Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another Philly Tech Connect podcast. Today I’m speaking with Denzel Geraldo, a new member of our community. Just recently met him at a startup pitch event he came to last week. Great guy, he’s a founder and CEO of two software companies. One’s like a software consulting recruiting company called in.com and another is a SaaS app for barbershops to help them manage their commissions and daily operations. So, we’re going to be talking today about all things Tech, about hiring, recruiting Dev Talent, about how you kind of plan to scale your applications, how you should structure your teams, anything else I can pick out of this guy’s brain. Denzel, how you doing, man?
Denzel: Doing absolutely amazing, thank God. It’s a pleasure to be on the podcast. Thank you very much, Dave.
Dave: Thanks, man. I appreciate you coming out, coming out last week and then already being on the podcast and just kind of being an engaged member of the community. It’s, you know, tell me a little bit about your journey, you know, what brought you to Philadelphia from Dominican Republic and just kind of, you know, the multiple software companies that you’re running.
Denzel: Absolutely, absolutely. So I come from the Dominican Republic and growing up over there, it was such a pleasurable experience. Coming from humble beginnings, it taught me a sense of gratitude and to always be grateful for every day and the things and the blessings that we get every day. And yeah, the way that I got into software, it was very interesting. I found myself being 11 years old one day and I was playing this game. I’m not going to disclose the name of the game, but they had this game that you had to pay to be able to get more benefits and stuff. And you know, coming from the Dominican Republic, $1 over there is like 50 pesos, 50-59 pesos and it’s a lot of money, especially for an 11-year-old. So back then I was thinking, “Hmm, if I don’t have money to be able to afford anything in this game, how would I be able to do it?” So I went on a journey to investigate on how to create video games and stuff like that and then I found programming. And just the first moment I got on it, it was like I just fell in love with it. And from that moment on, I was just coding every single day, improving on my skill sets and making sure that I am as proficient as I can. And when I was growing up and I saw that my family didn’t have as many resources, it was such an inspiration that I saw myself being 12 years old, 13 years old and I was like, “You know what? I developed these skills. I’ve been two years on it so far and let me see if I can make some money out of this to help my family push forward.” And from there, I started working online with different companies, with people that were in college that were doing their homework. And it was such a very pleasurable experience being able to work as an engineer at 13 years old. And from there, I was like, “You know, this is what is going to bring the future for me, for my family, and for the legacy that I wanted to bring to build.” Because since I was 12 and seeing different companies, different video game companies, I was like, “You know what? One day, I’m going to open my own company and that is going to be my dream.” And thank God, I was able to fulfill that promise and we’re here on it and loving every single second of the game. I currently run two software companies: one is inwell.com, which is a software consulting and recruiting company, and one is Pereni, which is a barbershop software as a service B2B service that offers barbershop owners the ability to manage their commissions and the day-to-day operations in real time. And not only that, but they can be outside of the barbershop and all the time be able to see how their barbershop is performing and how their barbers are performing, which is something that before they didn’t have the opportunity to do so because they had to count every single ticket. They have this system which they call tickets that they write down, like the price of the service and the type of haircut that they did, and it was such a tedious process for them to count every single one of those tickets every day at the end of the day and at the end of the week, calculate the percentage to know how much they’re going to pay. The barbershop owners, the barbers in the barbershop. And that was when the idea came into my mind. I was like, “You know what? I can automate this process. This is something that they do not need to be doing and it’s like they’re wasting one or two hours a day, depending on how busy the day was, to make sure that they count things, that they calculate commissions correctly. And they can just invest that time into doing more haircuts or focusing on growing the barbershop into the next level instead of just having to be over there in the daily operations of the business.” And it brings me so much inspiration and so much gratitude to be able to impact people’s lives that way, both in inwell, my software consulting service company, and recruiting, and Pereni. We’re creating great impact. For example, at inwell, we’re working with big brands such as Accenture, Informatics, and we have also collaborated with companies such as the NIH. And it is very pleasurable to be able to because we have developed this system that is a recruiting system that we apply to each one of the engineers that we hire at the company that assures us that we’re hiring a great talent engineer, very passionate about what they’re doing, and that they have potential for the future for growth. And currently right now as well…
Dave: Yeah, man. Let’s dive into that. This is great. There’s a couple of things I already have in mind I want to talk about, but I want to make sure I don’t miss anything. So let’s start for just a second about, you know, the Dominican Republic and your experience there. You know, the DR isn’t really known, to my knowledge, for producing a lot of engineering talent. I mean, you know, we think of companies like India, we think of Eastern Europe, and I don’t know if I’ve ever, other than you, met like a programmer from the Dominican Republic. So, you know, what’s the ecosystem like there? Like, were you mostly self-taught or, you know, what were the resources that are available to learning programming from where you’re from?
