This Entrepreneur Raised $60 Million To Remove The Resume From Developer Hiring
Vivek Ravisankar has raised tens of millions of dollars for a tech startup with an admirable goal: his venture, HackerRank, is making resumes obsolete while unlocking an enormous amount of tech talent, busting the notion of a technical skills gap and helping companies speed up innovation.
Vivek Ravisankar has raised tens of millions of dollars for a tech startup with an admirable goal: his venture, HackerRank, is making resumes obsolete while unlocking an enormous amount of tech talent, busting the notion of a technical skills gap and helping companies speed up innovation.
Appearing as a recent special guest on the DealMakers Podcast, Ravisankar shared with our audience how he made the leap from Amazon software engineer to one of the most successful young founders in the world, the challenges of growing a startup, the value of persistence and how hiring for skills instead of pedigree can help companies of all sizes speed up their contributions to society and designing our future.
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Here is the content that we will cover in this post. Let’s get started.
- 1. The Life-Changing Power of Y Combinator
- 2. HackerRank: Changing The Dynamics Of Recruiting & Getting Hired
- 3. The Challenges Facing Startup Founders
- 4. Time Zones and Fragmented Teams
- 5. Product Market Fit
- 6. Replication & Scale
- 7. Customer Service
- 8. Constant Reinvention
The Life-Changing Power of Y Combinator
Ravisankar is originally from Southeastern India, which he told me doesn’t feel that different from the Bay Area today.
While studying computer science at university, he wound up meeting one of the best hackers in school, Harishankaran Karunanidhi.
They quickly became close, working on many of the same side projects and getting to know each other well. In fact, it was one of those college projects that spawned the original idea for what would eventually become HackerRank.
Hari and Vivek believed in the magic of California’s Silicon Valley, viewing it as the birthplace of all great companies. They did what many aspiring founders do – apply to Y Combinator.
It seemed like everything was working out until Y Combinator rejected their application. Undeterred, Hari and Vivek applied again – and were once again denied. It wasn’t until their third attempt that they got some measure of success – they were invited to a 10-minute interview in Northern California, almost 10,000 miles away.
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