What Breaks First

Rohit Bhadange spent close to a decade in investment banking, private equity and venture. As an investor, he passed on over 98% of the deals he saw. Then he started Zamp, a fully managed sales tax service that pairs an AI-native platform with real tax professionals.

Forty months in, Zamp is at eight figures in ARR and has remitted about half a billion dollars in sales tax.

So what broke first? For Rohit, it was how he managed people. He hired operators who were better than him at what they did, then managed them the way Wall Street had managed him.

"Why did you hire me? Did you not trust me? And it's a very fair thing to say."

In this episode, Rohit and Ian Myers, Founder & CEO of Oceans Talent, get into the jump from investor to operator, decision fatigue, why an AI-first company still hires the best people it can find, and how to ramp new hires in a field nobody goes to school for.

"At the end of the day, humans put humans at ease."

Chris Ramos left a lucrative career in law to join Laurel. The founder’s pitch was “come and pave your own path.” His title has changed a lot since then. In his words, his job hasn’t: “go where the messy problems are and try to make sense of it as best I can.”

Laurel has grown its headcount about 6x in 18 months and is approaching 200 people. Recruiting rolled up to Chris, and it broke the way it breaks at most fast-growing companies: hiring managers sourcing, scheduling and running their own process, five or ten different ways.

So what broke first?

“Things are constantly breaking. It is an evolution of breakage and fix until the next time something breaks.”

In this episode, Chris and Matt Wallaert, CXO of Oceans Talent, get into how Laurel centralized recruiting, why an AI company is still hiring humans, how to make culture something people live instead of something they read at onboarding, and the lesson Chris now believes “to my bones.”

“The wrong person in the wrong role is much worse than no person in that role.”

Nik Sharma built Sharma Brands into one of the best-known growth agencies in direct-to-consumer, working with brands like Feastables, Jolie and Parachute Home. He ran it for six years and sold it to Lunar Solar Group, where he is now Chief Growth Officer.

When the deal closed, he asked to keep two people out of it: Rameez and Minul, the two team members who run his day with him.

"Anybody who knows me personally knows Rameez and Minul."

It didn't start that way. His first offshore hires went through a couple of different services and didn't work.

"I was kind of sold this dream at the beginning, and then the actual execution of how that person played out just didn't live up to where I thought it should've been."

So the next time, he changed how he hired. No job description. A list of what the person had to deliver every Friday, with every hard caveat written in, from Friday nights to weekends on call.

"Honestly, I wrote it thinking there's no shot you guys are gonna find somebody."

Two weeks later he met Rameez. Then he spent three to six months handing over everything in his head.

"It's the best investment I made."

In this episode, Nik and Ian Myers, Founder & CEO of Oceans Talent, get into how Nik went from DJ-ing parties and cold-messaging celebrities to running growth for some of the biggest brands in DTC, why his first offshore hires failed, how he onboards, and the one mindset shift he tells every founder who is hiring.

"You have to pretend like you're hiring somebody for a quarter million dollars in New York City."

Andrew Graff has run Allen & Gerritsen, an independent creative, media & PR agency in Boston and Philadelphia, with over 100 people, for 31 of its 41 years.

After his trusted and beloved EA left for another career path, he went through half a dozen in-house Senior EAs that couldn’t keep up. When he was on the brink of giving up, he was introduced to an unconventional solution from a country he had never heard of before.

"I was skeptical. I'll be candid: could this work? But I was frustrated enough to be open-minded enough to say I could do it a different way."

So he treated it as a three-month experiment. Low risk, in his words, and buying himself time, because it was clear he couldn't keep doing it himself.

Then he met Dulara.

"Honestly, meet Dulara, I was like, within three hours, all right, this is life-changing."

His own onboarding team told him she was the quickest person ever to onboard into the company.

What it looks like now: a half-hour call every morning, then an end-of-day summary of what she closed, what's still open, and what he owes people.

"We look like the most responsive team ever, because within an hour or so she's like, here's his availability, pick a time, I'll send an invite."

And the line that best illustrates what it’s like to have a great EA:

"For somebody who's never been to New York, she can navigate me in meetings in New York better than anybody before."

Introducing episode one of What Breaks First, hosted by Ian Myers, Founder & CEO of Oceans Talent.