Meet a 27-year old from India building a $20M startup in the US

hey guys welcome to silon Val girl today we have a very special guest aayush is a founder of pesto Tech and you are changing lives of Indians by helping them work for American companies yeah is that the right description of what you doing yeah nice uh can you talk about how many students have you helped so far about like thousand Engineers have gone through uh pesto in some form or the other and about a few hundred of them work at companies based in US particularly the rest of them work in you know like the rest of the world guys I want to quickly pause here and thank one of my favorite companies in the world that I use every single day for sponsoring this video I know a lot of you use notion as your second brain or as an extension of your memory and I do the same I use noan as my assistant which keeps all my information about my personal work projects in one perfectly organized place and now with a new AI features notion has become even smarter let me show you how I use notion AI in 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version is ready I ask the AI to double check my grammar since English is not my native language and the best part is that notion AI is in the same place where I do my work I don't need to constantly hop between my notes and a separate AI power tool you can get started with notion for free and unlock the power of AI for only $10 a month I'll leave the link in the description below this video thank you notion for sponsoring this video and now let's get back to our conversation with aush and so the the business model is that they do they take it for free like how does it work oh no so we actually ended up evolving we we first came up with a program in which we used to teach people as well but we realized that the demand for junior Engineers uh just went downhill because of AI so AI has something to contribute to it because of AI we need fewer number of developers right so the good Engineers basically became more valuable got it and the space is getting crunched also because of markets not being in the right spot right yeah uh so then we had like more Supply uh than what's needed so we basically became a platform where we get Engineers all across the world now and they list themselves on the platform and then uh companies hire them for more jobs how do you make money as a company we make money from companies we basically charge a subscription fee and we take a percent of the cut interesting but it used to be a different model before and I wanted to highlight that because a lot of people so from a student standpoint it totally makes sense to learn for free and then uh give away part of your income absolutely and I know Lambda they sell they did that they they like they have batches of students and then they sell this debt to financial institutions absolutely was that something you did that's exactly what we did and it didn't work out so the reason why we stopped doing that is because you know like we had like a decent uh chunk of our Engineers who ended up getting life-changing outcomes and uh I think what people Miss is that a large chunk of those Engineers also will not get those outcomes because a part in this relationship is also driven by how capable they are and their hard work and things like that right so by Design you will have more people who are not as um who won't get the desired result right um and also the model had its own flaws uh which financially I think was not as sustainable um and I think we are going through a shift in the market in last uh years particularly where we realized that uh you know training more engineers make a lot of sense especially when you are sh on Engineers right but we live in a world where craziness of 2021 is gone and things are a lot more realistic um and and suddenly we have a lot more Engineers than we need uh particularly right now right so I think we had to adopt to you know Soo the business as well but yes we started like that we had um I think the first 100 Engineers who went through pesto ended up getting 7x better pay in less than 3 months of program um and that was really exciting for them and and I love the fact that we won only when they did but I think as we kept on scaling the program let's say some Engineers were were obviously winning big but uh there was like more than 50% Engineers who won't win as big and I always built the company saying we win only when you do and in this case I realized that it's just not possible for them to win right so we wanted to come up with something which is basically free for everyone and still helps them get opportunities across the world and have those those life-changing outcomes right so uh we have a bunch of developers who list themselves on P day we of course can't train them anymore but uh people who are hardworking and they learn by themselves and and they're capable um who are not discovered by let's say companies around the world we give them a platform um to get access to the to these opportunities and that ends up being pretty lifechanging for them as well MH it's interesting and thank you for being honest about like the the business model because I feel like a lot of companies they want to start with something like this cuz it looks easy from the sales standpoint but I see like all of the companies who did this I've seen them pivot to something different you know like I when we launched it in our month one we had like amazing numbers and it was easy for us to basically sell more programs in month two 3 and four but even in month one we ended up deciding to not scale the program because I wanted to see what the outcome is right it takes like months for them to go through the program and then get placed and if they did not get placed then something is wrong in the program right so the way I like thinking about this is that is this model or business going to sustain and grow 10 years down the line and if the answer is no if there are especially design issues in the in the business then it's just impossible to s