Techvestor’s Sief Khafagi On Grit And How Soft Skills Can Help You Nail The Job Interview

Sief Khafagi is an entrepreneur, real estate investor, and the co-founder and managing principal of Techvestor, a proptech company based in San Francisco, California.

While earning his degree at San Diego State University, Sief Khafagi launched his first business, which helped motivated computer science students ace interviews for big tech companies. Eventually, Facebook reached out to Sief, hiring him as a recruiter for the production engineering team, where he increased the pool of top talent more than tenfold.

Sief eventually returned back to the Facebook office in Los Angeles when he had the idea for another startup company, this time in the real estate field. Sief understood the perks and challenges of the short term rental industry after staying in dozens and dozens of homes during his travels and recruiting efforts. Driven to learn all he could about the industry, he considered the intriguing possibility of scaling short-term rentals as an asset class, an idea yet untapped in the marketplace.

In 2021, he co-founded Techvestor, one of the first institutional-grade investment platforms for Short Term Rentals, aka Airbnbs. Techvestor helps everyday investors passively invest in Airbnbs that are professionally managed and operated to deliver cash flow, appreciation and tax benefits to investors while serving tens of thousands of guests per year. Their hospitable approach, industry-leading amenities and focus on the guest experience continues to deliver for all parties.

How did your journey at Meta begin?

Well, I graduated from San Diego State. At San Diego State, I started a small company called Jump Start. Jump Start was helping computer science students break into tech and beat the interview.

I was decent at interviewing back in the day, and I shared some tips and tricks for educating computer science students and new grads to break into big tech, nail those Facebook and Google interviews, get the offers, and negotiate them.

I actually got headhunted by Facebook, asking me if I’d be willing to use my skills on the inside rather than on the outside and give away all their secrets. It was a great offer, a great time in my career to learn from people who are much better and smarter than me in more ways than one, and it was an opportunity I didn’t pass up.

So it was a great opportunity with lots to learn there. And it’s a really fantastic company as well.

You weren’t working at Facebook yet, but somehow, you figured out how to break the code and get the jobs. People were turning to you, an undergrad, and getting information about how they’re going to get through jobs. You have credibility and information. How did you get that to where people would actually pay you any attention?

I think the biggest thing for me is that I was very public and transparent with what I knew and didn’t know. We were focusing predominantly on educating new grads on soft skills, not the code.

Coding is something that you can learn and should have learned over the four or five years that you were in school. But most individuals at that age did not know how to corroborate and take, “Here’s how I am in real life,” and bring that identity into an interview where the other person sitting across from them is really excited about them. Telling their story and their narrative and connecting code to personality is a big deal because I think people always think about a technology company like Meta where you have to be this great coder or this great engineer, and that’s part of it.

But 80% of the interview process is about something other than whether you can code. They expect you to know how to code. The interview process is about: Is this the person I want to work with? Can I grow this person? What are the soft skills of this person? Can this person bring value to my team culture?

It’s difficult to grasp, especially when you’re in a mathematical environment most of your life, which is about code.

Why are soft skills important in the interview process?

It’s a really big deal, the soft skills. It’s not even whether you smile or not in an interview. It’s how you smile, when you smile, what you smile at. The levels of and depth it goes in.

We used to host one-week boot camps on college campuses. Everyone was shocked that not a single session that we did was around their technical skills.

I can say as someone who, in retrospect, had the privilege of probably seeing thousands of people interview and reading their interview feedback across every possible infrastructure team at Facebook, people with great tech skills and horrible people skills will never get hired. People with subpar tech skills and great people skills have a shot because people can learn and navigate, and it’s that grit and attitude that you’re bringing into a culture.

As someone who runs a company today, you’re going to hire the person who’s a sponge who can come in and adapt and navigate, not the person who’s going to come in and destroy the culture because no one wants to be there.

How did you get disabused of the idea that the grades, technical ability, and everything was not the issue to the point that you started a business educating people ahead of you in school on this? How did you get turned on to this?

I was very career-oriented from a very young age because I had to provide for myself from a very young age since I was about 14.

My parents were, unfortunately, disabled at a young age and when we were young. We were in a pretty bad car accident that disabled both my parents. My dad went from working his main job to now finding three jobs around the city where he had to make ends meet. My mom was soon to be a nurse, and unfortunately, she couldn’t go down that path at the time. She became an incredible stay-at-home mom.

At 14, if I wanted to do anything or needed money for anything, it was like I was supporting myself in a way. I held every job you can think of, everything from working at a pizza restaurant to working at the high school and a lot of jobs in between.

But the point is I always looked to progress and improve myself over time—a lot of the time, that meant interviewing for the next job, the next opportunity. I learned very early that most employers don’t value you enough long-term. You’ll make more money simply by going to the next employer. I picked up on that early, so I’d maybe stay somewhere for a year or a year and a half. And then, I’d figure out what I wanted to do next and build my skillset.

I had just under two dozen interviews between the ages of fourteen and 22, and I got the job every single time except once. So I was really good at interviewing. That’s what I learned by the end. I was in college, and I kept getting these jobs, and not necessarily even taking them every single time.

But my friends were struggling to even get noticed in the interview. I kept thinking to myself, “Why aren’t they making it through this process?” And to me, it came very naturally to understand that the interview process, in many ways, is both art and science. But a lot of people forget about the art piece.

The science piece is you got to know your stuff. You’re interviewing for X role; you have to know XYZ. That’s obvious. But how do we improve the art side? Because that’s the side that people remember. And we’re human beings at the end of the day, right?

As someone who was in management at a young age, you remember the artful side of people, not the scientific side. I expect you to be able to get the answer right to a question as an interviewer. But what I gravitate and attach to is the story of the individual when I’m reviewing the interview feedback as to whether or not I want to hire this person. And if I can’t remember you based on our conversation and what we did, and did you affect my emotional side as an interviewer, then it’s unlikely I will fight for you.

Those are the types of things I picked up on when I was very young, both as an interviewer and an interviewee. What I realized is a lot of younger people just did not understand that or grasp it, or perhaps for most of them, they just haven’t been through enough interviews to really see those patterns.

So, that’s where I recognized an opportunity to help educate about the topic. I started writing online and helping other people. It naturally gravitated into that. I didn’t actually seek to start a business in that sense. I wouldn’t even call it a full-blown business. I was probably working with two to three dozen people a year, but each one was a great check for me and a great opportunity for them.