This 26 y/o 10x'd Revenue Doing the Opposite of Every AI Startup | Paraform, John Kim

Intro

00:00recruiting. It's the most important thing you should be doing as a leader, as a company, yet it's so inefficient. And I heard from a recruiter that well respected in the industry that 5 years ago, if you reach out to 500 to 700 engineers, you could probably make a hire as a recruiter.

00:152 years ago, that number jumped to 1500 engineers to make one hire, which was already so difficult to manage. With AI recently, it's 5,000. So essentially, AI is actually making hiring a lot more noisier. It's bogging us all down. If you get reached out about thousand opportunities, it's not special anymore.

00:32Meaning comes from scarcity. So I think even more in the future, if it takes 5,000 emails to get one engineer hired, trust, relationships, and access, these things become more and more important. So I think that was our deliberate decision to work with recruiters rather than replacing them.

00:49Yeah, we paid out 50 million soon to our recruiters. Hey

The AI Startup That Pays Humans $50M

00:55guys, I'm John Kim, one of the founders and CEO of Parform. We uh raised 65 million uh to date and in 2025 we uh 10xed our revenue. We work with customers from early stage startups all the way to public companies uh like Palunteer, Rippling, Dakagon, A Bridge.

01:11Parapform is a a hiring platform that makes hiring exceptional talent as easy as pressing a button.

How to Find What Truly Matters in Your Life

01:26Ever since the age of four, I sort of moved around a lot uh because of my dad's job. So yeah, I lived in Singapore, Australia, LA, uh and Korea as well. When I was 11, 12. In Australia, like entrepreneurship and going out on your own is not very celebrated.

01:40You're sort of told to stay in your lane, like do what's sort of uh comfortable. My grandpa encouraged me uh to go to law school. He went to law school and he really wanted to be a lawyer but uh he had to sort of take a different path because of uh his family.

01:56And so growing up I always thought you know that was the goal and I I did but um there was definitely a moment uh that I remember that I um you know started uh living my life and treating my time and and what I'm going to do very very differently.

02:09I think I was 18 back then.

The Hospital Visit that Changed Everything

02:12I like was very sick for like three months and so um you know I went to like the hospital to get something checked up in Korea. I walked in and uh I was the only uh young person there. I remember a lot of people there were quite old like maybe in their 80s and '9s so it felt very out of place.

02:28I obviously didn't really think that anything could go wrong. I just thought like oh I'm young. I'm you know I'm invincible. That type of mindset. And when the results came out, the doctor sort of said like, "Hey, by the way, there's like something in your lungs and um you know, it could be something really bad."

02:43And I think when I heard that, everything changed. I started thinking, "Oh, well, in the most extreme sense, if I have only 1 year or 3 years left to live, uh what am I going to do? What am I going to do differently? How am I going to spend time?"

02:56And that actually really changed, I think, all of my brain chemistry and

Living on a 3-Year Timeline

03:01what I decide to do. back of my mind, I always knew that I wanted to start and build my own company. When it comes to thinking that it's a big decision to start a company, it's what I always wanted to do, what I wanted to dedicate my life to.

03:14I thought that, okay, when I'm like 75, 85 years old, that's like my timeline. So, I had, you know, 65 years to figure something out, right? So, if you think about it in your 65 year timeline, then all of a sudden you push things back, right?

03:27If you want to do something, you push it back. If you want to try achieve a goal, you think you have 10 years, 20 years. But um if you think about that 65 years in three-year terms, you are sort of forced to prioritize and then think about what you really want.

03:40I think maybe that event made me think, okay, I have 3 years to make that happen, so let's do it now. And I think it added that urgency to start for the next 3 years. Every 6 months, I had to get it checked up to see if it's anything bad. So there was this sort of anticipation every 6 months of like what's going to happen.

03:58And turns out it was uh sort of like a false alarm. But I look back to that moment and you know although it felt pretty terrible. Maybe it was actually a blessing in disguise.

AI Moves Fast, It Breaks Trust

04:12I was actually on a business trip to New York and that's when I met my co-founder Jeff at Parapform. So I went around asking uh other people around us uh which were mostly founders asking them what is your number one problem right now and how much would you pay us to solve it?

04:25Uh and almost all of them said uh hiring and they said they would pay us 40k per hire. So we were like hey maybe if we make five hires each this year you know that's like maybe equivalent of like a salary. So maybe this is a good business to start.

04:37So we set out on a journey to make five hires each. So the first thing we did was actually become recruiters ourselves.

The Two Pivots That Failed

04:44What we started doing was like we scraped the web. We looked at, you know, your Twitter profile, your GitHub profile, like everything really online about you and we sort of try to combine that with like your professional experience, like your LinkedIn, your resume.

04:55And then, um, you know, 3 months, 4 months in, we were not even close to making five hires, let alone one. And so, we were like, okay, like clearly this is like super inefficient. What should we do? While we were exploring the problem space, we realized like it's actually like trust, access, and relationships.

05:11I could find a great engineer at Facebook or OpenAI right now, but doesn't mean that person will respond to me or know me or even interested in the opportunity, right? Whereas like maybe if your friend reached out, you might consider the opportunity or someone you respect, right?

05:28So the next idea we pivoted to was a referral marketplace, referral platform where essentially our startup customers could post bounties, referral bounties like 5 10k for the engineers they were trying to hire and turn anyone in the world to your recruiter.

05:41But there was not much retention. Um I think we overestimated how many people each person knows, how well connected someone is, and um it wasn't like their main profession and job. So they um didn't come back to the platform. You release it to the market and no one wants it.

05:56I think that you know it wasn't great. We were sort of hitting a dead end for three four months. Nothing was happening and then um one user group started uh using it a lot. We saw that uh user group growing and these were like independent recruiters, recruiting agencies, head hunters and it made so much sense.

06:14They're very well connected compared to most people. Uh it's their job. It's their profession. They're financially incentivized. So they started sort of um coming back and using the platform continuously. And I think that's when we realized, oh, we, you know, built something people want and then it scaled to where Parapform is today.

06:30We're really focused on how do we match the right person to the right opportunity. That's done not by giving them a thousand options and telling them to choose, but giving them, you know, three or four that actually really match what they're looking for.

06:42When you don't use AI correctly, I think it loses meaning and makes things not special, if you will. I think the word special is basically directly correlated to scarcity and directly correlated to quality over quantity. I think maybe AI can make you know 70 80% of what recruiters do and automate that.

07:05But I think it's like the last sort of 20% like the human touch I think is like very very important. Meaning comes from scarcity.

Everyone Has a Night They Want to Give Up

07:18So, uh, at the time, um, I was actually in Australia trying to get my visa to come back to the US. The time zone is obviously really difficult. I remember my routine was sort of waking up at 11:00 p.m. and then um, working throughout the night to overlap with San Francisco time and then going to sleep at like maybe lunch or after lunch and then repeat.

07:36And we didn't even have an office. So, I used to go to my old uh, college uh, library to work there um, just in a booth. So when people saw me, they probably thought I was just like a student. It was like a weird feeling because it was a school that I dropped out of and I'm like in the library um trying to build my company.

07:52And I remember the way we got customers because we had no brand name was just pure hustle like just going door to door uh emailing people one by one. No like email automation tool or anything like that. Just reaching out. And so each customer was very very valuable.

08:07Like uh when they said yes, I want to try it out, it meant the world to us. And there

The First Big Customer Who Almost Dropped Us

08:12was this one customer uh called Hightouch. Uh they're like a AI marketing platform. I remember they were the first sort of uh company that it wasn't our friend or some connection. It was like a company that through our own effort and hustle we got.

08:25They were hiring like a director of engineering which is like a very important hire. And we felt very grateful that they trusted us to do such an important job for them. And so we got started. But um I remember like it was like 3:00 am at the library over and over again every day trying to make it work for that customer.

08:42One of the recruiters messaged us saying like, "Hey, we haven't been impressed with the quality of candidates uh and the experience. If you guys don't turn this around in the next 10 days, we we can't be a customer anymore." In the middle of

Visa Rejected, Company Almost Dies

08:55that, I heard my visa got rejected. Actually, most people get it approved on the spot, but uh for some reason, mine didn't get approved for the first time. It was definitely mental breakdown, not being productive, all these struggles. So, I couldn't fully focus um because it's almost like a company killing event.

