Four Exits, $92M, and a New Bet on Global AI Talent

Hank Levine: The very first thing you should do before you start building your product is you should build a financial model. I have seen so many times where they spend nine months building something and then there's no market for it. [Intro]

Mark Gordon: Guys, I'm very excited to be here with a very special guest. I'm here with Hank Levine, who is a serial entrepreneur, has built multiple companies, has had four exits totaling more than ninety-two million dollars. And he has two specific companies that we're gonna talk about here today. One is Be Additive and the other one is Talentive. So really excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining us.

Hank Levine: Thank you, Mark. I'm looking forward to it.

Mark Gordon: Awesome. So I know you've been on a bunch of different podcasts and we like to keep things a little bit different here, but I'm kind of gonna ask you the standard question to start. Take me a little bit on your journey for how you ended up here today and working on these two exciting new companies.

Hank Levine: All right. Well, I'm a I'm a serial entrepreneur. So I would say there's at least three times I've pretty much completely reinvented my career. My early career was in home automation companies, very high-end home automation companies, very bleeding edge before the industry was ready for it. Then I worked for a succession of venture capital-backed software companies, mostly doing telecom back office software. For the last 20 years, I've been involved in founding and running global recruiting companies.

Mark Gordon: Awesome. And what made you decide to get into that world? I mean, obviously there's tremendous opportunity in the space and it was growing, but was there anything else specifically about your past experience or your journey that made you think this was the right spot for you?

Hank Levine: Well, the way I got into recruiting, I think very few people plan to go into recruiting. Most people just accidentally fall into it. And I would say I was that way also. I was running a software startup. Again, telecom back office software, very geeky software. It was a company that we had twenty-eight people. Twenty-six of them are Indian. So we had this whole team of coders who are of Indian origin. And one day one of our software developers asked me if I would help his cousin, who had started a company in India and didn't really know much about strategy and marketing. And could you help him out? So I said, sure, I'll help him out. So I spoke with him very smart guy, very terrible when it came to business, but very, very good technically. I coached him a few times, but he really wasn't picking things up. But in spite of himself, his business turned out to be very successful, mostly because of cost arbitrage. At those days, India was probably like one-tenth the price of the US. So when he had success, he told a bunch of his buddies about me and everyone started contacting me. Can I come in and meet with you? Either being naive or nice, I met with all of them and a bunch of them did pretty well. And I watched that and I said, Boy, I can raise money. I understand how to run a business so much better than these guys. I just never been to India. I gotta get over there and I'll do I'll do a much better company than these guys who are doing, who are being successful pretty much in spite of themselves. So I got this company to hire me from Bangalore. Turned out it was it wasn't a very good company, wasn't very ethical, but I got over there a bunch of times. I learned how to how India works, at least from a business perspective. And so I started my own recruiting company. Our recruiters were almost all in India and later in the Philippines, and we grew to about 950 recruiters.

Mark Gordon: So I in doing some research for this and kind of learning about your journey, it seems like you have you have a high tolerance for risk, but then also when things don't work out or they're not exactly what you expect, you seem to have a real disposition towards kind of shrugging it off and falling forward almost naturally, where you know, you even just the way you just said that now it's like turned out not to be an ethical company. And so what? I took advantage of this and that, I moved forward with it. Is that something that you've developed over time, or is that kind of always been your disposition?

Hank Levine: Well that's a that's a tough question for me to answer. I think as an entrepreneur, you know, not all my companies have been successful. I've had some pretty big implosions too. But you have to have a thick skin. One of the things I always found fascinating about entrepreneurs is entrepreneurs not only have to take risks, but they have to convince other people to take risk. And if you're successful, everyone says, boy, you're a brilliant visionary. And if you're not successful, this the same person who did the same thing is now a terrible person because he convinced all these people to take a risk with him. So I have a funny saying, but I think it's really true. The key to success is to be successful.

