Andrew: Hey there freedom fighters my name is Andrew Warner. I am the founder of Mixergy.com and the man who speaks way too quickly and Mixergy of course is the home of the ambitious upstart. Today I have got a guest, who is a long term Mixergy fan whose business was down to its last fifteen bucks and then he did something that turned it all around. Got backing from a competitor.
Vivek Ravisankar is the founder of HackerRank, a platform that helps hackers hone their skills and helps companies hire great programmers. And he is here to talk about how he built his company and talk about a couple of really big setbacks that he had to overcome. This whole thing is sponsored by well, this page that I created. It’s called AndrewsWelcomeGate.com. if you are looking to have a page on your site that allows you to grow your mailing list, I have one page that will do it for you. And I want you to go and grab it from AndrewsWelcomegate.com. AndrewsWelcomeGate.com is the sponsor. Vivek, welcome.
Vivek: Thanks Andrew for having me. Yeah, been like following your interviews in Mixergy for almost two years. So.
Andrew: You know, it’s an honor to have you on here. I have read about you because you are a part of Y Combinator for a while. I had no idea the difficulties that you went through until I got deep in to the research for this interview. But, before I even get in to the difficulties around this company I went to get to know. You are the guy who actually said you used to be an Internet Troll. And you used to playing pranks on people. You got to talk about that before we get to the business. What was one of the pranks you played that involved a restaurant.
Vivek: so, well I mean like I grew up in India. So my first sort of experience or connection with Internet itself was probably my Eleventh Grade. At that time Yahoo Messenger was super famous super popular, especially the group chat thing in yahoo where you can like go in and log in and join any room and type or ask whatever you would like to. So especially a group of friends like it was a first exposure to internet the fact that you could be anonymous and you can do whatever you like to and Internet was great.
So the prank was basically calling a person calling his IP to a restaurant and exactly at 7:30 p.m. saying that there is a huge surprise and for this person that he has to make it work. And I am not sure whether he turned up or not because we didn’t go to the restaurant. But I am pretty sure he would have been there at 7:30 p.m. Because he was all pumped up. He asked all the details about the restaurant and where should I come and what should I be dressed in and so on. That was a real fun thing.
Andrew: And you were just going to the Yahoo messenger connect with someone, I guess you were pretending to be a girl.
Vivek: Yeah.
Andrew: and leading them on and then saying come meet me at this restaurant it has to be 7:30 p.m. and the person would go presumably. I shouldn’t laugh because I believe I was at Dorothian school who fell for this stuff when I look back now.
Vivek: what we actually did was after he said he is going to come, we actually told them that hey we are from the cyber police. So we are just testing how many people you know fall for this and attack people and so they are actually caught. And so he then apologized saying very sorry, I never knew this.
Andrew: Caught for doing what, you pretend to be an underage girl.
Vivek: No. But I think it’s more a sort of slightly more conservative in India. You may be caught for actually talking to a girl and calling the person to a dinner restaurant like a normal person. And so he said he really apologized for doing all of that. And then we actually that they actually said like hey I was like trying to fool you. I am not the cyber police. I am actually the girl who you are talking to
Andrew: [??] people’s heads. I might have been, I might have fallen for one of these. I might have been on the other side of whatever your Emails back then.
Vivek: I definitely grew up a lot since then this was way, way in high school. Those sort of like first set of experience first on the Internet, Yahoo messenger, Rediff Emails, Rediff.com, reading about that. I am not sure how popular it is in America. But those were the first exposure to the Internet
Andrew: You know what. Just one quick story and then I got to get in to this business that landed you back to your parent’s house. I remember talking to this girl when I was in high school online in IRC and we were talking back and forth. And it was so great that I remember copying the whole exchange and posting it to my diary. It wasn’t until like I don’t remember when afterwards that someone said its all guys pretending to be girls in the IRC. Damn it. I fell for that.
Vivek: I definitely don’t think I was on the other side because the guy who was talking to was in India at that time so I am pretty sure it’s some other person.
Andrew: This idea that ended you up in your parent’s house where people felt sorry for you that eventually began this business HackerRank. What did it start of as?
Vivek: So while this is in High school whatever the Yahoo messenger story and then like I actually went ahead and studied computer science. And that’s where I met my co-founder Hari. So we used to work together on a lot of projects like we used to conduct Linux classes in college. In fact more than half of our college fee for the entire four years both me and Hari just paid off by the money we earned FROM conducting Linux classes. That was a big ROI.
And we used to do a lot of interviews in terms of like especially like, the way placement, the campus placement works in India is slightly different from the way it works here. So companies actually visit the campuses in order. So they don’t come all at once. So the first day, there is a particular company. You know if you get a job offer from a particular company you can’t you are not allowed to appear for placement interviews for the rest of the companies.
Andrew: Really.
Vivek: So if you got, let’s say Google comes on Day 1 and you got a job offer from Google and day number two Amazon comes on board like you know you are not allowed to appear for Amazon’s process. So Google was my dream job. I did not get. Well that’s not entirely true. They have not yet told my results yet. So.
Andrew: So you are saying they still didn’t respond to your application. So there is still a chance.
