A few years ago, the tech scene was littered with startups and entrepreneurs flogging their idea as “the next Uber”. It got to a point where writing about these startups became a copy+paste job, swapping out names and companies and talking about mostly the same thing. But now, things are vastly different. No one wants to be the next Uber (can you blame them), and a lot of entrepreneurs are coming up with ideas that offer the world and its people impactful innovations.
There’s so much incredible work happening on our own soil, and one such example is Siobhan Savage and her company Reejig.
I came across Savage watching Billion Dollar Napkin, a YouTube series created by AWS (Amazon’s cloud business) to, as the company says, “meet a founder of an established startup to explore the highs, lows, twists, turns and milestones they’ve faced as they’ve grown their business”.
What stood out to me when watching Savage’s episode was that she is the co-founder and CEO of a tech company, all without having a tech background. I had a few questions, so I got in touch with Savage and asked her to tell me the Reejig story.
Savage spent the majority of her life in HR, working in large companies and leading workforce strategy.
What that means is she was responsible for talent acquisition, but also moving people around the company. The problem was, she didn’t have oversight of who exactly all the staff were at large companies and protecting their employment, for example moving them from one role to another, or finding the right fit for a particular role, saw her rely on an Excel spreadsheet.
The information on employees (kind of like an extended LinkedIn profile) was all known by these companies, but it was messy and not easily accessible.
“There’s no view of an individual that gives everything that they’ve done before you, everything that they’ve done while with you, projects, gigs learning experiences, skills, they’ve gained, but more importantly, what they could do,” she explained. “But all this information or it exists within the enterprise, it’s just not stitched together in a meaningful way.”
Reejig was really born from a moment of genuine frustration, where, unfortunately, Savage wasn’t able to move people and they got made redundant. While it of course was such a waste of potential for the companies, it was also hard for Savage to be the one causing such an impact.
“For me, it deeply impacted me that I was unfortunately not able to mobilise people around my company because I didn’t know who they were and I couldn’t be the matchmaker,” she said. And that was when Reejig became a real thing.
Fast forward to now, and Reejig is on a mission to “create a world with zero waste of potential”. While that does sound a little fluffy, I can certainly buy into the idea of “right people, right skills, right time” and that Reejig wants to “ensure that every single person, no matter what their background is, is able to have a meaningful career”.
While you, dear readers, aren’t the ones buying the Reejig platform, why I’m bringing you Savage’s story is simple: there’s a real need to highlight that you don’t need to have a background in tech to start something and you don’t need to have an idea that will change the world’s entire 8 billion people. An idea for a company can come from sheer frustration with something not being easy or possible for you in your daily life. The idea, a solution to a real problem, should come first and the technology should just exist to make this happen.
With such a non-traditional pathway for building a technology company, Savage thought about Reejig in a different way.
“The way that I think about it is, I care more about solving this problem than anyone else in the world. So, when you care so much about solving this actual problem and you’re not motivated by money or motivated by building tech and forcing it into HR, the way that you think is very different,” she told Gizmodo Australia.
As she said during the AWS video: “It really came down to if I don’t do this, and someone else does, I’m going to be so pissed off”.
Back in the very early days of Reejig, Savage took her idea to her now co-founder Dr. Shujia Zhang.
“Shujia and I had a lunch and I told her I wanted to change the world and somehow at the end of that lunch she quit her job,” Savage said, skimming past the fact she convinced Zhang to leave her job and sign up for a new, not yet existing company.
“Shujia is Chinese, female, in tech and one of the things that was really core to when we built was, ‘How do you create AI that’s going to be fair? That’ll mean anyone has access to a meaningful career’ … baking good into everything that we do.”
It makes total sense why Zhang would jump on board. But there’s a third co-founder, Mike Reed, and the way Savage describes it is that they’re three legs to a stool: all of them do their own bit to make Reejig work.
I asked Savage what advice she’d give to her younger self.
“I’m built for this. I wish I knew that I was built for this environment and I wish that – I wish I could have seen more people like me doing it,” she said.
“There’s a lot female technical folks, but I think we need to remember that companies don’t need to be technically built. You can hire an incredible CTO or you can have another co-founder, like in my situation, but there’s a role here for everyone in technology.”
BRB, I’m off to go start a startup (here’s the vid if you’re interested).