Mark Gordon: I like that. I and it's not lost on me as somebody who found their entrepreneurial spirit from sports. You know, when coaches win, they're geniuses, and when they lose, they're an idiot. And usually the margin is one player making one play one way or the other, right? But that's how we characterize people after the fact. So when you've had multiple successful companies, and this is a conversation that we're having every single day on podcasts or just generally right now. It is, you know, it is our hypothesis that we live in a world where the barrier to building almost any product is lower than ever. And that as a result, distribution is sort of everything. So when you think about these new companies or just distribution in general, or how business has changed over the last 10 years in terms of how to the importance of having marketing and sales locked in for a product, do you think that there's been a significant shift and it's more important than ever? Or do think that's more just kind of a narrative? That people like me are pushing because, you know, we're on the sales and marketing side of things.

Hank Levine: I don't think it's a narrative, but I think it's complicated. All right. So particularly when you're talking about tech companies, they've never been so easy to start. And you know, there's a lot of talk about AI destroying jobs. And I think that most likely in the short run it will destroy tasks, not jobs, but jobs are made up of tasks. But I also think that AI is making it incredibly easy to start companies. And over time there's gonna be often a new company started that are gonna actually most likely hire a lot of people. But what AI is also doing is changing distribution because it's making it so easy to do mass distribution. I am telling you with no exaggeration, I get forty sales emails a day and they're all from bots. And sometimes they're they you can see that they've done a little research, they've gone to my LinkedIn profile, they've gone to our websites, so it's not a completely generic pitch, but there's just so many of them. And so it's making it was always hard to reach people with cold calling or with cold emails, but I think it's even harder now. And well and just because there's so much there's just so much spam out there. And now you see a lot of companies building agents where agents are contacting companies and agents are responding to the agents. So you really see that in recruiting, the industry I'm in. You see candidates, you know, they don't even look at what they're applying to. They just have a create an agent and the agent applies to a thousand jobs for them. And then on the company side, they get so many resumes that they don't even read them. They just have agents sorting through them and shortlisting people. So that can make it tough. I think what that what it really comes down to is at the end of the day, you gotta meet people.

Mark Gordon: Yeah, I agree.

Hank Levine: That's true.

Mark Gordon: I invested a tremendous amount of time in networking, and that was not something that I was doing in my career 10 years ago. So in fact, that's why we're both here, probably. Let's talk about Talentive. Why don't you kind of walk me through the argument for this new company for you and kind of what problem that you're specifically trying to solve?

Hank Levine: Talentive is the name of a product that's in one of the Be Additive companies. So its parent company is called Be Additive Tech. But Be Additive has two other companies, one's a staffing company, and one is what we call a knowledge process outsourcing company that places employees and contractors from 43 countries around the world. So the way talent has started, in my last company, I told you I ran a pretty big recruiting company. And if you remember during COVID, there was a terrible shortage of nurses. And all these healthcare facilities were just desperate to hire nurses. They would pay anything for a nurse. And there were three companies that started and they built these nurse marketplaces. They were really apps on a phone where nurses could register. And then they placed them in these healthcare facilities. And these businesses took off like crazy. Three of them went from being brand new, no revenue, to a billion dollars of revenue in three years. Now, after COVID, they've come way, they've crashed way down. But at that time, my company, we were sourcing and getting a lot of nurses to register into these networks. And I watched with both amazement and jealousy as these companies grew and grew and grew. They made tons of money and we were sort of doing all the heavy lifting but not making hardly any money. And so it was very obvious in recruiting, when you're in a service industry, you just don't get anywhere near the valuation that you do if you have a product company. And I built a lot of products prior to going into recruiting. So I wanted to get back into it. So at Be Additive, I started with seven people from my last company. They're running the recruiting parts of the company, but I'm running the product part of the company, which is Talentive. So in staffing, in staffing, you don't create markets. You respond to where people are hiring. And in general, the staffing business has been pretty bad for the last three years, but there's always pockets that are red hot. The one area that's red hot is senior AI talent. There's just so much money flowing into it. You know, I go out to Silicon Valley, I'm going out later this week again. And when I talk to people there, I have conversations that blow my mind. I mean, people will say things to you like, Well, my company's only raised thirty million dollars. And they don't understand how that sounds to the rest of the world. I you

Mark Gordon: Yeah.

