Okay, I'll try not to make this a super long answer. But I studied, uh, programming, um, in school, But then e took a bit of a left her. And after I graduated and ended up working as a professional cook for three years, I mentioned that because probably some of your students want to take alternative paths and might find them scary. I think it was one of the best things I ever did. Of course, things worked out okay for me. Maybe that would be saying something else that they wouldn't have. But, um, when I was working as a cook, and eventually I realized that it was not the right career for me, but while I was doing it, um, one of the things that I was really struck by was that hiring in kitchens was really meritocratic. So you come in in the morning and you do some tasks. Maybe you chop an onion, then you're prepping some dishes, and then you're actually working in the kitchen during service, and then someone's observing you the entire time. And at the end of the night, if you did a good job, you get a job offer and If you didn't, then you don't. So there was something very elegant about that. And later, when I went back to being a software engineer, I noticed that software engineering hiring really wasn't fair. Um, but I I was an engineer for about five years. Um, when I realized that I probably wouldn't be a super successful celebrity chef went back to doing what I know. And toward the end of that, I was running a team and I had to hire people for my team. And it was a small company. We didn't really have a recruiter and a za result. Kind of everybody on the team, myself included, was getting interrupted to look at resumes and schedule interviews and do all of these other hiring related tasks that got in the way of us writing code and building product, which was our actual jobs. So I thought, You know what? I'm going to take this on and see if I could make it a little more efficient. And I just fell in love with the problem of like, how do you find the right people for the job? How can you tell if somebody is talented? How much of this, The skills How much is aptitude and, uh, kind of never looked back, So I switched away from being a software engineer. I started working as a recruiter. I thought I'd have an edge because I was technical. And most technical recruiters are actually not. Um And, uh, my first real recruiting job was head of talent at ah 100 person startup called Trial Pay. I was very lucky that I was a job with not much experience. They took a big bet. Um, I also ran hiring at UDACITY. I started my own recruiting firm at some point. And throughout that journey, I just realized that hiring was broken in a lot of ways and I miss building things. So ultimately that very winding path led me to interviewing Io, where our mission is to make hiring about what people can do and not how they look on paper.

help people who are looking for software engineering jobs. And then we also have companies who are looking for software engineers. So on interviewing I owe, you can practice technical interviewing with senior engineers from companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon and others. And if you do well in practice, no matter who you are, how you look on paper, you could get fast tracked for engineering jobs at some of those same companies and others. So all about removing the resume and making things about whether you can code and in the process also kind of hopefully leveling the playing field and democratizing access to practice, which I know not everybody has equal access to. That's something we're trying to fix. Basically, we just want smart people toe have every opportunity, and we're trying to build things that will make it more likelyhang on lead code, probably spending a lot of time on their, um they're also probably when they can, interviewing at companies that they're not really excited about to practice before talking to companies where they are excited. So we said, You don't have to do any of that. Just get on our platform and we'll get you the feedback you need without having Thio to jump through all these hoops. Um, on the company's side before us. Um, there are a lot of hiring marketplaces out there s. So I think companies can use LinkedIn. Of course, they can use things like hired, but we're the only platform that actually, um lets companies select people based on interview performance and not resume.

of throwing the idea around in my head for a while. When I came up with the idea, I was running a pretty lucrative recruiting firm, as I mentioned earlier, and I decided that before I jumped in with both feet. It might be good to test this idea and see if there's actually appetite for it. So I created a marketing site pretty ugly one at that for this idea. I think it said something like free anonymous technical interview practice with engineers from top companies. And I just put the site on Hacker News, which is a Nen gin earing community. A lot of people hang out and and I wanted to see what the response was, and it was crazy. Within something like 36 hours, 7000 people had signed up eso. At that point, I realized that maybe it was time Thio pause on my recruiting firm and get to work on this. And then I spent the next several months kind of trying to get a team in place and get a co founder and get organized and incorporate the company and a bunch of other boring, mundane stuff. Uh huh.