Vivek: Exactly. I think [??] interview style I think. Closer to five years. And then so we had I had a series of companies that we wanted to get in to and I could not. And then I worked my way through to get in to Amazon. But basically what I figured out was like the process of what you have to prepare for each company is very different. And you actually, the students didn’t have absolutely idea of what you go to prepare. And that’s what led to the start of the first version of [??] started with Hari, the co-founder, where the idea was how can students prepare for their mock-interviews. So you could get, if you had an interview call with a particular company, you could come on to our site and attend a mock interview with the X, you know the person working with a particular company to get an understanding of how the real interview works.
Andrew: I see, because Google is famous for having trick question type or challenging questions in their interview. Amazon has a different approach to their interview. Every company has a different approach. You want to practice with someone who has gone through that process and who obviously did well because they have the job. And so that’s what, InterviewStreet, the original business idea was. Were these people going to work at the companies and do this for free or were you are going to hear them. How would you get them?
Vivek: So the plan was to have people who are working in those companies to take an hour or two off on a week to conduct these mock interviews and what they do get is they get paid for every interview they conduct. So the business model is we charge money from the students and we pay the interviewers and the difference goes to our pocket. So as you can guess, it’s a terrible business model, looking back
Andrew: What made it a terrible business model in retrospect?
Vivek: First of all, there was no easy way to collect money from students. Like there was no, I still think the whole concept of credit cards and payment gateways and other things for students in India were not as smooth. So that’s number one. The second thing you are actually charging somebody who is not earning money, that’s the students and if you have to pay the persons working at Google or Amazon or any company the per hour rate for them to be compelling enough is pretty enough. So you are going to charge much more to the students and your margin is super low. And the real incentive for the interview on the other side…you’ll figure out it’s not so much about the money because we’re already tired of conducting interviews where people did not pass through, so this was more of…yeah, this was like an additional thing with very little incentive for them.
Andrew: Okay. Were you at the time already working at the Amazon job that you got?
Vivek: No, we…so Hari [SP] went to IBM, both of us quit, I quit from Amazon, he quit from IBM, and we started to do this.
Andrew: So this wasn’t even on the side, you took your savings from Amazon and you said “I’m going to plow it into this business,” and… Obviously, as you’re saying, the model didn’t work out. How low did you get? Was it…how many dollars in the bank? 15 bucks, right?
Vivek: Yeah, something like that.
Andrew: Where did the money go?
Vivek: Well, I mean like…so for about 2 years, we conducted probably 20 to 25 interviews. The Oswell [SP] business model that I still have, the Excel, projected 25,000 interviews or something like that [laughs].
Andrew: So you wasted a couple dozen interviews after two years?
Vivek: We did have a lot of [??], like, we used to do tests [??] corporation tests on campuses since we had a network of campus ambassadors we used to evangelize this mock interview product, we used that network to do [??] but, overall yes, if you’re going to consider the number of mock interviews that we did, maybe it’s about in the [??] of 25 to 30. But again like, once we realized in 6 to 8 months that it was not taking off, we then used our campus ambassador network to help students prepare for their Master’s program.
So, essentially, if you were applying for your Master’s at Stanford or Berkeley or any school here, we’d connect you with someone who was already studying there, who’d review your statement of purpose and your resume [SP] and tell you what are some of the things you’d have to change in your resume [SP] or statement of purpose to make it work and so on. So we did a lot of [??] like this over a couple of years, you know, after which we were down to, I don’t know…maybe 30 or 40 dollars.
Andrew: Let me pause there for a moment. How did you get….ambassadors back then? I don’t have ambassadors. Most companies don’t have college ambassadors. What did you do to get these ambassadors?
Vivek: Well, I really went to the college and asked whoever was there in CS classes, whoever was there sitting around, reading books in the library, you can definitely say they were somewhat of a nerd [laughs]. And “it’s a great thing to add on your resume that you actually helped your peers get great jobs.”
Andrew: I see, so you walked around and you specifically and personally recruited each one of these people who was bookish and reading and you said, “This will be good on your resume, help me, be an ambassador by bringing people into this service.”
Vivek: Yeah, absolutely. And, “it’s good for you.” We actually didn’t even have any monetary aspect, we didn’t even have t-shirts printed. So, I think we gave a laptop sticker or something [laughs] for being a campus ambassador and like boot strap, that’s all we can do. And…of course it was more about like, hey, if we could actually make everybody…if you were to imagine every one of your peers getting a better job, because…just by helping them prepare, that’s a great thing to do.
Andrew: I see, so you’re getting them on board for the mission. I see a…cached version of the site from back in the day, of interviewstreet.com, and it says, “You can talk in our state-of-the-art forum and discuss questions.” What was that?
Vivek: [laughs] Does it really say “state-of-the-art forum?”
Andrew: It says, “Talk,” under the category, “Talk: State-of-the-art-forum to discuss questions;” next check mark or bullet point, “Ask, post, or discuss questions;” next bullet point, “Share your interview experiences;” next bullet point, “Open ID log in supported.”
