20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
We are back, and you are listening to The Twenty Minute VC with your host, Harry Stebbings, found most commonly on Snapchat, at hstebbings with two Bs, and also writing some more academic, thoughtful pieces these days on mehitovc.com. I'd absolutely love to hear your thoughts and feedback on that. But to the founders Friday ahead, and what a founder we have in store for you today, I'm delighted to welcome a fellow Brit in the form of Harj Taggar. Now, Harj is the founder and CEO of Triplebyte, the startup that is changing the world of engineering recruitment by building a new kind of interview that evaluates tech skills, not credentials. They've raised from some of our favorite seed investors and all past guests, actually, of the show, including Felicis Ventures, SV Angel, and Initialized Capital. As for Harj, prior to Triplebyte, he was the first partner brought in at Y Combinator since its founding, where he remained as a partner for four years. Before that, he was a YC founder, co-founding Auctomatic, which was acquired by Live Current Media. But before we dive into the show with Harj, with the new year comes new routines, and one of mine is Sleeping More, and that's where the Simba Hybrid comes in. It's the most advanced mattress in the world, with a unique combination of 2,500 conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam. It offers the perfect support for two people, a mattress that responds to you and your partner's sleeping patterns. Delivered free with a 100-night sleep trial, free returns and a 10-year guarantee. What is the risk? Start your free trial at simbasleep.com. Another target of mine for the new year is productivity, and there's no better for that than Cirrus Insight, the plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook, which automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don't have to. And it was named number 41 on the Inc 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce App Exchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 salespeople across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad and Android. And Sirius Insight is perfect for anyone in sales, support and success teams who want to save time, schedule three hours more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. Check it out at www.siriusinsight.com forward slash 20VC. However, it's now time to welcome the main man. And so I'm delighted to introduce Harj Taggar, founder at Triplebyte.

**Harj Taggar** (2:17)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:20)
Harj, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. We have been meeting Steve for a while, but thank you so much for joining me today.

**Harj Taggar** (2:27)
Thanks for having me, Harry. Much appreciated.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:29)
Now, I'd love to get started today by discussing a bit about you and how you came to found Triplebyte and the story behind Harj.

**Harj Taggar** (2:37)
So here's sort of the chain of events here. So I'm originally from England, as you can probably tell.
And during college, I had started working on a side project at a time, which was to just launch a simple Craigslist type service for students at our university to buy and sell things to each other. And that became a very interesting project. It grew. We sort of had a small team of people working on it. So I thought maybe we'd take a look at rolling that out to other universities in the country. It started getting a little bit of traction. We then applied to Y Combinator after reading a few Paul Graham essays online. That brought me out to Silicon Valley to go through the Y Combinator program in 2007
We loved being out here. We stayed out here. We morphed the idea into e-commerce software, which was acquired a year and a half later by a company called Live Current Media. I worked at Live Current Media for a year and then actually took a month or so to just kind of decide what my next steps would be. And during that time caught up with Paul Graham and Jessica Livingstone, the founders of Y Combinator, who mentioned that they had plans to start expanding the scope of YC, which I found really interesting.
And so in January, 2010, I joined Y Combinator as a venture partner, which was a fancy term for effectively the first employee and found it just like a fascinating place to be. And four or five months later, I joined officially as the first non-founding partner at Y Combinator and stayed there for almost four years. And kind of during that time worked with a lot of founders, invested in a bunch of companies, and met my future co-founders, Armand and Guillaume, who had gone through the program with Socialcam, a video sharing app that was acquired by Autodesk.