#196 Duri Chitayat on the Intersection of AI and HR Tech Innovation

0:00:02 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased to have with me Duri Duri, joining me from Austin, texas. Duri, the way I like to do it is I prefer the guests to introduce themselves, so tell us a little bit about yourself and what you are up to. 

0:00:19 - Duri
Sure thing. So Duri Chitayati, I'm based in Austin, texas, and I work for a company called Safeguard Global as the CTO, and what Safeguard Global is all about is that we try to analyze, recruit, hire, manage and pay anyone anywhere in the world. Currently, we support more than 100,000 workers, and that ranges everything from EOR, like I was saying analyze, recruit, hire, manage, pay so that includes things like EOR, where we will essentially do everything for the entire worker and effectively they work for us as a pass-through to the client, but also things like as complicated as payroll data, analytics, classification of workers, and we do this globally. So my team just a bit more context is definitely a signature of Safeguard. I have 155 developers and product folks based across 22 different countries, everywhere from Brazil, united States, turkey, uk, india, you name it. So we're a very remote team, we're a work in any way team and we're playing with some interesting technology that I'm looking forward to talking with you about today. 

0:01:42 - Mehmet
Yeah, sure, before we dig deep in this technology, something I'm always interested to hear is how you started your journey in tech and what drew you specifically towards AI and system development. 

0:01:59 - Duri
So my father is an inventor. He came from Baghdad, iraq, just after World War II. So he's up there. He's in his 90s, but he came over because he had learned engineering. He got a dual masters in electrical and mechanical and then after that he ended up inventing things like the linear motor. He helped work on the Apollo missions. He helped invent how you manufacture the stint that goes into your heart. He was entrepreneur of the year in the United States and also he's part of the technology hall of fame from New York. 

So growing up I grew up our company. Growing up I grew up around people that every day were trying to invent the future and I just thought that that's what you do. So I never had it in my mind that you do anything different. So at 16 years old I was writing software. I wrote, you know, in college I used software as a way to pay some of the bills. And then when I graduated, I didn't necessarily think I wanted to be a software engineer, but I just I tried a bunch of other things. I looked for other jobs and just none of them spoke to me. So I said, ok, well, I'll do something similar to what my dad was doing, but maybe more on the software side. So I jumped into robotics and I wrote an ERP system for a robotics company. Following from that, somebody heard hey, you wrote an ERP, you must be good at ERP, so why don't you help us with an SAP rollout in China for a big company? And I was like, oh OK, enterprise software. I haven't done that before, but what could be the difference? This is a big difference. So I cut my teeth on that. 

That was difficult and after a time of struggling with that I realized, you know, maybe I should go and try more startup stuff. So involved myself. I created a startup around social e-commerce, also based in China and with headquarters in the United States as well, and for three years I popped back and forth between China and the US and in there I learned about XP. I got really into the XP world. I was really excited about Lean startup and from there on, you know, after that I went on to, you know, founding a digital agency. I worked and helped build up a digital agency in a bigger company. I went into some consulting. I've done ad tech, med tech, finance, banking, and now I found myself here in HR technology. 

So Safeguard was kind of a product that initially had to be kind of sold to me. I wasn't really like. Payroll Doesn't really sound that exciting. But then I met the CEO, bjorn Reynolds, who helped invent the EOR market, helped really push global payroll, and he explains to me what we're doing here is about inventing the future of how people work Like. In the end of the day, what prevents people from being able to work in any way is a lot of the fof, the friction that gets in between them and the employment relationships that they want that them and employers being able to engage the best talent anywhere in the world. And so I said, okay, that's something I can get on board with, and so the rest is history. I've been here for two years. I built up the team. We started with 30 people in the product and engineering department. As I said, we're 155 now, but definitely not 155 strong. We feel like a thousand, because we only hire the best talent in the world. And yet I'm very proud of what we've been able to accomplish. Wow. 

