The origin story of Startup Club NZ and HireLyte
A conversation with Kevin Li about connecting students with startups
Kevin co-founded Startup Club New Zealand during his time studying at Auckland Uni. Concurrently, Kevin started HireLyte, providing in-house talent acquisition with startup advisor Mahesh Muralidhar. Their clients include the likes of Cake Equity, Simply Wall Street, Contact Out and more (some exciting news under the wraps). Kevin is currently a Growth Marketer at NextWork and finishing his studies in marketing, information systems and statistics at Auckland Uni.
Textbook Ventures partnered up with Startup Club NZ earlier this year for our transnational Growth case competition. Students were tasked with the opportunity to work through a case provided by a New Zealand startup and devise a growth strategy.
1. What sparked your interest in tech and startups?
In my final year of high school, I was a part of the Young Enterprise Scheme. It was a large charitable organisation which is a program you typically are part of in your final year of high school, where you run a business for the year, and you go to different events and learn about how to run a business which culminates in a competition with regional and national finals. I studied business studies in Year 13 and participated in the Young Enterprise Scheme. It was my first experience of actually creating a product, selling it, and having a customer pay for it.
2. What does the New Zealand startup ecosystem look like?
The New Zealand ecosystem is quite small and tends to skew more towards deeptech and hardware. Right now, Xero is typically considered the gold standard as a startup who’s found global success. A more recent startup success story that comes to mind would be Seequent, which sold for over a billion, and Vend which sold for around 450 million. It’s very rare to find unicorns startups out of New Zealand.
3. How did the idea for HireLyte come about for you?
The idea for Startup Club NZ followed the idea for HireLyte. HireLyte came about last year when I met Mahesh who became an advisor for our business. He worked across startups as the 25th employee of Canva. He worked in startups all across Australia, ex-Canva as a Kiwi with his area of expertise in people operations. When he returned to New Zealand- his intention was to supercharge the New Zealand side of the ecosystem. One of his hypotheses was that he would hire a bunch of high-performing students and train them in people operations or become great recruiters for startups. That’s how HireLyte came about. We ended up building the business ourselves, with Mahesh as an advisor.
HireLyte assists with recruitment for high-growth startups. We work with founders, COOs or the Head of People, and Operations to recruit for roles ranging from Head of Growth, Product Managers, Engineers, etc. We are a team of six. Our observations were that we saw different careers within startups and the salaries that they pay and how awesome these careers were- to work at a startup.
4. How did Startup Club NZ start?
At the end of Christmas last year, Athena and I decided to start the Startup Club NZ to give students access to these opportunities as at Auckland University, similar to most universities in Australia, top students are quite fixated on consulting, investment banking and a lot of engineering students focus on large engineering or big tech companies.
With all the great career choices, Athena and I talked to our uni mates and none of them know what startups were. There’s the stereotype that startups involve a lean team working in a basement for 14 hours a day. There are also 30 people startups and high-growth companies which pay well-to-do salaries where you are working great hours and you’re doing impactful work. We started Startup Club with the vision and mindset of growing awareness around startups in New Zealand as a great career option and showcasing the startup ecosystem to students.
5. How did you go about starting a community for students?
Fortunately for us, Mahesh from Phase One Ventures backed Startup Club and with his mentorship in Semester One- he was quite hands-on. We made our first post to declare we were setting up the student club which helped us from our team. Within about two weeks, we interviewed a bunch of students and got a team of about 14 to 16. From there, and two weeks in we ran our first event and Product Management competition.
Athena and I actually first met as we were part of the investment club, one of the two largest business school clubs at Auckland Uni. From there, we ran our flagship events- case competitions with great traction. We are currently a team of 16.
It’s great to kind of model what we do, one or two competitions in the semester, as the flagship events. Then we have a whole bunch of tutorials and panel events on the side, which are more efficient to organise along with social events. With case competitions, they give students insight into careers within startups and actually doing a business case. E.g. for our Product Management Case Competition- we gave students an actual case from an early-stage startup and they got an idea of how a Product Manager thinks and what is the decision process they would make if they were actually working in that role. Same with our joint Growth Marketing Case Competition.
