Byteboard - Redesigning The Technical Interview Process
Also some notable fundraises: AssemblyAI, Flume Health, Luminous Computing.
Notable Funding Rounds:
AssemblyAI (San Francisco) - Series A - $28,000,000 - Accel (Lead Investor)
AssemblyAI is an AI company building a platform of APIs to transcribe and understand audio data. They convert audio/video files and live audio streams to text with AssemblyAI’s Speech-to-Text APIs.
Flume Health (New York) - Series A - $30,000,000 - Optum Ventures (Lead Investor)
Flume Health is a digital TPA helping self-insured employers make their health plans more affordable and easier to use.
Luminous Computing (Mountain View) - Series A - $105,000,000 - Gigafund (Lead Investor)
Luminous Computing develops photonics chips to handle workloads required by the artificial intelligence industry. The company's product is an AI training and inference chip that fits the computing power of supercomputers into a single chip, allowing businesses to avoid major bottlenecks that traditional processors face.
Scouted:
Byteboard
Latest Funding: $5,000,000 (Seed)
Total Funding Amount: (See Above)
Industry: B2B - Human Resources - SaaS
Founders:
Nicole Hardson-Hurley (Google alum, Forbes 30 under 30)
Sargun Kaur (Google & Yahoo alum, Forbes 30 under 30)
Key Investors:
Snapshot:
Byteboard redesigns technical interviews to be more reflective of what engineers do on the job through a project-based approach. The Byteboard interview process replaces pre-onsite interviews across all of the business’ key technical roles with a small, time-boxed project that simulates real-life asynchronous work.
Some of the technical roles Byteboard covers include
Software Engineering - Candidates can collaborate in a design doc and code in an existing codebase.
Frontend Engineering - Candidates can use JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to create a real webpage.
Mobile Engineering - Candidates can use Swift or Kotlin to build an app in a real mobile development environment.
Data Engineering - Candidates can make a database design decisions and ingest and manipulate real data.
Site Reliability Engineering - Candidates can make systems design decisions and implement a reliable system.
Some of Byteboard’s customers include Betterment, ezoic, Lyft, Figma, PlayVS, glowforge, Strava, Ethos, GoodRx, Imperfect Foods, and much more.
The Problem:
Byteboard believes that the interview process doesn’t need to be improved; it needs to be redesigned, especially when hiring for technical positions. The current traditional process enables candidates to focus more on preparing for the interview than the actual position. The traditional technical interview has the following problems associated with it:
The evaluation process becomes focused on interviewing skills rather than actual skills - there are too many theoretical questions that are often not reflective of what engineers do on the job.
They lack control - interviewers create their own under vetted questions and lack structure rubrics, which creates a biased evaluation.
They create bottlenecks in scheduling - recruiters constantly have to shuffle for available interviewers and candidate availability, delaying the time-to-offer significantly.
With all of the problems listed above, there are also obvious biases humans have trouble overcoming when they make selections. The traditional hiring process is based far too similar to how we choose friendships rather than focusing on the skills the candidate can provide for the business, or lack there of. This is mainly happening on a subconcious level. Not only is this not advantageous for the business, but it naturally creates major gender and racial gaps in the workforce. With the solutions below, Byteboards’ focus on creating processes that emphasize just the candidate's skills can naturally fix these issues.
The Solution:
Byteboards interview process fixes the above problems with the following solutions associated with their product:
Byteboard evaluates for on-the-job skills, not interview skills - They use a highly predictive project-based interview that simulates asynchronous engineering work in order to assess fundamental engineering skills
Byteboard is built and monitored by experts - This includes an out-of-the-box interviewing solution of high quality, calibrated, unique questions paired with structured rubrics for a fair evaluation.
Byteboard has a scaleable replacement for pre-onsite technical interviews - Candidates can take the interview on their own time. Byteboard’s calibrated evaluators grade candidate materials and provide a detailed performance.
The Business + Why I like Byteboard:
Unfortunately, Byteboard does not disclose their pricing, nor could I find it anywhere with further research. However, Byteboard is a B2B SaaS product providing solutions to a significant problem (my favorite). Quality HR products and talent are a huge need in the technical space. Every company is a tech company now, whether they’re a startup or a legacy non-tech company needing to transition into one. There is a huge demand for technical talent everywhere, and the hiring process needs to be better. Unfortunately, there are a lot of non-technical people trying to hire technical candidates, and there are huge disconnects as a result. Byteboard can solve these issues with the services they’re providing in their product. I can’t think of a company out there that wouldn’t benefit from Byteboards service.
Although I couldn’t find any information on their pricing, I did find some reviews that indicated that they have a very quick and easy onboarding process with strong resources for customers to rely on. They also have strong reviews with their customer success team, which is very important for their ability to expand their product throughout their current customer base, which is a must for B2B SaaS companies. There are also quality integrations with other products such as Greenhouse and Lever.
I’m excited to see them grow through their seed-stage and see what their eventual Series A will bring in. They will be a fun one to follow.
Recommendations:
Read:
Developing the Research Basis for Controlling Bias in Hiring
Listen:
This Week In Startups Interview with Molly Wood. - There are plenty of arguments for Web3 - however, it’s still healthy to hear the against web3 arguments. Molly makes good candid points.