🏗️ The Agency Years

In 2018, I started Electriq a Shopify Plus marketing agency while I was still a student at USC. Over the next three years, I scaled it to 45 team members and an exit to DRINKS.com in April 2022.

Building a team that fast, with that much growth pressure, meant hiring constantly. I started learning, very quickly, what works and what doesn’t.

What I learned: the tools available for finding and hiring great people were embarrassingly bad.

We used the standard stack - LinkedIn, traditional ATS platforms and job boards. The same tools everyone uses. And despite pouring time and money into them, I kept running into the same wall: the candidates showing up in our pipeline weren’t the candidates we needed. Qualified people we knew were out there weren’t finding us and we weren’t finding them. The process was slow, manual, and produced results that didn’t improve - even though we were hiring for the same positions over

Nothing seemed to get better. We kept using the same platforms, kept expecting improvement, and kept getting mediocre results.

🎓 The Other Side of the Problem

At the same time, my brother Parker was going through recruiting from the candidate side as a Stanford student looking for internships.

His experience? Equally terrible. Applications disappearing into black holes, no feedback, automated rejections from roles he was genuinely qualified for, keyword-filtered out by systems that couldn’t understand context.

Parker wasn’t alone. Every student and young professional he knew had the same story. The process was demoralizing, opaque, and felt rigged - not because companies were malicious, but because the tools they were using were fundamentally broken.

🤝 A Shared Problem

When Parker and I started talking about this, we realized we were describing opposite ends of the same dysfunction.

On one side: employers drowning in applications that didn’t match their needs, paying a fortune for tools that didn’t learn or improve, losing great candidates to process friction.

On the other: candidates submitting into voids, getting filtered out by algorithms that couldn’t understand their actual potential, and losing faith in the whole system.

The job market wasn’t working for anyone. And the tools being sold as solutions were part of the problem—legacy architecture with AI features painted on top.

🔨 What We Decided to Do

We decided to build the platform we wish had existed.

Not an add on to Greenhouse or Lever, not another job board. Something architecturally different: a fully integrated ATS and job board, built from scratch, with AI at the foundation - not the feature set.

A platform where:

• Employers could source, engage, track, interview, and hire from a single intelligent system
• Every hire made the next hire smarter through a real feedback loop
• Candidates were treated as people, not as applicants to be filtered
• The matching worked both ways - bringing relevant opportunities to qualified candidates, not just waiting for them to apply

We called the tagline “Hiring Shouldn’t Suck” because that’s exactly what we meant. It shouldn’t. And with the technology available today, there’s no reason it has to.

📍 Where We Are Now

SCALIS launched publicly in early 2025 and we’ve been growing fast. Bella - our AI sourcing agent, sources from 700M+ profiles and runs full outreach and qualification sequences autonomously. Our platform handles everything from sourcing to signed offer letters in one place.

We’re SOC 2 compliant. We’re GDPR compliant. We’re building the new operating system for hiring.

We’re proud of what we’ve built. But more than that, we’re motivated by the problem we’re solving - because we know from personal experience exactly how broken the old system is, for everyone it touches.

If you’re tired of hiring being hard, we built this for you.

👉 Book a SCALIS demo and let’s talk about what recruiting looks like when it actually works.