Denzel: Yes. So one of the blessings that we have in today’s world is that we have the internet and we do not need to go to college or do this and that to be able to learn a new skill. And we can just Google it and all of the information is already over there. Things that people pay millions of dollars or thousands of dollars is available to you over there. You just have to do some thought and research and keep up and just focus on it. So, yeah, over there, the Dominican Republic, believe it or not, there is so much incredible talent and people that are extremely talented and extremely passionate about what they do. And not only that, but their work ethic, they’re extremely great. They have this drive and this motivation to themselves that they always want to push forward. They always want a new vision. They always want to do something new. And that’s something that in programmers, it really drives your career very forward. And I really admire a lot of developers from the Dominican Republic. We have in my company developers in the USA and the Dominican Republic. And the ones that work with us from the Dominican Republic, I admire them so much. And that’s one of the cultures of my team. Whenever we make a hire, we ask ourselves, “Do I admire this person?” And also I love, love, and I cannot describe even how much I love just to hire people that intimidate me with how capable they are, with their skill sets. And sometimes leaders, they don’t want to hire people that intimidate them because they don’t want to feel like they’re in the lower end of things. But it’s the other way around. You don’t want to be the bottleneck of your business. You want your talent and the people in your company to grow the company, not for you to just be the only brain in the operation. And that’s why we have that as part of our values of the company.
Dave: That’s great, man. I want to dive into more about identifying talent, but before I kind of get to that point, I want to hear a little bit about the software product. It’s a cool niche, you know, barber shops. It’s, you know, a lot of times everyone’s looking into what I’ll call like the really sexy kind of industries, but there are so many underserved and neglected industries, and I think barber shops maybe one of them. And that maybe something that you stumbled on to. How did you learn about the problems that the owners were having and that they were spending this time with the manual calculation of the work?
Denzel: So, back when I got here in the United States for like one to two years when I was 15 years old, I was working as a barber. And while I was working as a barber in my free time, I was freelancing on my computer, making sure that I stayed up to date with my programming skills. And I always had my vision of moving forward and into my career as having software companies and growing my companies. So, I saw that as a first step. And then I just saw that problem and I was like, “This is something that I can indeed solve.” And at 15 years old, it came to me the idea that I’m going to build this product and I’m going to bootstrap it to revolutionize the barber shop industry. Because as you know, and you mentioned it yourself, the barber shop industry within the tech environment is really neglected. Not a lot of people pay attention to it. And that was something that I really identified as well and that caught my attention. And that it’s something that can be really improved. Because as you know, most of the barber shops now, they’re still doing day-to-day operations written down by paper manually. And just having a software that automates all of that process for you is like a pain reliever. Before, for example, they had the stress that they have to do all of this manual process at the end of the day. But they no longer have to do that and they can just go home and have a nice drink and relax and be by themselves and their families and just enjoy the rest of the day.
Dave: Yeah. I mean, you’re touching on all the right points when you hear about software products and finding a pain in the market and saving them time so that they can just enjoy themselves or do other things to grow their business. It makes perfect sense. And it’s always interesting, you know, where people get this industry knowledge from. The fact that you actually were in the industry for a year or two is really unique because I suspect that not a lot of people have a crossover between barbering and software development, right? That’s not a common for one person to have both experiences. So that’s a really unique opportunity for you to service that market. And fortunately, I also notice you have a great haircut. You have a great fade. It’s great you get to carry some of those skills with you while you’re programming now too.
Denzel: Thank you.
Dave: Let’s talk about hiring developers. This is a real common pain point for entrepreneurs. There’s a lot of people with an idea, a vision. Maybe they’re good at marketing, sales, or operations, but they’re not necessarily technical people. They need to find a CTO or they maybe they’re not necessarily ready to maybe give up half their company or whatever is necessary. They just want to hire a developer. You mentioned things like finding people that you admire and people that impress you with their tech skills. What are some of the processes and approaches you take to finding good developer talent?