0:05:53 - Mehmet
That's really an amazing journey, Duri, and a lot of things came to my mind now. So two things actually. First, you are in an HR tech company and yourself you said like you have a team over 22 countries, so part of what you do like is it also something that will benefit companies in managing remote teams as well, same as yourself you do or is it like only in pay? I know like HR tech is very broad and maybe you, maybe later we can explain. You know what is HR tech, but do you use your own, Do you solve your own problems with the software that you produce? That's exactly what we're trying to do. 

0:06:36 - Duri
The whole saying of eat your own dog food, or maybe the more polite way is drink your own champagne, depending on how much you love your software. I think we try to do that a lot. It's something that we don't have solution for every problem yet, but that's precisely what we're trying to move to because as we run into our own problems, for instance, I have great people that I've tried to bring on, the best talent. But, for instance, one person I hired he was in. He's a Polish citizen that's been living in the UK for 20 years and now moving to Turkey and so pulling him. We were like playing Tetris with all the legislation trying to figure out exactly how best to do that. Luckily, I have an entire department in my company that focuses exclusively on figuring out and point it, so like that's an example of a like us eating our own dog food is like if I hadn't had that support, I would have been able to do that. If I hadn't had that support, I probably never would have hired that person. And that goes for down the list. Like I never would have considered hiring in Nigeria. I never would have considered hiring in Brazil. It just would have been too much effort I would have never known. 

How do you get them a computer? How do you pay them? Like, what about taxes? Do I have to worry about like legal issues if, for whatever reason, they end up leaving the company and they sue us? Like I need to know the processes in every country, and so it's the responsibility, effectively, of our technology system to be able to help people with that, and we've got a lot of the bigger blocks of that in place and what we don't have in place for technology. We have 1600 of the best payroll and HR experts based in country. I think we're in over 70 countries. We're based in country to be able to help you answer those questions in the language that they speak in those countries, knowing the local legislation. So it's definitely a big part of our technology and our company as a whole is to effectively allow companies like ourselves to be able to hire wherever they are. Like what on the things I say is, I don't want to care about where they are, I just want to know that they're the best. 

0:09:14 - Mehmet
That's amazing. That's amazing, julie. Now, back to the thing I was mentioning about HR tech. Let's at least from my side, let's admit it HR by itself is not the most funniest thing to be excited about. And then we started to see all these trends like fintech, health tech and now, of course, for a couple of years, we started to see HR tech. Now, apart from the hiring and, I would say, the administrative task, which is like payroll and these things, what HR tech can solve in HR in general, or should be solving, I would say. 

0:10:01 - Duri
Well, here's how I think about it. I think we've gone through an evolution of thinking about people as, like a cog and a wheel, a resource human resources. One of the first things that I started when, though, when I came on board, was the idea of when I came on board was, I said I don't wanna hear anyone in my company ever refer to a person as a resource. People are. The second, it's a multi-sided market. On one side of your organization is a customer, and everyone knows we create sales organizations, marketing organizations, your operations, everything in your organization is geared towards serving your customer, but you need to think differently, because, actually, the other side of your organization, the second side of the market, is your employees, and, ironically, with some of our like, biggest advancements in technology, it's the company with the best employees that are gonna be able to take advantage of it, because, a lot of the times, it's your employees that can adapt. 

Human beings are adaptable, and so what HR tech should be really focused on? Like in the old days, it was about documenting who they are, what do I pay them, and that's still important, right, like you still need. Like old days, you'd have a book. Then you had HRIS systems that documented and made it a little bit more easy to use digitally. But now you need to have a system of engagement. 

You have to have a system that helps you acquire, retain, train, the best talent anywhere in the world. If you're gonna be successful, if you're in the knowledge industry and almost everybody is then you need to have people that are great problem solvers, that could tie together the things that are complex and abstract customer problems, that could empathize, that can also care, that could care about everything that they're working on and we'll go and make the changes necessary. In a world where that is, disruption is a big part of everything everybody's dealing with, and if you don't have people that can adapt to that, then you won't have an organization that could survive so effectively. What I think HR tech is responsible for is about connecting workers and employers in a way that is completely frictionless, that makes the people that use that technology have a competitive advantage. 