09:11What failing a visa interview actually means is never being able to come back to the US. Maybe for some people it's just like, oh, let's try again. But for me, there was so much at stake. It was everything I built for, all the work I put in sort of going to nothing.

09:23And then I had responsibility to my co-founder as well. And uh I couldn't tell him the news because it's hard thing after hard thing after hard thing. I think the two things that kept me going was one like this responsibility this like if I don't do this this company will die you know I have this responsibility to make it work there's no other option than surviving and continuing so that was one the other one was actually a lot of like things were going on in my personal life as well like um friends and family and then I actually realized that oh other people

09:52have like pretty difficult problems too in life I then reflected whatever I'm going through right now at the time was something that I inflicted upon myself like I chose to start this company. I could have not done that. I chose to move here to the US and be based here.

10:08You know, I chose to apply for this visa. Like, you know, it's all like something that I chose to do. And there were a lot of people in my life who had problems and they didn't choose that. It wasn't within their control. And so, I think that was actually in a weird way encouraging as well.

10:22We were just like, oh, like maybe this is actually not that big of a deal. Like, you know, at the end of the day, I I wanted to try this. Um and so that gave me the energy back uh to sort of stand back up and and

Don't Find a Better Problem, Understand Your Problem Deeper

10:34continue to go. Yeah. You know, it turns out the visa thing was like some process issues, so it's all fine now. We actually ended up making a hire for Hightouch for the director of engineering. Hightouch told us that that hire took like 18 months.

10:50That role was open for 18 months. They tried everything out there. They tried recruiting agencies, other tools, job boards, and just nothing worked. And to do that within a month and a half with our product gave us a lot of conviction that this is going to work.

11:04And I think our customer actually saw that too. And so they reached out to one of their investor connections and said, "Hey, like what these guys are building, I've tried so many recruiting products in the past. I'm obsessed with this problem and none of it worked.

11:17Uh, but this is different. This is special." So he introduced us to uh our seed round investors. I remember my co-founder and I the next morning surprised and um all uh happy sort of like biking to their office and we presented for one hour just like our product.

11:32There was no pitch deck. We didn't even prepare for fundraising. We didn't even think we were fundraising. Actually, we just thought we were meeting them and they texted us saying like, "Hey, do you guys want to grab drinks at at 5:00 p.m. tonight?"

11:42And we were like, "Okay." And then we went and they just said, "Hey, like we really love what you're doing. I think you guys are doing something special." Uh so they gave us a term

Dig Deeper Until You Hit the Root Cause

11:50sheet and let our seed round uh that same day. I actually my analogy that I would give is uh going deeper and deeper and deeper like you're not going deep enough. You could at the surface just say hiring is very difficult but actually I think we understood the problem at a very high level and then did something to solve that.

12:06It's very easy to go hey like doing XYZ is difficult so let's go solve it but actually why is it difficult? Talk to users about it. You know what they do makes the problem inefficient or difficult. And I think that was the mistake we made first round and then like the subsequent attempts we dig deeper and deeper and deeper into the problem until we actually found the the root cause and I think that's when things started clicking.

12:29I see a lot of um people when they start a business or a company where they have this one idea they try it out for a little bit and they go ah actually it's not really working so try something again try something again. It actually takes like a lot more energy than most people think to like keep switching.

12:44Instead, what we did was we had a lot of conviction in the problem space. 110% conviction that this is the problem we need to work on. If you think you're going deep, you're probably still not deep enough. And so encouraging them to do that.

12:57Yeah.

Advice to Myself at 3AM in That Library

13:01If you could go back and sit across from the virgin of you who was in the library at 3:00 a.m. in Australia, what would you tell him? I would tell him to keep doing what you're doing. at the time it's hard to imagine everything we've achieved and everything that we will achieve uh in the future have that same conviction and I think that's kind of like what I still tell myself maybe like if I look back 5 years 10 years 20 years from now and look back to this moment maybe that might feel like the 3 a.m.

13:27every situation again. So I think keep going uh have conviction. Yeah.