6. What does your day-to-day look like then whilst you were working full-time on HireLyte?
Between the directors, we all covered around 20 hours a week and 15 of those hours were on client work. The client work starts with the actual sourcing of candidates. Sourcing and chatting with candidates was one aspect I really enjoyed. The other aspect was chatting with our clients and preparing reports and internal operations with payroll and invoicing for HireLyte. Other components include team meetings, board and advisor meetings to discuss client work.
Compared to talent boards, we are recruiters in a sense- we only have candidate pools for roles we’ve worked on. We operate and provide tailored services, by talking directly with clients. Understanding their talent needs and head hunting essentially. The unglamorous side of the job would be spending a number of hours on LinkedIn and other tools to find candidates through cold outreach. It can be repetitive and on a weekly basis, send a hundred different emails.
7. What have been your key learnings thus far?
It can get quite busy and hectic, so I learnt a lot about time management. I learnt to prioritise and what my top priorities are. E.g. ranking uni commitments, part-time work, HireLyte, society work etc. I spend some time looking at what are my priorities, optimising for relationships. Also having discipline; I categorise everything on Google Calendar.
My biggest learning from HireLyte in particular is the importance of relationships. We walk away with these relationships we’ve made both with each other, and the clients that we’ve met. It’s a skill to preserve these relationships rather than transactional, touch and go encounters.
The New Zealand startup ecosystem is really small — I’m always bumping into familiar faces and people I’ve met a couple years ago!
8. What are some highlights so far with Startup Club NZ and HireLyte?
It also comes back to relationships for me, aside from the quantitative metrics. For one of the clients I worked with, who I initially worked with for eight weeks, we ended up working for about six months together. They appreciated our work and we worked well together. It meant a lot! When they made a hire, I was excited as well. When they came to Auckland, we went out for coffee and then when I went over to Melbourne to visit- they took me out for the day. It’s things like that- that make it worth it.
9. Can you talk more about HireLyte?
There are four directors for HireLyte- Athena, Callum, Julia, and I. We hired Bradley and Sean. The difference between HireLyte and traditional recruitment agencies is our model. HireLyte is different from traditional recruiters- RPO model versus a placement model. With the placement model, it’s way more lucrative. The startup goes to them and asks for like a product maanger that pays a hundred thousand as their salary. They’ll pay a retainer fee upfront. Once they’ve hired product manager, they’ll pay like 20–40% of their salary. That’s 20 to 40k. Whereas we operate on an eight week contract where every contract lasts for 8 weeks/eight K. It was a steady stream of income which is helpful. Otherwise with the replacement model, we could be working for X number of months without getting paid at all.
10. What’s next for you?
Going into startups. I have a strong interest in startups and really hope to stay in the startup world and ideally at this current company NextWork- where we’re changing the way the world learns about vocational skills. We’re starting with cloud platforms in helping people get certified in cloud platforms (the eventual goal is the company would be the go-to place where anyone who wants to learn vocational skill). I’m currently working in growth marketing. It would be nice to see the company’s growth and be a part of the company’s journey in the next few months. We have pretty big ambitions in the long term.
11. Do you have any tips then for students looking to break into startups and VC?
I’d say get involved in communities. Earlywork is a really great community- I’m sure its quite well-known in Australia. Go along to events and be involved with these different student organisations when you are in university. It’s a great way to learn and differentiate between different players and roles in startups and VC i.e. a 100 person startup is very different to working at a five person startup. I used to have the impression that startups were 5, 10 people startups. Figure out your values- startup fit, startup vs. scaleup.
Want to know how you can take the first step to find your VC/start-up experience? Be sure to follow Startup Club NZ. Textbook Ventures’ social links here, and subscribe to our newsletter to hear more stories from young people making an impact.