0:12:34 - Mehmet
I love this Duri, because, yeah, we are not resources. I like this. It's like maybe the first thing that it made like something light up, I would say, and this is how it should be. Still, unfortunately, we have the same, sometimes the old conventions that we inherited, but it is what it is Now. If you allow me, hot topics in the market now is AI right, so everyone talks about AI. From your experience, why should tech leaders be considering embracing AI solutions through the entire organization? 

0:13:15 - Duri
It's a destructive technology for sure. Anybody that says, oh, it's just another thing, it'll come and go hype cycle, just come and go. They haven't actually tried to apply it, because it is a game changer. Now there was sort of a period of time where AI it was still hard to use. Like, for instance, I had a bunch of my software engineers that tried to get on AWS Jumpstart and try to use their tools and it was still too difficult for them to wrap their heads around. It didn't flow in very easily. 

But now it's reached a point where the tools are just so easy to use that if you're not taking the effort, your competitors definitely are, and so you're going to fall behind so effectively if you're not taking advantage of it. It's not just about capturing competitive advantage, it's about survival. If you're not adopting AI and getting your teams comfortable with learning new tools, then when the wave crashes they're going to be taken by surprise and you're going to end up losing. I think we've talked for a long time in the industry. It's like oh, ai is coming and it will disrupt, and people like say yawn, yawn. I've heard that before. It's now happening and every industry whether you're a copywriter or you're a legal expert. It's going to have an impact on you. 

0:14:58 - Mehmet
Right, and I think the sooner it's better and waiting. I repeated this couple of times on the show Before when I was asking this question how do you see things in the coming five to 10 years? I'm not saying this anymore. I'm saying how do you see things in the couple of months coming up? So how important also for leaders to be agile because you mentioned about the lean methods and so how important to also embed the adoption of AI in that. 

0:15:35 - Duri
It's definitely important. Leaders will help people overcome the natural instinct to stay where you are For a very long time. There's been a lot of talk in our industry around agile and it's definitely not lived up to its promise, partly because agile isn't a process. It's a mindset of constantly being close to the evidence and adjusting based on evidence. The reality is that normal human beings will have biases. They will want to believe that what is most convenient, which is usually what they're doing already, is the right thing, and they will come up with 20 reasons why you know it's not necessary. Oh, it's too hard, it's too expensive, things are gonna be difficult. I need more resources, I need more training, like they'll come up with every reason under the sun why not to do something, and there will be people that will evangelize, but they will be quickly swatted down if the leaders don't step up and protect. And I think that's, you know, one of the things that I've seen from my CEO. When we launched an AI product, he was the first one to use it and I could see it, not just based on, like him saying he used it. I like actually saw the data, the guys running queries every single day, using the tool every single day and he's going to all the team members are going. Have you seen this? Can you believe? Wow, how amazing this is and that enthusiasm. I could see it transferred to all the people he talked to. 

And so it's absolutely incumbent upon leaders. You know one of the things I heard before in the 2000s, to be a leader meant you were great at finance, you're good at understanding how debt was structured, and you can do those sorts of things Today. What makes the difference is that a leader is a change agent. They can be willing to take risks, they could be willing to put out opinions. They can provide the enthusiasm and the energy necessary for the organization to overcome what is, you know, uncomfortable. Things change. The world is getting disrupted. The way that we worked in the past can't be the way that we work in the future, and so those leaders help people like embrace that change. 

0:18:17 - Mehmet
Yeah, and here I want to ask you, because you mentioned something, how important also for I still consider myself on the technical side, you know, with business acumen so how important for us you know people in technology to also try, because sometimes what I see people doing is they go talk to CEOs or they talk to the business leaders, but actually they are not talking their language. So they end up by talking about, you know, as we say, knobs and you know bolts, and they are not conveying the message in a way where that guy who is in front of me is understanding what I'm saying Because all I'm telling him imagine, hey, like we should adopt these large language models because they are built on right. So how important is to convey this into a business language. 

