This week, the Startup Spotlight shines on HackerRank. Below is a conversation with Global Sales Director, Darin Medeiros.
What is the background of the founders?
Vivek started his career at Amazon in India. The idea of Hackerrank came from a flaw he saw in the recruiting process with regard to evaluating technical talent. There is a funny story of when Vivek was interviewing for a job and the interviewer told Vivek code that he had written was wrong when, if he had Hackerrank, he could have proven it was correct.
Tell us about the team you have built so far.
Our current team is about 60 people. All of the development is done out of India and managed by Hari, the other co-founder. The team of 35+ in the US in predominantly sales and marketing focused. Our singular focus is to hire the best talent.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
Seed funding came from Khosla Ventures after we were accepted by YCombinator (we were the first company from India to be accepted). Our series A came from Khosla and we recently closed a $9.2 million Series B with Battery Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
What problem are you trying to solve?
We help companies engineer their technical recruiting process by providing a platform to source, screen, and hire the best talent.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Our primary products are around code challenges that can be delivered in a a number of different ways – on websites, invitations from recruiters and/or real time code pairs with hiring managers/candidates. The products allows you to quickly identify who’s capable.
Who do you expect your customers and users to be at launch?
Technical recruiters and hiring managers for all engineering roles. Our top verticals right now are finance and tech. At this point, we have 200 customers including brands like Facebook, CapitolOne, Morgan Stanley, Evernote, VMWare, and Yelp.
What is the business AND revenue model? What is your strategy for profitability?
Sell more! We are based on an annual subscription model that is seat based for recruiters and engineers. Our goal is logo acquisition and growing existing customer spend.
Did anyone tell you this wasn’t going to be successful?
Sure, but they are wrong.
How will you measure success 12 months from now?
We will manage success in 2 ways, customer acquisition and customer success.
