Podcast with Sagar from Multiplier Part 1
Podcast with Sagar from Multiplier Part 1
Summary:
Dive into this podcast with SagarKhatri, CEO of Multiplier, as he uncovers the game-changing platform that's revolutionizing global hiring. Learn about the hidden challenges of
international expansion and discover how COVID-19 has sparked a radical shift
towards remote and global work. Explore how Multiplier simplifies this process,
enabling companies to effortlessly employ talent from 150 countries. Your
perspective on global employment is about to be transformed. Sagar Khatri, CEO
of Multiplier Technologies, discusses the company's mission to simplify global
employment by handling payroll, contracts, taxes, and benefits. He explains the
birth of Multiplier out of his personal struggles with global expansion, and
details how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation,
encouraging remote and global hiring. Multiplier helps companies employ talent
from over 150 countries without needing to set up a legal entity in each
market.
[00:00:00] Andrew Liew Weida: hi, everyone. Welcome tothe AI of mankind show where I share anything interesting about mankind. I'm your host for this season. My name is Andrew Liew. I work across four Continents and 12 international cities. Also, I work in tech startups across a
range of roles from selling products, making customer happy, figuring out
fundraising, making finance tick, building teams and developing sticky product.
Apart from building startups. I've also worked in fortune 500 companies as a
chief data scientist or technologist or people leader. You can call me Jack of
all trades or master of learning. I hope to make this podcast show a great learning experience for us In eachseason, there is a series of interesting things where invite guests to share
their views about their life and interests.
[00:01:09] Andrew Liew Weida: Now let the show begin.
[00:01:26] Andrew Liew Weida:
Today's guest is Saga Khatri from the Multiplier Technologies. Saga is a young and dynamic professional.
He's also the CEO of Multiplier, a software service based global employment
solution that was found in 2020. Having worked with global brands, he honed
rich and well rounded experience in regional profit and loss management,
international expansion, fundraising, and mergers and acquisitions. He has been
a part of leadership team at Helmet and worked in deal advisory at Nomura prior
to that. He hails from India, is a graduate of India Institute of Technology, Bombay. So a bit about Multiplier.
Multiplier is a leading global employment platform that helps companies recruit talent
across any market without the need to establish a legal entity.
[00:02:13] Andrew Liew Weida: It actually simplifies theemployment process by taking charge of the complexity involved in handling the
payroll, employment contracts, taxes, and benefits while complying with
employment laws, both local and global.
[00:02:25] Andrew Liew Weida: A bit more aboutMultiplayer. It was born out of sheer pure personal experience and
understanding of challenges that companies face while looking to expanding
globally. Over 150 plus countries, multiplier is the only global employment
solution worldwide able to help companies tap into Asia Pacific market apart
from other key markets in Europe and America.
[00:02:46] Andrew Liew Weida: Saga. Thanks a lot. Thanksfor coming to the show. Before we begin, can you kindly tell me. How you get
here from the day that you actually did your first startup?
[00:02:54] Sagar Khatri: Hey andrew. It's a pleasure tobe here and talking to you Maybe I can talk about my journey till here. [00:03:00] i'm originally from from india and youknow started I studied in IIT Bombay. I did my engineering there and I started
although I did engineering, funnily enough, I started my career as an
investment banker. And I was in Tokyo for a couple of years covering PMT for
North Asia and then moved to Singapore with the same bank covering Southeast
Asia oil and gas. And then I have good friends who are in the VC industry. Who
happen to be now my investors at Multiplier, they've convinced me to join one
of their startups called Hamlet, where I was VP of Corp Dev so doing
fundraising, international expansion . I spent a couple of years there where I
realized that, hey, my true calling really lies in being a founder and leading
the company from the front. And that's where I approached my current co
founders, Vamsi and Ambrit, with this idea in late 2020 and we got started.
It's been a year and what a year it has been.
[00:03:53] Andrew Liew Weida: So you mentioned about thedays when you were an investment banker to the days when you meet up with your
founders. And along that line,[00:04:00] tellme more, what is the gap or the pain that you discovered before you found Multiplier
this is a very interesting question and something that I'd love to talk about,
Andrew.
[00:04:08] Sagar Khatri: One of my portfolio at Hamletwas... Obviously in addition to fundraising was the international expansion and
I was instrumental in expanding the company to Australia to Japan, doing a
joint venture there. And it took me, and you wouldn't believe this, it took me
six months to open a bank account in Australia.
[00:04:24] Andrew Liew Weida: Wow, really? So tell memore about what is the number of steps or why does it take so long? Six months,
[00:04:30] Sagar Khatri: It's a developed market, butthen with each developed market there are challenges, right? And in today's
world where checks and balances in digital, the world is digital, and hence
checks and balances have become extremely important. And as a VC backed
business, and obviously Sequoia had more than 25% of our company, they wanted
to understand who LPs of Sequoias are, and obviously as a VC firm, they would
not be talking about their LP's and which gets not talked about it. And hence
the banks were [00:05:00] not interested indoing the business with startups and that's when I realized that, hey until you
reach a certain size and you promise them certain business, nobody is interested
in working with you. And I realized that, hey, if you think about today's way
the organizations are structured, there is no role in the company which deals
with anything global. It could be global expansion, it could be global hiring,
which has an element of compliance and payroll. Payments associated with it,
right?
[00:05:24] Andrew Liew Weida: Yes.
[00:05:24] Sagar Khatri: That's what I thought. Hey thefuture of organizations will either have that role or a system and we decided
to build that.
[00:05:30] Andrew Liew Weida: I see I can empathize. Eventhen, how would that be painful? How do you take it upon yourself to have this
mission? Because you could jolly well be an investment banker making even more
money than doing a startup where there's a high risk of failing.
