Update: ePluribus is now Unum ID.
When Stanford grad Liam McCarty raised his seed round after working with Learning Dollars remote contractors, he asked us whether we can introduce him to local in-person talent. Learning Dollars had always been in the business of connecting remote contractors with tech teams, so playing the role of recruiter was not part of our business model.
However, we noticed the need on both sides of our talent network. Liam, after raising his seed, was ready for hiring in-house talent. Also, many of our US-based remote contractors were open to working in-house full-time as employees. So, we at Learning Dollars ad-hoc setup a “Finder’s Fee” agreement with Liam. If we could find him an in-house match within our talent network, instead of charging him indefinitely for contract work, we would charge him a one-time finder’s fee of a few thousand (compared to the $25K most recruiters charge). Liam said this sounds great!
The Learning Dollars talent network has several US-based engineers who have graduated from top R1 universities so we introduced Liam to some grads from UC Berkeley and University of Washington. One of those introductions clicked and Liam met with one of the UW grads several times. The UW grad happens to be a blockchain expert. They are working together now, and Liam just paid us just a few thousand dollars for that intro. It was a win win deal, and our first finder’s fee deal type executed.
We have now added a section called Recruiting Full-Time Employees with LD to our website learningdollars.com where we describe the finder’s fee details. We hope to do more such introductions for a “finder’s fee” in the future, as our clients grow from bootstrapping startups that hire only remote contractors to seed funded and series A funded startups that hire both remote contractors and full-time employees.
Learning Dollars’ has hence stumbled into a new business model that disrupts traditional recruiting. However, our core business is still matching remote contractors with tech teams.
