Our Investment in interviewing.io
I first met Aline, the CEO of interviewing.io, at a game night hosted by our friends at Bloomberg Beta. We exchanged a few friendly words but didn’t really chat. A few weeks later, a friend formally introduced me to Aline because she was raising her seed round. A little bit of Googling revealed I had actually been reading her blog for years. She had been writing data-driven posts about hiring and interviews for a while, and her posts were always bubbling up to the top of Hacker News.
I met up with Aline and quickly got to know her and her vision for interviewing.io, a platform for engineers to anonymously practice interviewing. As a former software engineer who had been both interviewer and interviewee, the platform resonated with me.
As an interviewer, we picked interview candidates based on resumes. Resumes are a poor reflection of ability because not every FAANG engineer is amazing and not every amazing engineer works at a FAANG company. Resumes typically offer proof-of-pedigree, but what companies really care about is proof-of-ability. Interview performance is much better than resumes when it comes to showcasing engineering ability.
As an interviewee, I had always been stressed out by engineering interviews. Despite performing well in national and international programming competitions, I would anxiously study and cram whenever I was faced with a programming interview. I would re-read books on algorithms and solve dozens of practice questions to keep myself from feeling rusty. This felt like a broken approach: I knew I was a solid engineer but would stress out about interviews because they were a very high impact activity that I had to do for a few weeks every 3–4 years.
Interviewing.io’s anonymous interview practice platform solves each side’s problems. Hiring managers get to talk to applicants who have already shown they can demonstrate their ability well in a live interview. Engineers, on the other hand, get a place to practice and get comfortable with technical interviews, all behind the safety of being completely anonymous.
While interviewing.io addressed key hiring challenges for both companies and engineers, the real highlight for me was its CEO, Aline. She is the perfect CEO for a technical recruiting platform. She was an engineer for several years, then a Director of Talent at Udacity, and then ran her own recruiting shop. Because she’s technical, she gets engineers, which they deeply appreciate. I remember reading a few reviews of Aline’s previous recruiting business, and the most common feedback was “Most technical recruiters suck, but not Aline. She’s an engineer at heart and she gets us.” I could not have been more excited to work with her on her vision for technical recruiting.
After Susa Ventures led the company’s seed round four years ago, we worked with Aline and her team as the business scaled up. There were bumps in the road, but the company made a lot of progress, and was on a multi-million dollar revenue run rate by early 2020.
And then COVID hit.
Before the pandemic, interviewing.io made its money by charging employers, but suddenly hiring froze and budgets disappeared. Revenue dropped to basically $0 in a matter of weeks. It was a scary time, and the company was running through the remains of its seed round quickly. At one point, I think there was <$50k in the bank. Aline and I were chatting every few days to problem-solve, but things looked bleak. She wondered if it would make sense to charge engineers and not just companies — after all, engineers got lots of value from the platform whether or not they ended up using it to find an employer — and the post-COVID situation seemed like a good time to try that. Or to try anything, really. With weeks of runway remaining, the company threw a Hail Mary and started charging candidates.
This worked spectacularly well.
Within months, revenue recovered to its pre-COVID highs, but with a completely different business model. Growth continued, unabated. After months of anxiety about burn, the bank balance started to grow quickly. Based on the business model’s success, Aline and her core investors felt like it was a good time to raise a Series A. Aline did pitches in the spring, while 8 months pregnant, and got a term sheet from our friends at M13 Ventures a few days before having a baby.
Holy #*$%, founders are resilient and incredible!
Fast forward a few months, and the company now has $10m in the bank, millions in revenue, and a great ~10-person core team. They’re expanding quickly to continue to fix technical hiring across the industry. If you want to make a big impact and help the software industry become more inclusive and merit-based, interviewing.io is hiring. It’s a great place to work, and I feel lucky to have been a small part of the journey so far.
