Kinnek isn’t trying to be the “cool” startup.
Instead, the New York-based company strives to be an essential one, grounded in its mission to solve an age-old pain point for small businesses — finding supplies and equipment efficiently and for the best price.
The idea for Kinnek came to founders Karthik Sridharan and Rui Ma back in 2012 when they asked a Flatiron building cafe owner where they sourced their equipment.
What they found was that small businesses needed an alternative when it came to buying machinery or bulk supplies from more traditional brick-and-mortar outfits.
Since then, Sridharan and Ma have grown Kinnek into an online marketplace with over hundreds of thousands of small business buyers and tens of thousands of suppliers. The company uses an advanced algorithm to match requests from buy-side business owners to a large database of suppliers, providing users with easily customized quotes from numerous sources.
We visited Kinnek’s office in the Flatiron district, which is at 55 employees and hiring, for a behind-the-scenes look at what working for a high-growth company solving such a prominent business problem is really like.
We caught up with folks from their marketing, engineering and sales teams, including Director of Acquisition Marketing Rudan Zhang, Senior Frontend Engineer Thalida Noel and Account Executive Nick Crowley. If you’re looking to join the team, check out their open positions here.
What initially drew you to Kinnek?
Rudan: Originally I interviewed for a product marketing job, but throughout the process they realized a greater need for a person doing user acquisition. The process is very lengthy and thorough for all candidates, and in the end, the way they positioned the user acquisition role to me made me feel like I should take a chance. It was an out of the blue opportunity and now I love it. And then, as I started mastering that new function, they started giving me more responsibility in product marketing, so I’ve really been able to expand my skillset here.
Thalida: I started at Kinnek about a year and a half ago when it was a lot smaller company than it is now. While we’ve grown a lot over the past year, our engineering team is pretty tight-knit — we have eight people on the engineering team in total. That’s what drew me in — I always wanted to work for a company where I knew I could have impact.
Nick: After graduating college in 2014 I went straight into banking at J.P. Morgan and the culture wasn’t for me. I wanted to work in sales and I looked at tech companies in New York. What I loved about Kinnek is that everyone here wanted to make this dream a reality. While we enjoy the perks of startup life, like a fully-stocked kitchen, wearing whatever you want to work, a ping pong table, et cetera, we’re all here for the mission.
Not only are you a fast-growing team, but you’re also a fast-growing business. What’s it like to work at a place with so much growth?
Rudan: I feel like there’s more access to top-level company decision making at Kinnek. The founders try really hard to be transparent. Everyone here is young and trying to learn how to do their jobs, sometimes for the first time, and often personal growth comes from figuring out how to do your job in the right way. That’s a tall order. For me, I felt that growth when I first came into this user acquisition role, because there was no one here to teach me how this job is done in a systematic way. However, the founders did a really great job of encouraging me to network externally, particularly with their classmates from the incubator out of which Kinnek was founded. These contacts work at companies like Uber, so they were able to hook me up with the person who’s in charge of user generation at Uber, and the ability to talk to industry experts that way was a great learning experience.
Nick: I actually just got out of sales training where we talked about what would make a good metric for churn rate at an account management level in order to make sure we’re optimizing efficiency and bringing on good accounts. That’s a high-level, strategic conversation that I just had with my sales team, which is really cool. At other companies, I don’t know if I would be included in conversations about churn rate, cost per acquisition, et cetera — those are strategic conversations that leaders like founders usually have, and we get to talk about them here.
You’ve mentioned that transparency is a big part of the culture at Kinnek. How so?
Rudan: During the company-wide meetings each week, we spend over an hour talking about all the progress and challenges we’re facing together. Karthik tries hard to pinpoint whatever obstacles we need to collectively solve for. That struck me because, in my previous experience, a lot of founders tend to sugarcoat things for morale. I find this transparency refreshing. Karthik is willing to share challenges because then we can effectively use our collective brain power to improve.
Nick: We have a ‘questions and kudos’ meeting at the beginning of each week with the founders, and it’s bold of them. I think oftentimes, when companies grow, the executive team tends to view people as resources, but here they really keep a pulse on what we’re doing. On the sales team, we feel empowered in a lot of ways to bring up our suppliers concerns because we don’t want to solve a problem that doesn’t exist or create a problem that didn’t exist before. In these meetings, our founder takes questions from the crowd and he’ll stand there and answer them. One time, someone asked what our run rate is, and he answered in front of everyone.