0:19:11 - Duri
I mean, it's definitely important. 

It is important that you can explain, and this is true for any technology, not just disruptive technology. 

You have to be able to explain if I do X, I will get Y, like of course. 

But with some of these sorts of new disruptive technologies, you know, I will say I've been, I've been less than perfect in how I can train people like to you know, to you know, like to explain what it actually means without them actually seeing it. 

And one of the metaphors I've kind of hit back on is something I think it comes from lean thinking, which says the further away someone is from a problem, the harder it is for them to solve it. And so there's another job that we have to do, which is take them to the Gemba, genshin Kabutsu, bring the actual leaders, bring whoever you want to change, bring them to the actual thing and have them work on it At that level, not at the level of abstraction, where you know LLMs. Here, let me send you a thing that came from Forbes. Like you know, that could be helpful for, like, creating some hype, but for people to actually understand tangibly what it means, they have to be able to feel it for themselves, and so it's part of your job, I think as a leader, to bring people to the work, not just to bring the work to them. 

0:20:51 - Mehmet
Now, like, let's say, we decided, you know, everyone agreed, yeah, that we will do this. You know we will embrace this new technology, we're gonna adopt it. But what do you think is the success formula to get things in the right way? 

0:21:11 - Duri
Ooh Well, so I'll give you my formula that I've been championing, but I will admit up front that it's a lot more complicated than this. So the way I've kind of bucketed things is in three buckets First, it's the talent gap, second, it's the culture gap and the third thing is the data gap Mm-hmm. The first one, talent. One of the things we talked about earlier was, without the right people, some things are really really hard and some things completely impossible. Like it doesn't matter how good your strategy is if you don't have the people on your team that are good problem solvers, that are adaptable, that are enthusiastic, it's pushing a rock uphill. So you have to have the right people, and one of the key roles that many people are now saying might be the most important role in the next two years, and one that is in increasingly high demand, is someone that is an AI specialist, and what I mean is in somebody that writes large language models they're not actually at the foundation level but somebody that is capable of working up and down the AI stack. Somebody who knows what Langchain is, understands how open AI differs from Claude, understands the details of if I'm doing copywriting maybe I should think about Jasper. They should be able to kind of think about how all these tools work and be able to decipher what's hype and what can actually help people. And so those sorts of people like have business acumen, good communication skills, great problem solving skills, a little bit technical maybe they have some data engineering background, they might have some software engineering background, but, like you could see, it's kind of a it's a mishmash of a role, so that's really important. I think that's the talent gap. 

The second one, which is about culture, is a little bit also. What we talked about is you have to have an organization that's capable of change and it's not just capable of it, it does it every day Because, as you said, we're measuring things in dog years. Now it's a week, it's a month, it's two months, like the market's moving, new things are happening, and so you can't get married to like your solution. You have to figure out, like my system is an evolving system, we're in a complex adaptive environment and any new adjustment that comes in, I'm gonna listen to that, I'm gonna see the evidence and I'm gonna take an action. And so creating the culture that is like very well tuned, not to like creating charades of you know success charade, but instead they're saying what's actually happening. They have the evidence, they can show you the receipts and they're able to be proactive. It's not a hierarchy, it's very flat. So it's a lot of stuff we've been talking about for years, but it's now in hyperdrive and then that's great. 

0:24:37 - Mehmet
Yeah, please go ahead, Dury. 

0:24:39 - Duri
Well then, just briefly. The third one that might be interesting to folks is the data side. Now, this is a super common base but it's the data itself is another thing that if you're locked I've worked in some organizations that are very legacy and so, like the process of getting access to the data can be a process of years. So even with the right people and the right cultural maturity in the wrong circumstances, you're still gonna struggle. So data, the maturity of your data ecosystem, is also very important. 

