The following interview is a conversation we had with Sebastian Schüller, Co-founder of HiPeople, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Sebastian Schüller, Co-founder of HiPeople: $7 Million Raised to Develop Data-Driven Augmentation for Hiring Teams
Sebastian Schüller
Thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before begin talking about what you’re building, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Sebastian Schüller
Sure, let’s do that. So my background is an Ops, supply chain management studies, a little bit of finance, so everything processes and a bit of money. That is where my background is professionally. I looked into a few different things before starting High People. Actually, I did a bit of marketing labor relations at a Spotify competitor. So chatting to labels, making sure the content gets in. I looked into MNA for a big media house here in Europe, been at Google, sold ads to startups to make them grow faster. And also did we see for a while. So doing investments in early stage BTB SARS. They also did an investment in no Magic, and I guess you had Casper on the podcast a while ago. So that was an investment. I did, yeah. So it’s pretty colorful what I did and tried before High People, but one common thing that stuck with me across all those jobs actually was surfacing and objectifying information that is driving decisions.
Sebastian Schüller
And that’s what we’re also doing with High People. Nice.
Brett
Well, we’re going to jump into High People in a second, but two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. As a founder and entrepreneur, what do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Sebastian Schüller
Yeah, it’s a good one. I do not admire one particular one, but a set of folks, and you’ve heard them before, probably Phil Knight or Andy Graph. But it’s also changing. It’s constantly changing. There’s new folks coming up to that list. But for the sake of podcast, I’m going to give something more exotic. So I’d highlight two founders actually from Berlin based company called Thinkcell. It’s marcos and ano And Thinkcell is a company that has close to 1 million users and everyone who’s working consulting across the globe in corp dev finance, similar functions, has used their little Excel PowerPoint extensions to make graphs a bit more appealing. And what I really like about them is they’ve been so under the radar for years, really heads down, focusing on a very particular problem, and that is s***** default graphs in Excel and PowerPoint. Everybody had that problem when working with those tools, and quite under the radar.
Sebastian Schüller
They really built this amazing software company that’s driving close to 300 million in annual revenues. They never took funding, by the way, and it has been profitable with 50% profit margin since many years at a super small team. So that I really admire. And then another exotic one would be Roger Federer, actually a tennis player, and I consider him a founder for his own sports character, to pick it that way. And I recently read a book about him that is bio, I guess. And there was one quote comparaphrase that really stuck to me, and that is you cannot win a tournament in any match but the final, but you can lose it in all other matches before the final. And that is super applicable, I think, for the journey of a startup where one really needs to be in for the long run. And there’s a lot of talk and focus about particular events.
Sebastian Schüller
One contributes a lot to them, respectively. But just if you get to all the rounds and all the steps, be it a conversation with somebody you want to hire, closing a deal, closing around, it’s mostly about just getting through. Not perfectionizing it or something, but close it, move on. Ultimately there will be a final win. It’s about an ultimate win. Nice.
Brett
I love that. I’ve been on a quest lately to try to find books that are not business books just because they’re getting a bit boring at this point. So I’ve been reading a lot of sports biographies, but Roger Federer wasn’t on my list. But now he is. That sounds like a fascinating book.
Sebastian Schüller
It’s really great. I think there’s three, four about him, actually. They’re all pretty close and I think already fascinating. Yeah, fascinating sportsman. Nice.
Brett
That’s amazing. And can you tell us a bit more about the Berlin Tech ecosystem right now? I know in recent years it’s been really booming there.
Sebastian Schüller
Yeah, it is, definitely. And I think especially at the moment where everything is getting a bit more normal, I’d say, where a lot of tourists leave, how we say that went for the industry to collect some labels for a CB or just try it out. I think it’s getting more dense again. Right. So there’s more exchange between founders. Everything is really cool, and I think it has transitioned and really built up over the last years. So when it really started out here, that was more the beginning of the 2010, I’d say it was all about ecom rocket Internet in those days. And over the last decade, especially the last years, has really picked up with really building proper software companies. And there’s a lot of great founders, a lot of great peers that we have here. So really a healthy ecosystem. Yeah. Not to forget great VCs, Cherry Ventures, for example, based here in Berlin.
Sebastian Schüller
Let our precede back then. So there’s a healthy and flourishing ecosystem for sure.
Brett
And being based here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, you mentioned the company that’s probably the most hated company here, which is Rocket Internet. Do they still have prominence? Are they still highly active there or did their kind of influence and scale diminish in the last couple of years?
