We recently named some rooms in some of our offices in honour of Jasper and Louis.
This seems like a good time to tell their story.
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“Tanda IT Cadetship”
When we started Tanda, we used to send customers hardware in the mail - specifically an Android tablet. Before shipping it to them we’d charge it up, install our app, then lock it down. I used to do this in my bedroom,1 then we upgraded to Adam’s desk in our first office.
Adam was pretty good at setting up a lot of tablets concurrently but after a while this was too much even for him. So we decided we needed to get someone else to do it. By this time we were a “real” company (we employed like 10 people lol), and we couldn’t bring ourselves to ask any of our other full time, salaried, mostly-have-degrees employees to spend 10 hours a week installing the same app.
Adam and I went to the same school, and so one day one of us had the bright idea of seeing if we could get a high school kid to do the work. I went to our school’s website and found the email of the teacher that looked most relevant (Head of Department for Technology or something like that), and sent an email telling our very brief story2 and mentioning we had some casual work available that might suit a student. I said the role would be “perfect after school work experience for someone interested in IT”, which felt like a bit of a stretch.
Anyway, the teacher very kindly replied and I sent a more detailed position description:
“Hardware management and software setup” also felt like a stretch, but I figured if I implied there was some programming, then the rest of the role wouldn’t be such a lie by comparison.
Anyway, the job posting went gangbusters. 7 kids emailed me the next day. Most of them had really legitimate questions like “how many hours of work is expected of me” (this was a very academic school at the time… less so when Adam and I went). The best application was one kid who said he knew Linux and had previously worked at Pizza Capers (a customers of ours) and as a door-to-door salesperson.3 After a few more emails back and forth, where I confirmed he was keen to do the job once I actually said what it entailed, I invited Louis in for a job trial.
The trial went fine. He was able to perform the tasks adequately. So we hired Louis! We were printing business cards around the same time, and so we made his say “Junior Vice President of Supply Chain Management”. He’s the only person ever to have held a Junior VP title in Tanda history, and probably the only Junior VP ever to earn $11/hour. For some reason, he’s rewritten history a little bit for his LinkedIn:
Forming the dream team
After about a year of packing boxes and completing various other random tasks that Josh thought of, Louis decided he needed an assistant. And he already had a candidate ready to go! That’s how we met Jasper.
My most clear memory of this time is of Jasper and Louis strutting around the office, with matching earphones in their ears and Jasper talking loudly over them, moving as quickly as possible to and from the “mail room” where they continued to pack tablets into boxes. These guys really moved a lot of tablets. (By the way, the mail room was technically a storage closet. It didn’t have a window.)
Maybe 6 months later we decided enough was enough and we weren’t sending people tablets anymore. It was easier for customers to supply their own and it made our business a lot simpler. But what to do about Jasper and Louis? They’d stuck with us and done a really good job of a pretty boring job, and we wanted to find a way to keep them around even though the job was no longer needed. Tasmin had the idea of them combining Louis’ past two roles by going door to door around Brisbane trying to give people pre-configured tablets so they could start using Tanda there and then. Unfortunately, that didn’t work too well. But it did evolve into them becoming an outbound sales team. We all thought it was hilarious that two 18 year olds were cold calling CFOs, until suddenly they started to book meetings. Then it was hilarious and practical. Would it work?
Jasper spent the next 5 years becoming our best enterprise salesperson. During that time he taught us a lot more than we taught him about sales. He went from cold calling to book meetings through to running deals with publicly listed companies. No sweat.
Fast forward to today
After a short stint in sales, Louis moved on to work elsewhere. In his departing email, he promised us he’d be working for himself on his own business really soon and that this was a stepping stone to help him get there. Despite my promises, I never taught him any code.
I guess he taught himself though, because a few weeks ago Jasper and Louis announced they’re finally starting the company. Learn more about it at AutoRFP.ai. It might be the last company ever to have its origin story start in a mail room! We’re super excited to be their first customer, and I’m excited to continue watching them learn and grow.
Here’s to two great blokes.
I hadn’t discovered Substack at the time.
I don’t know if this influenced the decision specifically, but it’s just funny to imagine Louis selling door to door.