0:25:17 - Mehmet
Dury, actually you nailed it, I would say, by mentioning these three pillars over here. Now the question is can we use AI to tackle some of these some of the challenges that might come up while doing this deployment, or maybe any other emerging tech? Do you see any role in tackling, for example, the talent gap, the culture gap and the data gap? 

0:25:50 - Duri
It's a great question. I think AI at least so software we're building. We're trying to help with finding and enabling the best talent. So, certainly within our ecosystem, I'm trying to create products that make it easier for you to find the best people, hire them, bring them on board, be able to decipher what local legislation means. We've rolled out things like chatbots, but more than that we're also putting in AI under the hood in order to do fraud detection, in order to expedite people's onboarding, so there's a lot of things that help in the talent realm. That I'm definitely I could talk all day about that. 

In the culture domain. That's a really interesting one. I mean, a big part of the culture that I'm trying to build here is making sure every single person in our organization Is starting to use tools that are a AI enabled, ai powered, because I think, for instance, whether you're doing marketing or You're writing an email for a client or whatever it, whatever it is, there are now hacks that, like that are coming in and they're coming in fast. That can, that, that can assist you, and if you're not attuned to that, if you're not aware of it, and if you're not, like constantly searching it, you're just gonna end up being less efficient and Also missing out on future opportunities that will build on it. So there's certainly an aspect of AI Making sure that everybody's empowered, and these things can include like, for instance, within my software engineering department, we were the first, one of the first, to adopt Copilot, github copilot because you know, that was something that we knew was coming. Bought on to it right away as soon as it was integrated with open AI first ones to use that and it's just. It's helped us Measurably in the speed to which we can deploy and test and develop. Code gives you a lot of the scaffolding that it's necessary for that. 

And then the last bit around data. Now, definitely, there's little hacks as well in terms of helping you unlock your data. Like I was just the other day Thinking, okay, I need to take a data structure that looks you know, it had like three columns and I needed it to basically pair it down and transform it into JSON. Now, there's plenty of ways that I could have done this differently, but I thought, oh, wouldn't it be fun if I could just toss this into open AI and see what kind of data models it gave me back? And, yeah, it gave me a great model and was able, in two button clicks, like be able to use it. So there's certainly Little hacks that that AI can can help you with. 

0:28:48 - Mehmet
Yeah, regarding the last one, I'm not a data scientist, I'm curious guy, like I like to keep testing things, and I was thinking, okay, how I can test the code interpreter that you know they released couple of weeks back. So, funny enough, you know the, the real estate, I mean the department responsible for real estate transactions here in Dubai. They have a Open data policy so you can go. Of course, you don't see names, but you can download the transaction. So I said, okay, let me get a sample, give it to open AI and ask a few questions like Simplify it to me. Fine, friends, and I was shocked. 

I mean, you know, I remember I took a crash course in data science, like couple of years back, and what you know they taught us, maybe in Maybe 10 days, like openly. I was able to do it in just like couple of seconds more over. You know what is called data cleaning or cleansing. Also, it was able to do it by itself because it found a, it found a feed and it said, hey, like this field contained Brackets. I'm not sure what is that. And then it's auto correct oh, this is the currency. Fine, let me continue. And I was what? 

0:30:00 - Duri
Yeah, really amazing. It is. I mean, that the that's a really good point. I mean, I remember back, I think in 2010 or something like that. I was working at a health healthcare or a pharmaceutical company and we're sitting on petabytes upon petabytes data and people were talking about, hey, we'll be able to create disruptive health outcomes by being able to use this data. And then everybody said Can't actually do that because data is dirty like complex, difficult to actually merge things together. And we had we spent million, millions and millions of dollars on Both people and technology to solve a problem which I believe, like you just described, probably could be solved with something like open AI and you know hours or days. So I think, I think it definitely a lot of that data cleansing, data quality, testability, you know, particularly legacy code. Wow, like what a difference it makes, like just being able to go in and help you create unit tests on legacy code that it definitely it's a game changer. 