[00:05:45] Sagar Khatri: I think once I was, once Iworked for a startup, I realized... Just a few things. One is that I am
fundamentally an extremely driven individual and I like to build. Once you
realize that it is almost impossible for you to go back to a corporate life, [00:06:00] secondly being in banking, you alsorealize that the real wealth creation happens in equity. That's where I was
very sure that, hey yes, you can get handsome salaries and but if you really
want to make impact, you really want to do value creation, it has to be plus
obviously when you work on a problem statement that is, that you're really
passionate about, these things become secondary and you really want to make
that impact or dent in the world as you may.
[00:06:25] Andrew Liew Weida: Cool, because you wereworking in the corporate and now you're helping startups and you're a startup
yourself. So you were doing strategy work before and after COVID 19. And how
has COVID 19 actually changed the way companies do their business? How does it
change digital transformation?
[00:06:43] Sagar Khatri: So I would say COVID has been anabsolute drastic turning point in the way we work, in fact, for the entire
human civilization. Obviously it has caused pain to the society. It has taken
many lives. But the other way of that is it has really [00:07:00]changed the game for what we call digital transformation. I would say it was
not more of a choice. People had to do that. And if, you know there's a running
joke that what cause the digital transformation of your company, it's ceo ,
chief Digital Officer or Covid. Before covid digital adoption was pretty
limited in most working spaces. Work from home and hybrid models were totally
unheard of. And people were absolutely reliant on physical spaces commuting and
so on and so forth. But COVID has really shown people that work can be done
digitally. The companies like Zoom, Slack have facilitated that. The
proliferation of remote working tools has really enabled the digitization of
how we work today. The pandemic has also forced leaders to think of different
ways of delivering value and retaining the workforce, starting from a few. A
lot more companies are now joining the bandwagon of going remote and working in
an async manner. We also have innovative and efficient supply chains now. We
have technological initiatives based across industries. We have remote work
that is taken off. We have distance learning. [00:08:00]That's taken also. So I would say the way to think about this is obviously
physical is equivalent to quality, but digital equivalent to access. We have
seen that COVID has really transformed the industries and now more and more
people have access to each other in a more digital world.
[00:08:15] Andrew Liew Weida: I totally agree with you, Sagar,in a sense that before COVID 19, companies, they typically like to get
everybody to the same office. And so that there's a lot of interaction and
therefore people have to hire locally they have to You know, interview them,
set a registration office and workers wise, they have to feel that this company
is trusted. And that's how on premise or on site work begins. Now, because of
COVID 19, people have to go back to home, and as a result, companies realize
that, hey we can actually work from home. And that actually got them to rethink
the way that they can hire people. They can do business, right? They can...
start hiring people from overseas. And if that's the case Saga, How has
Multiplier helped to plug in this gap here?
[00:08:57] Sagar Khatri: That's a very interestingquestion, [00:09:00] Andrew. I think if youthink about what Multiplier does, ? Multiplier helps companies employ talent
globally without having to set up a legal entity, payroll, benefit, taxes, and
all you need to do is to find candidates online and we'll take care of
everything else. So it literally removed the need for you to have your own
office. Need for you to have your own entity. need for you to have your own HR
Ops department, we are literally the extended HR team for your team in every
single country. We are your local HR team in every single market. We have
customers and big and small alike. Some of the biggest enterprise customers,
some of the smallest startups, who now rely completely on Multiplier to expand.
Again, I'm based, personally based in Singapore. Now we cover more than 150
countries globally today, we've realized that a lot of customers today. That
were working with us will never ever open a single entity across the globe
sitting in Singapore using our platform Now they can employ anyone anywhere within three clicks and 30seconds. So we what we have really enabled is You know Companies who are going
global we've enabled them to go global Without moving from the comfort of their
house without getting into the nitty gritties of payroll compliance benefits of
each market you know internally how we would put is we really have balanced the
demand and supply of Global talent without anybody immigrating from one place
to other
[00:10:25] Andrew Liew Weida: That's a very radical formof digital transformation in which that Gone are the days where companies need
to have a physical entity or legal entity and human resource unit to really get
people. With multiplayer, , three clicks in maybe under three minutes when the
administrative bureaucracy itself and all this nitty gritty compliance can
literally take six months. We're not talking about the go to market about like
the ability to what to sell, where to sell, how to sell, and what is the
product value proposition of the design in the local market.
[00:10:58] Andrew Liew Weida: We're just only talkingabout how to [00:11:00] literally just get thepeople to do the work on the ground.
[00:11:02] Andrew Liew : Hello, listeners! Weappreciate your company in today's podcast episode, where we just wrapped up an
eye-opening chat with Sagar Khatri, the dynamic CEO of Multiplier. Together, we
unearthed how this game-changing platform is pioneering a transformation in
global hiring, successfully addressing the hidden challenges of international
expansion. We also unpacked how the COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst,
expediting a seismic shift towards global and remote work. Through Multiplier's
groundbreaking technology, companies can now effortlessly employ top-tier
talent from 150 countries. We're certain your perspective on global employment
has undergone a transformation today.
[00:11:38] Andrew Liew :
As we transition into Part 2of our conversation with Sagar, prepare to journey deeper into the evolving
landscape of work. You will discover how the power dynamics have tilted,
favoring talent in a remote-working era and pushing organizations to fast-track
their adaptability. Sagar will further reveal how Multiplier's innovative tool
is revolutionizing the hiring process worldwide, generating compliant contracts in a matter of seconds. Andfinally, we'll delve into a future-forward vision where AI not only catalyzes
business efficiency but also empowers individuals to upskill and flourish in
new roles. Intrigued? Be sure to tune into our next exciting episode for these
illuminating insights!
[00:12:15] Andrew Liew Weida:
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