L or own a department or a full company.
Joel: So as someone, a proud member of the generation that said rub some dirt on it and shut the hell up, this feels very warm and funny, very, very millennial Gen Z. Talk about the generational divide and wanting this kind of feedback and how your product supports sort of the younger, upcoming generation.
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah. So obviously, I think everybody wants feedback, right? Like I think the question is, what are people vocal about? And I think with the millennial and Gen Z generation has just been a lot more vocal about they want ongoing feedback. But I think sort of wanting to know where you stand is a fundamental human need that doesn't differ between someone who is millennial or Gen Z or older. But I think what we've done is that we've done things like voice input, et cetera, into the app that makes it easier for habits of what you call older generations that make the product easier from the sense of a leader 'cause ultimately we are selling into a senior exec in many ways and sort of bridging that gap between what people want and what people are comfortable doing. And so for us in our organization we serve, the leader we sell to is typically sort of in their late 30s to early 40s, but the orgs sort of they run, are anywhere between sort of people in the early 20s to ranging all the way. And so as a business, we do need to think about experientially who that applies to, and frankly, a huge benefit that we have is that we have a global diverse team and we are building for ourselves and ultimately we are representative of our market, which helps a ton in having that empathy around who we're building for.
Chad: So you, or at least what I've seen from the marketing, you guys are leaning pretty heavily on hybrid work. Why?
Projjal Ghatak: We just think the pain is greater, right? So when 30 people are in the same room and working outta the same office, issues around alignment, clarity, visibility, et cetera, are not a burning piece or a pain point, right? And that's why we believe this problem that we're solving is not a new problem, right? This problems existed for a very long time, but there is a double confluence of the problem becoming more acute because the clarifying loops are a lot lesser when people are working in a hybrid setting. And b, generative AI provides us a brand new way to solve an age old problem by taking a lot of the friction out around hot topics like goals and feedback. And so for us, you know, as a problem solver, like I'm a doctor, I'm looking for the most complicated patient who needs my help the most. And typically for what we solve, hybrid organizations need more help. But we have a set of customers who are not hybrid who equally see value in the work that we do.
Chad: So how do you collect the performance data? So are you integrated into Salesforce, HubSpot, human capital management platforms? Where are you getting your data? Because I'm gonna need sales data, marketing leads data, attendance, promotion data, that kind of stuff. How do you get the data into your system so that your gen AI can actually mix it up and batch it into something that makes sense to me?
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah. So what exists in other systems is what we call targets, right? So that is sort of hard metrics around what people are achieving. We have a sort of CSB way of uploading that and keeping that going. We haven't done deep integrations yet with all of those platforms, although we are talking to people like Cobalt who have sort of super APIs, that can, that can sort of connect across the board. But actually what we help quantify a lot more is sort of the softer, qualitative behavioral feedback as well as sort of project work or skills work that sort of gets input 360 into the app in a micro manner. And then we create something called a prism summary at the end of it that can exist as a PDF or editable doc or a JSON that can get pushed into an HRIS. So sort of as a platform, we will eventually bidirectionally connect with every HRIS, whereby we'll pick up sort of employee data, as input in the early part and sort of be able to then push outputs on the other end and then sort of being able to pull in targets or tasks from other sort of tools that people would use on the other side.
Chad: So it sounds like right now you don't have the bidirectional that's going, so how often does somebody have to manually enter the information through spreadsheet or what, I mean if they get it, they've gotta pull it, they've gotta manually pull it from another system. They probably have to clean up the data and then push it into you guys. So there's a lot of manual work that's going on, right? How often, usually, does that happen?
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah. So typically there's a big lift that takes place in our organization. Usually at the start of a year or the start of a planning cycle, right? So for larger organizations there's usually a planning cycle that takes place that then sort of sets KPIs or targets at some cadence and sort of uploading that at one go at onboarding is pretty straightforward. And then people sort of keep that updated as they go. Now the kind of companies we work with often don't even have that level of robustness, in terms of sort of where things are kept. And so they're fine with sort of individuals also sort of keeping things updated as they go. What we care a lot more is feedback happening on an ongoing basis and then on a quarterly basis being able to spit out a prism summary that combines goals celebrates and improves. But the core habit that's much more regular and important to drive is driving observations as an individual as well as people working on a particular project to provide observations on a regular basis, which is as simple as an unstructured voice note, which we then convert to structured feedback, and then attach it to a particular goal.
Chad: Why aren't you guys focusing on the enterprise? Because the enterprise is one of the hardest performance-driven sets of organizations, number one, but the performance review still sucks. So being able to pull all of that data at scale just makes sense. Why haven't you guys focused narrowly on enterprise?
Projjal Ghatak: Great question. So ultimately you build what people ask for. And so we are in the process of getting our SOC 2 certification, and we will more progressively sell to larger companies. Asana today, at 440 million, sells exclusively to CIOs, and that's how they build their business. Asana would not be Asana if they started selling to CIOs on day zero. And so it is, if you're trying to build a disruptive end user product that drives a change in how things are done, you first need to build a coalition among the people they're trying to help, and then eventually push that into a functional organization like HR and IT over time. So as a company, if we become phenomenally successful, we will only sell to HR and IT one day. But HR and IT tend to not be early adopters of products. They tend to be late adopters or laggards in how they buy. And therefore, typically if you're selling to enterprise on day zero, you're not gonna be disruptive and driving change. You will then do what that enterprise is gonna ask you to do. And we're fundamentally changing how companies operate and therefore there's a sequential sort of process on how you go about it.