0:31:09 - Mehmet
Absolutely. You mentioned something about the role of an AI specialist and you mentioned that His or her role would be just keeping up with you know what tools. But how to keep up, and you know today we, especially after Open AI, you know they they opened their API is more in a more broader way. 

Every day we see a new tool coming up right, popping up, so how to keep you know with this fast-paced Movement? And again, it's not only open AI. So cloud is there and I'm not sure if Google they will open the API for bar. I'm sure they will after, after sometimes. So we can see, I think, kind of a bubble of of these AI tools. What would you say? Would you take on this duty? 

0:31:57 - Duri
Definitely, if I was, I wouldn't be in the LLM space right now, like I think there is gonna be a ton of a ton of competition there and and they're all gonna get really good really fast and maybe some of them are gonna get specialized, I think. I think what strategy I have is I'm saying the strategy isn't to have the best strategy, meaning like to have the right answer that strategy is to constantly adapt and so build in the make sure that whatever you build is Is is very cost-free to change or very low cost to change, rather, that enables people to overcome their biases, not not feeling like they have to defend their previous solution, but to be Kind of designing for whatever is coming next, to design for the unknown, to design for, like, whatever you're building to be Swap. You could swap things out, and I think that that's one of the Things that other people have hit on as well. Like, for instance, lang chain Came along as a tool to help you be able to intermediate whether or not you're going to open AI or you're going to some other large language model, and To be able to handle configuration adjustments and upgrades and and make things a little bit more open open so like a Terraform for AI, and and I think that that's just such a smart thing for every organization to do is like to bake those kind of evolutionary artifacts into your products so that your team members can feel open to experimenting, trying new things. You know, because you know. 

One of the things that we know is that we're fighting against people's nature, loss aversion as an example. Like I, I put blood, sweat and tears into this software. I don't want to see it thrown away. So how do you make it so that they don't feel that? How do you make it so? That's, that's the evolutionary aspect of it, and also it's who you hire. 

You know I can't teach someone to go to meetups like they either do or they don't, right, I can't teach someone to read the blogs like they either do or they don't. If they're not, if that's not something they enjoy, if that's not a you know, they're gonna be a little bit of a laggard. That's just the way it is right. Like you, just like. There's no other way to get it. You have to be out in the world in order to learn stuff. So if that's not your normal mode, I'm sure you're a great person. I'm sure you're a great software engineer, but you're gonna be a little slower, you're gonna be a little bit further behind, and so who you hire needs to be people that are on that cutting edge. If they've never written anything in, if they've never, if they've never, if they've never contributed, have they've never been part of startups, if they've never like, if they don't go to meeters, if that's not something that they like to do, you can't train it. I don't think. 

0:35:04 - Mehmet
Yeah, 100%. I agree with this. That's very Spot on, I would say. Now, as we we almost coming to an end and let's talk about, you know, startups and entrepreneurship. So what do you think you know? Founders, especially in this age where Things moves fast, should be focusing on both from technology perspective and from Business operations perspective. 

0:35:38 - Duri
So many things. A founder's job is so difficult and I've been there I understand that any advice I can offer will feel pale, because just the vast array of plates that you have spinning is hard. But a few things come to mind. First, make sure that you're in the right market. So, with what's going on today, there will be certain markets that there are advantages to AI. You're like, if you're dealing in a fractured market where disruption is very possible, where you could bring in maybe some adjustments to a business process to replace human intervention, particularly things that are on the lower order of people's creativity, then it is a great space for you to be in, and it's a space where you can innovate and adapt quickly. 

I think that that's one of the main things I learned was picking the right market is very important and going to where the innovation will be. 

