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Triplebyte failed because: 1) They were useless friction. As a candidate I could apply directly to the companies I was interested in, and take a phone screen a

Triplebyte failed because: 1) They were useless friction. As a candidate I could apply directly to the companies I was interested in, and take a phone screen and then on-site. With Triplebyte I had to take their much more time consuming process and get to the same point of either another phone screen or on-site. They added absolutely no benefit to me as a job seeker. Especially during the hiring heydays of 2019-2022 why would I need to use Triplebyte when I can get access to the recruiters myself? If applying through Triplebyte offered some sort of benefit, like an easier on-site or straight to team match because the candidate had been vetted by Triplebyte, then that would be useful. Instead it was more interviews just to get to the same onsite that you could get to by passing a phone screen, so it was useless. 2) Triplebyte betrayed user privacy by posting their names etc on a new service that the users didn’t explicitly subscribe to. And it took a while for the CEO to acknowledge that and backtrack. That was the deathknell for Triplebyte for me as a candidate.

racional 2y ago
Interesting that this post gets right to the point with at least plausible, and more to the point: user-focused reasons as to why Triplebyte filed. While the blogpost starts off with -- its "impressive founding pedigree." That's the first thing these people think of in their root cause analysis.
- SmellTheGlove 2y ago
  It’ll be interesting to see how much “founding pedigree” actually matters now that free money is gone. It’s not to say it was ever easy (and I’ve certainly never done it), but I’d bet even folks with past successful exits are going to have a hard time these days. Hell, the market has shifted so much that I wonder if having done it before matters a whole lot now, when you fundamentally today need a different attitude toward free cash flow early on versus 5 years ago.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Being (or working with) the son or daughter of a celebrity or prominent rich person / business leader is more important than ever.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  I go into the background because I don't want to assume people are familiar with a specific company that hasn't even existed for a year-plus, and because I wanted to emphasize that these were the mistakes made by smart, serious people doing their best. If people who have done this before, people in whom very smart, very incentivized people are willing to place their trust, can make these mistakes, I sure as hell can, and so can you. I certainly do NOT intend to say "the founders had cool credentials and that's why they were right about everything". The previous poster to whom you're replying has legitimate criticisms, although I don't think they're correct that those were the reasons for Triplebyte's failure (since we did indeed acquire many candidates with considerable skills, and since the public-profiles incident was a consequence of pivoting, which we did because we couldn't solve bigger problems).
  - racional 2y ago
    How is an obviously foolish and unethical decision to publicly post user profiles without their consent -- "a consequence of pivoting"?
    - rachofsunshine 2y ago
      To be clear: it was a bad decision both ethically and tactically, and I am not in any way defending it. I am explaining it, in the same way that one might explain why a bridge collapsed. (I will also note that one piece of the backlash somewhat misunderstood things - the profiles were "public" to subscribers, not to the internet at large, insofar as that distinction is meaningful.) The reason it was a consequence of pivoting is that that decision was made in the context of that pivot. Getting the hypothetical "linkedin for engineers" network up only made sense in the context of existing data, so there was a powerful incentive towards grey/dark-patterns in getting it up and running and, as relevant here, towards motivated reasoning about how it would be received. Or at least, I think it was probably motivated reasoning, because as far as I can tell the surprise at the backlash was sincere (I was not part of the leadership at the time, so this is a retroactive best guess on my part, but one I'm fairly confident in.) That incentive pressure only existed in the context of a company trying to figure out what to do next in somewhat desperate circumstances, and it's in that sense that it was a consequence.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I remember Triplebyte for saturation advertising and paying off bloggers to write spammy articles with titles like “hiring is broken”. Nothing destroys a brand more effectively than ineffective and annoying advertising. (I think of the otherwise great milvlogger who does his own product placements for his own caffeinated gum which I get disgusted just thinking about)
soneca 2y ago
I always understood the promise of Triplebyte was ”do the first steps of a hiring process with us and skip them for your next dozens of job applications (that are through Triplebyte, obviously)” Did they never deliver on that promise?
- gurchik 2y ago
  Triplebyte didn't have a relationship with every company out there looking to hire. When the job market is great and you can filter yourself to specific companies, that's great. When those large companies are laying people off and you need to broaden your search, it's impossible on Triplebyte.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  We did, at least in most cases. At the time, I was working directly with the "live" batches of candidates. We generally considered it a failing on our part if we couldn't get them at least one connection with a company; the typical average (if I'm remembering right) was around 4-5, of which 2-3 would result in an interview. Something like that.
alephxyz 2y ago
As a junior at the time I found that triplebyte actually removed a lot of friction. Being able to do the screening/tech interview step once instead of for _every_ role you apply to was great. It was also good to be able to give feedback after interviews (e.g. these guys want me to do another technical quiz or are just trying to advertise their Blockchain platform).
- jkingsman 2y ago
  Yes, this. Of course, there's always a tech interview even if Triplebyte claims to eliminate that, but they DID eliminate the "hello new grad, do you even fizzubzz" step which was great.
parpfish 2y ago
re point 1: whenever i looked at triplebyte, i didn't see a lot of companies/positions that i was interested in so I wouldn't get the benefit of removing the redundancy of interview at each. maybe they had a bunch of roles i'd like that weren't visible, but that's a mistake -- I need to know it's worth my time to apply. if you have one or two jobs i like, i'll skip triplebyte and apply directly. if they had 10+ jobs I liked, it's worth going through them to not do the same interview ten times
Fripplebubby 2y ago
The post gets into _so much_ depth around what the company did that worked and didn't work and why it failed as a business. Your comment is about why you personally, one of >250k people who used the service as a candidate, didn't overwhelmingly approve of the product (and, it sounds like you may have still used it...). Do you really hold your own opinion in such high regard that you think it is more privileged than the opinion of TripleByte's head of product giving a painfully honest post-mortem? Your opinion is your opinion but it is just a piece of all-too-late product feedback - this post has so much more to offer than that, it's really strange to me that you'd lead this with "Triplebyte failed because:", implying that the author is wrong and you're right...
- mepiethree 2y ago
  This is especially true because the (very good) post addresses both points that this commenter raises and _so much_ more. It's really shocking how few people in this comment section seem to have read the (again, very good) OP. It's like I'm on Reddit.
- blindriver 2y ago
  Yes. I’m the target customer for this service. Me. I have had 10+ jobs in Silicon Valley, from YC startups to FAANG. They failed because their core product had no value to its customers above and beyond what currently existed and only created friction. This is the crux of it. If they delivered value that their customers benefited from they would still exist. I have probably 100 coworkers I could text right now and have lunch with this week. I have hundreds that I’m still friendly with. Zero of them used Triplebyte either because they didn’t hear about them or because of what I mentioned above. Having no customers or no users at the breadth of experience that I or my colleagues have is a true indication of what chances they actually had to succeed, which was nil. Meanwhile EVERY SINGLE ONE of them knows LinkedIn. My last 3 jobs were through LinkedIn. That gap plus lack of benefit for going through Triplebyte is why most would not take it seriously. 250k “users” is a false number in as much as most of them probably didn’t place through Triplebyte. I would love to know how many people actually got jobs through Triplebyte but I would guess much much less than 10,000. That would represent at least 250M in revenue and it could be sustainable at that point. Given the fact it died it must mean it had much less than 10k.