Vivek: Yeah. I can totally see that I wrote that. So, “State-of-the-art forum…” Well, we…there was no clear place for you to actually discuss your interview questions, and…So we went ahead and took an Open Source version of [??] and completely customized it to have…you can tag it by companies, you can tag it by the positions, the roles they are looking for, colleges and stuff. “State-of-the-art” might be pretty much… [laughs] Well, what we essentially did was take an Open Source version of [??] that somebody had implemented it. So, that’s the top???
Andrew: Okay. I see what you’re going for here. You’re just getting going with this idea and I see it would cost 350 rupees plus tax.
Vivek: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. I see the idea. I see how it’s not working and I understand you adjusted it and made it into a test prep site, not just an interview prep site. You mentioned that you were so low on funds you were living at your parent’s house. I’m curious, when people would see you at your parent’s house, what did they think of this idea that you had?
Vivek: I don’t think anybody got the idea. They did seem sorry for me. I think 2008 was a big recession year when some of my friends actually were working in investment banks, especially Lehman Brothers. A few of my friends that were working there were let go and they had to look for another job. So they thought I was actually one of them, who were competing to get a job, or I was actually fired from Amazon. So they had heart-felt sympathies for me sitting at home all day long.
Andrew: You know what? I lived with my parents for longer than most because I believed it was worth investing in myself. Even having people think that I was a big loser, just so I could build whatever business I had in my mind. I felt good about that. I mean, I was a little embarrassed, but mostly I felt good. How did you feel about it?
Vivek: It definitely sucks that you have to. The situation is like this; 18-hour work days, 7 days a week. No revenue. Living off your parent’s money. And you wake up and you see 15 people visiting the site. And you do this for 400 and 500 days, consistently. So, it definitely sucked. But, my parents had a lot of belief in me. They said, look, if you really want to do this you should just continue pursuing and doing this. So, that was great moral support. And, of course, Harley is awesome to work with.
Andrew: Your parents were better than mine. Mine said, why don’t you just get a job a little bit.
Vivek: They actually did not say that. I think that would have been pretty hard because that is probably one of the important people you are relying on when things are not going well. So, they never said that, which is very good. I don’t have the internally talk like, oh my god, like this guy had. I am not sure about here in America. In India, Amazon and Google have a chauffeur driven car. So you get a car right in front of your house to pick you up from your house to Amazon.
Andrew: Oh, wow. I had no idea.
Vivek: It was one of the most amazing jobs you can ever get. You get a car, picked up from your house to the office. You can take a car whenever you want from the office back to your home. You can just call up the Admin desk and say, hey, I need a car in 15 minutes. They say, okay, go for it. And you got the laptop and they paid you really well.
Andrew: So, that’s what you gave up to start this business that ended up with very little money coming in. Fifteen hits a day, living at your parent’s house. I get it. I get the pain of it. And I get the sacrifice that you were willing to make. You were watching Mixergy interviews. You were on Hacker News. You were seeing people going to Y Combinator. You decide to apply. The first time you apply, what happens?
Vivek: The first time we got turned down. I think it was for this mock interviews idea. We did not get through. We got a response saying, hey, I’m sorry, we looked at the application and we’re not going to accept it. We then applied a second time with the Masters students idea. We got turned down even then. The third time was when we actually started.
The way that idea worked was after 400 or 500 days, almost 2 years, we decided it’s better to go on the other side. Which is to help to better the company’s process of making their hiring process effective. Rather than the other side; the students preparing for interviews business model. That’s when we actually had a few BETA customers in India. Amazon India was actually one of our early, big customers. And we thought we would apply to YC for the third time. This time we got a call. That was the greatest email, and, you know, like, hey, welcome, and we didn’t have Visa.
We had to apply for Visa, and I landed in the morning, and I had my [??] in the evening, at 4:00. So, yeah, fortunately we got in. So, you take a flight, 20 hour flight, attend an interview for 10 minutes, and [??]. We were feeling terrible, but fortunately we got in. So, that was a great moment.
Andrew: What do you think they liked about your application enough to bring you in?
Vivek: That’s a good question. I can probably ask PG [SP] now, as to what he thought about it, but I think our application got crisper as we did, after every cycle, we actually saw the really clear pain point, like what is the problem that we’re trying to solve. [SS]
Andrew: What is your problem? You finally, you went from just feeling your own problem, to really getting clear about the problem that the people who have money have. What was that problem? How would you articulate it today, as you understood it back then?
Vivek: So, the problem that we actually, or the problem some of the [??] was, if you conduct about 10, 12 interviews, only two or three actually get through to the next round, and maybe one of them get hired. So, there’s a huge majority of time that gets wasted in this whole process, which you can make official by having an automated way of doing this. So, if you are able to save the recruiting time, an engineer’s time, and then there’s a little of [??] that I did estimate. If you’re going to hire a hundred people in a year, this is the amount of time that you save, and then multiply that by the number of companies in the world, this is so much of time that we can save by this product, it is a really valuable proposition.
Andrew: And, it was going to be the first, state of the interview was going to be done on Interview Street, using webcams.
Vivek: No, it was like, you can send a coding challenge, and he had an automated way of evaluating the code [??].
Andrew: Oh, I see.
Vivek: Yeah.
Andrew: So, by the time you got to Y Combinator, you already had this coding challenge, which is what the basis of the current company is . . .