Joel: Chad, I don't know about you, but this sounds crazy expensive. JJ, talk about the pricing. What can a company expect to pay for OnLoop services?
Projjal Ghatak: Yes. So this is, this is where when you don't have all the engineers in California, things are a whole lot cheaper. So we sort of start at $500 a month and that sort of covers organizations of up to 50. And then we scale based on organizational size. Our typical sort of sweet spot today, is serving orgs between sort of 100 and 400 people. And that's an org. It may not, it may be a larger company, was the org that we serve. And that sort of works out to about $1,500, $2,000 a month. So it works out to be an 18k to a 25 or 30k contract annually, which is not, which is actually fairly reasonable based on what I've seen people buy at what prices in larger companies.
Joel: All right, JJ, that is the bell. It's time to face the Firing Squad. Are you ready, my friend?
Projjal Ghatak: I am ready.
Joel: All right. Chad, get him.
Chad: All right, JJ, I gotta say, so performance management is broken. You are 100% right, but it hasn't been fixed thus far. And you gotta ask yourself why? Right? You gotta ask yourself why, but it's broken. Totally get it. So I understand where you're going. Because I've been in management leadership position since I've been in my early 20s. And do you know what sucks about that position? Performance review. Not just people, I mean people suck, don't get me wrong. But performance review. So using gen AI to spit out summaries, bullets or whatever format the user wants to refresh their memory on their employees wins, losses, and overall performance is unique and wonderful. I mean it's like a breath of fresh air, my friend, if you're integrated into the systems that have the performance data, that's the big key. Right? You're not quite there yet.
Chad: There's still some work to get there. I believe you are leaning way too hard on hybrid because in all of those companies, I was even in the US military, we had to do those and they sucked. Right? [chuckle] So there's a lot of, I think, from what I'm listening to you here, whether it's your tam, it's your go-to-market, it's your customer profiles, all of it. It feels like you're still litmus testing. Right? And I get that, but my friend, you've been in this long enough, my advice is you pick a target, you hit that targets over and over and over until you hit that 2 million, 5 million, 6 million, then you sell this. Discipline, my friend. That's one of the things that right now you are missing. Litmus test time is over. This is, this bitch is ready to run. You're not running yet, so therefore gonna give you a golf clap. I think you're there. I just wanna see the discipline and see you just kill it, man.
Joel: All right, JJ, not too shabby, but it's my turn, my friend. So buckle up. I'm gonna start with the jockey on this one. I was telling Chad before you got on the call, I said, this dude is a baller. Like look at his LinkedIn profile, you know, his advisory roles, his role at Uber, like the jockey has got it going on, and even your co-founder as well.
Chad: Man crush, man crush alert, man crush.
Joel: We didn't talk much about the co-founder, but she's stellar too. So, like the jockeys at this company, I think, are, from what I can tell, really really solid. And I think you're the second Uber employee that we've talked to on a startup end, so that, like whatever's in the water at Uber, in terms of people that have gone on to start companies is pretty solid. So as I move on to that into the company itself, look, I think this is where companies are moving and this is where the world is moving. I think from a generational standpoint, younger people want that constant contact. They want that feedback loop. They want it all the time. And if you don't do that as a company, you're going to fall behind. Like there's just no way around it.
Joel: I think from Chad's point, managers want the same thing. They want an automated way to keep hands on their team, what's going on, check the pulse on a regular basis. I think that's all where the world is going and there is competition. I think you guys are gonna have a place in that, on that field, no question about it for me. I also think from a recruiting standpoint, people are kind of tired of being on the Jorbo wheel, hamster wheel of let's post another job that was the same job we posted six months ago. Let's like get people back in the whole system of hiring and interviewing, like just people are kind of tired of just being on that hamster wheel for eternity. They're looking at ways to upskill their people. They're looking at ways to make them feel better at work, at helping them become better, either human beings or employees.
Joel: So from all those counts, for me, like in raising money, I think the money's gonna come. I think, when the news story crosses our desk that you guys have raised $20, $25 million, it's not gonna surprise me whatsoever. I think you'll be an acquisition target for sure, for a lot of ATSs and other platforms out there. So for me, like this is a no-brainer. It is a big applause.
[applause]
Joel: Big applause from me. So JJ, big applause from me. Golf clap from Chad. So, take that for what it's worth. But you come out of the Firing Squad with your dignity intact and your face is not bloodied or scarred. So how do you feel?
Projjal Ghatak: That was great. I had a great time. Thank you. Y'all were not brutal at all.
Joel: Oh, you're welcome. We aim to please.
[laughter]
Joel: We aim to please. All right, JJ, for our listeners that wanna know more about you, where would you send them?
Projjal Ghatak: Yeah. LinkedIn's probably the best. And so search for OnLoop or JJ Ghatak and you'll find me. I read every message that comes through on LinkedIn. I may not reply to everyone, but I do read it.
Joel: Even the spam. All right, that is JJ Ghatak from OnLoop, Keanu Reeve's next new movie coming out this summer at onloop.com. Chad, another one in the can. We Out.
Chad: We out.
Outro: This has been The Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad & Cheese podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face The Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.chadcheese.com.
Comments