I think that that's a very important aspect of it. Other things that are important as well is constant direct feedback from customers, and I know that that's something that people say a lot's a little cliche, but what I mean by that is is don't build software that people don't want, and the way to know whether or not people want it is that people are using it. And so being really on top of your metrics, on top of your funnel and that's something that, regardless really whether or not you're in a startup or whether or not you're in a larger company, you need to understand how, if you're bringing innovations, if you're bringing change to that software, you need to understand really the effect that it's having on people and it can't be incremental anymore. I think today we're moving into the world of exponential change, so you need to be thinking about your metrics in terms of a different order of magnitude value that you need to be creating today than in years past. 

0:38:02 - Mehmet
Right. So it's not like anymore about hey, I can do it like one hour faster or I can do it $10 cheaper, so it should be like on a larger magnitude. Otherwise, and unfortunately, what I'm seeing recently is a lot of people are jumping on the this gold rush let's call it of AI and they are developing products and they say, guys, okay, you just put the name of AI on it, but probably what will happen is like maybe open AI through Microsoft. Now it's they are doing this, so probably Microsoft, they will come up with the same product and they're gonna give it to their customers for the subscription that they already charged them. So why you are building this product? So I think also here, finding the right problem that you can really differentiate and it takes a lot of time for the others to imitate you is also something that they should be doing, in my opinion. I don't know, what do you think? 

0:39:01 - Duri
Yeah, ironically, often what I'm seeing is that differentiating based on your technology can be really hard. One of the interesting things is being able to differentiate based on your combination of technology and people. That's a really interesting thing that you could build up a mode around, because one thing I'm seeing, for instance, is that technology a lot of this large language models, for example are relying on data that could be, over time, degraded. We're seeing that already 25% of the internet's content is being created by AI itself, right, and that probably is gonna go up and up and up and up, and so that content is gonna be like, basically polluted, and so finding ways to create real, unique insights, real unique data, it requires people, people with creativity, with close connections to actual events on the ground, real insights, real discovery, and so that's the source of innovation that I think that people that get too infatuated with the technology can overlook. The technology is great, but it's the combination of technology and people that could really differentiate. 

0:40:24 - Mehmet
That's 100% right, and I believe people ask me sometimes do you think it's a hype? I'm telling them it's not a hype. But the hype is when you try to imitate and then people will say, okay, like, for example, something that generates marketing content. People will get so used to it so they think it's now part of what we have already and they will forget what's behind it. So you need something really which I would say like leaves a lot of effect on your daily life, your business, whatever, so really it's tangible. 

And here this is something we used to say when and I still say it, of course, in business, like people bite from people. People want to understand your culture, your motivation, your vision, because, at the end of the day, all technologies, at some point in time they would emerge and become available for everyone. So this is my own theory you can differentiate yourself, maybe for five years, maybe maximum, but at a certain stage everyone will have the same technology. Of course, this is why you will keep trying to be ahead of the competition, but yeah, it's my own two cents. 

0:41:43 - Duri
I couldn't agree with you more. 

0:41:46 - Mehmet
Yeah, so this is after, I would say, 20 plus years of I'm passionate about startups. I didn't start a company myself, I mean in the sense of a tech company, but I love to read about what they do, how they succeed, how they fail, and this is the, I would say, the trend that I've seen over the years, like the ones who were always been, and this is why you mentioned something very important to do, like you need to always be adapting new things, otherwise you will be wiped out, we'll be out of business. I would say, do you know where people can find more about your company and about you? 

0:42:23 - Duri
Well, you can find us at safeguardglobalcom and for our products you could go to appsafeguardglobalcom and register for free. Use some of our AR products, like ChatSG, which allows you to, for free, get access to basically our entire 15 years of knowledge on local markets how to hire, what kind of requirements they have in different countries, what it means in the UK to be IR35. So I'd encourage folks to go check that out and always I'm available on LinkedIn. I love to connect with people and have great conversations, so this has been really great Memet and I appreciate you inviting me. 

0:43:07 - Mehmet
I'm not done yet. I have one final famous question. What is the question that you wished I asked you, and how you would answer that? 