Sebastian Schüller
That’s a really good question. I always think about it when I go from the main station to my flat because I take a shortcut to cut some traffic and that is going past the old office. And always when I go there, I said to my partner, like, hey, that used to be this office everybody’s speaking about ten years ago. But I think they kind of vanished. So there’s a fund, right, global Founders Capital, I believe, that is connected to those folks still. And they are pretty active and great investors. But I’m not sure if Rocketed Seb is doing anything. If they’re doing it’s probably under the radar or I’m just not taking notice. But I think the big times where they were all over the place that.
Brett
Some years ago that’ll make everyone listening from Silicon Valley happy to hear. I think they went private, right? Didn’t they go public at one point and then the brothers bought the company back and privatized it?
Sebastian Schüller
Yeah, it could be. It could be. But there’s still a lot of folks that have their roots and they have been a good school, I think to many in the beginning just opening up that industry because in Germany probably a couple of years behind everything US and also UK some years ago and they’ve been a great I think that catalyst to get things going in the beginning. My cofounder, Jacob, for example, was also in that team in the very early days, running some car platform in Bangladesh, for example. So a great school for many great minds here in this ecosystem as well.
Brett
Yeah, I have four or five founder friends who work at Internet at one point and it’s fascinating just how they tend to view business. At least from my perspective, they’re very much like mercenaries. Like one of my friends, he owns an on demand flower company in Malaysia and it’s a German guy and he’s running this company and I don’t think he has this burning passion for flowers. It’s much more like this is a good business opportunity and we’re going to go dominate this market with everything that we’ve learned from companies doing something similar. So it’s a fascinating approach to business that I’ve always found really interesting.
Sebastian Schüller
Yeah, definitely.
Brett
Now, I know you mentioned one book there with Roger Fredericker, but what other books would you say have had a major impact on you as a founder?
Sebastian Schüller
There’s a lot and yeah, you mentioned also you hear a lot the same books. So everybody’s reading to some extent, I guess the same stuff. But one that probably also folks are reading, or have been reading in the beginning, probably, of the days, is High Output Management by Andy Graphs from intel. Yeah. And I got to the book because all angels of our precede, actually all experienced entrepreneurs, they recommended this to us and said, like, hey, especially as a first time founder, get this. It’s like the essence of management in under 180 pages, I believe. Yeah. And it’s a great drill down of everything. Core management principles, super short, super clear in words. It’s 40 years old. Just picked it up, which is crazy. I think it has a new forward by Ben Howard or something that is also ten years old or so. Yeah, but it’s so clear.
Sebastian Schüller
That’s what I like. It’s very crisp. Okasa. Explains in just a few pages what others need entire books or series of books for. Yeah. To me, this book is really fundamental. It’s like a rope of books for me. So you can’t make a rope better. That’s how I see it for that book. It’s the rope of management books for me. Yeah.
Brett
I first heard about that book in a Fortune article about Brian Chesky from Airbnb, and he was describing his learning process, and he called it something like going to the Source or Straight to the Source. And it was basically, find the absolute best resource that exists, consume it and master it. And for management, that was his number one book. So when I first read that, I’m like, all right, say no more. I’ll read the book. It must be good if Brian Chesky is using it at Airbnb.
Sebastian Schüller
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Brett
Nice. That’s awesome. All right, now let’s talk a bit more about high people. So can you tell us just about the origin story behind the company and then just a high level overview of what the product does?
Sebastian Schüller
For sure. So, as I said in my intro, for me, it was always common denominator across the gigs. Ahead was surfacing objectifying information that drives decisions. And throughout our careers, My, Coperner, Jacob, myself, we got more and more exposed to the world of people. So we never worked in people ourselves. Nobody was ta or HRF or something. But you’re more exposed to people topics and then also problems as you progress. So you become the first time part of an interview panel, you become a hiring manager for the first time, and much more. And we really started wondering more and more how are things being tackled in that domain? And yeah, were asking ourselves, why does the most important function of a firm and we all know that people or HR hasn’t been treated like that in the last decades. Maybe, but why is that function not doing most of its decision making, actually based on data, especially in hiring, where it’s a lot about being fast, making quick, strong, solid calls why is it that this is the only function in the company where this is the case actually?
Sebastian Schüller
Why sales, marketing, finance, routing everything in data, but people not. And then ultimately when we dig a bit deeper, why is all that despite having a lot of research and solid research for many decades, that actually is pretty unquestioned and highly predictive, that allows you to actually make unbiased and data driven hiring decisions. And that sum of questions, this is, I guess, like late 2018 that brought us to look into that deeper and actually said, okay, let’s speak to experts. Or we spoke to close to 100 recruiters across the globe, from big tech to small consultancies, and then said like, hey, let’s go in there, let’s build a hiring toolkit. And our wedge into building that get into use at hiring teams back then was reimagining the way to automate reference checks by getting into customers with that.