Hank Levine: know, you tell someone in the Midwest, you've only raised, you know, I raised thirty million dollars, you've raised more money than anyone in their city. And so when you raise money like that, your investors become very, very impatient. It's so competitive. There's so many companies being funded and it's build, build, build, build. But the people who can really build these companies and by that I mean not only build a an enterprise grade secure product with the right team and all the go-to-market strategies and all the things you really need to do to be successful in a very competitive market, there's hardly any of them. And so these funded startups are all competing for the same talent. They can't find people locally. The people's salaries are mind-boggling high. And even when they're willing to pay the salaries, a lot of these people turn it down 'cause they go they want to go work for OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or NVIDIA. And so that's very, very hard. Meanwhile I know from working around the world that there is great AI talent in countries everywhere, Latin America, in Eastern Europe, and Asia. And a lot of these people, they'll have advanced degrees, a lot of them have a PhD, but it's when they're working in their local country, their career opportunities are way more limited, both in terms of salary, but really in terms of exposure and being in the cutting-edge technologies. So on so Talentev is a two-sided hiring marketplace for hiring senior AI talent. On one side, we have funded AI startups. They create and post jobs on our marketplace. On the other side, we have very talented senior AI people from 43 countries around the world. We match them with AI. We can get people hired in typically two to three weeks. Where right now it might take some of these funding startups three to six months to hire someone, and they're typically a third to half the cost.

Mark Gordon: So is there anything that is, you know, unique from a technological perspective in your product, or really is it the network effect of this unique marketplace that you've been able to build through the work that you've done across, you know, the Be Additive family of companies?

Hank Levine: I think there's two things that are really different than us in other marketplaces. One

Mark Gordon: Mm.

Hank Levine: is our access to global talent. For your typical US company, they just don't know where these people are. And they just can't find them. So we have a big pool of and we understand all the local culture and local rules around hiring people in all these different countries. So US companies, you know there's no reason they should know should know that stuff. So that's one big difference. The other difference is I think we have the really proper blend of using a lot of technology. So mainly AI technology, but also people. So I'll give you an example of that. Our candidates are all triple vetted. So what does that mean? The first vetting we need to bring in candidates at scale into our marketplace. So we do that with AI. And an AI voice agent goes out, contacts people from all these countries, we do a voice interview, we do a basic qualification to and we get them registered in a marketplace without any human interaction. But we also have a big team of human technical recruiters. And when we match a candidate to a job with AI, then we actually have a human being interview the person, make sure they're a good fit. And then on the client side, we don't just take any client to post their job into our marketplace. In Talentive, we have an account manager assigned to every client who understands their needs. So we do a third vetting where if the candidate gets passes the technical interview, we'll have an account manager interview the candidate for cultural fit. So we get so we get two or three candidates submitted, usually within three days, and they're very good because we have both the technology and the people in the process.

Mark Gordon: Love it. Awesome. So this is a brand new company. You're in the beta phase of this. If you look two, three years down the road, is this something that you're looking to exit from? Is will how is there a size goal? Do you have like some initial vision for how much you're looking to grow over the next 12 months?

Hank Levine: And well, yeah, we have very a very specific plan. In fact, we have a really good financial model. One of the things I advise entrepreneurs all the time, especially technical entrepreneurs, is the very first thing you should do before you start building your product is you should build a financial model. Because I have seen so many times where you have technical people who love the technology, they think something's really cool. They spend nine months building something and then there's no market for it. So when you build a financial model,

Mark Gordon: See it every day.

Hank Levine: Yeah, when you build a financial model, it really forces you to think through all your assumptions, like the cost of acquiring clients, your operating cost, and how fast you can really scale. Those are things that a lot of people just tend to skip and just start working. But when you have to really think it through, a lot of times you find out you don't have a viable business. And if you can find that out in two or three weeks, that's the greatest thing that ever happened to you, instead of spending a year working on it. And what you also find a lot of times is that the leverage points, the point where you really make money or don't make money isn't what you think it is. And you'll see that because you see what things cost. So build a financial model. We have a very good financial model for Talentive. And the strategy we're following is not a new strategy, it's called a beachhead strategy, but we're focusing on senior AI talent. We want to get known within the funded AI startup community as a great option for hiring senior AI talent globally. And then once we do that, we can expand into other markets like IT hiring so forth. But the goal for the next year is to is to really get this beachhead going.