Vivek: Yes.
Andrew: . . . HackerRank.
Vivek: Yes.
Andrew: I see . . .
Vivek: Yes.
Andrew: . . . and the way you got to it was, the way you tested, I think, it is worth getting into. The first company you went to, that paid, what was that conversation like?
Vivek: The first company was a company called BankBazaar.
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Vivek: I’m not sure if you’ve interviewed them.
Andrew: I didn’t.
Vivek: Okay. So, they are in, they were in the finance space, and one of our friends was actually working in that start up, BankBazaar, and they also had a [inaudible 00:02:52]. So, the first version . . . So, BankBazaar was the first customer who gave us the first check, I think it was for $2,000 Rupees . . .
Andrew: Okay.
Vivek: . . . which is $40.00. And, the first version was very, very . . . The first version didn’t even reports in it.
Andrew: Did you even have it? Did you have a first version when you talked to them?
Vivek: Yeah. I tend (?) to call it a first version, but yes, we did have something that we could . . . [??]
Andrew: Here’s what I understand. Tell me if I have this right. You went to BankBazaar, and you said, “We have this idea. We understand your problem”, you explained it to them. You said, “It’s going to be a custom code challenge. We will challenge people who are applying to work for you, and only the people who get through this challenge successfully, will make it to your interview process. Will you pay us for that?” And they said, “Yes”, and that’s when you knew you had something.
Vivek: Yeah, yeah. [??]
Andrew: That’s it.
Vivek: Yeah, well, BankBazaar was actually going to a lot of campus’ university recruiter, and . . .
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Vivek: . . . so, instead of actually giving a pen and paper test, you know, the better version was actually to try and say, “Hey, here’s a link to the coding challenge. You have an hour to go” and your results were instant. So, immediately after the hour, you go, “Oh”, and you can actually see the results, and [??] the same day, as opposed to what happened in the previous years, where you had to use pen and paper, and you’re on tape. You’re connected, and so on, and there was so much a fine line. So, that got compressed. So, not only were they able to do the interviews the same day, but they able to visit more number of universities, they were able to accurately identify who were the programmers, who really good for their company. So, it saved a lot of their engineering time.
Andrew: This is a key moment. That’s why I’m spending so much time on it. I’m wondering, how exactly did you understand that this would be something that would appeal to them enough that they would pay you for it?
Vivek: Because, I’d taken a few interviews at Amazon myself, and I was a developer, and I used to wonder why couldn’t we have a… I used to wonder about two things. One is like why aren’t we going to, there are thousands of Engineering, there are a lot of engineering colleges in India. So why aren’t we, why are we restricting to only hundred or fifty engineering colleges? And I understand that like you know it’s a human bandwidth and notation. But we are completely missing really good programmers who are existing in so many other colleges and don’t even know. That was problem number one. Problem number two is we are so focused resumes, keyword search and others, which might not be accurate reflection of the good or bad the programmer is. It’s probably an inverse correlation a bad resume can be really a great programmer. And I used to wonder like why couldn’t there be a better screening process for this. So
Andrew: I get that. But when you talked about the first version of your software, you also understood your own pain. Because you went through the process of trying to interview for Amazon and Google and lots of other companies and realizing that everyone one of them was different and you needed a way to practice. And that was also a clear understanding based on your pain about what software would be nice to have. What’s different about this one that made this approach work while last one didn’t?
Vivek: I Think one of them is, it’s not like human to human , where you are like using probably inherently hot [??]. There was scheduling conflict like you got to have a ton of interviewers on your interviewer panel to actually make the mock interview work. And the incentive for interviewers wasn’t a lot. What are they gaining? Okay I am not saying how somebody can prepare if it is a philanthropic way of doing it. I don’t know if there are a lot of people who are willing to do on a consistent basis.
But here there was a very, very clear pain point. And you are actually going and selling software demonstrating PR ROI. But this is the amount you are actually going to save by using this product. And this is what it costs. So when were able to demonstrate that PR ROI, which weren’t able to do in the previous model. This was actually better and took off
Andrew: That makes a lot of sense. You are able to clearly demonstrate a return on investment so of course that are willing to try you out and make the investment in your software. The other thing is you say that the first version was very bad. I see here in my notes, you call it bad you say it was very manual and so on and we can get in to that. But, seems like that’s a positive thing that you didn’t fully build it out until you actually got bank bizarre to say yes we want this. And then you have a check in hand, and, madam, you know here you remember the actual check that you got, right?
Vivek: Yeah, it was great. It was like somebody was willing to pay for it. Okay if somebody is willing to pay for it. That was an amazing day. Like that some company is actually willing to pay for the software that we book.
Andrew: Okay, I do love hearing what was missing what was bad about the first software? Don’t want all that looking. I see here in my notes that you look that kind of cringe but my guess is you are also a little proud? What was it like that made you say, the first version was very bad?
Vivek: Okay, let’s s see, let’s say if they were about 20 people who attempted the challenge. And you wanted to know how these 20 people scored. You could not log in to an interface and see these reports. You have to either call me or Hari or email saying, here are the twenty mail ids, and can you tell me all the reports are processed. And can you send me the scores. And every time somebody took a challenge you got an email from me or Hari and then we actually looked in to it and yes this is processed.