Brett
And were you initially just focused on the German market or what market were you initially focused on?
Sebastian Schüller
We were not focused at any market but the world technically from day one. So I think our first customer was a company that you might know, which is called Cylones. I think the most valuable German company these days were not mistaken, heading from Munich, but also New York. They’ve been the first customer. So from day one, all our users would only work with the platform in English. The platform till today is only available in English. Support is only in English. The entire company we built was English by default from first day. So we never set boundaries for us. We said like, who wants it, gets it. Yeah, that’s why were global from day one.
Brett
Wow. And how did you manage to land a logo like that for your first customer? I feel like that must be the dream for all founders.
Sebastian Schüller
Good question. I have to think back how that went, but I think it was pretty early. In the early days, were close to actually get the first wedge of our platform. And I can say a bit what the platform of the toolkit consists of in the SEC, but we are close to releasing this first wedge with a ref check. And I think we got introduced, I think even by a VC who folded in the precede. Yeah, I think that was the story. I think she knew someone from the team there and we just chatted and they said, okay, we’re actually looking into that at the moment as we speak. Let’s go. And that was kind of the backstory. Nice.
Brett
That’s awesome. Now let’s talk about the platform. So what are some of the features and capabilities that people are excited about?
Sebastian Schüller
Yeah, so we think a lot of problems, of course, and the big problems our customers have. And we have two main problems that we solve. And first that is that teams and hiring teams, they have a lot of manual biased steps they need to take to identify the best heavens for their organizations. You can think of screening hundreds of CVS LinkedIn profiles of applicants or people that you actually want to reach out to, then ultimately calling references, scheduling those calls, taking notes, sharing results, all that comes with that to actually checking criminal records, all the dirty stuff, how we call it. Yeah. And we give them for that pain. We give them one tool to automate all of that. So think automated screening, big library and a big assessment product. Automatic draft checks, automatic background checks. That’s the first. The second is the teams also have no at most super shaky insights in how their hiring performance is going and what they should improve and focus on.
Sebastian Schüller
Super important in today’s candidate markets, right? Everybody’s fighting for the greatest talents, but teams really know yeah, underlined by numbers, who’s for example, the greatest interview on the team. Most organization can’t point a finger and say, okay, that’s Brad, he’s doing the best interviews or is the fastest to respond. And ultimately where there’s a lot of question marks if you ask that. Hey, how’s equality of hire? So who are the best performing employees in your organization and what are the common denominators or characteristics that you could actually use to inform your talent acquisition? Which means like the screening, the sourcing, the interviewing and all of that. And both those problems we let them understand automatically via two offerings. We have a candidate experience analytics offering that collects feedback throughout the hiring process from candidates surfaces, where to focus, where you have the biggest lever to actually improve the experience.
Sebastian Schüller
And then the second is quality of high analytics. We just launched it yesterday actually publicly it was closed beta before and that allows to automatically collect information about how our new joiners doing based on their own assessment and their managers or land managers assessment and actually derives insights from that inform talent acquisition.
Brett
Nice, that’s super interesting. And can you talk to me about that journey to finding product market fit? What was that like for you? Because I know it can be a wild ride for startups bringing tech to market.
Sebastian Schüller
I guess were always working pretty close to customers. So we started with the initial see this as I said, of hey, we want to build a toolkit ultimately. So we never started with CDs, we want to build a rev check. Company wanted to build a hiring toolkit and the ref check was our first wedge that allowed us to get in the value chain of recruiters get actually in use. Because I think recruiting is tough to the extent and much tougher than the people space because it’s outside facing right. So when you have your new joiners or you have your employees in your organization and the tool looks s***** or tool is breaking, okay, you can explain this to your people right and say like hey sorry guys, I’m going to get another one. But if you put something new technology by a young team and a young firm at your most precious good in terms of the people flow and funnel which is your candidates that you have might invested a lot in sourcing identifying, getting to talk to you, then people are pretty cautious.
Sebastian Schüller
So that is why were so keen in getting in, getting used and then we expanded from there. So we knew that assessments are a big space and super interesting and as soon as we had enough signals from existing customers and also prospects were speaking to we would prioritize first moves there and accordingly we did behave with the pillar of analytics so can experience and quality of hire. As soon as we had enough signals to say like hey let’s take that as a next step we open up the box and now it’s for us getting better across all those four pitas.
