What's up, everyone? This is Courtland from Andy hackers dot com, and you're listening to the Indy Hackers podcast on this show. I talked to the founders of profitable Internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How did they make decisions, but that their companies and in their personal lives and what exactly, makes their businesses tick on the goal here, as always, so that the rest of us could learn from their example and go on to build our own successful Internet businesses? Today I'm talking to Alien Lerner, the founder of a company called interviewing dot io, a lean seven. So it has been a long time in the making. Glad to finally have you on here.

Hey, very excited to be here.

Big fans, right at the top of your website. You say that tactical interviewing and looking for a job as a software engineer are annoying and that an interview Ohio make both of these things less terrible. Tell us about how you

I wrote that coffee. I'm very pleased with it. It was

one of my questions. I was gonna ask you. This copy was a youth.

Is it was me. It was me for better for worse. I'll tell you a bit about some earlier copy we had later. If if you'd like. When I was very proud of that, we can't use anymore. Um, So, uh, what was the question?

A great start to the senses. What do you do? What is interviewing I who uses it? Why did they use it?

So interviewing Io is well, depending on who I'm pitching, I position it very differently. But given that this is mostly I think our listeners are mostly software engineers. Right? We're We're a platform that provides people with really high quality free and completely anonymous mock interviews. Then we also make it easier for you to get a job if you want. So I can I can go into a bit more detail on what that means. Basically, I used to be. Maybe I should introduce myself. What do you think?

Yeah. Who are you?

Yeah, Why not? I'll come back, Saul. Tell the like wind the story of why I operate in this base. Even though hiring is gross. So I was a software engineer for for a few years, about 51 of the things that was always hardest for me was hiring people, right? It was either. It was at best, kind of a painful distraction, and at worst it was just this kind of Kafka esque nightmare. So one of my biggest frustrations when I was an engineer was just that Ah, lot of the best people I was working with didn't look good on paper like there's a guy that one of the best engineers I ever worked with at the job where I was the longest, who I think did a semester at some like fifth tier state school and then dropped out because he realized it was dumb. And then ah went to work.

And when he applied, we almost turned him away. Because of that, even though his high school friend who was among the best engineers I've ever worked with us well, really gave him a strong referral. So that really upset me and and stuff like that happened all the time. I think we all have friends that are amazing engineers that just don't look great on paper. So I ended up in part because of these frustrations and in part because I didn't want to write code for the rest of my life, ended up transitioning to technical recruiting. So I started by just doing recruiting stuff at the software company where I was working because all of us were constantly getting interrupted to do interviews. And then we need to go back to work, and we were doing everything from our own scheduling to just looking at resumes. It was not the best use of our time, but then I really got into it, and I just saw how broken recruiting was. So I ended up running recruiting at a couple of companies.

One was trial pay and one was udacity. You've probably heard of Udacity, maybe not trial pay as much. Um, then I started my own recruiting firm, and what was really annoying was again, I just kept running into this issue over and over. When I was recruiting for a bunch of start ups in the Bay Area, I would have candidates that I knew were amazing because I had run them through super rigorous technical interviews myself. Right then, I just put the alien Lerner stamp of approval on them like not that that necessarily meant that much. But in my world, I like to think it meant something and I would present them to companies and companies. The recruiters, these companies would just look at this candidate and be like We don't want to talk to them. And I'm like,

but they're really good. I know they're really good lately and we don't care. We're hiring from these five schools and they have to have worked at one of these companies as well. And, um, that just really pissed me off. So I started interviewing. I owe to stop that kind of thing from happening. So on our platform, if you're a software engineer, when you sign up, you could just grab a time slot. And then when you show up ago time there's gonna be a senior engineer from a Google or Facebook or a drop box or a Microsoft or any number of other companies that tend to have pretty difficult technical interviews. That engineer's gonna run you through a very realistic either algorithmic or systems design interview, and they're not gonna know who you are, so you can screw up all you want without any negative ramifications.

And if you do do well, then you can unlock our jobs portal. And then with one click, you can book a job interview at a number of great companies. So we we work with companies like Twitter and Lift and Uber Drop Box in a number of others. The nice thing is, now, instead of having to get your friend to refer you or having to apply on lion, which is like screaming into a black hole, right, never never hear back or having to hope that the recruiter that contacted you six months ago when you weren't looking is still working there. They're probably not. You just press one button and then you have a guarantee technical interview at that company, probably the next day, and it's still anonymous, so the company doesn't know who you are until you do well. That was a very long answer to a very short question. Did that make sense?

It made perfect sense, he said. A couple of cool things and I want to talk about you said that you work in hiring even though hiring it's gross. You said that recruiting is broken. Let's say you could snap your fingers and change The industry changed the entire industry of hiring software engineers. And you could do this once with each hand so you can change two things. What do you think? Would you change?

I feel imbued with godlike powers. You are. Gosh,

welcome to the broadcast daily.

Some butterfly effect stuff here. I don't know. I'm just very, very paralyzed. But look, the thing I I find just immensely frustrating is just that good people don't have access to opportunity. So I guess, um what I would do if I could snap my fingers is Well, actually, I'm gonna I'm gonna answer this a bit facetiously. First is I just wish everybody used interviewing Io because I like the thing we've built. There is the thing that I want to see in the world, right? This idea of your evaluated on what you can do and not how you look on paper and also this idea of just a backup of it, Like the way hiring works. And this is why I said it's gross. Is,

um it's just such an antiquated process. I think a lot of our hiring approaches come from a time when there was a shortage of jobs and a surplus of candidates, right? So if you read a typical job description, their garbage right, like the worst. And if you read a typical job description, it's just this long list of bullet points saying stuff like You have attention to detail and you're not a murderer. And you know, just all this, like dumb stuff that has nothing to do with the job. I mean, I guess like not being a murderer, maybe eats the global are filter. Yeah, yes,

it depends on the job, but generally, the way these things are written is meant. Do you exclude right? And it's It's meant to be like, Oh, we have all these people beating down our door and make sure that you fit this criteria. That's not how hiring works anymore, right? Especially in software engineering. There is a shortage of good people in a surplus of jobs, but the processes were running are not optimized at all to make candidates move through the process fast or to add value or do anything. It's it's weird there's this tension between we need to hire all these engineers and then you apply to our company, and then they give you like a two week coding challenge to do that they don't pay you for. You know it doesn't make any sense. So I just want,

like, hiring practices, tow line up with market dynamics. So if there's a shortage of candidates, you should roll out the red carpet for them and treat them well. And if there's a shortage of candidates, you should be looking at talent pools that aren't just Google and end M. I t. Alums.

That's actually the right answer. When asked what everybody should be using us to answer is your own company name. So, yeah, this is a test.

Did I pass? I hope I pray you

got it right. Who? Thank God. So you are hiring and recruiting expert there. A lot of people listening who are themselves. Software engineers are who are starting companies that hire software engineer. So I'm gonna come back to this topic in just my you for information. But first I want to talk about why what is this process of interviewing and hiring sucks so much. I know a lot of people who would not be founders today if it wasn't so scary or difficult to interview as a software engineer,

I'm so terrified of having a job. My God. Uh oh. There's so much shit I will do to not have a job.

Let's go through this list. What would you do? Not have a job?

