Ep. 37: Erik Kostelnik — Building a Side Hustle Start-up while you are the VP of Sales

Tune in ladies and gents. Learn how someone works as a VP of Sales at a fast growing company to bootstrap his start-up into a full time job with over 400 customers and millions in revenue…

His company is making a difference in the HR Tech space. Text and App recruiting are the now and the future too. Today’s candidates are looking for speed and convenience when communicating with recruiters. One day soon, a candidate can text “Chipotle” to quickly apply for a job, but guacamole still costs extra.

• Erik’s mindset when to first start a business — “Tired of making other people a lot of money by selling crappy products”

Simple but not easy to take that first step out on your own…

Listen below on Soundcloud:

ITunes, link here — http://bit.ly/STS37ErikKostelnik

Erik Kostelnik is the Co-Founder and CEO of TextRecruit, a candidate and employee engagement platform that leverages text, chat and artificial intelligence to help companies hire better people, faster. Prior to TextRecruit, Erik served as the Head of Sales at Wrike from 2014 to 2016 helping it reach #116 in 2015 Deloitte Fastest 500 and ran sales as VP at Identified through its acquisition by Workday in 2014.

He acts as an advisor to startups including Eatify.com, Outreach.io and HIRABL, was named an Upstart 50 Inventor by the Silicon Valley Business Journal and lives in San Jose with his wife and three kids.

Agenda:

• Ben/Erik find common ground with basketball — Erik played power forward in college.
• Erik talks about his Finance background in college on the east coast and how he made it to Silicon Valley
• Erik gets tired of making a lot of money for other people as a sales pro. Starts TextRecruit
• Erik opens up about how recruiters use texting for recruiting. Coming soon — You will soon be able to apply to Chipotle over text message. Can I get guacamole with that?
• Erik talks about how his company got acquired by iCims
• Erik gifts a bag of coffee to his friend at Cracker Barrel, Sumato Coffee of course
• Out

Links:

TextRecruit website — https://www.textrecruit.com/

Erik on LinkedIn — Erik Kostelnik

Erik on Twitter — https://twitter.com/ErikKostelnik

Sponsor: www.sumatocoffee.com

Coming soon: New Secret Tech Sauce Talent website coming soon, here — www.benmartinez.co