racional 2y ago

Interesting that this post gets right to the point with at least plausible, and more to the point: user-focused reasons as to why Triplebyte filed. While the blogpost starts off with -- its "impressive founding pedigree." That's the first thing these people think of in their root cause analysis.

SmellTheGlove 2y ago
It’ll be interesting to see how much “founding pedigree” actually matters now that free money is gone. It’s not to say it was ever easy (and I’ve certainly never done it), but I’d bet even folks with past successful exits are going to have a hard time these days. Hell, the market has shifted so much that I wonder if having done it before matters a whole lot now, when you fundamentally today need a different attitude toward free cash flow early on versus 5 years ago.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  Being (or working with) the son or daughter of a celebrity or prominent rich person / business leader is more important than ever.
rachofsunshine 2y ago
I go into the background because I don't want to assume people are familiar with a specific company that hasn't even existed for a year-plus, and because I wanted to emphasize that these were the mistakes made by smart, serious people doing their best. If people who have done this before, people in whom very smart, very incentivized people are willing to place their trust, can make these mistakes, I sure as hell can, and so can you. I certainly do NOT intend to say "the founders had cool credentials and that's why they were right about everything". The previous poster to whom you're replying has legitimate criticisms, although I don't think they're correct that those were the reasons for Triplebyte's failure (since we did indeed acquire many candidates with considerable skills, and since the public-profiles incident was a consequence of pivoting, which we did because we couldn't solve bigger problems).
- racional 2y ago
  How is an obviously foolish and unethical decision to publicly post user profiles without their consent -- "a consequence of pivoting"?
  - rachofsunshine 2y ago
    To be clear: it was a bad decision both ethically and tactically, and I am not in any way defending it. I am explaining it, in the same way that one might explain why a bridge collapsed. (I will also note that one piece of the backlash somewhat misunderstood things - the profiles were "public" to subscribers, not to the internet at large, insofar as that distinction is meaningful.) The reason it was a consequence of pivoting is that that decision was made in the context of that pivot. Getting the hypothetical "linkedin for engineers" network up only made sense in the context of existing data, so there was a powerful incentive towards grey/dark-patterns in getting it up and running and, as relevant here, towards motivated reasoning about how it would be received. Or at least, I think it was probably motivated reasoning, because as far as I can tell the surprise at the backlash was sincere (I was not part of the leadership at the time, so this is a retroactive best guess on my part, but one I'm fairly confident in.) That incentive pressure only existed in the context of a company trying to figure out what to do next in somewhat desperate circumstances, and it's in that sense that it was a consequence.
PaulHoule 2y ago
I remember Triplebyte for saturation advertising and paying off bloggers to write spammy articles with titles like “hiring is broken”. Nothing destroys a brand more effectively than ineffective and annoying advertising. (I think of the otherwise great milvlogger who does his own product placements for his own caffeinated gum which I get disgusted just thinking about)