Mark Gordon: So I'm gonna dive in. We're gonna take a look at kind of our assessment, what we call revenue acceleration score, but really it's a look at your public go-to-market presence. I think you'll find it very helpful and we'll kind of walk through it together. So this is your website right here, ship faster without competing with big tech for AI talent. So we understand what problem you solve right away. That's great. And then we have some metrics here kind of about what your differentiators are. So I'm going to leave it there just for right now and then we'll kind of walk through our assessment. So this is our total acceleration score. It goes from zero to a hundred. As you'll see here, average over 832 companies from this year is a 52 and you're at a 51, which is actually very good considering that you just started and we're going to because some of the things that we're gonna talk about, you actually cannot get right out of the gate. And we'll kind of walk through what that means. But really what we're look what we've found over time is that companies that score over 70 grow at about two and a half times the rate of companies that are under 60. And if you're under 50, you're almost completely dependent on founder-led sales. And so we grade you on these 25 categories on a zero to four scale, and then we kind of walk through and kind of see where our opportunities are for improvement. So I'm gonna skip through some of this part up here because I think it's a little, you know, can be cumbersome to go through. But our first major pillar is clarity of market fit. And as I just kind of went over with you when I look the website, your ICP visibility, meaning what you do and who you do it for, is perfect. It's right there, it's right on the very top of the homepage. You can see it. And so no surprise there, you got a really great score there. Same thing, problem clarity, value proposition sharpness, positioning, consistency. I will say, well, I'll circle back to where I think that's why that's not a perfect score there. But obviously outcome proof, very difficult to obtain when you're in the beta phase. And so that's it's causing your major hit on the score there. But obviously, as you kind of start to publish your early beta customer stories, or even what I would say is if you can take stories from your other organizations, that kind of what you've done internally using the tool, even before you've gone to market, I think anything you do to remove the need for imagination from your product is helpful for people in the story right out of the gate and it's also helpful for AI in recommending you when someone's looking for a solution that you guys are solving for. Does that feel does this so far kind of feel like it's on the right like it's on it's grading fairly, let's put it that way.

Hank Levine: Yeah, it's fabulous feedback. I hope you can send this to me because I love to learn from

Mark Gordon: Of course.

Hank Levine: it. And you're not the first to comment on outcome proof. So several other people told us that we're working on it actually as we speak.

Mark Gordon: I love it. I love it. So demand visibility. Again, very hard to get right out of the gate. And again, we're not, you know, this doesn't grade on a curve, but you know, SEO from a website discoverability phase. I think there's some opportunity there that you're gonna need to do some things. Obviously, there's not a lot of social media content presence right now. You do have social media content presence, which you see here, narrative and founder reach. And so you're out here doing the hard work of this right now, you're fixing this problem as we speak, but you see here that's kind of the a piece of that. And then reputation signals obviously are huge because there is no opportunity here for you to go out and get reviews yet. You're still in the beta phase. But obviously you can see this is a big part of not only getting people to feel safe using you when they come to your website, but obviously the AI models are really heavily weighting any reputation signals that you don't have access to. One of the things that I will say that has worked out very well for us in our grading, both for AI, for our clients, and for us as a company is, if you can get testimonials on the website from CEOs that you've worked with before, even just about working with you or your other companies, and then you can link those to their LinkedIn profiles, that is enough social proof a lot of times to get the AI to recommend you. So like if you go to our website, you'll see that there's a bunch of different CEOs saying what it was like to work with us. And then if you click on that, it goes to their LinkedIn profile. That has helped with early reputation signals for some of our other clients in this space when they're first getting going. Conversion infrastructure. So we have some lead capture mechanics and some primary calls to action. Still limited funnel depth overall. And again, that's expected because again, you guys just started, but you know, top of funnel education articles, the middle of funnel comparison pages and buyer guides would be helpful as you kind of continue to roll out your product. And then continue to offer your follow-up, improve your follow-up path as you go. From a sales readiness perspective, again, really this score here comes down to those case studies and use cases. And again, until you have case studies, publishing use cases is a big piece of this. Even just blogging about the stories you know of Silicon Valley companies not being able to find resources, the amount of time it took them to find a hire, the fact that they maybe made compromises in their hiring process that led to bad outcomes. Those case studies and use cases don't necessarily have to advocate for your product. For them to continue to signal to people why your product is necessary. In the beginning, that's kind of how you kind of some stolen valor and getting those signals out there. So that, you know, again, we want to take away the need for imagination in that buyer process. So but this is all, you know, you're on the right track for sure. Like I said, you to have an average score right out of the gate is a really good sign. And then, you know, there's some automation and CRM signaling stuff. You know, what's the automated follow-up process for somebody once they register on the website? Are they getting different blog articles? Are they getting regular updates from your sales funnel? We found some opportunity there. And again, we'll send this to you. And then lastly, kind of this is their generative SEO score, as you see, kind of like how likely is AI to recommend you? And again, really tough when you're just getting started. But the good news is entity clarity, which you have complete control over even in the beginning, you guys are doing a great job with it. Where you can continue and where you can make some updates right out of the gate is kind of this structured data and schema for AI to read kind of the things you want it to see. And then third-party validations, other people covering your stuff, contact content depth and authority, all of that comes as you go. But kind of it's picking up kind of on all the things that you would expect. So that's kind of for the new company. As you look through this, does it feel like it's accurately reflecting kinda your own thoughts about what's next in your go to market journey.