0:43:17 - Duri
Well, I think you did. I mean, you pulled all my hot button topics out of me. I think the one topic that might be of interest to you and your listeners is what it means to support people and kind of an organization in a world where we're demanding so much of people. Like I said before, we're demanding people to challenge their biases. Like every day I come to the job and I say to my team well, why can't we do it? We could do it, let's do it. Come on. Like and I'm challenging people and like I've been telling people that's gonna take you six weeks, I want it tomorrow. Why can't we have it tomorrow? I want it tomorrow, we could make it tomorrow. 

0:44:03 - Mehmet
Come on, let's do it come on, I'm constantly challenging people. What does it mean to support? 

0:44:07 - Duri
people in that kind of environment where we're pushing, we're pushing the edge, we're going, trying to go fast, we're asking for high performance, and so this is what it looks like to me work in any way. Work in any way to me means you set your hours, you can live wherever you wanna live. You don't have to come to the office. You can work remote, but you can also go to the office if you want to. We have offices all over the place. You can take holidays when you want to. If your kid's swim class is Wednesday at noon, take off. You do what you want. You do what you want. 

Like I said before, there's a two-sided market. One is for the customer and one is for the employee, and so I need to ask a lot from my employees, and I do. But I want to give a lot too. I'm given, I'm giving them freedom, trust, the ability to pick their own tools, their own technologies. Like, believe me, if I, if I, if I had my, I have a ton of tools that are my favorites. I'll go around and they say you should use this, you should use this, you should do this, and I still do, I still encourage, right, but they get to pick in the end of the day, if they want to use the Django over Django, over over, over, next, fair enough, flat, you know, fair play, you do what you want. 

That Gives people, I guess, the confidence to then go and innovate, because they feel ownership, they feel that they have autonomy, mastery and purpose, and or at least the autonomy part. Hopefully I could give them also some help with mastery and purpose. But so that's one thing that I think is also important here, because you know We've talked a lot about like the changing world and how hard it is, and you know what companies need to ask from their employees and only hiring the best, etc. Etc. But there's that other end of the, the other side of the coin, which is that you know, when you ask a lot, you have to give a lot, and that's a. That's a big piece of the puzzle too. 

0:46:12 - Mehmet
I Love this story and I wish that more Technology leaders and leaders in general will think the same way that you think, because, unfortunately From I would not say personal experience, but personal observation Companies are waiting a lot from their people, but they are not giving back the way they should give, and I think this culture that you talked about is is something you know. I encourage every company to follow it, because they will be the winners on the long run. And I, without mentioning names, you know, I was just seeing couple of LinkedIn posts before we we start to record, and I saw differences, you know, between people who you can feel, yeah, they are like they are seeing the company as their family, not for the sake, just to show off, but really you can feel, yeah, they really Feel that they are part of that company, the company is something important for them, because the company sees them as someone important. Also, on the other side, I speak with other people and they say you know what I'm doing? The job, because it's just a job. So, but when you do it the way you described it and I Wish that more people would follow the same approach because, first, it's good for everyone, it's a win-win situation and it's win for all of us, because you can get top-notch technology developed in a domain which is, again, touching everyone. Like. So, hr tech is for everyone, right, so I Wish that everyone will follow that duty, do you? 

Thank you very much, for you know the time today. I know you have a very busy schedule and I enjoyed the discussion. A lot of information you shared with us today, and this is you know. I say to the listeners, or if there someone is watching this Guys, I always seek your feedback, so if you have any questions, you can Reach out to me. I'm also very active on LinkedIn. You can reach out to me directly there. If you are also interested to be guests on the show, don't be shy, just reach out and we can arrange for that. Time zones is not a problem. There is today in the in Texas. I had some guests in in in New Zealand, in Bali and Japan, so we are all over the world, I would say. So that's not a problem. Thank you very much for tuning in and we'll meet again next Episode. Thank you, bye, bye you. 

Transcribed by https://hello.podium.page/?via=mehmet