Startup Spotlight: Aravind Bala, CTO, SeekOut.com - How to successfully pivot your company

In this episode, we feature Aravind Bala, who is the CTO and co-founder of Seekout. SeekOut (https://seekout.io) empowers companies to go beyond LinkedIn in recruiting hard-to-find and diverse talent. Prior to SeekOut, Aravind spent 14 years at Microsoft as a Partner Engineering Manager. In this episode, Aravind shares the following: * *From Big Tech to startup leap:* Aravind Bala shares why he left a 14-year Microsoft career to build a company “for real,” guided by Jeff Bezos’ regret minimization mindset—and the importance of finding the right co-founder (Anoop Gupta). * *The first idea (and why it didn’t stick):* The team’s original startup, Next.io, explored a two-sided marketplace that used “money as signal” to cut through cold outreach—then hit the classic marketplace bootstrapping and consumer-virality challenges. * *A pivot born from survival + customer pull:* With ~6 months of runway, a side project (“Career Compass”) drew strong recruiter interest, leading them to pivot into *SeekOut*, where B2B feedback loops felt more “debuggable” than consumer growth bets. * *How SeekOut differentiated vs. LinkedIn:* Aravind explains the opening they saw: LinkedIn optimizes for member experience, while SeekOut could optimize for recruiter outcomes—especially by using *external signals* (e.g., GitHub/code, papers, patents, public profiles) and *diversity inference at scale*. * *When the market turned:* The tech hiring downturn, recruiter headcount cuts, and shifting DEI priorities forced a rethink—plus a new reality: in a flooded applicant market, passive sourcing tools can feel less urgent. * *The “agentic” thesis: tools vs. outcomes:* A core debate: most AI “agents” boost productivity (you still control everything), but SeekOut is pushing toward *outcome-delivering agents*—a “white-collar factory” model where humans supervise pipelines and give up more control to get 10x gains. * *What it takes to make agents reliable (and monetizable):* Aravind breaks down why outcome delivery needs a *factory-like pipeline with quality control, why some tasks need top-tier models, and why this shifts pricing from SaaS “all-you-can-eat” to **per-outcome economics* that can compete with recruiter/agency costs. Brought to you by TiE Seattle Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain