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I remember when Triplebyte had a blog post and/or job ad every other day on Hacker News, and a bazillion physical ads in San Francisco. It's surprising how qui

I remember when Triplebyte had a blog post and/or job ad every other day on Hacker News, and a bazillion physical ads in San Francisco. It's surprising how quickly after the public-profile-incident (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037 ) they fell off the radar.

madamelic 4y ago
Might be a little elitist but it always seems like these sites go for the broadest applicable market rather than sticking to their lanes of catering to at the very least experienced engineers. TripleByte felt like a premium product that cared about both sides of the transaction but when I came back to it years later, maybe I had changed but the site just felt... bad, like that it was just a job mill. It didn't feel premium, it felt like a hokey recruiter site with a Silicon Valley skin. It doesn't help that companies also treat(ed) it like a job mill. I would have companies reach out, tell me my resume looked great and fit all the criteria then would turn me down for lack of experience when I responded.
- zitterbewegung 4y ago
  I had a weird experience with Triplebyte. First I take their intake test and then I’m ghosted for a year or two. I email them and I got unghosted somehow. They said it was some kind of glitch but it didn’t really appeal to me…
- titanomachy 4y ago
  I had the same experience. In 2017 it was amazing and I felt like I'd discovered an incredible career-boosting hack. I told all my friends about it. By 2020 it felt exactly the same as every other low-grade career mill. To be fair, none of my friends that I referred to TripleByte actually passed their (2017) screening process. So it was a site that was very useful to a very small subset of engineers. I'm sure there's a viable business in that premium market, but probably not a unicorn scalable tech company.
- Xt-6 4y ago
  They start elitist, people love them for it but that's a niche market as the top "1%" is, well, only 1%. So to justify valuation/please VC/increase revenue, they have to increase the pool of candidates which basically destroy the value-prop of their service.
  - rachofsunshine 4y ago
    (TB's head of product for the last ~year and a half here - I wasn't involved in the decision to pivot away from the old model, but I'm retroactively aware of its reasoning.) This is essentially correct. Our original model worked, more or less, for a small pool of candidates. But acquiring those candidates was extremely expensive in ways that scaled poorly as Triplebyte grew. Basically, we were dependent on ads for growth (anyone who used Reddit at the time probably saw a lot of our ads, shout out to /r/againsttriplebytemike), and the marginal cost of ad conversions grows as you try to scale how many people you're bringing in. Slightly less cynically: if your business can't exist without VC funding, but can't justify the expectations of that funding, you never really had a business to begin with. You borrowed one temporarily. This is normal for startups, and VCs know that they won't always (or even usually) succeed, but you can't sit on your break-even-ish business when that's not what VCs were funding you to do. For what it's worth, early TB's efforts (and for that matter, late TB's efforts, both before my tenure and during it) were sincere, it's just that that sincerity is predicated on actually being able to make a working business out of it.
    - compumike 4y ago
      (The engineer formerly known as "Triplebyte Mike" here. Hi Chel!) Harj recently described Triplebyte's user acquisition trajectory publicly in a video from Y Combinator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s from timestamps 7:53 to 9:33. But yes, ads worked for a while, until they didn't.
    - camdenreslink 4y ago
      I got my current job through TripleByte, so thanks for that! I feel like the niche exists for how Triplebyte was set up, but maybe it is not a VC-scale “unicorn” type of business.
NSMutableSet 4y ago
They completely destroyed the value of their brand with that. It was crazy. I really liked the concept of Triplebyte, even though I never found a job through them. I would get requests from reputable companies occassionally. After that incident, I never got anything again. I would have considered using Triplebyte from the employer side prior to that, but not after. What a disgrace.
FlyingSnake 4y ago
But has anyone learned the lesson? I'm sure the founders will go their merry way to another plum position and continue thriving on VC Twitter. In the past 10 year being unethical wasn't considered immoral by a lot of such startups. I remember the intern incident at Repl.it or how AirBnB destroyed the rental market in certain geographies or the whole Uber incidents.
rachofsunshine 4y ago
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 matters! it absolutely does!). We were simply never able to make the marketplace version of Triplebyte work after moving away from the transactional model we had in the early days. 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. But sometimes you find product-market fit right around the time the market goes sour. C'est la vie. The reason we fell off the radar is that we'd been spending a lot of money on ads and stopped at around the time of that backlash (due to a change in business, not due to the backlash itself). Turns out you can boost your profile quite a bit when you're pouring a lot of your cash into ad campaigns! (Also, the physical ads wouldn't have made much sense since that pivot also coincided with all of us sitting in our tiny Bay Area apartments for the next year, lol.)
- edgyquant 4y ago
  I got my big break through triplebyte but once you switched from the “personal” site that connected me to companies I was actually a good match for and moved towards being just a jobs site I’ve had zero luck so I got my last job via workatastartup (which is also going downhill.) It’s a shame because I know there’s people like me stuck in a dead end job somewhere despite being a senior level engineer (I was working construction!) and these people will have nowhere like triplebyte to help show the industry their skills.
  - rachofsunshine 4y ago
    Yeah. You weren't alone. My favorite was some guy who'd been packing boxes for Amazon for like ten years and couldn't get anyone to give him the time of day, who ended up getting a like 200k a year job at one of the bigger SV companies. That kind of story was something I couldn't shut up about during my first couple years at TB, and it was definitely something lost when we changed models. (We made that change for a reason - discussed elsewhere in this thread - but it was still sad to see that model go.) The issue of "talent but no experience" is a glaring inefficiency, but it's the kind of inefficiency that (so far, at least) it's been very hard to make a business out of. (And to be clear, this isn't just employers being evil, a lot of their behavior is rational and it's not like candidates never lie or cheat either.) I have some thoughts on this that I'll probably be batting around with my new bosses a bit once we're settled in with Karat's teams. Since Karat focuses more on screening than on trying to be a marketplace, it's a more natural fit for their (our, I guess I should say now) existing business anyway. Hopefully we can make it work.

