San Francisco-based Byteboard is trying to improve the technical interview process and today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures.
One of the Business Times's 2022 Startups to Watch, Byteboard was founded in 2019 by Sargun Kaur and Nikke Hardson-Hurley. They met while working at Google and decided to change the industry's standard for job interviews.
"We started venting about our technical interview experiences with various companies in the Valley with each other and started reading about many other negative experiences historically underrepresented individuals have had with the technical interview process," Kaur, Byteboard's CEO, told me earlier this month. "The interview process was broken, and something better needed to exist."
So they designed a new process that focuses on actual skills, rather than theoretical situations, and added a layer of anonymity to weed out bias.
when @nhardsonhurley and i first met at @Google, we somehow started venting about our interview experiences. that convo clearly got out of hand & we ended up pitching to Google's incubator Area 120 w the simple idea that "interviews should reflect what engineers do on-the-job" pic.twitter.com/0mBKlQLLc7
— sargun kaur (@justsargs) January 26, 2022
They also ended up taking Byteboard through Google's Area 120 incubator and now have a team of eight working at the company.
Check out all 20 of this year's Startups to Watch in the gallery below.