Brett
Wow that’s super smart. And can you talk to us about growth and any metrics that you can share that just demonstrate the traction that you’re seeing in the market?
Sebastian Schüller
Sure, I can share a bit. First touching base on or connecting to your initial question about Germany or the globe. We’re used by companies across the globe, we’re super proud of that. We have great traction. It’s a good portion in the US actually we work with pretty broad spread of companies in terms of headcounts so the smallest company is five FTE, the biggest is 5000 and that is actually from a small consultancy be it Cape Town to Bill Gates Breakthrough Energy that you might know to Global Entertainment Service. So pretty big spread. We are most excited about actually being able to transition companies and customers along that transition or path that I was describing on your previous question regarding product market fit. So with every module that we’ve launched, we’ve been able to expand customers and make them use more. But at the same time, also new customers that are coming now, they’re not only buying one, but they are buying two or three or even four products out of the four on the platform.
Sebastian Schüller
And that is super interesting for us to see. And we have bad traction as we speak, especially in those tense markets at the moment. So I think a lot of companies are producing or doing layoffs at big scale. We have it every day still in the news and we still see that teams have to backfill, have to hire despite growth slowing down for a lot of them, especially in tech. But Ta teams find themselves with less resources, less power and they need tools, they need support. So we have stream stories like two weeks ago we signed a customer where actually the person or 200 people customer where the person buying us was leaving or is leaving in three weeks. So he was actually let go. And he said, okay, we are just going to have this one person from Ops who will take over hiring for the next year.
Sebastian Schüller
And this person needs to it. And that is why I’m getting you guys. And that is what we find pretty swelling. Our path is being close to doubling this year again. I think the common traction metrics we are targeting are like most SaaS players do.
Brett
Wow. And are you seeing the buying process change at all in the last, let’s say three to six months, given what you’d mentioned there? Every time I log into the LinkedIn, it’s just a wave of depression of people being let go, open to work. So are you being affected by that yet? I know you just touched on that a little bit there. But overall in the buying process, have you seen it slow down at all or have you seen any changes or is it actually picking up steam?
Sebastian Schüller
I think there’s no clear answer to that. That accounts for all segments, oil, GEOS and stuff. But I can share that. For example, in tech, things are moving slower. So if you take the vertical of just tech, things are slower. And we also expect that to be at least the case throughout H, one of this year, companies will take more time to buy. We’ll be more cautious about hiring, especially because they’ve seen so much overhiring in the last years. We see a lot of inelastic industries, health care, for example, healthcare staffing. We have great exposure there. In the US. For example, that is unaffected. Super fast buying cycles, I think. No change. And then we see also that super small businesses are unaffected. Where it gets a bit tricky is, I think in the middle, and especially for tech. But yeah, I think the question is not about, okay, will it pick up again and will tech grow at more speed?
Sebastian Schüller
Maybe not the speed like the last two years, but the question is more like when? And then we want to be there. That’s what we focus on.
Brett
Nice, that’s super smart. What would you say you’re getting right? You talked about growth there. It sounds like you guys are doing really well and there’s obviously a lot of funding that’s gone to HR tech and recruiting tech. So what have you gotten right? How have you managed to rise above all the noise?
Sebastian Schüller
It’s a good one because I think that yeah, noise is everywhere. I think we’ve experienced that in outbound initiatives. I think when we started to commercialize roughly two and a half years ago, it was much easier to cut, for example, through LinkedIn inboxes. I guess these days nobody is really doing anything about LinkedIn inboxes anymore until LinkedIn related.
Brett
Dev shops trying to sell outsourced, dev work.
Sebastian Schüller
Yeah, I mean, it’s tough because I can understand, right, people want to sell stuff and I also feel bad for people spending time at least setting up automation or something to get through inboxes or inboxes but it’s not really cutting through and I think it’s really ruining the other idea of the inbox for LinkedIn. So that’s why I think email is different the way to go here. But first I guess it’s mostly about the other messaging, right? So Opwart is product is an enabling part in the toolbox of the recruiter. So we are very about hey, we are supporting hiring teams to have an easier day to day while also performing better. We are not in the business of black boxes or automation monsters cannibalizing a business function or so and I think that is a big difference. I think there’s a lot of players that are actually walking around and highlighting a lot powerful solutions are but that scares can scare people, right?
