Seven years ago, my co-founder John and I walked onto college campuses in Rhode Island handing out rubber ducks and two-dollar bills to get people to download an app. Today, Pangea is an AI-native staffing platform connecting companies with fractional creative and marketing talent across 150+ countries. Here's what I learned along the way.
Your first idea is almost certainly too narrow. We started with college students hiring college students. Both sides of the marketplace were the same demographic, with the same limited budgets and the same limited problems. It took us too long to realize that we'd boxed ourselves into a market where nobody was willing to pay enough to build a real business. The instinct to start small is right. The mistake is staying small because you're anchored to your original assumptions.
Listen more than you sell. In the early days, we were very opinionated about what we thought the world wanted. We kept trying to sell our vision instead of listening to what the market was telling us. Two ears and one mouth, as the saying goes. The companies that wanted to hire through us had very different needs than what we'd imagined, and it took us too long to hear that. Every hour spent talking to users is worth ten hours of building in isolation.
The supply side is not the hard side — until it is. When the pandemic hit, our supply side exploded. We went from a handful of Rhode Island schools to over 1,800 colleges across the US. But supply without demand is just a database. We had to put our own talent to work acquiring companies as clients before we had a real marketplace. The lesson: liquidity problems are never solved on just one side.
Product-led vs. sales-led is not a permanent decision. YC encouraged us to think big and build for scale, which pushed us toward a product-led, self-serve model. But in a marketplace where trust and quality matter, being more sales-led, consultative, and curated would have served us better in those early years. The right go-to-market strategy depends on where you are, not where you want to be. Sometimes the fastest path to something huge is building a viable business first and scaling from a position of strength.
You have to evolve the product as you evolve the market. Moving from campus to professional talent wasn't just a market shift — it was a product shift. The matching algorithms, the onboarding flows, the pricing model, the way we thought about quality — everything had to change. The companies hiring AI-native marketing talent have completely different expectations than college students looking for a logo design. Every time the market evolves, the product has to follow.
Build the data infrastructure early. One of the best decisions I made was building out our data engineering architecture myself — dbt transformations, BigQuery, reverse ETL pipelines that activate data for marketing and operations. Having clean, reliable data lets you make decisions with confidence and automate the things that would otherwise eat your team alive. Most early-stage founders underinvest in this.
Great teams build great products. This is the whole thesis. If you can help assemble great teams, you can enable more great products to exist in the world. The old model of working at one company for decades is gone. People want flexibility, they want to work on interesting problems, and they want to progress. The organizations of the future might cap out at 100 or 200 people instead of 10,000 — but they'll still need to find and assemble great people. That's the problem worth solving, and it's the one I keep coming back to.