Hank Levine: I think it's very accurate. And so I don't I accept it all as very constructive criticism. I think we have a thought hard about it. So just to tell you our plan in thirty seconds is right now we're focusing on our first beta clients. We have three. We wanna get another three or four and we wanna get some big success stories, which we're gonna promote like crazy. By early next year we're gonna set up a digital marketing center of excellence in the Philippines. So our other company, Be Additive KPO, which stands for knowledge process outsourcing. It has subsidiaries in India and the Philippines. And the India sub subsidiary is leading our development, our software development of Talentive, although our lead our product head is in Michigan, but the other people are in India and the Philippines we're gonna set up to lead most of the marketing efforts. So that's another reason if you look at our financial model, we do have a cost advantage because most of our employees are not are not US based. We only have three people in the US.

Mark Gordon: I love it. One of the things I would always recommend too is like I think this chart is super awesome. As you build out your customer success stories and case studies, I would specifically have one that fits each of these four narratives. So in other words, how did your global access to elite like, okay, let's get something in there at a new price point, right? Hey, we have these two resumes. One was somebody at 500,000 in the US, one was somebody at 200,000 somewhere else. Let this person had more experience, et cetera, et cetera, putting that together as its own case study. Same thing here, right? Losing candidates to big tech, contractors eager to work for US and European startups. Tell a story about how you were able to fulfill those roles differently with your network. And so as you build out the your support for this, that's what will trigger the AI models to recommend you because now it'll be like, here's how you're doing your comparison approach and here's all the public evidence to support that actually that actually is true, right? Because they're looking for truth in your marketing. And so I think this is a amazing start. And I would try to make sure you support those with your case studies. And I would like cleverly write them specifically so that the language is used similarly in both spots. That's the consistency, the positioning consistency that they're looking for.

Hank Levine: Yeah, that's those were great suggestions.

Mark Gordon: Yeah, and what we're already finding is there's a lot of companies out there that are trying to like hack AEO GEO. And I keep trying to explain to people like that's you're not gonna be able to do that, right? Like the algorithm and the AI is gonna move faster than your ability to hack the system. What you need to do is do the hard work of building real credibility among your audience and publishing that credibility and getting other people to publish that credibility. And that's how you're gonna hack it, is to do the hard work of actually building that public go-to-market presence. So yes, you can do some of it on your own. You can build some websites in the background, but how do you get other people to say that they've used you? How do you get people on Reddit to talk about your business? How do you incentivize your most loyal customers to go out in the world and talk about what you do on their social media? That's what AI is going to be scraping for as we go forward. And that's going to be the difference between who gets recommended and not, especially in a very crowded space like talent recruiting, right? Which has a new company starting up every day because the barrier to entry is very low and the barrier to successful execution is really high. So you have a bunch of people at the bottom. And if you can break through that and deliver, that's where the opportunity comes in, right? It's very similar to consulting, right? It's there's a low barrier to entry and hard to do it well.

Hank Levine: Yeah. And it's gonna it's gonna become the barriers to entry are become even lower. There

Mark Gordon: That's right.