Oh, my God, I don't know. Yeah, I think I would. I would definitely do that. And starting a company is miserable. I mean, it's I guess it's, um what's that line about war like that? It's like long, long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Think that's entrepreneurship? Is this guy? I don't like that, too. So

nevertheless, you are a founder. So why are you found her? What do you like about doing this?

I feel like I'm lying on like a psycho analysis couch moment, right? I don't know. I think that there's, Ah, there's a certain personality that goes with being a founder. That's not always true, right? Founders come in all shapes and sizes and temperaments. But for me, I've just always had issues with authority. I think so. I've had issues with just having to do stuff that didn't necessarily make sense. to me. And at least when you have your own thing, you you might be telling other people to do all sorts of stupid shit. My staff will attest to this,

but at least is your stupid shit, right? And and you have some some control over your destiny. So that's 12 is I don't know if this has been your experience, Courtland, but like there are some things I'm pretty good at. There's a lot of stuff on bad at, but like, I don't know that there's just one thing I want to do with my time right here. You just when you're a founder, you get to solve all sorts of weird problems all the time. And I think that's really interesting of those Problems are cross functional, and they really just, ah, stretch you to the limits of your ability. And some of them are really boring. And you wish you didn't have to solve them. But a lot of them are things that you've never done before and and I think that's that's

really cool. It's definitely been my experience as well. You've been at this with interview and I oh, for four years now, right? That's right. You've got a dozen people that you're working with. Full time on this. You've got many more contractors. So you've created jobs. You get to tell them what to do. You know what? To tell

you what to do. Well, they I mean, people still tell me what to do. Actually, I'm grateful for it. Ah, lot of my my employees know what to do better than I do. I try to

listen. Yeah, great. That's even better. Your employees are so good at telling you what to do. You you've got a cool company that's actually helping fix an industry that you know a lot about and that you're passionate about. You've grown your revenue to multiple millions of dollars per year And just the last four years. So overall, you've come a long way. You've accomplished a lot. Thank you. Having accomplished all this, would you say that it's worth it? Are you happy?

I don't know if I'm happy, but I'm certainly happier than I've been before. I had this job, I think one of the nice things and I think you and I talked about this in the past, right? This idea of like when you were a founder. Even if you're sort of tactically miserable, right, you don't have time to be existentially miserable. So you're so busy. And, you know, hopefully you're doing something that you find meaning. And even if you know, certainly nothing has meaning, right? Everything is completely chaotic and meaningless in the universe.

Give zero fucks about you, but in your little corner, you've kind of created the suspension of disbelief that what you're doing matters, And as long as you have that lode star of like, I am doing this something that matters and you pretend that it does then all of a sudden, even if if your life is terrible even if you know 1 1/4 you know your revenue goes down or like you know, people leave your company. All sorts of things happen that are very, very stressful when you run a business. But you don't lay around at night thinking, you know, why am I here and what am I doing? And this is the first job where I felt that way where I feel like I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And, um, I don't care how miserable I am on a day to day basis. I will trade that for being kind of existentially purposeless.

Okay, let's talk about this. Let's talk about some of these other jobs where you didn't feel like you were doing what you were supposed to be doing. What were some of those jobs?

I've generally been fortunate enough to work in companies where I've like the people that I work with and some jobs I stayed at way longer than I would have otherwise because I love the people. But every job I've had after the first I don't know. Sometimes a learning curve was more steep than other times. But eventually, once you figure out what you're doing and you're not overwhelmed, like why why am I doing this? And it didn't matter how great the company was. It didn't matter how good my coworkers were. Ultimately, although that did keep me pretty happy day today. It always felt, felt a little bit empty. I am. I used to cook for a living like, I guess that job for a minute satisfied my existential existential longings because it was so difficult and I was so bad at it at least for the first few months that, you know, I didn't have time to think about other things.

And that job was was really, really cool. And then eventually I figured out that, like, I'm never gonna be Tony Bourdain. Brodin Bourdain. God, I don't even know how to pronounce his name. That's embarrassing. But I I realized I wouldn't be him and a TTE that point. I quit, but, like, for a little bit, that job was was almost as fulfilling as is doing this, but never quite us.

I want the story of how you got there. I mean, how does someone who is now a software engineer running attack company How did you even become a cook in the first place?

Um, well, so I as you know, we we were both m i t alums, and it's a great school, but it also kind of bleeds you dry or at least had bled me dry. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, And I was just so burned out on academics that when I graduated, I didn't really have a plan. And I really liked watching Food Network. Let me if there's a time in my life to do something absurd, right? It's when I'm 2122. I'm not When I'm 30 and I thought about going to culinary school, I think, uh, culinary school is like the coating boot camp.

Right. So, uh, you know, uh, if you look at coding boot camps websites on and you talk thio the people that are trying to get you to go there, they'll promise you the world, right? And they're they're not cheap. Fortunately, these days, some of them are aligning their incentives better with students. And then you don't have to pay until you actually get a job. But that's not how it always was. And there's still plenty of them where you just have to pay it quite a bit of money up front. So I thought about going to culinary school,

which, as it turns out, clear some something crazy. Back when I was at M I t. I think it was full if you pay full if you pay retail, going to college is something like $17,000 a semester. I think it's a lot more now. These dates me a little bit, but back then, culinary school, you'd go for three semesters. It was like an associate's degree, and it was 50 grand. So to go to some crap culinary school, it costs the same as going to M i t. So that was just not an option for me,

especially. I went and I talked to some chefs and I realized that once you graduate from culinary school, you're going to get the same jobs people that didn't go to school at all. Except you're now $50,000 in debt and you're making $11 an hour. What a deal. So with this the best, right? What's the deal for the schools there? They're fucking killing it. But I

get into the school business.

Yeah, right. Let's let's open a culinary coating boot camp. Just like really screw everybody in every capacity. Right? Um, I I chose not to do that, and I found a restaurant that I I just looked on Craigslist. And there are all these restaurants that were hiring cooks on. I didn't know how to do anything. I had taken one class in college called kitchen chemistry. Did you ever take

that one? I didn't know that was a class

C. Yeah, it's It's like during you get, like, two credits or I forget what a credit is. It You get some, like, nominal portion of, of whatever credit you normally get for a regular class, and then you make pancakes and you hang out. It's it's really great. So I took that class, but that was about it. I didn't know how to chop anything, Didn't know. So I I found. Finally,

after applying to like 100 restaurants and Craig's list, most of whom laughed at me, I found one that was like, Hello, you can come here and work for free And I was like, Great! So I worked for free for three days. They taught me how to chop vegetables, and then they started paying me. And then from there I tried to make the next job. I went to better than the previous one.

During your stint as a cook with only experiences, you had our lessons. You learned that have helped you out subsequently during your life as a founder.

I think actually, the most lasting thing that I learned was about hiring to. I'm not just just making that up to bring it back. This this is this is 100% true. Like I I was fascinated by how restaurants hire people. So if you want to work at a restaurant, nobody gives a shit about your hopes and dreams. Nobody really looks at your resume or your resumes kind of meaningless in that industry as well. You just come in and you bring your knives and, uh, in the morning they show you how to set up your station and you're prepping, So that means you're making sauces. Your chopping vegetables. I mean, in some restaurants, they also like, put an onion in front of you and they're like,

chop this onion and you're like, Okay, when you chop the onion, you know, you you basically set up your station and then during service. So, you know, come five o'clock, people start showing up for dinner. They show you howto do the dishes that your station is responsible for, and then all night you're just putting out those dishes and then they're watching you and they're like, Are you doing a good job? Then at the end of the night, if you do a good job, then they feed you and they make you an offer, and if you don't do a good job,

they send you home. Maybe they feed you if they feel sorry for you, but it's it's very, very fair. Or at least if you know, much more fair than anything I'd ever seen in an office setting. And I didn't quite realize how much of an impact that had on me until years later. But I filed it away, and that's the kind of fairness I'd like to bring to our industry.

