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Triplebyte acquired by Karat
81–90 of 126 posts
Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nearly same journey for me. I can’t thank them enough for organizing everything (including the flights, hotel, and scheduling) and putting me in front of several great companies as someone who at the time did not live anywhere near the bay or have easy access to the SF startup scene. It felt like a really premium experience, and one that I’ll forever be grateful for.
These kinds of stories were really motivating for all of us who worked here at the time, and they definitely soften the blow of the final result, at least for me (and I think for Ammon as well).
Same here. Triplebyte quite literally changed the trajectory of my life. I wasn't really aware of how things have changed over the past 6+ years as mentioned in the other comments, but I'm sad to read them. I wish the whole team well, regardless. <3
Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
That incident was obviously pretty damaging to us from a PR perspective, but it isn't really what killed us. It's not like no one ever used TB after that, even though it did reasonable damage to our brand (and for what it's worth, that kind of blowup really is damaging - we got asked about it during basically every one of the acquisition conversations we did at the end, so please don't think that PR backlash never ma…
> We tried some new tactics near the end that seemed to be bearing fruit, and I think in a world where tech hadn't crashed in mid to late 2022 we would have had a reasonable shot. Is this referring to Magnet? I thought that was neat product idea.
Yeah. (For those unfamiliar with it, Magnet was basically an attempt to automate sourcing. The way it worked was that companies would complete a questionnaire about what they wanted, we would message candidates on their behalf, and they would review only candidates who indicated interest. We applied some throttling and quality thresholds to try to make this a good experience, because taking control of the messaging let us actually do that.)
Magnet grew out of four main observations:
* Our users got much better results when we helped them search rather than leaving it to them.
* What company users fundamentally wanted was to - as our head of finance put it during a discussion last January that ended up leading to the creation of Magnet - "swipe a credit card and get candidates".
* The most interest we'd seen on the candidate side was when we could tell them what companies really wanted, and bringing that in-house meant we could show that information very accurately and without incentive for companies to be dishonest, and
* We had a fundamental lack of activity problem. We talked often about how nice it would be if we had Linkedin's spam problem, because we had lots of ideas for how to solve that problem if we actually had it, which we didn't.
So we built Magnet, which ended up increasing activity on platform by a factor of like five and made companies way happier. We scaled it up over time, and right as we really turned it up in June, the market fell out from under us. And it's a testament to just how well it worked, at least on paper, that our number of connections between candidates and companies actually grew through much of fall 2022 despite the collapse in hiring.
That's not to say Magnet didn't have problems. It did. It had issues with fraudulent profiles (there turned out to be quite a few of these - a lot of job sites are dealing with this problem at the moment in the remote-work world), and we were definitely hitting a point of diminishing returns as we scaled it to some extent. But given how quickly it was built, and how bad the market was, the fact that it took off at all suggests that there was probably something there.
Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat
#84Will Karat be around after the AI revolution?
I wouldn't be surprised if an OpenAI + Zoom solution makes Karat obsolete.
I, for one, won't shed any tears. I've wasted too much time conducting interviews. I'd like to have more time to focus on work.
Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat
#85I had a friend get a job through triplebyte and generally had a positive opinion of them. I also had a generally positive opinion since I had wasted time phone screening candidates. Every phone screen a company does is at least $100 of wasted time. The value proposition of outsourcing phone screening for fizzbuzz is clear. The value proposition of doing one phone screen for N companies is also clear. Then they starte…
Yeah, our experience with Triplebyte really fluctuated a ton over the years. Made some hires pre-vetted by them who were real badasses and contributed a lot, but then there were periods when they sent us numerous candidates who could barely squeeze out a line of code and clearly must have gamed their process somehow. Feels like they were searching for some sustainable growth model and never managed it.
Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat
#86I was a big fan of Triplebyte until I went on an interview that they arranged for me that turned out to be a complete waste of time. I told the company beforehand that I didn't know Ruby, had never written a line of Ruby, and they said that it didn't matter, they wanted me to come in anyway. What is the first thing they ask me to do? Write some Ruby code, of course. I'll spare you the gory details of what happened after that, but it was a train wreck.
If you're going to try to build a business on the basis of eliminating the bullshit from interviewing (which is a terrific thing to try to do) you have to make sure your client companies are on board.
Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Can we not doxx someone over a benign comment thread on HN?
It’s not really doxxing someone when they freely put their name out there, in many places, including in content they themselves have posted to Hacker News. That said, parent probably didn’t need to post a linked in profile either heh.
Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat
#88[deleted]
Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat
#89I did a coding bootcamp in 2014, and couldn’t get a job afterwards. I spent the next three years trying to break into tech. I had tried starting a startup, failed at that, interviewed at a handful of companies, failed those too. At one point, I was literally begging startups to let me work for them for free. Nothing.
I finally managed to get into Triplebyte’s program. I did a phone interview with them, failed it, then came back a few months later and passed it. They flew me out to California where I interviewed at five companies. No offers at four of the five. It was the very last company that I interviewed at where I got a job. Had I not gotten that job, I would probably be trying to sell insurance right now or something.
I’ve been at Google for a year now, so it ended up working out pretty well in the end.
Re: Triplebyte acquired by Karat
#90I went thru Triplebyte in 2019, did well enough on the initial quiz to skip the technical screen, but then they matched me with a bunch of little tiny startups -- including one on in a different hemisphere! -- doing uninspiring work. I talked with two, one of which ended up ghosting, and ended up declining a flyout to the other. Three weeks later I got an email from Triplebyte saying they were "pausing your process".
Huh, really? I thought it sounded interesting years ago and checked them out. I then read that it was for jobs/people in San Francisco only, and my reaction was, as the kids say, "lmao". Never thought about them again. Had no idea they moved on to allowing places that were potentially elsewhere and even in different hemispheres.