Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers

However, for many other roles, there's still a ton of insights + best practices that can meaningfully help engineers achieve their career goal. Alex and I don't have all the answers, but as a community with ambitious people, there's a very good chance you can find what you need.

I will be paying you money for the privilege of posting questions (content) to your platform.

These questions will generate answers and discussions (more content). You now own this content, and it will be used to lure future customers by giving them an enticing preview, followed by a paywall. Once they are past the paywall, this content, that I helped create, and that you now own, will be something that adds value to your product.

I am assuming that the people providing advice during early stages are primarily paid seeders, and/or contributors with other incentives, such as shares in your company.

I assume that the long-term plan is that both sides will consist of paid subscribers.

I’m sure there are people who will pay to freely provide you with ownership of their advice for others. They might not even need the money. They will be content with receiving access to a community that is paywalled, unanonymous, and heavily moderated, in exchange for the subscription fee and their efforts.

But that’s not how I feel. So my question is, where’s my cut?

I view our product as more than a Q&A database. Certainly getting questions answered is valuable part, and our goal is to make that interaction high-quality and easy (a coach can often be hundreds of dollars an hour). However, we also offer case studies from tech veterans and community features such as member matching.

We're focused on delivering as much career growth to members as possible. Working with this group of software engineers, the cost of upskilling pays for itself very, very quickly (we charge <0.1% of yearly comp for typical mid-level engineer in FAANG).

Prior to this time frame and more so in the last decade, there was a lot of focus on mastery of SW skills and even towards random exploration and learning, and all of that appears to have been lost. I personally felt all this has accelerated with the increase in big tech compensation, and levels.fyi and blind information.

The challenge with a greedy approach is that a career spans over multiple decades, and a lot of careers plateau over local minima and often one may have to down level or restart careers to find their true calling and excellence and the career growth that follows. This is better done at the beginning of the career when risks are lower than at a late career stage.