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Similaire à A Conversation with Francesco Scalambrino, Jet HR’s co-Founder and Chief Product Officer
Similaire à A Conversation with Francesco Scalambrino, Jet HR’s co-Founder and Chief Product Officer (20)
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A Conversation with Francesco Scalambrino, Jet HR’s co-Founder and Chief Product Officer
- 1. Musixmatch, Bending Spoons, Casavo, Scalapay, Gellify, Talent Garden, Poke House, Lambda Alpha, and Santagostino. Last year, the firm raised a pre-seed funding round of €4.7 mn in one of Italy’s largest pre-seed rounds. The company's mission is to help firms simplify and streamline HR activities; increase automation and productivity through digitalization of tasks, and enable rapid scalability of digital HR services. Most of all, the firm’s greatest declared ambition is to help firms reduce bureaucracy. Francesco Scalambrino, a mechanical engineer by training, is a passionate product designer and an emerging en- trepreneur with a solid international background in the tech industry, par- ticularly in the HR-tech space. Before his current role, he held senior manage- ment positions at two international Q&A I n this latest edition of the “For- ward Thinkers’ Talks Series”, Ivo Pezzuto, Professor of practice of Global Economics and Digital and Sus- tainable Innovation at ISM Paris/New York and Founder and Director of “Ivo Pezzuto Forward-Thinking Lab,” inter- views Francesco Scalambrino, Jet HR Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer. Jet HR, based in Italy, is a promising and fast-growing tech startup that aims to deliver innovative, seamless, and user-friendly digital HR services to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) through its proprietary software-as-a- Service (SaaS) platform. It was founded in December 2022, and in a relatively short period, has attracted the atten- tion and capital of several prominent Italian venture capitalists, investors, entrepreneurs, and leaders of firms such as Exor Ventures, Satispay, unicorn companies, as Country Man- ager -Italy at PayFit and Product Direc- tor at Oyster. Readon >>>> Ivo Pezzuto: Francesco, please explain to us what is Jet HR all about. Why do you think that Jet HR is a ‘game- changer’ for Italy? What is so unique about its business idea and business model? What is the innovation gap that your company is aiming to fill with this newventure? Francesco Scalambrino: I will an- swer your question step by step, start- ing with the initial part of the question. Jet HR is a new platform that aims to provide easy HR solutions for compa- nies that have 1 to 600-700 employees. Typical tasks provided by Jet HR’s
- 2. | The Global ANALYST | 39 | February 2024 | SaaS platform for its corporate clients include: hiring and onboarding employ- ees, and managing employees’ payroll and their bonuses, holidays, and ex- pense reports. The service also includes, training employees and assuring firms’ compliance with job security regula- tions. We also provide laptops to firms for their employees. The core services are centered on the employee directory and payroll, but we offer a modular and horizontal product that can aggregate multiple services. We streamline user experience and facilitate the company’s handling of HR tasks within a single platform, rather than relying on mul- tiple service providers for the same tasks. In addition, some of the service providers might not even deliver digital solutions. Regarding the second part of the ques- tion, we believe that Italy is a lovely op- portunity for Jet HR since, currently, the right technologies are available; the country is ready to embrace digital transition, and the higher level of regu- latory complexity and bureaucracy in the country may favor streamlined solu- tion which provides a much better user experience. We believe we have a first- mover advantage by providing a simpli- fied solution targeted directly to the end-user, that is, the companies that use the HR Tech services. This is a more viable value creation opportunity for our business than selling complex soft- ware (pro software) solutions, which re- quire specialized skills to be used, to other service providers and intermedi- aries, who will then sell their products to the end-users. This way we can disintermediate the market and di- rectly serve the SME users with a better solution for them. IP: What are the opportunities and challenges of internationalizing a digi- tal platform business model? FS: I will try to provide a structured an- swer. Internationalizing products that are subject to regulation, like our prod- ucts, is very difficult. In a country like the United States, for example, the market size is large and attractive enough to encourage firms to innovate and build new products and services. The regulation there is quite harmo- nized and there are only some differences among the states. Even the language is the same across the whole country, and a good quality digital in- frastructure is avail- able almost every- where. In Europe, al- though the overall market is big and at- tractive, it is much more fragmented than in the US. Besides, there are also several other differences among countries in terms of language; the level of digital maturity, market structure, and some aspects of the regulatory environment related to labor laws and tax codes. Hence, expanding the business plat- form abroad inmultiple European coun- tries can be quite challenging due to fragmented markets and significant differences in the regulation. In fact, even for markets which might seem to be quite similar to one another such as, Italy and Spain, the interna- tional expansion of the platform model abroad often may require rebuilding half of the product from scratch in order to fit the local market and regulatory requirements. In some countries for ex- ample, accountants also provide pay- roll, labor law, and some HR services, while in others there is a clear separa- tion between those who deliver account- ing services and those who provide pay- roll and HR services. Thus, for a com- pany whose goal is to provide a simple user-experience to the customer, deal- ing with multiple countries regulatory complexities is particularly difficult. Our belief is that a platform business should first pursue a leading position in one specific country (in our case this is Italy) before diluting efforts in other countries. We will consider expanding in the future to other markets but only after reaching a strong position in the first market, and probably progressing gradually one country at a time. Other startups in our industry, in my opinion, tried to scale up the business too fast in multiple countries (four to five) but since they were not big enough, eventu- ally they ended up diluting their re- sources in multiple highly regulated en- vironments. Obviously, this strategy turned out to be very inefficient. Though, some companies have also pur- sued M&A strategies to grow faster in multiple countries in our industry but our belief, as stated, is that a gradual internationalization model, one country at a time, is probably a more robust so- lution, especially when market frag- mentation is quite strong. IP: In terms of talent pool and avail- ability of great talents with digital skills, how would you describe the dif- ferences among various countries based on your experience? FS: For sure in Italy, we don’t lack tal- ents. We have good schools and good de- velopers, and especially, good design- ers. The challenge for us today in Italy is that in our specific space (SaaS B2B ecosystem) we do not have enough firms operating in the same space, thus we have to grow our talents since we cannot hire them from competitors. This is quite different from my previous work experience in Paris, France, which has a very good ecosystem in terms of startups, and where there is a wider tal- ent pool in the digital space and a larger number of unicorns. In our business, we need talents who speak the local lan- guage and understand the local country’s laws and regulations. This can make the recruiting process a bit more challenging in countries with a more limited specialized talent pool. IP: Francesco, what are the corporate values and the organizational culture DrIvoPezzutowithFrancescoScalambrino Q&A
- 3. | The Global ANALYST | | February 2024 | 40 at Jet HR? How do you build a strong entrepreneurial culture and highly mo- tivated and high-performing teams in your firm?How do you recruit, train, and reward your staff? FS: If I have to summarize the answer in only a few words, I would say that the only thing that matters to us, at Jet HR, is the speed of iteration. We are very extreme in this aspect. To scale up the business, we need to iterate fast. In our industry, there are a lot of non-digital players or digital players that produce software that is not easy to use. These incumbents have a lot of financial re- sources, but usually they are slow, de- spite having a lot more resources than we do. Thus, our competitive advantage is in the speed of iteration. When we re- cruit new talents, we seek to achieve a good match between the candidate’s skills, attitudes, and aspirations and our customer-centered culture, our rapid experimentation approach, and our strong commitment to speed of it- eration between customers and our teams. We also believe very much in empowering our teams. We have a lean organization with a minimal hierarchy. We tend to hire senior profiles and we grant them broad decision-making au- tonomy. This is a key component of our company culture. For example, in prod- uct positions like designers and engi- neers, we do not have junior profiles. Also, our company operates as a fully remote organization and there is a great reliance on mutual trust. Speed, trust, and autonomy (i.e., limited hier- archy and few rules) are key building blocks of our corporate values and cul- ture. This lean organizational model also contributes to keeping overhead costs low. Leadership in our organiza- tion is widely spread among our teams since we attract, recruit, and develop great talents with an entrepreneurial mindset, who are highly committed to our mission, vision, and corporate val- ues. As stated, we often recruit senior people, thus they are more empowered and require less mentoring. When a firm raises the bar so high in recruiting, then playing the role of a leader in the organi- zation becomes a much easier job. IP: We are living in an era of great transforma- tions, frontier innova- tion, and exciting new disruptive technologies such as AI, generative AI, LLM (Large Lan- guage Models), etc. Sev- eral HR tech firms are already operating in this space such as SeekOut, HireVue, Workable, Beamery, Fuel50, Eight- fold, Fetcher, Textio, Paradox, Ideal, Entelo, and Skillate. Is your firm currently following this trend and planning to develop AI-driven HR tech services? FS: At the beginning of our activity, we were not focused much on thistrend, but now we are starting to do tests, espe- cially in the customer support processes using our proprietary content. The goal of this experimental phase in the use of AI is to streamline and improve our in- ternal processes. Ivo Pezzuto: At this stage of your firm’s growth trajectory, what is on your radar in terms of KPI dashboard (i.e., scalability, revenues, margins; EBITDA, cash flows, NFP, productivity indicators, customer satisfaction indi- cators, conversion rates, etc.)? FS: One of the good things about being in a B2B SaaS Business is that most firms in this space share some similar metrics. At the same time, there are a lot of metrics that one can follow, so it is important to choose the right ones for the specific growth stage of the firm. For our company’s current stage, what we consider our “North Star Metrics” (NSM) is the Monthly Recurring Rev- enue (MRR), which is the predictable total revenue that a company expects to receive every month from all the active subscriptions, and the Annual Recur- ring Revenues (ARR), which refers to the projected revenues over one year, in other words, they are the monthly recur- ring revenues multiplied by 12. A sec- ond tier of key metrics we regularly monitor are related to Customer Satis- faction and Customer Retention. In the beginning, we were just undertaking qualitative studies on the customer ex- perience through regular conversation with them and reading their feedback, tickets, andreviews, whereasnowwe are measuring much more quantitative in- dicatorson customerexperience and cus- tomer satisfaction. We will soon intro- ducethe NetPromoter Score (NPS) since we need to boost growth and we believe that a significant part of our growth en- gine will depend on users’ sharing in their communities the experience they have had with our SaaS services. We hope that they will say that this tool is completely different from whatever they have experienced before. This type of Word-of-Mouth (WOM) communication can significantly boost our growth. Our third tier of key metrics includes Gross Margin. Our top priority, at this stage, is still growth but the gross mar- gin is gaining more importance. So, I would say these three tiers of metrics are indicators for our firm. In summary, our goal is to reduce bu- reaucracy and help firms reduce time and resource allocation to manage com- plex and time-consuming administra- tive obligations for HR activities. Our SaaS platform aims to fill the gap in the market through its simplified and user-friendly solution by automating activities and streamlining processes. We are eager to scale up this business and to have a positive impact in the market. Reference # 20M-2024-02-09-06 Q&A Interview conducted by Ivo Pezzuto. (©2024 Ivo Pezzuto’s Forward-Thinking Lab All Rights Reserved.)