It's surprising how quickly after the public-profile-incident (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037 ) they fell off the radar.
We were simply never able to make the marketplace version of Triplebyte work after moving away from the transactional model we had in the early days. We tried some new tactics near the end that seemed to be bearing fruit, and I think in a world where tech hadn't crashed in mid to late 2022 we would have had a reasonable shot. But sometimes you find product-market fit right around the time the market goes sour. C'est la vie.
The reason we fell off the radar is that we'd been spending a lot of money on ads and stopped at around the time of that backlash (due to a change in business, not due to the backlash itself). Turns out you can boost your profile quite a bit when you're pouring a lot of your cash into ad campaigns! (Also, the physical ads wouldn't have made much sense since that pivot also coincided with all of us sitting in our tiny Bay Area apartments for the next year, lol.)
It’s a shame because I know there’s people like me stuck in a dead end job somewhere despite being a senior level engineer (I was working construction!) and these people will have nowhere like triplebyte to help show the industry their skills.
The issue of "talent but no experience" is a glaring inefficiency, but it's the kind of inefficiency that (so far, at least) it's been very hard to make a business out of. (And to be clear, this isn't just employers being evil, a lot of their behavior is rational and it's not like candidates never lie or cheat either.)
I have some thoughts on this that I'll probably be batting around with my new bosses a bit once we're settled in with Karat's teams. Since Karat focuses more on screening than on trying to be a marketplace, it's a more natural fit for their (our, I guess I should say now) existing business anyway. Hopefully we can make it work.
Is this referring to Magnet? I thought that was neat product idea.
Magnet grew out of four main observations:
* Our users got much better results when we helped them search rather than leaving it to them.
* What company users fundamentally wanted was to - as our head of finance put it during a discussion last January that ended up leading to the creation of Magnet - "swipe a credit card and get candidates".
* The most interest we'd seen on the candidate side was when we could tell them what companies really wanted, and bringing that in-house meant we could show that information very accurately and without incentive for companies to be dishonest, and
* We had a fundamental lack of activity problem. We talked often about how nice it would be if we had Linkedin's spam problem, because we had lots of ideas for how to solve that problem if we actually had it, which we didn't.
So we built Magnet, which ended up increasing activity on platform by a factor of like five and made companies way happier. We scaled it up over time, and right as we really turned it up in June, the market fell out from under us. And it's a testament to just how well it worked, at least on paper, that our number of connections between candidates and companies actually grew through much of fall 2022 despite the collapse in hiring.
That's not to say Magnet didn't have problems. It did. It had issues with fraudulent profiles (there turned out to be quite a few of these - a lot of job sites are dealing with this problem at the moment in the remote-work world), and we were definitely hitting a point of diminishing returns as we scaled it to some extent. But given how quickly it was built, and how bad the market was, the fact that it took off at all suggests that there was probably something there.
As a mere jobseeker in the pipeline, I wasn’t sure if the representative understood the reality of recruiting. To me, the ambition sounded ignorant; companies do not want to outsource and centralize their hiring in a third-party that is also hiring for their competitors.
The biggest single barrier we faced for early TB was pricing (we were charging 20% of first year's salary) and the demand that companies skip candidates straight to onsites (which we were promising them at the time).
Later on, our biggest barrier was differentiating ourselves from Linkedin and the like: companies saw Linkedin as the primary sourcing tool, and because they were hiring non-engineers there, it was one they usually wouldn't get rid of. So we were always the secondary tool, which meant (a) we tended to get the roles they couldn't hire for elsewhere, which selected for the hardest roles, (b) we had to justify ourselves in a way linkedin didn't, and (c) we were the first to be cut when the economics turned against us.
You were the only way to get well-assessed devs in the door despite non-technical hiring managers and an HR department asserting any assessment was discriminatory.
Government can't buy open source since lack of support fails due diligence, so wash OSS through vendors offering enterprise support. Similarly, talent can't be hired well directly, so wash great talent assessment for enterprises while they stay compliant, it should be a gold mine.
Most every enterprise in America needed (needs) that, and any of them running a Transformation had someone that would have been a sponsor.
(Btw, looking for folks interested in setting up a new kind of systematic person-role matching, and while still somewhat marketplace-like, profit could be on the order of $500K per match. Know anyone interested in trying that?)
TripleByte felt like a premium product that cared about both sides of the transaction but when I came back to it years later, maybe I had changed but the site just felt... bad, like that it was just a job mill. It didn't feel premium, it felt like a hokey recruiter site with a Silicon Valley skin.
It doesn't help that companies also treat(ed) it like a job mill. I would have companies reach out, tell me my resume looked great and fit all the criteria then would turn me down for lack of experience when I responded.
To be fair, none of my friends that I referred to TripleByte actually passed their (2017) screening process. So it was a site that was very useful to a very small subset of engineers. I'm sure there's a viable business in that premium market, but probably not a unicorn scalable tech company.
This is essentially correct.
Our original model worked, more or less, for a small pool of candidates. But acquiring those candidates was extremely expensive in ways that scaled poorly as Triplebyte grew. Basically, we were dependent on ads for growth (anyone who used Reddit at the time probably saw a lot of our ads, shout out to /r/againsttriplebytemike), and the marginal cost of ad conversions grows as you try to scale how many people you're bringing in.
Slightly less cynically: if your business can't exist without VC funding, but can't justify the expectations of that funding, you never really had a business to begin with. You borrowed one temporarily. This is normal for startups, and VCs know that they won't always (or even usually) succeed, but you can't sit on your break-even-ish business when that's not what VCs were funding you to do.
For what it's worth, early TB's efforts (and for that matter, late TB's efforts, both before my tenure and during it) were sincere, it's just that that sincerity is predicated on actually being able to make a working business out of it.
Harj recently described Triplebyte's user acquisition trajectory publicly in a video from Y Combinator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s from timestamps 7:53 to 9:33. But yes, ads worked for a while, until they didn't.
In the past 10 year being unethical wasn't considered immoral by a lot of such startups. I remember the intern incident at Repl.it or how AirBnB destroyed the rental market in certain geographies or the whole Uber incidents.