Yeah, that'd be like being a developer, just going in and working a real day on the job Exactly, because she wouldn't do that to take your whole day. Just get your environment

setup. Yeah, totally like I wish somebody would crack that right. Um uh, and I think it's it's It's harder because you don't have a day to give, like and why would you like when? When companies air interviewing you the standard way? It's a lot faster, so it's a complicated thing, right? But there has to be a proxy where you don't really have to spend. I mean, like you said, a day is unrealistic because you have to just like you know, clone your Rebo and, like, mess with config files and do whatever the hell you have to do. But, you know Ah, you don't have to spend a few weeks working, But there has to be a better way than what we do now that that serves the same purpose

so fast for a little bit. You eventually quit. Your job is a cook. How did you transition into tech?

So I quit. My job is a cook after about three years in the industry, and then I just had no idea what I wanted to do. I was sort of going through this quarter life crisis. I think I was 25 at the time, so it was apt. And I remember Ah, well, when I had, I was out of money, right? I was just completely out of money. I had saved a lot of money because I started a tutoring business when I was in college and at the time, like, you know, my friend and I were raking it in. We're making,

like, $50 an hour like holy sh over for a rich so rich and then I burned through through most of my, um, tutoring money and, you know, went into debt and I just had nothing. So I saw this advertisement for this M I t. Program called Meat. They changed what it stands for, but back then it stood for, I think, Middle East education through technology. So the idea was, ah, they fly you to Jerusalem, and then you teach programming to a mix of Israeli and Palestinian high school students.

I thought that was amazing, right? Cause the whole thesis was hey, instead of sitting around and talking about politics and the conflict, what if we just make this is very kind of hippy dippy like what if we just make people build stuff together with code, you know? Then they'll find a common language, and then they will they'll build, build some foundation for mutual respect. And I thought that was really cool. I wanted to be part of it. And I also had no money, and there was a stipend and I had a place to live for the summer if I went to Jerusalem. So it was just a win win on on all fronts. I don't think I've ever admitted that to the program so Hey, eyes like if you're listening.

Sorry, I did it for good reasons also. But that kind of got me back into programming cause teaching something is the best way to understand it. Better yourself in and fall in love with it. I think so. After that summer, which went super, super well and where I made some very lasting friends, probably among the best friendships of my life. I came back and I was like, You know what I can do. Computers Computers aren't as bad as I remember. It'll be fun. And then I did computers. For five years, I'd worked in Tech,

I guess. During college I had a number of internships. So it wasn't my first foray into writing code in production, but it was close to it. And I remember, like preparing for job interviews back then, after not having written after spending three years like drinking and having plaits thrown at me, it was it was interesting, too, to get back out there and and interview. I remember I had to reverse a link list and I'd forgotten what a link list was, so that was cool. But eventually I figured it out Um And then I spent most of my time actually at one company, which I never would have thought I'd end up there. But it ended up being an amazing place to work. And so many of the people that have worked that have gone on to be very,

very successful. It was, they're still around. It's called, um, click time. And they did a fast time and expense tracking. So I spent five years making time sheets and it was not as horrible as you would think.

You've got this amazing job making time sheets, the people around you, a great Why ever leave whatever go on to do your own thing?

Well, I fell into recruiting there, right? So that was the place where I said, you know, we were all kind of jumping in and ramping up in ramping down and constantly getting interrupted. So I was like, Hey, this is This is cool. I think there's a real problem here. I think I What I didn't know at the time was that technical recruiters were not technical usually like that. That blew my mind. I was like, How can people that our intention years to be involved in filtering and vetting engineers. Just crazy. But that's that's how it works. And I thought,

You know what? I'm an engineer. And, um, I think that there's an opportunity here that and after five years of doing computers, as I like to put it, I don't think I wanted to do it for the rest of my life. I like writing code to solve problems, but it doesn't like when I was in school. There are all these people that just lived and died for this stuff like this is all they lived and breathed and, you know, it was just so thrilling to them to code. And I knew that I would never I want if I'm going to do something, I want to be the best editor at least among the best. And I knew that if I didn't have this level of passion for the craft, I would never be the best.

That and I'm not saying that I was a great program or despite that right, like I was decent. But if you're decent and you don't love it, like your odds of ex selling are very, very

low, yeah, because you're competing with people who are really going to do it. Who love it.

Yeah. Do you like programming?

I love programming, but it's also a means to an end. People like you. It's a means to an end for me. I wouldn't code if you couldn't create cool things. I wouldn't deal with just a set of my computer coding all day. So I think I'll also probably never be the best software engineer because I'm only doing it for its own sake.

Yep. Can't like the truth and beauty and beauty and truth something.

Okay, so at this point, you leave. Your job is a software engineer. You get into recruiting. You're a person who wants to avoid existential angst. You wanna keep yourself busy, you want to be the best. And whatever it is that you're doing, how do these two things and form how you approach your job as a recruiter and the next decisions that you make?

Yeah, well, so I I didn't quite quit my day job yet, so to speak. So what I tried doing was just moonlighting as a recruiter because I saw what third party like, there's so many shitty third party recruiters out there, right? And we were trying to fill roles and we were using agencies. And I'm like, My God! And then I found out how much those people were getting paid. And I'm like, shit, you know, there's like, just like with the other. I'm like,

This is a case where, like my my hopes and dreams and financial incentives line up really well, I'm like, this is a problem. I hate how unfair hiring is. And my God, there's so much money in the space so

much where they're getting paid.

So back then, Um, it hasn't changed very much, so I think right now industry standard for a contingency recruiter contingency means you get paid when you make a higher so industry standard December between 15 to 20% of first years based salary. So if ah, with software engineer makes 150 grand a year, right, what's 1/5 of that? Well, 30 grand, right? So you get 30 grand every time you make a placement. So it's it's ah, it's a lot of money for not very much work. It is more work than people think, though there are. There are a lot of people that think recruiting is very,

very easy, and I was naively one of them. It's not. It's not easy. There is all this nuanced stuff that you realize once you get in there. But it is like it's not a backbreaking job. Put it that way. So I started moonlighting as a recruiter, right? A few friends that had start ups and I was like, Hey, guys, can I just try to make some hires for you and we'll see what happens and I could and it worked well, and one of those companies was trialled pay, and they took a chance on me and gave me the title head of technical recruiting, even though I had never worked as a recruiter before.

So I'm forever grateful to them for doing that because that's what got me started in this space. Ana and I, I was very fortunate to be able to land that position. One of the weird things about that job to was that I was kind of half recruiter and half technical interviewer, so because ah, I could do technical interviews and I have been an engineer for years and years. They're like, Hey, what if you're the one that just interviews are candidates, and it'll sort of take the heat off the edge team. I was thrilled to do it was like this. I'm gonna learn something no matter what, like this is going to be cool. And I ended up doing something like five or 600 technical interviews in the year that I was there. Yeah, yeah,

there somewhere I was doing, like, six a day and then I would just go home and sit in the dark and just just like God, what a day. But that also sort of helped me get here because I I started realizing there are a lot of patterns and repetitions, how interviews are done and there's a lot of stuff That's Dad and that job also, what I you know, whenever I'm doing something that makes me miserable, I don't know if you do this, but when around doing something weird or something that that is arduous. I think I'm gonna write about this one day and then it, like, makes it better. And in this case, I was doing these interviews in part because I thought maybe I could write something interesting about it. and what I ended up doing because I was the person that decided who got interviewed and then the person wasting my own time.

