The Story Behind Yodas Hyper
Over the past year my team and I have experimented with dozens of different ways to help talented software engineers discover the best career opportunities for them. The whole recruitment marketplace is built around helping companies hire the people they’re looking for, but there’s a huge vacuum in building products around the individual and their unique needs.
We’re about to change that.
While we’re working on Yodas (request beta invite) we have decided to launch Yodas Hyper — a mini product that is based on some of our learnings.
The Need for Impact
Working with hundreds of people we discovered a common trend: There are many talented developers out there who have a deep desire to make a significant impact but struggle with how to put their desires into action. A common theme is the openness to take a small risk for an exciting mission and take a meaningful role in the creation of something new.
Hyper is a list that automatically get updated with companies that fit the following criteria:
- Recently raised their Series A funding
- 25 employees or less
- Based in San Francisco Bay Area
When you break down each of these components, it makes total sense from both an experience and a career perspective. Together they forms a surprisingly strong recipe for a fantastic career opportunity.
Why Series A?
Series A is usually the first institutional round where professional investors evaluate a company and decide to invest in it. The fact that a professional investor chose to invest is a valuable indicator of the company’s level of risk and potential for reward. It doesn’t mean there’s no risk, but there’s definitely a lower risk compared to seed stage.
On the other hand, it’s still early enough in the company life that new team members could get meaningful equity and benefit from a future potential upside.
Why 25 Employees or Less?
When a company has raised a large seed round it usually means that they will grow to 50+ employees, so a company with 25 employees or less is likely to double it’s size. Joining at this crucial juncture in a company’s growth has several key advantages:
- What you actually do is far more important than your title. With a strong motivation there’s a great chance to have a huge impact and play a meaningful part in the formation of the company
- This is a great experience to learn how a company is evolving — especially if you are thinking of launching your own startup one day
Our Bigger Picture
Beneath Yodas Hyper is a much bigger and more powerful product. We’re working on a search engine that performs in-depth analysis of all startups across billions of data points. You see those tags listed under each of the companies on Hyper? That is just a teaser of whats to come.
We wanted you to see a brief summary with relevant insights about the startups on our list, but if there’s anything else you’d like to see or are curious about technical details of how our product works feel free to get in touch.
What’s Your List?
It would be awesome if you could try Yodas Hyper and let us know what you like or dislike.
Footnotes
Inspirational Posts — Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Elad Gil,
noah kagan was hired as employee #30 at Facebook, his package included 0.1% stock options — estimated at $300M. The story is far more complex, listen to Noah story on This Week in Startups episode 672.
