This month’s 4-minute FirstMile Founder interview is with Joe Thurman, the CEO and co-founder of TalentBloom.ai, a FirstMile Ventures Fund II portfolio company. Joe Thurman is an entrepreneur, community leader, and talent expert, currently serving as the founder and CEO of TalentBloom.ai, a VC-backed SaaS company revolutionizing the identification and selection of talent in healthcare clinical roles through advanced data analytics, machine learning, and AI. With over 15 years of experience in the talent and HR technology space, Joe is passionate about leveraging the intersection of human potential and technological innovation to build exceptional teams. As a second-time founder, Joe has guided hundreds of teams in reimagining how they attract, engage, and develop talent. Prior to TalentBloom.ai, he founded a successful HR consultancy that supported numerous Fortune 250 companies. Joe is a firm believer in the future of work, driven by technology that fosters more equitable, efficient, and validated hiring processes. When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a pilot, which still could have been a great career. I loved the magic of flying. Being a fighter pilot would have been awesome. Growing up in Colorado Springs, I had all airplane toys and could watch all the Air Force shows at the Academy. My brother and I built a giant model aircraft carrier made of wood that we'd land planes on and have our GI Joes run all over. Was starting TalentBloom an "aha moment" or a "gradual realization"? Definitely a gradual realization. In the space we are in - human capital management - there is a recent but gradual movement to help people find the “right roles.” It's a good evolution. The tipping point of all the small realizations came from our work with Fortune 100 companies that were supposedly “human-centric.” We saw them struggle at scale to hire the right people for the right roles. So we started to dig into the problem at first broadly and, then over time through a progression of small iterations, honed in on healthcare and our solution TalentBloom. We are on a mission to help healthcare organizations bloom by providing simple, effective solutions to centralize talent data, visualize their entire talent pipeline, and hire more amazing team members. If you could go back in time and tell yourself something when you first started TalentBloom, what would it be? Stay small as long as possible. Do not grow your team too fast. We started with four co-founders and that was way too many at the seed stage. We then grew the team a ton. Our hiring was too far ahead of our traction. SO I recommend to founders to stay small and stay in the problem longer…really until you have an unbearable amount of work and you have to add people. What is the best constructive feedback you have gotten? So I actually got hard advice from a book - The Mom Test. The book talks about the fact that if you pitch your mom, she’ll tell you to go for it because she loves you. This tendency is similar when you ask your friends for feedback on your pitch. As a founder, you can spend a lot of time with people who just confirm your idea without validating it - often because it feels safe. The book taught me how to frame questions and get feedback in a way that people gave me raw answers. In the process, I got way out of my comfort zone. You just have to get really comfortable with being uncomfortable i.e. when you don’t feel your best or when you feel beat down. Why is Colorado a great place to start a company? The ecosystem and the people! Everyone wants to lean in and help. There are experts across industries here. The IQ within the network is really high. I have spent most of my career in Colorado, raised in Colorado Springs, then did college here, and went straight into tech afterward. So I have found the community accessible and incredibly helpful. Fast-pitch questions
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