When I interviewed the wrong people that I felt OK, like, uh, casting a very wide net, Cy, I talked to a lot of people and ended up writing a piece about what attributes of a resume might predict whether somebody gets an offer. So I interviewed all these people look to see who was successful, and then I looked to see who was already working a trial pay. And I, um, I looked at their resumes and tried to see like, Is it the number of years of experience? Is it whether they went to a top school? Is it whether, um, they know a specific programming language or framework?

Is it do they have their own website? Do they have a get hub? Do they have lots of projects? Did they work at a top company? Right, looking at all of these traits, and this is one of like the first thing that I ever really wrote on the Internet that took off that also sort of shape what ended up doing later. But that in that analysis, When I wrote about it, I found out that the thing that mattered most much more than where people worked and incidentally, where people went to school didn't matter at all. But the thing that mattered most by far in a way, was how many typos and grammatical errors really people had on their resumes? Yeah, is insane. I mean,

I said months manually counted. You can't like, have a computer account typos because all resumes, they're full of acronyms, right? It's all sorts of weirdo proprietary technical terms. So, like, yeah, really? There are three things that mattered. Number one was number of typos and grammatical errors. And of course, the fewer the better. I almost said the less, the better.

And then I corrected myself of Ah, the second thing was, ah, how clearly they explained what they did at each position. So a bad explanation would be. I took part in the software development life cycle. Where is a good explanation to be, You know, my team was responsible for, you know, upgrading this thing or like building this. This this feature and this feature have this much traction and here's why. It mattered, you know, like basically what you'd expect. And then the third thing that mattered was whether somebody had worked out a quote unquote top company that mattered.

Least everything else. Years of experience, advanced degree college, G p A. Like all these other things didn't matter at all.

That's interesting is it implies the top companies aren't doing that good of a job filtering people because if they were than working in a top company would be a pretty good signal for whether or not somebody is good.

Yeah, I think the idea was like, at least if somebody else was willing to marry you, Maybe you're not the worst, you know, like which is not not necessarily the best way to make decisions.

So you're a software engineer. At this point, you're working as a recruiter. Basically, Do you think about how you could apply your skills as a software engineer to perhaps scale this business and turn into something bigger?

Well, so I did. Well, the reason part of the reason I wrote that block post I was just talking about is I was trying to come up with, like, the ultimate logistic regression of truth. You know where you could have. Ah, it started as a hackathon project. Like it, I put in someone's resume and it would just give me a score. Well, this score was really either yes or no, because that's ultimately all you care about, right? So, uh,

I started that way. I realized very, very quickly that that was not gonna work. The resume fundamentally, just does not have enough signal to extract any kind of meaningful decision. That's why I'm very skeptical incidently of any like a I hiring startups because I don't know what they're using to get signal. But I there's no magic. There's just like, No, there's not that much info available from people's public profiles to decide. Can they coat or not? Right. So when I realized that didn't work, I realized that there has to be some other way to get data about candidates that would be more meaningful, and I kind of got there organically. So after I wrote this thing about typos and grammatical errors,

I published it and people liked it. And then by this time I had started my own recruiting firm. But rather than just working at trial pay or Udacity. I was doing my own thing and hiring for about 40 or 50 companies because I started writing all this stuff on the Internet about how hiring was totally broken. A lot of really good candidates started approaching me, saying, Hey, you know, I'm nontraditional on paper. Can you help me get my foot in the door at the top company? And I didn't know what to do with them because, ah, you know, my normal approach is useless here. I couldn't look at their resume and didn't tell me very much and their resumes in particular. I didn't know how to parse because I'd never heard of their employers or their schools if there was even a school.

So I just started interviewing them. And then I realized, You know what? If there's a way I could make a platform where we get people's interview performance and then on top of that, if we can trick Cos I told you earlier just how frustrated I was, the company's wouldn't talk to my candidates even though I said they were good. Like if there's a way to, like get candidates to hang out on this platform, do interviews, surface the best people and then force companies to talk to those best people despite themselves. Then there's gonna be a business. And and that's how interviewing Io came about.

Was this, like a flash of insight, like one night in the shower is boom. It hits

you are. It might have been on the toilet, I think. Which is where I do a lot of my best thinking. I'm not sure, but it's very possible it was either the shower

important half

of the questions. Sorry. No, but I like I've got I've got the answer. Courtland, listen, it was on the toilet. All right,

Flash at some point, turn this into a plan for your business or strategy or road

map or something to this day. Like, I'll be honest, I have no idea what a business plan is or how to write one. I don't like people keep right, and people keep talking. I'm like, What? What is that? I don't know. This seems like a waste of time. The way I I tried to validate it was Well, I mean, I I tried to do something out of necessity, so I was running this recruiting firm and Then I had this idea, and then I thought, Well,

I'm making a lot of money being a recruiter. Do I really want to just shut this down and do this random thing? I don't even know if, like, I think people want interview practice, right? That's something I kind of figured out from doing a ton of technical interviews back when I was a trial babe, but I wasn't sure. So I put up this really, really shitty marketing site on Hacker News, and it said Free Anonymous. Maybe it's a practice. Actually, it said something pretty similar to what our marketing site says now. So it's said practice interviewing with engineers from top companies anonymously. Something like that.

And it was number one on hacker news for I think two days and something like 7000 people signed up the first day. Whoa. So I was like, Okay. Time to quit my job. Time to time to shut down my little recruiting firm and do this instead. My favorite piece of copy from that site. Incidentally, um, so I was, like, practice interviewing. I promised you earlier I would tell you my favorite piece of copy for better or for worse. I may regret this, but it was a practice interviewing with engineers from top companies blah, blah,

blah. And then, um underneath it said it's like chat roulette, but without the dicks. Okay? And we had this marketing site, probably for the first year that we were in business. Maybe more still said it. We were signing all these enterprise customers that were hiring through us, and at some 0.1 of our favorite customers might My main contact point from there called me up. And he's like, alien. I like you. We like working with you with interviewing Io. We think this is funny, but not all of us think this is funny. Some people on our team think that the dicks thing is a little offensive. Can you please take that down? And we did. Where a bunch of sellouts

you are a person who had a personality, You know, You had a soul.

Yeah, hand no more

is what happens to your service.

Yeah, Yeah. Kids don't start businesses. Eventually you have to take down the dicks.

It's true. Okay, well, this leads perfectly into my next question. A za founder, your person. Really wears all the hats. You're not just sitting on the toilet coming up with ideas. What? You're also the person who's writing the marketing copy is you did so artfully Ailey. They're also building the product. In most cases, they're hiring the people to build the product. You're doing sales, you're doing everything. Really. And I think as an employee,

sometimes it'll be hard to make that transition because you're like, Oh, my God. I have to do everything you know responsibly and my job are usually pretty circumscribed, like common gonna How am I gonna wear all that's how did you deal with making this transition alien? Because you were a software engineer for five years. That was it for you to transition and basically being responsible for everything.

Yeah, um I think one of the things That's if I think about me before I started a company, or I think about people I know that are not founders. One of the biggest attitude shifts that I've had to make um and, ah that maybe people that have a normal job don't have is that there's no playbook, right? And that there's also no wrong answer, right? I think people often get very paralyzed before they do something because they don't know exactly the right way to do it. Once you have to do one of the I think the worst thing you can do is just especially if you're starting a company is to just sit there and and agonize over what you should do. It doesn't matter if you pick the wrong thing. You just have to do something. And then, no matter what, just kind of accept that everything you're gonna do is probably gonna be wrong. But as long as you're right, sometimes that's probably good enough.

And as long as you can figure out what you did wrong and iterated on it, and this is this is a This is not rocket science. This is like every every blogged about being a found probably say the same thing, but I will cast my vote. This is absolutely true. So even you know it. If you're trying to hire for your start up, let's say started a company and you need somebody to come work for you. It's very tempting to spend hours being like Oh my God, who do I reach out to? Are they even going to respond to me howto I source talent for my new startup. And the fact is, the worst thing you could do is just sit there, not source talent, no matter what. Like the first few batches of emails that you sent,

two people are gonna be crap, right? Like you don't know how to talk about your business. The things that you think are interesting about your business may not be the things that other people think are interesting. You're probably not good at talking about what you do concisely, because in your head they're like 50 moving parts, and each of them is endlessly fascinating. But the reality is, most people don't give a shit. So how do you distill your messaging? And that just comes with with failure and with repetition, I think that's that's the big difference. Or, um, if you're a job seeker, I'll go with your analogy,

right? Especially if you don't look great on paper. The best thing you can do mean people just get in this rut where they just start. Ah robotically sending resumes to companies and then getting annoyed when they don't hear back. The fact is no one's reading those in the first place, so you shouldn't feel bad and you shouldn't be annoyed. But the best thing you can do is probably reach out to people that work at those companies. And that's really hard because you're making yourself vulnerable and you're reaching out to a person that you have no nothing about, and you don't know what to say. But that feeling, if you can get over it and actually just like right, let's say somebody at a company you wanna work wrote a really cool block post, and it's about something you're interested in. Maybe it's a project that you like to work on if you worked at that company, if you can get over that sort of terror and and write to them and say, Hey,

I saw that you did this thing and it's really cool And I've been thinking about something along the same lines, and I really wanted to know, like how how you did this, That's good enough. And then once you do a few of those that breaks the seal, and if you can take that approach to every unknown that you encounter in the future, you'll you'll be okay. So I think, like just finding the activation energy, right. Getting over that little little hump and and doing that is the big difference. And some people never get over it. And then the people that do, I think, especially if they have the temperament to be a founder, probably gonna be much happier.

I love that point. There really is no well laid out path as a founder. There's nobody patting you on the back saying Good job in lean. You're doing the right thing. Keep going this direction

while my mom, my mom still it's so then, Dad, they do that sometimes. Things

every episode of the podcast.

Yeah. Yeah, Mind my parents too. Well, my parents, my mom texted me recently, and she's like, Your podcasts are great. You sound so intelligent. But please, please, can you stop saying fuck? Sorry, Mom. I'm sorry.

Okay. So as an employee, you've gotta track laid out in front of you. You've got a boss telling you what to do. What not to do. You've got promotions. It's all very comfortable, very guided. As a founder, you've got none of that. But you still have to make decisions and actually take action. I want to talk about the actions that you took at the beginning of interviewing Io was the very first thing you did. If you decided that this was the problem that you wanted to solve,

I think I tried to find a co founder that cause I I felt really overwhelmed. Actually, I kind of felt like I was holding an atom bomb in my hands, and I didn't know what to do with it. So I put up this crap marketing site with the dicks on it. Or the ref, whatever. It was right, and people just signed up. And, um, I was like, the universe has handed me a gift. And in the hands of of a more capable person, this gift would be taken to fruition and realized. And instead, this gift has been handed to me a lot of pressure.

And, yeah, like what? What do I do with this? And, um, like, you know what? I I don't think I have the, um, wherewithal to do this alone. I think I need help, and I I certainly don't want to build like this is gonna be a complicated product. right on our. Our product hasn't really changed from inception until today. We've made some changes.

Certainly the u Y has gotten better than you know. We've Ah, we built more features for employers, but at the heart of it, we have to build something where people could talk to each other anonymously and write code and submit feedback. And then we wanted those people to get ranked, and we want it scheduling toe work. And there's, you know, it was Ah, it's not rocket science, but it's a lot for one person who hates coding t build. So fortunately, we were able thio to use coder pad. I remember you and Vincent on on the show. One of my favorite episodes.

Um so I think maybe even I went to him and I'm like, What do I do? Ah, we had met because he read my blogged. I think it was the post about how resumes are stupid and typos matter. So, you know, fortunately, we were able to use coder pad within our product and license it. But even outside of that, there are a lot of moving parts. So I went around trying to find a co founder and my friend Art. He wasn't really willing to leave his job full time, but But he was willing to jump in and help and then sort of build something to get the product off the ground. On top of that, I remember as a proof of concept to do the first few we wanted to see if anonymous interviewing could even work before we built to too much,

right? Ah, we generally try to build this little less possible invalidate, right? It's this lean startup idea. At the time, I didn't know what Lean startup was. I just thought it was because we were so strapped for Resource is that we should make sure this thing can work before we spend weeks trying to build it. So, um, I remembers me. Vincent Parker, Um, Parker Finney, who runs interview cake. You should have him on the show.

He's fantastic. Who else? Art was there, too, and we just, like, emailed some of the people that had signed up through Ah, that marketing site that was on hacker news and said, Hey, we're gonna book you some anonymous practice interviews, and then we used Uber Conference and Coder pad and just, like, sort of stable together, some disparate things to try to make it look like it would be if it wasn't anonymous. Interview is just, like,

basically combining some tools together and making a flow that that wasn't the worst. And we just interviewed those people to see if they liked it and to see if it would work. And then it seemed like it would. So at that point, Art and I started building some stuff.

I'm a huge proponent of starting small. I think almost everybody take it. Started that way. And you really started. Well, before writing any code for interviewing I owe you were interviewing hundreds of software engineers as a recruiter. What was it like interviewing somebody to be your co founder?

Ah, very different. I've never asked any So art ended up. Like I said, he didn't join full time. Eventually I got my friend Andy to join, um and he's He's great, but none of those people, you know, I put through any kind of like technical interview. I mean, in part because I had worked with them previously on stuff, right? So I think for me the biggest questions we're one. Do this person and I get along right? Like, Do we make each other better?

Is it fun to be around them? Can I see myself being locked in a room with them for a 12 16 hours a day without, you know, biting each other's heads off? A second thing was, and this is really important for all early startup employees, not but not just co founders. But can this person ruthlessly kind of decide what matters and not get lost? Going down technical rabbit holes? So can they build? What can they just, like, hack some shit together and then fix it later, right? Rather than, um,

having to build the thing perfectly? And also do they know when it's important to stop hacking shit together and actually build something more robust like that, especially for a technical co founder like that? So much? What you do all day is make those decisions. And then, lastly, I knew for me I'm not a very linear thinker. I go all over the place. Um, I think this is something that frustrates the hell out of my employees, but I wanted somebody that was more of an analytical linear thinker and could sort of round out some of my flaws and imperfections and fill in those gaps. And hopefully I could do the same for them. That ended up being the case and and was very lucky.

Was such a good point about wanting to hire early employees who know how much to code? No, when the have something together, No one to stop. It's basically knowing what the bigger picture is and not being so absorbed. And your money details of your job that you just want to be the best software engineer possible on you create amazing software that the company doesn't really

need. Yeah, yeah, doesn't. I can write the most beautiful stuff and you're out of business a few months later and it didn't even get to see the light

of day, right? It's super tricky for for people who come from a software engineering background, where it's all about having the right unit tests and making the best decisions and writing the best code, because that's all you have to worry about being a founder when you've got 15 other things to worry about in the code's not the only thing that matters so you have to be to make these trade offs. What kind of questions can you ask somebody to determine whether or not they're that kind of person?

Honestly, gosh, I mean what I did with art. And then later with Andy Waas, too. Just try working together. I mean again. I knew both of these guys pretty well. I knew I got along with them. I knew that. You know, we made each other laugh. That's also really important, right? It's like it's like dating right Either marriage, you and everyone says this, but it's true,

like you have to just enjoy being around each other. And you have to be able to diffuse tension with laughter because there's a lot of tension. But for us, like we just got in a room and relate. All right, let's just let's just build some stuff. Let's, like, talk about let's say we want to build this part of the product. Let's just start drawing some stuff on a white board and being like, what would this look like? Are we aligned? You know, do we do we care about the same things and it's it's really hard to ask that I think without just working on it. I think maybe if I were a better interviewer, which is ironic as I run a company called Interviewing Io.

But if I were a better interviewer, maybe I could suss out some of these things through a series of very intensive top grading behavioral interviews. For me, the best thing to do is just get in a room, be like, let's build this part of the product together. Let's design it together and then it comes out very, very quickly if you're not aligned on things and you don't always have to be, But then is it? Is it constructive? When you disagree? Can you communicate well? Can you limit the communication overhead? Like how many words do you need to explain things to each other?

It's basically a relationship. It's like a romantic relationship without the romance.

Yes, exactly, right or, um, Or maybe you're both in love with a product rather than with each

other. There you go. You both

very much. Yeah, it's like a weird three way love triangle. Yeah, you have. Yeah. So or maybe with your users, Maybe you should be in love with your users and the product. But then, yeah, it's too complicated now

he asking about a hand alien. It's like a love square

now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't need that.

So I think with interviewing I Oh, it's obvious to me why software engineers love this. I mean, if you told me 10 years ago Hey, you can do free anonymous interviews online is a free

agent. Yeah, of course. Of course. Of course

it has. Yeah. You could do free anonymous interviews. I would've signed up in a jiffy because it's like I get to say, face, I get to practice my interviewing skills get better, I might even get a job out of it. The other side is probably much harder because you're dealing with probably a lot of engineers who want that confident to go through the normal channels who are already getting interviews. I mean, as a company, maybe you don't really want to do business with interviewing Io because this is weird new thing. How did you get your first few customers to sign up from the business hiring

side of things? Yeah, that's thank you for asking. It's the first. You were harder than the you know last few. Our pitch to companies is basically Hey, do you want to talk to some? Rando is off the Internet without knowing who they are and put inch time into it. So you can imagine how that that pitch you can raise some eyebrows. Of course, that's not literally what we say, but that's kind of what people internalize. So we explain how it works. We say, Look, resumes are stupid and increasingly in the climate that were in fortunately, more and more companies or bought into this idea that a resume is not the source of truth,

right? So that's that's been to our advantage. And I've written a lot about resume, so that's also helped things. Things move along. But honestly, for the first few customers that we landed, we had to let them try it out. Now the proof really was in the pudding there because they would talk to a few of our candidates, and then they'd be like, Holy shit, you know, this is so much better than the people we're getting through our other channels and certainly better than, um better than the people that maybe even resources ourselves because when your sourcing. You're looking at the same signals. Everybody else's right,

so there's no opportunity to arbitrage anything. So our employers would basically talk to a few candidates. We do free pilots where maybe they would talk to 4 to 6. And then after that ah, they see that most of those candidates are ones they wanted to engage with in a typical good hiring process. Maybe 20 to 25% of candidates make it from the technical screen to the on site, and that's on top of spending, you know, 10 hours a candidate to source them and then having to do recruiter calls before you know if the candidate is good. So you're really investing a lot of time and then on Lee, about 1/5 or 1/4 of people actually make it through to the next step. In our case, it's around 70% and you don't have to spend any time sourcing. So we save something like 200. Enjoy our sorry 200 recruiting hours per hire and something like Ah, 15 to 20 nge hours.

So it's non trivial and and once people like got their heads around that they were generally very committed. The other thing is, you know, especially if you're thinking about starting a business where you want people to try your product. Think about how your pricing can reflect that. So, fortunately, in our case ah, the beginning. We were charging these for higher fees, and companies were already used to this idea of like paying a recruiter only if they made a higher. So it was de risked and the pricing model was something that was already familiar to them. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. No, it's fascinating to me Is that usually when you see an industry as crowded as the one that you're in creating and hiring and job placement, you see prices get driven down. You see a lot of people coming in and saying things like, Hey, you know, you're charging 20% of the first year's salary. I'll charge 15% to place an engineer. Hey, you know, I'll do it for a flat fee, $5000 a head. Why hasn't that happened here? Why are you able to charge as much as you do?

It's kind of moving in that direction, so it's gotten a little more commoditized these days, most of our revenue is coming not from these per higher fees, but from large flat fee deals. So we'll approach a company. They'll try us out, right. They'll talk to a few candidates, see that those candidates are good, and then they'll generally pay us for a year of candidates up front, which ends up being about 50% cheaper than paying us per hire ala cart. So exactly what you described is what's happening. But the other thing that I've seen that aside is that I think the reason it isn't as extreme as you describe is that companies air hurting so badly. For engineers, that price generally is just not a friction point. When you're selling right, if you can promise people that you can get really good butts and seeds quickly, they're willing to pay a premium for it.

So you said something earlier that really resonated with me, and that's that with interview mayo, it felt like you've been handed a gift, and you knew that in the hands of a very capable person, the gift would be taken to fruition. But it's in your hands and you've got to be that capable person, and you've got to be the one who makes this company work. I think that's something that a lot of founders could identify with. Identify with it. What are some of the best decisions you've made since starting that have helped you get to where you are today, where you're making millions in revenue, where you've got thousands of engineers, you're helping to find jobs, and we actually do feel like you're the right person for this.

I think most of my good decisions have been the people I've hired. None of this would be possible if it were still just me. So just it's been It's been on real like, Every time I look at, you know, I'm kind of I'm sitting in an office that has a glass window, right, and I'm kind of looking out onto the office right now, and I'm just looking at the people that work here and like, Why the hell are they here? They could be anywhere, like all of them. All of them could be anywhere, and they could be making more money. It's It's crazy to me, Um, and it's It's just so grateful that you know,

people that are really good are willing to put their time into this, I guess. Like the thing I'm most proud of. And I think one thing that I I did do well is creative business model we're doing good is the thing that gets you paid, and I think that's rare. So in our case, we're trying to build this efficient marketplace and the more efficient it is, that means hopefully, the more not hopefully definitely the more meritocratic it is, right, like in hiring. Efficiency is defined by light or you have hiring the right people for the right jobs. So the best people, just the more the more you can, you can place the best people in the right opportunities, the more efficient you are,

and then, by extension, the more money you're making. So that's that's crazy, like you don't have to do mental gymnastics to be like, Oh, you know, we're doing this thing and then through some kind of Rube Goldberg machine, eventually some good will happen in the world. It's like, No, this is a very, very direct, A to be sort of journey. And, um, I'm so happy that that that is is true when I was happy that the people that work here see it.

I don't have a ton of experience hiring people, a lot of people listening in. Right now, we're fledgling founders or aspiring founders who are very soon going to have to start making hiring decisions were probably a lot of things wrong. What are some things we can do to get it right the way that you have?

Um, well, I've certainly got if I've messed up a lot of like, people think that just because I know stuff about hiring, that it's easy for me, it's not. I've made some bad hiring decisions. I've, you know, let people go. People have left, right? These things happen. It sucks, they dio. But I think one piece of advice that I would give especially to new founders is to remember that if you're trying to hire software engineers in the market that we're operating in, hiring is not a vetting process as much as a selling process.

People don't have to work for you. So from the moment you engage with somebody, maybe your sourcing them, you're writing to them saying Hey, come work for me. Maybe you're interviewing them. Make sure that every time you interact, you're adding value for them and you're giving them a reason why your company is awesome. So when you interview people, if you're fortunate enough to even get people to talk to you, I think about what kinds of questions you can ask them that don't just vet their ability to write code, but also showcase why the problems you're solving are interesting and unique. So try to ask them cool, real world stuff, you know, take them to lunch.

I spent a lot of time with them, care about what they care about. And we've a narrative where the disparate path they've had up until this point culminates perfectly and working for you. And if you can't tell that narrative, maybe they're not the right person. You know, um, and also like, don't don't be afraid of saying no to a higher if it doesn't feel right. Sometimes there's a lot of pressure. You're like, Should I need somebody working right away? Out. I'm drowning. If you doesn't feel right, it's probably not

okay, So let's get back to talking about how you grew interviewing Io from something small and to what it is today. And specifically, I want to talk about the sales side of things, you calling up companies and convincing him to take a chance on you to trust their hiring process to you. Basically, I know in the early days you were doing a lot of demos, a lot of trial, period and just sort of hoping that people would choose to use you after they saw that it worked. I imagine things have changed a lot since then. So what are the biggest milestones and how your sales process has evolved?

We still, you know, it depends on the size of the company. If we're piloting with some, like, huge brand, I mean, we're gonna bend over backwards. We'll do whatever, right? Okay, try as many candidates as you want. I'm exaggerating a little bit because eventually we do want to get paid, but, um, I don't know. It hasn't changed that that much certainly are.

I remember the first time I made a deck to sell, right. I'm like most of the selling I when I when I was only when doing selling most of the selling I was doing it was just like trying to have coffee with people and just doing a demo. Well, of course, listening to to their needs first. And then, you know, showing them the parts of the product that I thought spoke to their needs. But then eventually, you get to the point where you have collateral and different decks and different decks for different audiences. And, you know, you're yourselves. Process matures. Eventually,

one of the milestones for us actually was hiring. Um ah. Customer success person. Um, where you know, we have enough enterprise brands. I work with us now that are used to a certain white glove high touch kind of experience, right? And one of the guys that works for me, whose job it wasn't even to do sales that he was mostly doing marketing and product, right? He and I were just running around playing whack a mole, trying to pretend that we had a customer success too. Apartment, way, her just running ourselves ragged.

And it wasn't good for anybody. So making that higher was great, because it, um you know, we put on our big boy pants at that point that I was like, Okay, okay. We have a person who's dedicated to making sure that customers are getting value out of the product. Other things that changed, uh, early on. You know, I keep talking about how there's practice, and then there are really interviews early on. Um, we didn't have that.

Everything was just one big pool. So some people were there a CZ practice, interviewers. Some people were There's candidates. And then we also told cos you could just hang out in this pool and you'll be matched with people. And hopefully they'll wanna work for you and you can just sell them. So every interview was kind of practice until it wasn't. It was kind of this ender's game situation where it's like, Oh, what should I just ruined Daniel's game for everybody else?

I'll cut this out. That's it.

Don't cut it out. It's funny. I want to ruin it. But

I know you think

I'm gonna watch,

You know you're not sorry.

No, I'm not sorry at all. I hope this whole exchange states and, uh, no. Um, so it was just like this 11 big pool and one thing we learned from talking to our bigger customers and from listening to some of their interviews on our platform after the fact was that they did not want to have to sell that hard because they were leaning on their brand. If you have some big brand, you, you know you should be able to leverage that. So then we changed up our product. So we had a practice pool and then for a bigger customers, candidates could sign up and and that that was sort of a big turning point for us. Another big turning point was getting into subscription pricing. So stopping just doing per higher fees and, uh, making making it so. Companies just paid us some flat fee for some number of candidates and that that increased our revenue like six X over the span of like 1/4 or two. That's that's yeah,

There's a lot of advice floating out there for founders. We talked about it a little bit. This episode he talked about starting Small and Iterating. There's also, you know, do things that don't scale talk to your customers, etcetera. Is there any advice that's common for Founder's out there that you don't think you followed that? You just kind of skipped over and things were still pretty much fine.

There are a few things. So I, um I don't know if this is controversial or not, but I I don't agree that you should be doing a lot of management early on in your growth, right? Like if you find yourself doing a lot of people management, when you're like five people, six people, seven people, you're probably doing something wrong or you hired the wrong people like you should When you're hiring this early, you should find people that, um that can sort of figure out what to do. And it's your it's your job to communicate constraints and goals to them. And then you kind of just wanna set them loose on those constraints and goals. Doesn't mean that you don't, you know, check in with them.

It doesn't mean that you weren't helpful, But ultimately, if if you're looking over their shoulder all the time, either you're doing it wrong or they're doing it wrong or you're both doing it wrong. Another thing is, um, people talk a lot about, you know, having a ton of different perspectives. If you have people that work for you that fundamentally aren't aligned with your mission and don't fit into the culture. It's bad, especially early on, and this may be a bit controversial, right, because you do want to kind of be encouraging of discussion, and you want people to suggest things.

But fundamentally, everybody has to be marching in the same direction, and if they're not, it's going to kill you. It's exhausting. We, uh, we had some friction at interviewing. I owe for instance where, ah, you know, externally. People often think that we are first and foremost Ah, platform that's dedicated to diversity and inclusion. And we certainly believe in both of those things. But that is first and foremost,

not what we do. We believe in talent being evenly distributed. We believe in surfacing, and we believe in giving great people opportunity. But we don't specialize specifically in creating opportunities for women or people of color, right? We're just like we're just gonna try to make hiring less bad for everybody. And we hope that that ends up creating a more inclusive environment. And that anonymity is something that's useful for people that feel marginalized. But, you know, we're not we're not a deny platform, you know, there are cases where people at the company wanted us to go in that direction, and that's not something that I wanted to do. So fundamentally, it's it's important that everybody has their eye on the same North star.

Okay, we've talked about some of the things that have gone right with your business, some of the decisions that you're proud of, what are some of the things that have gone wrong, Whereas you could go back in time, you would change them. And also in the president what obstacles lie between, You know, where interviewing Io is today and where it could theoretically be, where it's like the only solution that any company uses for hiring.