This is the score, this is the quote and we actually put together all of that in a Zip file and send it to them. So it is really cumbersome. And I still really remember the comment from one of the lead engineers at Ahmadabad. Hey Guys, can you design a simple HTML UI page for viewing the reports. So that was the first version. It’s amazing that they were ready to pay for that.
Andrew: Amazon as a customer you mentioned earlier doesn’t overlook it. How did you get Amazon as a customer?
Vivek: They were a lot of. Again Amazon was also using pen and paper. When I got recruited to Amazon from my campus, it was a pen and paper test. So what we actually went ahead and got a meeting with one of the University recruiting lead, whose name is actually their on our site. There is a page called Hackerline.com/thanks. So it’s actually the people who you know who actually supported us when we were really low and the University lead approved Amazon [??], because we were two guys, right? Like two guys, and very early on software, and you’re actually going use it for all of your campus recruiting for the entire season. Now, that’s some trust, and then, [inaudible] was great for her. Her name is Portia, and she still works at Amazon, and she was our first customer to help us get to the front (?) of university recruiting, which then got us to momentum, to take it forward.
Andrew: I see Harry on the site. Just cold calling it, cold email.
Vivek: No, we actually got one introduction from one of my friends, who used to work in Amazon [??].
Andrew: Okay.
Vivek: Yeah.
Andrew: But . . . [??]
Vivek: You see a lot of . . . Well, cold calling, we didn’t do a lot of cold calling, but what we use to do is put up a resume with our names changes, and email IDs changed, really impressive profile, with our phone numbers on all of these job sites . . . [laughs]
Andrew: Go on.
Vivek: . . . so we’d actually get calls from recruiters, saying “Hey, you know, I have a Developer opening, and your profile looks great.” So, we’ll say, “That’s awesome, but I just want to, like, confess, that, you know, it’s not me, but I can help you hire more crew members, using our product. Would you like me to come and [??]? And, [laughs] we did get a few customers like that. It was almost, like the opposite of cold calling. We use to get, like, inbound calls, so, for . . . [??]
Andrew: That’s a good idea. So, that’s how you did it. You get accepted to Y Combinator, you barely have money. . .
Vivek: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: . . . how do you get out to California, to go for this interview with Y Combinator, the one that ended up turning your life around?
Vivek: No, we had money to buy our flight tickets.
Andrew: Oh, you did, at that point? Okay. [??]
Vivek: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for the flight tickets, but definitely, I don’t think we could have, sort of, like, lived through the TFO (?) months, if we did not get the funding from YC, and so . . . Yeah, so we got ‘me there, and we actually got funded. It was great, and . . . So, that’s how it started.
Andrew: Good. Before we started, you told me that Y Combinator will reimburse the money, that [??] it costs you $2,000 to get from India, to the U.S., too . . . [??]
Vivek: Yeah.
Andrew: . . . make it to this meeting. Y Combinator reimburses, I think, it was $700 of flight fee. That means you have to pay $1300, right?
Vivek: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: Is it possible that there’s someone who’s listening to us right now, who wouldn’t have the money to go to a Y Combinator meeting like that?
Vivek: Well, as I said, like, I don’t want to, sort of over dramatize the situation, that I can always ask my parents money, saying, like, “Hey, I need to borrow . . .” [??]
Andrew: I get that. I’ll tell you why I’m saying it.
Vivek: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: I’m wondering if someone out there, who’s listening to us, could use it, and if they could, would it help, or am I just being clueless here, when I say I would pay $2,000 for somebody who’s trying to get into get into Y Combinator, and the $2,000 is keeping them from going into an appointment that they have? Would that be helpful, or is that going to be unnecessary at this point, because they’ve overcome it?
Vivek: No, I don’t think so. I think that’s probably more of an excuse, an entrepreneur would give, to himself or herself, saying, “Hey, I don’t have $2,000 in the bank account, so I can’t go to . . .” [??]
Andrew: You’re saying, they could find it. They get in, they . . .
Vivek: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: . . . could get it. I see.
Vivek: Oh, Absolutely.
Andrew: That’s poor use of my money and my good intentions. I should save it . . . [??]
Vivek: Yeah.
Andrew: . . . for something else.
Vivek: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, exactly, like yes, we did have . . . We were almost, like, bankrupt, but, you know, if I really wanted to have $2,000, like, my mom and dad would have definitely give me . . . [laughs] [??]
Andrew: Okay.
Vivek: I don’t want to, like, over dramatize. You know, there’s a great film actor in India, called Rhanikaneh.
Andrew: Hmm.
Vivek: . . . if you’ve heard of him. So, all of his movies have this rags to riches, so I don’t want the story to be a wrap. Like, I did have money, but it’s, of course, like, I had to borrow it from my parents, which obviously didn’t look good.
Andrew: What’s the name of his guy? I think I might be into him. Rhanikaneh?
Vivek: Yeah, R-H-A-N-I-K-A-N-E-H, and if you get a chance to interview him, I can guarantee you, Andrew, if you interview him, your popularity in India will go, like . . . [??]
Andrew: I will.
Vivek: . . .absolutely [??] crazy, and you’ll become celebrated tomorrow. [laughs] I can guarantee. In India, you can’t land in the airport, because if you land in the airport, like, people are going to surround yourself, surround you, saying, “Oh my God, he actually interviewed this guy.”
Andrew: I see him. He has just one name. Rahanikaneh?
Vivek: Yeah.
Andrew: He is . . . Wow, all right. I got him up here. If someone out there can help me land him as a guest, please do, and if someone out there can help me watch some of his movies to prepare, or frankly, just to enjoy him, because it sounds like my kind of thing, with English sub titles. Please let me know. All right, you get in. There’s still the . . . So I’ve tried helping entrepreneurs from India get to the U.S., or from outside the U.S get in. Because I feel like we should be encouraging more entrepreneurs to come in here build great companies. It’s always a problem. You get in with a visa. When you are sitting in front of Y Combinator what did they say about the fact that you were not in U.S.
Vivek: I remember one question. Actually unfortunately Hari could not get his Visa. He cannot, the immigration form actually denied Hari’s visa. So he could not come to the interview. So I remember one of the questions from PG like you know so why is Hari not here. Is he going to be here when the program starts? So I told him, if he doesn’t get his visa, he will swim across the ocean and come. They all laughed. But probably that’s the only alternative right now. You don’t get your visa. But absolutely we should encourage or rather I shouldn’t say we like American government should encourage a lot of entrepreneurs. Because ultimately it’s only going to create more jobs. So
Andrew: I heard that you were the first all Indian team all Indian company that Y Combinator invested. Were you planning on going back to India, afterwards?
Vivek: No my dream was to always start a company in Silicon Valley. I always, It was amazing like looking back you know like. Me and Hari used to work in this lab in India called the Sun lab. So and they used to be very, very, they used to be only a handful of people five or six people because nobody knew how to operate Solaris Operating System. So there was one night when we were looking at the founders of Google. So they were at Stanford, a Yahoo Stanford and then we were wondering okay who is Sun Microsystems. And then turns out it’s actually an Indian. And so by the name of Vinod Khosla. I have been following him. One of the things that I wanted was to get a click with him. I have still not gotten that. Because he actually invested in the company. I think I am Okay with the tradeoff.
Andrew: Vinod Khosla invested and you never got to take a photo. I thought you got to meet him. Didn’t you?
Vivek: Yeah. I got to meet him. But still don’t have like a photo
Andrew: Oh I see. You were too busy talking with him about the business. And the reason you got to meet him is because you went through Y Combinator. He came in and saw you through them. Before I get to that, how did being in Y Combinator change you besides the fact that it got you in to Mountain View, California.
Vivek: I think it definitely opened up doors in terms of the advice in terms of the focus I could get. The office hours were amazing. So most of office hours were either with PG or Sam, mostly with Sam, actually. And super focused and very clear advice. And interesting thing is like my first of customers or Beta customer were Y Combinator companies. So you know I still have that in my iPhone note like I sent a list this long, I am not sure to PG or Sam. Hey, can you [??] me to all these companies. Drop box or being [??] or all of the Y copies were going like crazy. The fact that I could get my initial set of customers from the Y Combinator network was a big deal and which I used the feedback. I used the feedback from them to start to get to other customers. Emmett from Twitch.TV was a used to give me tons of advice tons of feedback. Twich was again like one of our earlier customers.
Andrew: Paul Graham did office hours with you. I don’t know he still does office hours. Sam Altman the guy who is running it gave you feedback. They introduced you to your first customer. I see how that helps. Did the product change because of all these feedback because of the office hours and feedback from customers.
Vivek: Not the core value of it. But there were a lot of things that we could or we were. But we did a lot better in terms of how people view this and how it should be presented and what is the flow and what actually people want. So not the core fundamentals of the things, but the way we presented it to the user did change quite a bit.
Andrew: I say this a lot. I am going to say this again. I must say it’s one of the best interviews on Mixergy. Everyone is going to go and listen to Paul Graham especially before they go and apply to Y Combinator. Terrific it’s a great interview you should. Emmett Shear is, one of the best, if I die and you want to go back and see what did this guy Andrew does? Go and watch the interview with Emmett Shear. The way that he thought. Even before he had that billion dollar rights that gives a lot of credibility anything he says. You can see his thought process. I only met him because other Y Combinator entrepreneurs said that this is the guy who thinks, I forget how they said it, but the way you thought is what they wanted introduce me to and I understood it. The way you talk to customers, the way he understood what they were looking for, and built a product is terrific.
[crosstalk]
Vivek: That’s great. I actually didn’t know that because like we did get a ton of feedback from him.
Andrew: And then you walked out of Y Combinator calling yourself Interview Street, didn’t you? I remember that in the articles and then later on you changed to HackerRank.
Vivek: Yes.
Andrew: What made you change the name, even though the products essentially had already been changed?
Vivek: So, [NYC] when we did mostly [NYC], Y Combinator was a period for companies to screen programmers to identify who’s good. But what we also realized as we were starting to like talk to a lot of customer’s companies is there are two password coding problems.
So one, there is hardware attract a lot of programmers and second problem is from the first touch point of the programmer to making the hire or no hire, how do I make and act a right decision fast? Like, they’re two things.
Like, you’ve got to make sure that you hire the right programmers in the shortest time possible. So which means like there were essentially two problems that we want to like that we’re going recruiting. And we wanted to build out platform which could build out a community of programmers who just come and solve [??] challenges for fun and give them an opportunity to solve the [??] that paid. “Yeah, I am interested in this opportunity for a company.”
So from a programmer’s perspective, it’s a very clean way of you know connecting with a company or any other opportunity. From a company’s perspective, it is essentially like [broadband], the problems that you are solving is moved to so many programmers and you get good people applying to your companies.
And so HackerRank, is one of the only platform, that’s what we are like building. The only platform that you use for tracking or recruiting.
Like how you use Salesforce for sales or for CRM but that’s if you get any sales organization the first thing that they try to install or get is Salesforce and so if you were to do anything in technical recruiting, HackerRank would be the product. That’s the way that we are moving forward with.
Andrew: All right. You shifted over. Before you shifted, going back to the Node Khosla, the Node Khosla Ventures invest in you. Right?
Vivek: Yes.
Andrew: Why do you think they invested?
Vivek: I think the opportunity is that where we is that first is definitely big and we like a big company is dependent more on technology. It’s more just you know like you know Google or Amazon or Facebook or Microsoft, that you know retail stores [??] kind of steam.
So every company is getting dependent more and more on technology but we’ve not solved the fundamental problem of tech recruiting or technical hiring. We [work] and this a new way of approaching it. And they really like the pitch and the opportunity and or possibly me. And they invested. Yeah.
[laughs]
Andrew: Maybe even Hari a little.
Vivek: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: If I’m looking at AngelList properly and understanding what’s going on there. In addition to Khosla Ventures, a general partner in Khosla Ventures invested too? Benjamin Ling? Does he invest separately?
Vivek: No, no. He’s actually a part of Khosla Ventures.
Andrew: Okay. I see.
Vivek: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: Let me see. The total amount that you raised was three million for Series A, 9.2 for Series B.
Vivek: Yeah.
Andrew: It’s huge.
Vivek: Yeah.
Andrew: Did you take any money off the table at that point?
Vivek: What…
Andrew: Meaning, did any of the money go to you and Hari, your co-founder?
Vivek: No.
Andrew: No, it all went right into the business.
Vivek: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Andrew: Okay, all right. So you’re doing really well and still one of the challenges you’re having is hiring and the culture, right? That you have when you hire and grow so quickly.
Vivek: Well, in terms of like some of the, one might ask some of the challenges as we can really grow. So one of the things is, I mean like we have an office here in Mountain View and we have an office here in India, in Bangalore.
So we are growing at both places. So there are things we got to like communicate. We were also like everybody is in sync. And make sure that as we continue to hire, you know there’s always this battle that you have to fight which is desperation versus quality. You are desperate to hire people, but at the same time you can’t compromise on quality. So those are like some of the things that we are getting better and as we continue to progress.
Andrew: When you made a mistake can you give me an example? Tell me about one of the mistakes you made without mentioning a name obviously.
Vivek: One of the mistakes that I made,… I attached a lot of value to the companies this person came from, and I was actually not fully convinced during the interview, but I just tried to convince myself that I am actually doing it the wrong way because he clearly performed well in a lot of these companies and maybe I am wrong, and it turns out that it actually did not work out exactly for the reasons that I doubted during my interview process.
Andrew: What were the reasons?
Vivek: That you had a lot of good resources in place to actually perform really well because it was a large company, it was a big company and so on. And the answers to some of my questions when you don’t have a lot of resources like how are you going to perform in things that would not look super convincing, and it turned out exactly the way it was.
Andrew: So when you run a company that helps other companies hire and you have challenges hiring what do you do with that [??]?
Vivek: I don’t think there is like a 100% solution that we can actually go ahead and do it. We have … I mean we use [??] We for engineer hiring and not so much for like the other roles like sales and marketing and so on. I don’t think there is a 100% solution to it. A lot of the mistakes that we have made, or I have made, has mostly got to do with the culture fit perspective as much as it’s about skills work. I mean you can be a really, really smart engineer, but if you actually don’t love what we are doing or the mission, then it’s not going to be a great fit. So we have actually not yet cracked how do you identify if the person is actually a great culture fit or not to a 100%. There are certain things that we can do in the platform itself that we continue to do, but not to an extent of like ok we have done it 100%.
Andrew: And you grew really fast. I am looking again at the notes from … Actually this is from your pre-interview. You were 30 people and then you went to 78 within four months.
Vivek: Yeah, yeah, it was very, very steep growth and we continue to grow. We actually moved offices within like three months. So yes, it is continuing to grow, and I see a huge, huge opportunity in front of us and we got to go and make that happen.
Andrew: So what do you do to keep the culture when more than half of your company is brand new and they are all getting started together?
