Hey! Justin here, and welcome to Just Go Grind, a newsletter sharing the lessons, tactics, and stories of world-class founders! We’ve got a special interview today with Bill Kerr, the founder of Athyna!

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Bill Kerr, Founder of Athyna

After discovering Bill through his newsletter, Open Source CEO, I began to get to know what he was doing with his startup, Athyna, a global talent platform.

Their whole thing is “incredible talent, matched with AI-precision, at lightning speed.” The TL;DR of that is they hire the best offshore talent on the market. And I was lucky enough to take part in the $2.5M round they announced today—so I am officially a shareholder in this company.

The cool news is they reserved ~10% of the round for their community, so you can invest too if you like what they are building.

I wanted to have Bill share his story with all of you as there are some tremendous takeaways for all founders.

Let’s get to it.

Can you tell us about your journey from growing up in Australia to becoming the CEO of Athyna?

I grew up in a small spot called The Mornington Peninsula, about an hour south of Melbourne. It’s a beautiful place where I spent my time surfing, riding bikes, and generally just being outside and active.

School wasn't my thing—I got expelled twice, mostly for being a class clown, but I was always entrepreneurial.

I bought my first house at 19 and had 3 houses by the time I was 22. A health scare at 23 shifted my focus, leading me to travel the world and eventually land in the startup scene.

Fast forward a bit, and here we are with Athyna, helping businesses build amazing global teams.

What inspired you to start Athyna and how has the vision evolved since its inception?

Athyna was born out of necessity.

While running my first startup AdventureFit, I had to build a team on a shoestring budget, so I hired globally. This led to the realization there was a massive opportunity to help others do the same.

The simple maths cuts pretty clearly, companies can save 70-80% when hiring global talent, and talent usually gets paid way more working globally.

This is between a 40-50% jump in salary when switching to Athyna, but that’s because we work with pretty senior talent who are already working in big tech (Amazon, Meta etc.).

For younger talent, it can be 100-200% more. This really fires us up at Athyna. We help companies become more profitable and help talents live better lives.

The grand vision has always been to create the world’s leading talent network, connecting incredible talent with great companies, at lightning speed. Over time, we've fine-tuned our approach and now, with Athyna AI, we're leveraging AI to take it to the next level.

Athyna AI is a leap forward for the company. What makes this new product unique and essential for today's market?

It actually took us a while to figure out what it was exactly we wanted to bet on with the new power of AI.

The first thing we did was a detailed needs analysis (Pictured below) alongside one of our investor / advisors, Anand, who was one of the product leaders at Meta building the Instagram algorithm.

Once we had our needs analysis mapped we started building. All product and features pitches needed to map back to a user need from one of our three ICPs: talent, customers, and internal. What are we building and why should people care?

It’s all well and good to create an amazing product but if you can get—and hold—the attention of the end buyer then what is the point. So we need to find out UVP. And we found it with speed.

Athyna AI is all about precision and speed. We're using AI to match talent with job opportunities more accurately and faster than ever before.

In today's fast-paced market, businesses need to move quickly to find the right people. Not only to hit their goals but also because the best talent just doesn’t stay on the market long.

Candidates want to land their dream jobs without jumping through hoops. Athyna AI simplifies this process, making it a game-changer for both sides.

You mention that Athyna focuses on building an incredible company culture. What steps have you taken to foster this culture?

Culture is everything at Athyna.

I used to stress in the first days of Athyna about us being a remote company. That was until our first Head of People & Culture, Carmela, said something to me that I’ll never forget.

She said; “Culture is not made at the water cooler, culture is how you treat people.” And that’s how I have always wanted to operate. People first. Our engagement scores are 93% on average so we are definitely doing something right.

I think a big part of it also comes down to the fact that we do the little things well.

One example is when someone signs on to join Athyna we immediately announce it in Slack and our team sends messages out to the person to say hello.

It may seem insignificant, but it isn’t. Changing jobs is hard, and filled with anxiety. We try to remove that anxiety from before day one.

We also try to make sure everyone feels part of something bigger. We offer RSUs (stock) from execs to interns, so everyone is invested in our success. 

We chose RSUs rather than options because that means our team doesn’t need to buy the stock. We have a lot of team members who are young and who are in countries where the purchasing power is lower so we needed to make sure our team didn’t have to buy their stock.

We also put protections in place to avoid a taxable event for the team and made the plan a big plan, giving away 20% of the company from the get-go. '

I think it’s bullshit that founders are so miserly with their stock. Unless you sell in a fire sale any founder who has any sort of result will usually be able to buy more houses than they know what to do with. Why not bring the team along on the way?

What has worked for you in building Athyna? What growth initiatives do you have working today?

We are actually pretty boring, boring but interesting if that is possible.

Most of our growth has come from cold outbound email.

We started outbound on week one at Athyna sending 50 emails per week and have since scaled our outbound machine to 1.2M outbound emails per week.

It’s pretty difficult to actually send that many emails per week to your detailed ICP so we built ~15 sub-brands. We now send ~100k per day per sub-brand.

I won’t mention the names of the brands, but they are along the lines of www.wehiredevs.com and so forth.

We have a fair bit of fun with it. We have brands in the name of our creative director and our head of sales.

We have one dedicated to my best friend, my brother, and even my dog.

People say outbound email at scale is dead. It’s not—you just have to be really good at it. It’s about putting the right message, in front of the right person, at the right time. If you get 3/3 right you have a client. 2/3 you have a lead. But 1/3 or god forbid 0/3 and you are spam. Most people are spam.