soneca 2y ago

I always understood the promise of Triplebyte was ”do the first steps of a hiring process with us and skip them for your next dozens of job applications (that are through Triplebyte, obviously)” Did they never deliver on that promise?

gurchik 2y ago
Triplebyte didn't have a relationship with every company out there looking to hire. When the job market is great and you can filter yourself to specific companies, that's great. When those large companies are laying people off and you need to broaden your search, it's impossible on Triplebyte.
rachofsunshine 2y ago
We did, at least in most cases. At the time, I was working directly with the "live" batches of candidates. We generally considered it a failing on our part if we couldn't get them at least one connection with a company; the typical average (if I'm remembering right) was around 4-5, of which 2-3 would result in an interview. Something like that.

alephxyz 2y ago

As a junior at the time I found that triplebyte actually removed a lot of friction. Being able to do the screening/tech interview step once instead of for _every_ role you apply to was great. It was also good to be able to give feedback after interviews (e.g. these guys want me to do another technical quiz or are just trying to advertise their Blockchain platform).

jkingsman 2y ago
Yes, this. Of course, there's always a tech interview even if Triplebyte claims to eliminate that, but they DID eliminate the "hello new grad, do you even fizzubzz" step which was great.

parpfish 2y ago

re point 1: whenever i looked at triplebyte, i didn't see a lot of companies/positions that i was interested in so I wouldn't get the benefit of removing the redundancy of interview at each. maybe they had a bunch of roles i'd like that weren't visible, but that's a mistake -- I need to know it's worth my time to apply. if you have one or two jobs i like, i'll skip triplebyte and apply directly. if they had 10+ jobs I liked, it's worth going through them to not do the same interview ten times

Fripplebubby 2y ago

The post gets into _so much_ depth around what the company did that worked and didn't work and why it failed as a business. Your comment is about why you personally, one of >250k people who used the service as a candidate, didn't overwhelmingly approve of the product (and, it sounds like you may have still used it...). Do you really hold your own opinion in such high regard that you think it is more privileged than the opinion of TripleByte's head of product giving a painfully honest post-mortem? Your opinion is your opinion but it is just a piece of all-too-late product feedback - this post has so much more to offer than that, it's really strange to me that you'd lead this with "Triplebyte failed because:", implying that the author is wrong and you're right...

mepiethree 2y ago
This is especially true because the (very good) post addresses both points that this commenter raises and _so much_ more. It's really shocking how few people in this comment section seem to have read the (again, very good) OP. It's like I'm on Reddit.
blindriver 2y ago
Yes. I’m the target customer for this service. Me. I have had 10+ jobs in Silicon Valley, from YC startups to FAANG. They failed because their core product had no value to its customers above and beyond what currently existed and only created friction. This is the crux of it. If they delivered value that their customers benefited from they would still exist. I have probably 100 coworkers I could text right now and have lunch with this week. I have hundreds that I’m still friendly with. Zero of them used Triplebyte either because they didn’t hear about them or because of what I mentioned above. Having no customers or no users at the breadth of experience that I or my colleagues have is a true indication of what chances they actually had to succeed, which was nil. Meanwhile EVERY SINGLE ONE of them knows LinkedIn. My last 3 jobs were through LinkedIn. That gap plus lack of benefit for going through Triplebyte is why most would not take it seriously. 250k “users” is a false number in as much as most of them probably didn’t place through Triplebyte. I would love to know how many people actually got jobs through Triplebyte but I would guess much much less than 10,000. That would represent at least 250M in revenue and it could be sustainable at that point. Given the fact it died it must mean it had much less than 10k.