Yeah, um, I think the main thing that's stopping us from being the only source of candidates for companies as our candidate supply right. It's It's really hard to run a two sided market place because you've got a balance. Ah, in our case than the number of candidates and the number of open rolls and companies and keeping those balanced is really difficult. Like a lot of my job is sort of running back and forth between those two sides where I'm like, Okay, shit. It looks like we're running out of candidates. All right, how do we turn that up? Oh, shit. Okay, now we have a surplus of candidates, and I need to go back out and sell,

or I need to empower other people to sell. So, um, I I wish, um I wish I were kind of better at that stuff because it's really, really hard to keep things balanced. And, um, I I think that maybe if we were more aggressive and just, like, went all in on getting a ton of candidates and then said, Screw it like we're we're gonna find the company's later. Maybe that would be a better way to do it. I I just try to keep things balanced and that that may not be the best way to do things, but so far it's worked. It's worked okay for us.

Another thing that I think I did wrong is it just took me way too long to get started. So after I put up that and this, maybe we'll be poignant for your audience. Don't Don't make this mistake. So I put up that marketing site. We got all those sign ups and then it took me, like, months to mobilize because I was terrified. Um, and I I wish that I'd, like, just found ah, cofounder or just just went for it myself the next day. In retrospect, instead of just sitting there being like, Oh,

my God, what do I do? What do I do? Have been handed this gift, and I'm gonna screw it up.

What Finally got you over the edge to actually start moving?

I just got really angry at myself. Is that his dancer? Like, What are you doing? What are you doing? You stupid piece of shit? Just just like you know what's worse than than doing the wrong thing is doing nothing, and it sounds so trite. But coming to that conclusion yourself can take time.

There's a lot of stuff like that where you kind of have to have that raw emotional experience on your own. And somebody can tell you the answer. Somebody like alien. Here's what you need to do is tell you what to do. You could read it in a block post or a book. You could listen to it on a podcast like this, but it won't really resonate with you and make a difference until you actually struggle through it on your own and come out the other side. And you did come out the other side. You are now running a team. It's no wonder just you struggling by yourself to get something done. I'm curious about your role has changed since then. On a day to day level, you could still be getting your hands dirty with everything. You could be sitting back and making high level decisions about sales and increasing the supply of developers. You could be delegating a lot of this stuff as well. So what's the balance like for you today?

Yeah, well, we actually. So we brought on our I mentioned earlier. We brought on a customer success person who's under the sales umbrella, and that's made my life a lot better. Um, we've also brought on our first actual sales person, which has made my life better already. I guess a lot of my day today is, um, thinking, like generally is a founder. You're spending time hiring always where you're thinking about like when you need to do more hiring. One of my favorite things about my job is writing So doing, content marketing. Our block has been such a great channel of users for us.

And it's also been great for me because I get to write about things I care about most of our blawg. If you check it out, of course I'm gonna plug it. It's blawg dot interviewing dot io is about data in interviewing. So how deterministic our technical interviews like How? How consistently do people perform from interview to interview? What happens when you make women sound like men in interviews and vice versa? How does that affect outcomes? How much? How does it what matters in your coding style? Ah, when it comes to a technical interview, outcomes like, does it really matter if you write super modular code or not? And we've examined all of these questions and a ton more. We looked at what trades make people better interviewers,

and in these this is like my favorite thing. I guess if I could just sit in a cave all day and right, maybe I would. Fortunately, I can't do that, but to this day, because I really enjoy doing it. I still do it, though fortunately, other people on the team are now doing it as well. I do a lot of high level, like product vision stuff like, what should we be focusing on? Um, what should our voice be? What features are going to get us the most bang for our buck without a CZ Much work,

although again, you know, I'm trying to work myself out of jobs on all of these. And we have great people that work for me now that I think about the details of that and then probably do it much better than I do. Um And then, of course, fundraising is Ah, something you generally ah, have to do all the time is a founder. Whether you're actively raising or thinking about raising or thinking about like what metrics are gonna matter for your next raise, it's always in the back of your mind.

What's the future look like for interviewing I At what point are you done? And I hope one of you happy

I'll be happy when hiring is fair. That may never happen. I also may never be happy. I don't know. I really love what we do now, and I just wanna I want to do it as long as it feels like it's fruitful and it feels like we're removing the hiring world in the right direction. People have asked me about you know, whether I see an acquisition in our future at some point, and that my answer to that is always like if it's a partner that shares our vision for hiring, being fair of, and if they can amplify our efforts, and if we believe in the way that that partner has done things to date, then we'd be very excited. I would love to be in a position where, you know, we're figuring out what makes people good at stuff, and no matter who people are, we just can put them in front of the right opportunities than the night feel fulfilled. But short of having you know, a bunch of resource is in a partner that's going to do that. I think we're just gonna keep doing what we're doing and try to do more of it.

Sounds good to me. Um, I've kept you long enough of a lean. It's kind of a tradition that at the end of every episode, I ask you what your advice is for people listening in. We've got an audience full of people who are primarily but not exclusively software developers working full time jobs, and a lot of them are considering starting a company considering starting a startup of their own. What's your advice to somebody in that position? A. Li.

I think you just dip your toe in the water like figure out. You know, sometimes you think you're sitting on the best idea ever, right? And if only you had the fortitude to get out there and do it, then everything would be great. The fact is, whatever idea you have is probably gonna be very like Either it's wrong or even if it's right, it's gonna change a lot. So you don't have to be so attached to that particular idea and put all your eggs in that basket. But if you do think that you're onto something, find a way to try it out. You know, in our case it was putting up that marketing site and seeing if anybody signs up, that's not the solution to everything. Some businesses are much more complicated than just putting up a marketing site saying, Join our waiting list.

But many businesses aren't so think like what is what is that core idea that you have? And how can you validate it very, very fast. And then if it looks like there's something there, then then go all in. But I think just just seeing some encouragement from the world where somehow the world says back to you, I want your idea is gonna be very fulfilling and is gonna make it easier to take that plunge. But before you take the plunge, you could just dip your toe in the water,

dip your toe in the water. You heard it here first alienated here. My pleasure as always talking to you. So glad you came on the podcast. Thank you. You tell listeners where they could go to learn more about what you're up to with interviewing. I own what's going on in your personal life as well, If you sure that sort of thing online.

Well, uh, you can go to interviewing dot io. Um, I, uh you know, he asked me this stuff I did wrong. I think like there's sort of a blessing and a curse when your name is also a domain name. But that is the name of our company. That is where you go. Please check out our blawg. And if anybody has questions about starting a company or hiring or anything, you can email me at a lean a l i N e at interviewing Dr Theo.

All right, thanks so much. Really. Thanks, Courtland. You're the best. If you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you want a really easy way to support the podcast, why don't you head over to iTunes and leave us a quick rating or even a review? If you're looking for an easy way to get there, just goto nd hackers dot com slash review And that should open up iTunes on your computer. I read pretty much all the reviews you guys leave over there, and it really helps other people to discover the show. So your support is very much appreciated. In addition, if you are running your own Internet business or if that's something you hope to do someday should join me and a whole bunch of other founders on the Andy hackers dot com website. It's a great place to get feedback on pretty much any problem or a question that you might have while running your business. If you listen to the show,

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