Vivek: Sure. So one of the things that I have started to do, at least in terms of getting the new hires trained is spend a good amount of time in their first week, whether that’s actually going to lunch or actually sitting and talking to them as to what is it that we really care about, what are some of the things that the company works towards and so on. And the other thing of course is like having an open office hours where anybody can just like drop in at my desk and talk about anything, whether it’s like a new idea that you want to do it, or new idea for recruiting strategy or things. So the best way that I can think about making sure that it’s uniform is actually telling them a lot and communicating as to what is the most important thing because as a founder, you have access to so many different data sources and that’s why you are able to take a decision because you have access to so many different data sources.
And so if you want everybody in the company to take the same kind of decisions, then A, you have to give them the same access to all the data sources that you have, or you have got to communicate to them like why are we doing this in a particular way, and not just tell them that this is the way that we are going to go.
Andrew: How do you do that? One of the things that [??] really stands for is in the past interview Sam Carpenter [SP] helped me realize that I need to get clear about this and have a document so that everyone can see it. One of the things we stand for is education. We are not about software; we are about education, ideas that will outlive us. I can walk around and say “Hey Emory, [SP] you know what we are about? We are about education, not about software. We don’t create software; we create ideas that will last forever.” All right, I got to go back to my work. If I were to do that you’d think I was a mental case. How do you get your values into the minds, into the hearts of the people that you hire? Without looking like a weirdo?
Vivek: Yeah. Yeah. So, there are seven fundamental things that the community cares about and as you can see, it boils down to what the founder’s characteristic is. Larry Page and Sergey Bring were Stanford CS PhDs, so Google is filled with engineers who have high GPAs, great colleges, and so on. But Zuckerman was a hacker, so the entire Facebook culture is like a hacker culture. And so it comes down from what the distinct trait or characteristic of the founding team is and in our case, for both me and Harvey, it has always been to do whatever makes customers really happy. Constantly be ambitious to push yourself. You have to understand what your limits are and continue to keep growing. That actually creates new experiments, new things that you can actually do within that company. It is actually going to make the whole company grow much better. As opposed to artificially assuming that is all I can do to make it work. So…
Andrew: Give me an example of a way that you made a customer really happy.
Vivek: There was this company, a pretty big e-commerce company in India, who is one of our customers. They had to actually go ahead and visit a campus at 6:00am. They did not have all of their test questions and everything uploaded in our product and they had the test in two hours. It was actually not really our fault because they could have just gone ahead and did it. Clearly the crew was really busy because they had just landed there, conducted a presentation, and so on. The fact that they actually could have called somebody, their personal [??], who just woke up at 6:02 and get this thing running at 7:00 and have the entire test smoothly running and things it was amazing. That actually bought us so much praise and goodwill from the customer. Those are the kinds of things that we actually stretch ourselves to make sure that the customer is happy, because that is one of the most important things that matters.
Andrew: That’s a great example. So many people would just say, “Oh, we always do things for our customers”. This is so much clearer. What are your revenues now?
Vivek: The revenues are good. [laughs] It is definitely in the millions of dollars and closer to double digit probably in a quarter or so.
Andrew: So you think by the end of the year, the end of the first quarter 2014, you’ll have…
Vivek: 2015.
Andrew: …2015, you’ll have more revenues than investment?
Vivek: Yes.
Andrew: Wow. All right. And, obviously, no profits yet. You guys are constantly just reinvesting.
Vivek: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. That’s probably out of choice that we are going to go ahead and do it this way.
Andrew: You know, Vivek, why I just said it that way? I just realized. A lot of people don’t know the difference between revenue and income, revenue and profits. It just occurred to me that leaving that thought out there would make some people think that you have more profits than you’ve investment and I said, “I got to nail it.” I didn’t realize how many people didn’t understand the difference between revenue and income, sales and profits, and all of that.
Vivek: Uh-huh.
Andrew: I don’t think that anyone who is listening this far into a Mixergy interview is in that bucket, but I just realized that is why I said that. All right. How does it feel to have your own place – no longer living with your parents?
Vivek: Good and bad. I obviously miss them, but it is good that we actually have an office but that’s just one part of it. The bigger mission is how do we truly make the world flat, where the only thing that matters is your skill and not which school did you go to, which company you worked at, which country you are in and so on. That’s the mission that everybody in the company really cares about and we have to make that real. The office space is great, but we have to go and make that happen.
Andrew: Well, congratulations. This is such a great success story. To see this happen to you over five years now? Four years?
Vivek: About four years. Four and a half. Yeah.
Andrew: Congratulations. Thanks so much. First of all, thanks so much for having listened over the years. It looks like you know some of the people who I have interviewed in the past and for coming back here completing what I used to call, and I still do, the circle of Mixergy – where you listen, you learn, and then you come back when you’ve done something great to teach others. Boy, it feels so cool to see it and I’m glad I got you on here to do this interview.
Vivek: Cool. Likewise. I’ve really enjoyed your interviews and I honestly did not think that someday you’d interview me. But, don’t forget instant popularity in India, and possibly Asia…
Andrew: I would love it. I am looking at his Wikipedia page right now. Could somebody out there please help me learn more about him, help me figure out how I could do an interview? And, of course, we’ll continue on our own here with him, too. Thanks so much, Vivek.
Vivek: Awesome. Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew: Thank you all for being a part of it. Thank you everyone.