Hank Levine: There are so many people, you know, with agentic AI who you don't even have to know how to code. You can just talk to your computer and vibe code and you can get a you know an MVP built in a couple days. And so how do you how do you break through the noise in that environment where everyone's just coming up with stuff?

Mark Gordon: The last thing I'll say that as I kind of scroll through this, that I think is a real area for opportunity. The recruiting companies that we've seen growing the fastest and have the websites that score the highest are the ones that physically show their candidate pool with pictures on the pages.

Hank Levine: Yeah.

Mark Gordon: to the continued ignorance, and I say this with love, of American companies who have never worked with people overseas or hired overseas talent. What we find is as soon as they have to whatever if we allow them to use their imaginations, they go to kind of dark and inaccurate places by being able to show real videos on the homepage of people that you've placed or candidates you have in your pool and highlighting the quality of the candidates, the quality of their ability to speak the native languages, and the experience, you know, and the resume of a highlight of them. If you can build sort of mini candidate profiles that scroll on the screen or move around or pictures of human faces. Not only do pictures of human faces get people to engage longer with the content and stay on the website longer, but again, we want to remove imagination wherever possible because our we live in the Instagram generation, right? And so if there isn't something immediately grabbing our attention and letting us know that you solve my specific problem and you're not doing it in a way that reframes that problem for me, I'm losing interest right away.

Hank Levine: We actually have a lot of content where we can do that 'cause we have these AI agent calls and with we get the candidates permission, I think a lot of candidates would think it'd be pretty cool to be on a global website and so we can take little snippets and edit them and start posting them.

Mark Gordon: Awesome. Well, I'm really excited about what you're building. You are clearly solving a huge need. And you know, your business model certainly solves kind of one of one of the foundational things I recommend to people in all businesses if you're gonna solve problems, solve rich people problems. And in this case, you're going to the most expensive end of the market where people, where there's the most amount of competition right now and the most amount of demand, and solving a problem that is really making a difference on both sides, right? The companies are finding the talent they need. And one of the things, especially at the higher end, when we talk when hire people for like leadership roles, you know, and we don't we're not just hiring admin type people at all, we're hiring our heads of strategy and different things from around the world. The thing that they're most thirsty for is like the culture that they feel inside of an American company and the differences in how we do different leadership things. And you can just feel the inspiration once they get inside the business because they're worried they're gonna get treated differently because of their situation inside these companies. And we obviously treat them like they're the they're the building blocks of our organization because we feel like they are. And so I think we've developed something a real there's real reciprocal benefit on both sides in addition to just the exchange of money for work. Is that something that you've kind of found in your experience as well?

Hank Levine: More than absolutely. And I so as I mentioned, we built my last company. Be Additive, the three companies together have about a hundred employees now. Talentive has like six or seven. But my last company where we got to hundred and fifty recruiters, that was the secret sauce. We treated people so great, they felt so special, and it's really helping us now because we have an unlimited pool of recruiters who want to work for us. And they're really good. One of the things that I found most rewarding from my last company is we hired all these twenty two, twenty-three years old and these people never left us. And then they became you know, they'd be there ten, fifteen years or even longer, and they just became great business leaders. You know, and they were so invested in the company 'cause it was like they it was like their family to them.

Mark Gordon: Well, Hank, I'm really grateful that you came here to share your stories with us. Is there any last thoughts you want to leave our audience with or anything you wanna direct them to if they're listening so that they can really get a sense of all the cool stuff you've built?

Hank Levine: Well first thank you for doing this assessment. I can't wait to see it and I think it was right on. We will be implementing the things you said. Some of the things are already in the works. I'd love to hear from anyone in your audience. My email is hank.levine, L-E-V-I-N-E, at beadditive.com. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. The Talentive website is www.mytalentive.com and the Be Additive website is www.beadditive.com.

Mark Gordon: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that. In the future, maybe six months from now, we'll re-pull that report and we'll do an update to see just how you how much you've improved it in your journey. Cause I think that'll be really exciting to share with the audience.

Hank Levine: That puts the pressure on me, so that's good.

Mark Gordon: There you go. I love it. Hank, thank you so much for joining, and we'll see you guys next time on the Say It So They Buy It podcast.

Hank Levine: Yeah. Thank you, Mark. [Outro]