Denzel: A couple of the tips that I always share with people is that founders, especially non-technical founders who don’t know how to code or don’t know how to identify great programmers, that’s sometimes an issue. Something very important if you’re in that position is to identify someone that you know that is relatively technical, very technical, or just hire somebody to be able to screen the software engineer and make sure that they have the right talent. Because these are some of the issues that happen to startups whenever they don’t find the right CTO or the right talent for the business. They start the product, everything’s great for the first one to two years. Once the startup bootstraps and goes to the sky, it’s like the product cannot keep up with the market because it’s so slow, it has so many issues. And that’s something that you really have to test at the beginning when you’re looking for talent. You want to look for somebody that is experienced enough and have the background record of building applications and architecture for that application that is going to be sustainable for the future. Because at the beginning, it might not sound like a big deal. “Oh, okay, we can just build this software. It doesn’t matter, we have the MVP.” But over time, it’s like the product needs to be taken care of. And that taken care of should have been done from the beginning of things because maybe you structured the database in the wrong manner that affected the future features that you’re going to build in the future. Maybe you just didn’t structure the servers’ architecture in the right way to be able to scale the service horizontally or vertically to be able to scale for millions of users in the future. And that’s some of the scenarios that happen when you don’t hire, for example, the right CTO or the right software engineer. And one of the main points that I always like to advise new founders and people that are hiring for software engineers is to get a person that’s relatively technical that can identify someone that’s good or not. With technical skills, as far as coding algorithm questions, don’t give this an intermediate very or very hard coding algorithm questions because most of the talent that are really good at coding, they’re not really focused on that. They’re focused on architecture. They’re focused on the structure of an application. So you just have to test a basic coding algorithm question to make sure that that talent is capable of doing some problem solving, identifying an issue, and coming up with different scenarios to solve that issue. And the perfect way to do that coding algorithm question is to keep it short, too, because, for example, you can just do a 10-minute coding algorithm question, very easy. But the 10 minutes is what is the hard part because in that 10 minutes, you will see if that developer is able to handle pressure, you will see if that person is able to problem solve while they’re also going through pressure and while of the pressure of going through an interview and while they also have to solve it in a very quick manner. So that is something really important that you have in a talent because when you are a startup, you’re going to come up with so many problems and you want a person that is able to solve problems right away in a timely manner. And another one of the tips that I always recommend as well is that you ask them about the most complex problem that they ever solved. And if they are really talented and they are really passionate about it, you will see it. You will see automatically how their eyes are going to get bright and they’re going to give you so many details about that problem that they solved because when they’re really involved in coding that way, bless you, when they’re really involved in coding that way, it’s like talking about something that they’re passionate, a problem that they really struggled with. It’s really passionate for them because they never had that opportunity to explain it to someone. So, you taking the adventure to ask them that question, they’re going to be so excited to explain to you more forward in details about that. And last one but not least is that when you’re hiring for senior software engineers or a CTO, is to also include a design algorithm question. For example, you give them a diagram application, for example, like Lucidchart.com or Draw.io. And those are platforms that allow you to diagram an application. And over there, you ask them, for example, to structure an out system for an application from the client perspective to the server, how it’s supposed to work and how the client is going to authenticate the process. And with that question, you will be able to see how far and deep their knowledge goes as far as how to structure an application and how to make sure that it’s scaled. If they just come up with a simple solution, that might not be able to scale because you cannot outscale, for example, the out service that is might be not the software engineer that you want for that position or the CTO. But if they come up with a system that, for example, they have, and I’m going to go a little bit technical here, they have, for example, JWT tokens that you can just process through different servers and they’re able to decrypt that token to make sure that that token is valid across different services and that they don’t depend across each other. You know that you have a possibly great engineer in there because he’s structuring things in a way that can possibly and can most probably scale up in the future without an issue.
Dave: Yeah, man, those are awesome tips. So many things that you just mentioned there, I want to make sure that I highlight them because these are the important things that people need to understand. I’ve been through them myself as well as someone who’s run a SaaS product before but doesn’t really have a technical background. It’s amazing how quickly the problem of scalability comes up. It is not an issue where it’s just like, until you’re Amazon, you don’t really need to worry about it. But even when you start to have just some active users, if things aren’t structured right, if you haven’t kind of planned for the future, you will start to see problems, slowdowns, errors will pop up as a result. And everything that you identified about giving these type of architectural and structural problems for an engineer to answer, as well as the expectation that if they’re really passionate about the work that they do, that they’re going to have a complex problem to be able to speak about in depth. People, you know, if you ask anybody about something they’re really interested or excited about, they’ll talk your ear off. And you kind of expect the same thing in that scenario. So, I know exactly where you’re going with that. So, hey, this is a great talk, a great addition to the podcast. People that want to learn more about you and the companies that you’re working on, where should they go?
Denzel: Yes, absolutely. And it’s really interesting that you mentioned that, finding someone that is really experienced on development, you might not have someone close to your network. And that is one of the reasons why great companies such as the Ax Informatics, as I probably mentioned, work with us because they know we have the technical capability to identify the talents and we provide them talent experts and very talented talent. And they have continued to work with us among years and the relationship is still going to move forward because every single talent that we provide to their company is high quality and they even put them through a last screening section to make sure that the talent aligns with the vision and the culture of the company. Because culture as well is really important. You can have the greatest talent in the world, but if they don’t match with the culture of your company, it’s just not going to be a great fit. But yeah, we, I, people can reach out to me through LinkedIn, Denzel Geraldo, D-N-Z Geraldo, G-I-R-A-L-D-O, and through Instagram as well. It’s the same thing, Denzel Alo. You guys can find me and I’ll be happy to connect and be able to help in anything that I can help with.
Dave: Awesome. Appreciate it. Thanks for being a member of the community. You can also reach out to Denzel on our Slack group. I hope to see you at more events. I hope to see you in more events, Dave, as well. Thank you very much for having me in the podcast. God bless you.