What’s been a challenge the company has faced? How did your team overcome it?
Thalida: Part of the challenge is that there hasn’t been another company in this space doing what we do. So we’re often looking at how other companies tried to solve similar issues and then trying to make a Kinnek version of it. It’s been nice to be able to talk to other companies who have solved similar issues, pick their brains about how they did it and then combine those insights into something that would work for our users.
For example, it’s been a challenge to build our payments system as we’re working with businesses that haven’t been online before. In fact, they’re used to giving credit card numbers over the phone, so we worked with other companies like Etsy and Amazon who have dealt with a similar problem. But for other companies that handle online payments, they’re dealing with purchases in the range of, let’s say, $20. Our users spend more in the range of $5,000. Because we have so much money flowing through our payment system, we want to have that be secure and reliable. So now, we’re building our own wire transfer system. Building and researching that system is something that other companies haven’t done at our level or scale yet, so it’s an interesting problem to solve.
Rudan: We’re still in the process of really fleshing out our product team, so there were some questions about the direction of our product at the end of last year. People felt like we were trying a lot of things without direction — which is the type of question that cuts to the core. And Karthik responded by saying ‘yeah, we’re not dancing around the issue — we’re trying really hard to hire a Head of Product.’ What was impressive was that, while he committed to that, he didn’t shy away from addressing the problem directly, as well as making a public commitment of solving it. And after that, he actually followed through.
What’s your favorite company tradition that’s brought the whole team together as you’re growing?
Rudan: On Wednesday, we always have a company-wide dinner and most people make an effort to stay. We’ll order food from various eateries around here and whenever we have candidates who are in the interview process, they always stay to learn more about the company. We also play a lot of boardgames. That often happens after Wednesday’s dinner, and brings back a simpler and more convivial type of company culture. While startups have a tendency to be fratty, it’s actually rather innocent and fun here.
Thalida: I love our work anniversary balloons. It’s cool because you can see that some people just celebrated their one-, two- or three-year anniversary. It’s a little thing that happens but it’s great.
Nick: The dinner on Wednesday is cool. I love hanging out with everyone, because everyone has eclectic interests. We don’t alienate and try to accommodate everyone’s interests — we have basketball and soccer teams. There are a lot of foodies in the office and next week the whole company is going on a ski trip.
Are there any particular qualities you look for in new hires?
Rudan: Thinkers and doers — we look for a combo. You’ll get asked a lot of questions in your interviews here designed to showcase whether you have opinions and deep thoughts on certain topics relevant to the business. On the other hand, as a startup, everyone has to have that roll up your sleeves up mentality. You have to be results-driven and action oriented.
Nick: Culture-fit is huge. While we’d love to have ‘killers’ on the sales team, we want to foster a collaborative environment. What we’re looking for is high-level thinkers that know how to succeed.
Thalida: A lot of companies focus heavily on algorithms on the front-end. We’d like you to know that, but we care more about your thought process with implementing and the trade-off decisions you make because that’s more of what we do on a day-to-day basis. We’re deciding between using new and old pieces of technology and how they’ll impact our users. Being able to make those decisions is what we test for in candidates.
Can you pinpoint a moment you’ve had at Kinnek that reaffirmed your decision to work here?
Rudan: Actually, this very week has been great. There are a lot of big product projects that are culminating and these are the type of game-changing product features that we’ve talked about for a long time, took a long time to build and now are finally are coming to fruition. I feel like all the links are falling into place and I feel so proud to present these new features to our users.
Nick: I just had this moment. Sales is stressful, very stressful. I came in with aggressive goals, and I’m the only person at this company who's ever gone from being a Sales Rep to an Account Executive so there’s no benchmark, and I hold myself to a really high standard. We do sales standups every morning to talk about what we’re doing and if anyone needs help with anything. Recently in one of these standups, we were all joking around and laughing at inside jokes and I thought, ‘Yeah, sales is stressful, but this isn’t so bad because I love the people I work with.’
We’re not here because we like to bounce around from startup to startup. People here genuinely believe this could be huge, and we all want to make it happen. Our business model is to take a percentage commission of B2B purchasing and B2B purchasing in the United States is a several trillion dollar market. So take a small percentage of that, and you’re a huge company.