madamelic 4y ago

Might be a little elitist but it always seems like these sites go for the broadest applicable market rather than sticking to their lanes of catering to at the very least experienced engineers. TripleByte felt like a premium product that cared about both sides of the transaction but when I came back to it years later, maybe I had changed but the site just felt... bad, like that it was just a job mill. It didn't feel premium, it felt like a hokey recruiter site with a Silicon Valley skin. It doesn't help that companies also treat(ed) it like a job mill. I would have companies reach out, tell me my resume looked great and fit all the criteria then would turn me down for lack of experience when I responded.

zitterbewegung 4y ago
I had a weird experience with Triplebyte. First I take their intake test and then I’m ghosted for a year or two. I email them and I got unghosted somehow. They said it was some kind of glitch but it didn’t really appeal to me…
titanomachy 4y ago
I had the same experience. In 2017 it was amazing and I felt like I'd discovered an incredible career-boosting hack. I told all my friends about it. By 2020 it felt exactly the same as every other low-grade career mill. To be fair, none of my friends that I referred to TripleByte actually passed their (2017) screening process. So it was a site that was very useful to a very small subset of engineers. I'm sure there's a viable business in that premium market, but probably not a unicorn scalable tech company.
Xt-6 4y ago
They start elitist, people love them for it but that's a niche market as the top "1%" is, well, only 1%. So to justify valuation/please VC/increase revenue, they have to increase the pool of candidates which basically destroy the value-prop of their service.
- rachofsunshine 4y ago
  (TB's head of product for the last ~year and a half here - I wasn't involved in the decision to pivot away from the old model, but I'm retroactively aware of its reasoning.) This is essentially correct. Our original model worked, more or less, for a small pool of candidates. But acquiring those candidates was extremely expensive in ways that scaled poorly as Triplebyte grew. Basically, we were dependent on ads for growth (anyone who used Reddit at the time probably saw a lot of our ads, shout out to /r/againsttriplebytemike), and the marginal cost of ad conversions grows as you try to scale how many people you're bringing in. Slightly less cynically: if your business can't exist without VC funding, but can't justify the expectations of that funding, you never really had a business to begin with. You borrowed one temporarily. This is normal for startups, and VCs know that they won't always (or even usually) succeed, but you can't sit on your break-even-ish business when that's not what VCs were funding you to do. For what it's worth, early TB's efforts (and for that matter, late TB's efforts, both before my tenure and during it) were sincere, it's just that that sincerity is predicated on actually being able to make a working business out of it.
  - compumike 4y ago
    (The engineer formerly known as "Triplebyte Mike" here. Hi Chel!) Harj recently described Triplebyte's user acquisition trajectory publicly in a video from Y Combinator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s from timestamps 7:53 to 9:33. But yes, ads worked for a while, until they didn't.
  - camdenreslink 4y ago
    I got my current job through TripleByte, so thanks for that! I feel like the niche exists for how Triplebyte was set up, but maybe it is not a VC-scale “unicorn” type of business.

NSMutableSet 4y ago

They completely destroyed the value of their brand with that. It was crazy. I really liked the concept of Triplebyte, even though I never found a job through them. I would get requests from reputable companies occassionally. After that incident, I never got anything again. I would have considered using Triplebyte from the employer side prior to that, but not after. What a disgrace.

FlyingSnake 4y ago

But has anyone learned the lesson? I'm sure the founders will go their merry way to another plum position and continue thriving on VC Twitter. In the past 10 year being unethical wasn't considered immoral by a lot of such startups. I remember the intern incident at Repl.it or how AirBnB destroyed the rental market in certain geographies or the whole Uber incidents.

rachofsunshine 4y ago

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 matters! it absolutely does!). We were simply never able to make the marketplace version of Triplebyte work after moving away from the transactional model we had in the early days. 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. But sometimes you find product-market fit right around the time the market goes sour. C'est la vie. The reason we fell off the radar is that we'd been spending a lot of money on ads and stopped at around the time of that backlash (due to a change in business, not due to the backlash itself). Turns out you can boost your profile quite a bit when you're pouring a lot of your cash into ad campaigns! (Also, the physical ads wouldn't have made much sense since that pivot also coincided with all of us sitting in our tiny Bay Area apartments for the next year, lol.)

edgyquant 4y ago
I got my big break through triplebyte but once you switched from the “personal” site that connected me to companies I was actually a good match for and moved towards being just a jobs site I’ve had zero luck so I got my last job via workatastartup (which is also going downhill.) It’s a shame because I know there’s people like me stuck in a dead end job somewhere despite being a senior level engineer (I was working construction!) and these people will have nowhere like triplebyte to help show the industry their skills.
- rachofsunshine 4y ago
  Yeah. You weren't alone. My favorite was some guy who'd been packing boxes for Amazon for like ten years and couldn't get anyone to give him the time of day, who ended up getting a like 200k a year job at one of the bigger SV companies. That kind of story was something I couldn't shut up about during my first couple years at TB, and it was definitely something lost when we changed models. (We made that change for a reason - discussed elsewhere in this thread - but it was still sad to see that model go.) The issue of "talent but no experience" is a glaring inefficiency, but it's the kind of inefficiency that (so far, at least) it's been very hard to make a business out of. (And to be clear, this isn't just employers being evil, a lot of their behavior is rational and it's not like candidates never lie or cheat either.) I have some thoughts on this that I'll probably be batting around with my new bosses a bit once we're settled in with Karat's teams. Since Karat focuses more on screening than on trying to be a marketplace, it's a more natural fit for their (our, I guess I should say now) existing business anyway. Hopefully we can make it work.