EP7: Finding Product-Market Fit with B2B products, with Paul Sawaya, founder Human Interest ($1b valuation)

Paradigm Shift

Summary:

Conversation with Paul Sawaya, co-founder of Human Interest, $1b company that makes it easy for SMBs to provide 401k savings plans to their employees, and helps employees save for their retirement.

We cover so many interesting topics in this conversation across the Human Interest story, numerous lessons learnt, and technologies he's most excited about for the future.
Episode Highlights:

1. Early experiences like building an FB app at Bloomberg
2. Interviewing with Emmett Shear to interview at Justin.TV
3. How big company vs tiny startup experience made him want to start a company
4. Spending 2 years exploring problems and ideas
5. Challenges and lessons from wandering the wilderness
6. Key lesson: focussing on problems first before jumping into futuristic projects
7. Got excited about solving 401k access problems which led to Human Interest
8. Only 20% small companies offered 401ks due to setup, admin and cost challenges
9. Product innovation: automating operational work to lower cost structures and expand access
10. Building on top of back-office solutions to learn/move fast, then moving in-house
11. How they moved fast to get early customers for feedback and validating demand
12. How to spend time during exploration/sabbatical: establish a routine and talk to lots of people
13. Approaching GTM through an effective partnership and integration strategy
14. Cleaning up some shady 401k practices by offering better, sustainable solutions
15. Transitioning out of day to day Human Interest work to spend time with early stage startups
16. Exploring new ideas for his new project and things he's excited about
17. Exciting breakthroughs other people might be under-appreciating: Web Assembly to run high intensity server side compute locally in the browser, and AI to reimagine user interfaces
18. Prototyping to explore and learn new things
19. Ability to enter ambiguous, messy situations and find a path forward
20. People who gave him an early break that he is grateful for
21. Power of developing personal values as a guiding light

Links:

• Read more about Human Interest: https://humaninterest.com/
• Follow Paul on Twitter: https://twitter.com/automin

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