Sebastian Schüller
And it’s people working in people especially and those people want to work with people and they don’t want to work with machines or have machines take them over with a click. But people are open to do a better job and that is what we focus on. We focus on, hey, do you want to do a better job? And yeah, let’s support you with our toolkit. I think that’s a bit about it and what drives everything we do. And then I think the basics make sure that customers speak high about your product. Write great content that provides value that not just drives clicks but really makes people come back, perceive you as an expert and come back when they need something from you. Yeah and listening to our audience and community, I think that’s especially important in the market at the moment. Right. We have a lot of high tech companies in our customer base and there’s a lot of folks who also really just need to have a moment of clear and real talk and that will provide safe spaces.
Sebastian Schüller
So informal gatherings, events, dinners and stuff like that where people just can be people and don’t have to hold a mask that says like hey, it’s the greatest time of my life but be more like the LinkedIn what you said every day you open LinkedIn, right. We have people that attempt those events say like hey, it sucks. Last week we had to lay off 20% of people and it was really hard and I think that builds a lot of trust. That is important also for us to build upon going forward. Nice.
Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What about category creation? Do you have strong views when it comes to category creation for you? Is this a category creation play or is this really just chipping into and redefining an existing category?
Sebastian Schüller
Yeah, that’s a good one. I mean there’s so much talk about categories, right? So yeah, everyone’s picking about category leaders, especially in VC. I would put it more to the analyst side or the research or investment firm that is supposed to have a look at this and create those we think in user problems. And that’s what we are obsessed with, understanding user problems, solving them in our case, helping them to unlock reality about the talent and processes. That is what we are about. We are not obsessed about categories. Although if one wants to create a category that is about hiring toolkits and there’s no hiring or no such hiring toolkit out there yet, then we’d of course be happy to take a nice seat in that. But yeah, we’re not obsessed with categories, we’re obsessed with customers. Nice.
Brett
I love that. That’ll be the clip we use for the episode obsessed with customers, not categories. And I see there that you have a lot of reviews on Captera. I believe Captera is owned by Gartner, if I remember correctly. Are you putting time and energy into engaging with Gartner and Forrester and any of the analyst firms yet? Or is that something that you’re planning on in the future?
Sebastian Schüller
That is something that we’re going to go after in the future at a later point. For now, we make sure that we take place and on those platforms, be it a captivity two or whatever, so that people, again, customers, right, can read about what other customers are saying, what we’re doing great, what we need to improve on. And that is the core focus for us. We know that there’s a lot of analysts, folks reaching out, interested to speak, but there is something for the knowledge.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And as I’m sure you’ve experienced on your journey, bringing tech to market isn’t easy. What would you say has been your single greatest challenge that you face, that you’ve overcome?
Sebastian Schüller
I guess we started with a pretty classic B two B Motion, right? Which means, because it’s plain vanilla B two B’s ask what we’re doing, twelve month deals, upfront payments and that calls, I guess, intuitively at least when you start or hey, let’s do B two B Motion here, especially when you start with the customers like we did. And that means a lot of outbound initiatives, right? SDR sellers, decision maker decisions, huge procurement, a lot of paid marketing and whatnot and what we learned there is especially over last year, that a different model works better for us. That is where we focus more on content over paid, where we focus more on inbound, over, outbound, just go hyper targeted with outbound and most importantly, making the product experienceable for everyone by introducing product lead. I think that has been a real game changer for us because it makes us process small customers across the globe more easily, right?
Sebastian Schüller
So we are more open to customers, we can process them faster via saleserve. And the same time we give big accounts that sales wants to speak to and it’s the best to speak to a better entrance and better overview of what we’re offering. And that is a. Fantastic combination for us.
Brett
Nice. I love that. And last question here for you. If we came out into the future, what’s the three year vision for high people?
Sebastian Schüller
Yeah. Well, three year vision is our vision, right? So we want to give hiring teams the best toolkit to unlock tenant and process reality, to make the best hire every time. And by 2026, we’re going to have probably build out most of this intelligent hiring toolkit that we need for that, and it will be used by thousands of customers at the same time. We’re going to take a next step then, and that is either crossing out the hiring in our vision when we place it by people, so going after the people segment, which means engagement, performance, development, and whatnot, or connecting our toolkit more seamlessly with an underlying talent CRM or ATS capability. Both directions are super attractive for us, but that is something for more down the road. So 2026 probably a good moment to think about that. Nice.
Brett
That’s super exciting. All right, Sebastian. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview before we wrap here. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Sebastian Schüller
That is definitely our website and that is https://www.hipeople.io, alternatively also LinkedIn. There you get it all. Awesome.
Brett
Thanks so much for taking the time to chat, talk about what you’re building and share this vision. This is super exciting and look forward to having you come back on in 2026 and talk about all the progress.
Sebastian Schüller
Perfect. Thanks. Blessing the best.
Brett
All right, take care.
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