Professional Network Leads to Kriyari

Published by bruinbear on Tagged Startup Company, Job Search

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I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to leverage your professional and personal networks when looking for your next exciting employment opportunity. Sure, you could waste your time mulling through the various online recruitment tools like Hotjobs, Monster and Dice, but honestly speaking, those web 1.0 recruitment tools have done very little to help facilitate my process. In fact, as an owner of an IT staffing firm, GTI Solutions LLC, I can tell you that these tools have done more harm than good for companies by dramatically increasing the flow of resumes between employee and employer, thus requiring a far greater number of resources committed to filtering through resumes, with only a minimal increase in access to better talent. In fact, our “pitch” to clients was modeled around how inefficiencient these internet based recruiting tools made IT recruiting and how our firm had developed its own internal network of highly qualified candidates, eliminating the need to review the thousands of resumes that came in everyday from candidates around the world.

Sure, some of the newer, web 2.0 recruitment tools have been more effective, including those that I now use like Linkedin and The Ladders. However, I cannot emphasize enough the power of your own personal and professional network for finding great opportunities vs some of the easy to use online tools.

During my last visit to the Bay Area, I spent the majority of my time meeting with and speaking to venture partners and associates from across 10 different top tier VC firms. This was a strategic move on my part, knowing that an investment in my time, getting my name out to the “movers and shakers” of the start-up world would eventually bear fruit with introductions to companies with compelling value propositions. After nearly 3 weeks, I finally received my first introduction from Tim Chang with Norwest Venture Partners. Tim put me in touch with Anand Jagannathan, Founder and CEO of shopping start-up Kriyari after speaking with Venkat Mohan, NVP general partner, about the firm’s portfolio’s hiring needs.

Once the connection was made, it took a less than 24 hours to set up an in person meeting at Kriyari’s offices of the Plug and Play Techcenter in Sunnyvale. I have to say, the Plug and Play Tech center is incredibly reminiscent of the many “incubators” that sprung to life during the dot com boom. That being said, the entrepreneurial residents were a who’s who of tier 1 venture backed start-up companies including Peerant, Fastscale, Mobopia, Melodis, Sendori, and Retrevo, among many others.

After summarizing my business development experience at Shopzilla and explaining in detail the type of opportunity than I was looking for, early stage start-up, consumer internet, compelling value proposition, Anand provided a background on the company. Kriyari has built an shopping mall platform, partially developed based on Anands past direct marketing experience, that allows publishers to create customized, consumer relevant, shopping malls on publisher sites. Annad’s team has taken a step back from the product search driven model of today’s comparison shopping companies such as Shopping.com, Shopzilla and Pricegrabber and developed a model whereby consumers begin their online shopping experience in a similar fashion as they do in the offline world, by window shopping through the malls. I like the fact that Kriyari has taken the best parts of the shopping experience from the offline world and developed a system for implementing a similar experience online. I don’t know if what Kriyari is necessarily the “secret sauce” for the next generation of online shopping, but I commend Annad and his team for seeking out the offline shopping world to guide development of the Kriyari platform. As many of my long time colleagues know I have long advocated for the development of new shopping platforms to support the next wave of e-commerce, given that the existing platforms, namely, comparison shopping is fundamentally (for reasons that I will not go into here) flawed. In fact, many of my internal battles whilst at Shopzilla were primarily driven by my support for initiatives that went against the grain of the current operation and model.

So, I applaud Annand and his team for pursuing innovative ways to grow the overall ecommerce pie. Who knows, maybe they are in fact on to something here…check it out

http://washingtonpost.kriyari.net/
http://womenwine.kriyari.net/

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June 28th, 2007