For a while there, and I am talking in years, outbound alone accounted for 80% of our revenue. 

We are still a small company so to be able to do this at the scale that we are at lends me to believe we are probably the best in the world at it.

What role does AI play in Athyna AI, and how does it enhance the talent-matching process?

AI allows us to analyze huge amounts of data quickly, matching candidates with job opportunities based on skills, experience, and cultural fit.

This not only speeds up the process, but increases the accuracy of matches, meaning that both businesses and talent get exactly what they're looking for.

Think about a typical recruitment process. It takes weeks to find talent, is riddled with bias, and is filled with human errors. AI takes care of all of that.

Now, thanks to AI, when a job search lands on our desk, the job description is parsed across 10’s of thousands of vetted candidates in our network who are then ranked for fit across dozens of data points.

Not to mention bringing AI along to technical testing, AI-interview companies, and more.

At Athyna every step of the process is being improved, optimized, or replaced by AI.

What trends do you see in the future of work, and how is Athyna positioned to capitalize on them?

The future of work is remote, flexible, and global. Companies are moving away from offices and looking for talent across the globe, while talents are seeking more flexibility and better opportunities. Luckily, we get to be at the forefront of this shift.

Today we enable companies to find the best talent regardless of location and provide talent with access to exciting job opportunities worldwide. This trend will only grow.

Upwork did some studies that predict 73% of all departments worldwide will have some elements of remote work inside of them.

It’s an exciting time for us to be honest. Most people are participating in the future of work; while we are out here trying to shape it.

You've spoken about the importance of personal branding. How has your personal brand impacted Athyna?

My personal brand acts as a megaphone for Athyna.

It helps attract talent and opens doors for business opportunities and investment.

Talent sees the values and vision we represent and wants to be part of it and on the client and investor side, I am building a massive base of allies, especially through my newsletter, Open Source CEO.

The most interesting thing though is that, at least in my newsletter, is the fact that negative CAC is becoming possible today.

Look at Hubspot’s acquisition of The Hustle, they bought a media asset, which makes money plus they get leads and close deals from it.

Smart companies are moving farther and farther away from SEO and traditional media buying and more and more towards creators and owned assets. It’s not hard to see why either.

I ran the math on 13 acquisitions in a recent newsletter deal report and found that newsletter acquisitions had a value per subscriber at a whopping $38 per subscriber. You can buy a good sub for $2. Not a bad deal.

Personal branding in general though is more just building my online reputation. It’s necessary today, and I know that a big part of my job is to tell the story of Athyna and to tell it as far and as wide as possible.

Can you share a success story where Athyna significantly impacted a client's business?

Absolutely. One of our standout success stories was a small US tech startup that needed to quickly scale their engineering team with really bespoke devs—Cloud Engineers and the like. Traditional hiring was going to be too slow and expensive, so they came to us.

Within a few weeks, we matched them with 10 or so awesome engineers from our network, and not long after that number was closer to 20. This meant they kept, their clients happy, hit their deadline and probably saved ~$150k per engineer per year.

But every story is a success story really. We work with companies large and small and at the end of the day, for most companies, we get them access to talent they wouldn’t be able to hire locally while extending their runway or putting money back into their pockets.

Can you share some challenges you faced while growing Athyna and how you overcame them?

We've had our fair share of challenges.

We lost 70% of our revenue during COVID and we nearly ran out of money in 2022 as well.

The crazy thing was in 2022 we nearly raised $5M at a $25M valuation but it got nixed at the very final stages.

To be honest, I feel like it would take an asteroid hitting earth to kill us now. I can’t think of a couple of crazier situations to live through than COVID and what happened in 2022. I think we are stronger than ever now either way.

How does Athyna plan to use the funds raised in the upcoming round to accelerate growth?

The funds will be deployed into growth.

We plan to invest heavily in enhancing our AI capabilities, which will improve the precision and speed of our talent-matching process, but really we want to put the foot down on growth.

We have everything set now to really go after the enterprise as well. At the beginning of 2024, we had no real enterprise business and in the last 2 months, 23% of new business has been enterprise.

A couple of our investors in this round are the founders of TaskUs, a listed company with the same business model as us. They do $1B in revenue and have less than 200 clients.

Bryce, the CEO of TaskUs is now my advisor so now we have the team, we have the market, and we have the support.

This next period is really about us doubling down on that momentum in the enterprise.

What’s next for Athyna and Athyna AI? Where do you see the company in the next five years?

The next big thing for Athyna is scaling our enterprise accounts and continuing to refine our product side.

In five years, I see Athyna as the go-to platform for global talent acquisition, with a reputation for excellence and innovation.

We're aiming for that big exit, but more importantly, we're focused on creating a positive impact for our clients and talent alike.

And finally, what have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources for you as you've built Athyna?

I love this question. I am a voracious reader, and well, I guess audio-booker if that’s a term.

Books that have helped me are:

• Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek

• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

• How to Win Friends and Influence People.

They would be my leadership stack.

I loved Predictable Revenue back in the day. Fanatical Prospecting and The Sales Acceleration Formula as well.

They helped me to build Athyna’s outbound engine.

In terms of other things that have inspired me—I got a lot out of a couple of books on Bezos and a couple on Elon. Mainly just to get me to push myself. Those are the type of books you put down and think “I need to be better.”

I also love the Founders Podcast, Acquired, and My First Million when it comes to podcasts to improve.

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Thanks for reading!

Best,

Justin

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P.P.S. Want to work with me 1 on 1?

P.P.P.S. Hiring? Check out the team at Athyna.