#66 - Breaking Down HackerRank's Survey of 40,000 Developers with Vivek Ravisankar

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Vivek Ravisankar. And Vivek is the CEO and co-founder of HackerRank, which was in the summer 2011 batch.
HackerRank is a technical recruiting platform that assesses developers based on coding skills. And you can find them at hackerrank.com.
All right, here we go. All right, Vivek, why don't we start with what you guys do, and then we'll rewind to before you even did YC.

**Vivek Ravisankar** (0:31)
Yeah, sure. So I'm Vivek, one of the founders and CEO of HackerRank. Our mission at HackerRank is to match every developer to the right job with the underlying driver being skill. I mean, so resumes are just a very poor correlation to skill. So that's how we got started.
The way what we do as a product, as a developer, you could come on to HackerRank to practice and improve your skills across different dimensions, whether that's algorithms or artificial intelligence or database skills.
And when you're applying to a company, instead of going through the traditional route of uploading a resume, and it's mostly going to be a black hole, you take a company's coding challenge. So if you want to apply to Airbnb, you take an Airbnb's coding challenge. If you want to apply to VMware, you take a VMware's coding challenge. And if you have the required skills, basically we automate the whole code and give you a report, then you get called in for an interview. So it's great for developers because it's a merit-based process. It's great for companies because now you're able to attract the right developers for the interview process.

**Craig Cannon** (1:31)
And what might one of those challenges look like? For instance, Airbnb, are we being put into the code base in any way? What would it look like?

**Vivek Ravisankar** (1:38)
Yeah, I think that it varies. So we've built a platform where it's super custom for companies to go ahead and create. So you could have a simple problem-solving challenge to something close to a real world where you could give an access to our GitHub repo.
And people can go ahead and modify the code, fix a bug on your repo to go ahead and do it. So that's a wide range of problems that you could give on the platform.

**Craig Cannon** (2:04)
Okay, got you. So you guys haven't always been doing this, correct? In its exact instantiation.

**Vivek Ravisankar** (2:10)
Yeah.

**Craig Cannon** (2:11)
So let's go backwards. Before YC, what were you working on?

**Vivek Ravisankar** (2:15)
Yeah, sure. So Hari is my co-founder.

**Craig Cannon** (2:19)
Right.

**Vivek Ravisankar** (2:20)
We knew each other from college. We used to do a bunch of things together in college.
And we started the company, technically. We quit our jobs. I used to work at Amazon as a developer before this, where I did a lot of technical interviews, which is kind of where I saw the problem. Yeah. You know, the resumes were not a good correlation to skills. So we quit our job.
The way we started to do the... We thought that the way to solve this problem of resume is not correlating skills was to help prepare students for their interviews. So we started Interview Street. That was our first version.
And what it did was mock interviews. So let's say you had an interview call with Amazon or Google next week. You could come onto our site and attend a mock interview with either somebody from Amazon or somebody, an ex-Amazon person who can give you a walkthrough of here are the things. We'll do a mock interview, and give you what are the areas that you need to improve, where do you stand, and all of those things.

**Craig Cannon** (3:20)
And the students would be paying these people for their time?

**Vivek Ravisankar** (3:22)
That's right. So it's gonna be hard for people to comprehend the value here in the US, because we were doing it in India, but we were charging 350 rupees, Indian currency, from the student, and we used to pay 250 rupees to the interviewer. So 100 rupees goes to our pocket.
So you could almost imagine that to be something on the lines of, I mean, technically it's six dollars and five dollars, but assuming...

**Craig Cannon** (3:54)
You earn different amounts.

**Vivek Ravisankar** (3:55)
Yeah, different amounts. You could say a student would pay 200 dollars, something like that, and an interviewer would get about 150 dollars.
So then if you then think about it in that way, it was pretty expensive for students, and we didn't have any good payment gateways or anything of that in India, so we used to set up campus ambassadors in different colleges. And Hari and I used to do a trip every month to visit all of these colleges to collect money from these campus ambassadors.