* Our go-to-market was contingency recruiting; we'd get paid for placements. Our CTF and HN calling cards easily got us added to the recruiting funnels of big tech companies (I'm assuming any of you could have done that too; I'm just saying, we never had to cold call). But it didn't change anything about how those companies qualified candidates, so to make that business successful we'd have had to do the same dialing-for-dollars matchmaking work any recruiter does, with comparable results.
* We took things very personally. You build relationships with your earliest users (candidates, in our case). Recruiting funnels at our clients had no such connection. The impedance mismatch was demoralizing; our lived experience was that every time a candidate we presented to a client got rejected, we had ourselves failed (I mean, really, we had!). Similarly, the idea that we were just another hoop that candidates had to hop through (but only the non-name-brand candidates who didn't know how to skip us to get an interview at a client) grated on us.
* A lot of second-system-syndrome on the implementation side; we'd done successful recruiting CTFs before, and set what was in retrospect a completely bizarre goal of outdoing ourselves at that job. That mistake is all me.
* Japan/Chicago remote founding team was very difficult, most especially for Patrick. There are teams that could handle that, but their members are more punctual about routine meetings than I am. Both the US and the Japan side felt checked out to each other. This didn't kill us; other things did, and we could have pushed through this problem. But it made things miserable for everyone. Again: this is all me.
* Erin & I were self-funding the company, which was expensive (just in terms of paying everybody's personal bills). Towards the end, it had become clear that we weren't going to drive 3 FTE worth of revenue on contingency placements in the next 12 months. We could have switched up the business model, driven user growth metrics, and gone out for seed funding, but none of us at that point were convicted enough of the business to stake our reputations on that. For all 3 of us, our time was worth too much. I think we made the right call.
It's been almost a decade since we did this, and those years haven't been especially kind to recruiting startups. There are knobs we could have turned to keep things chugging, and probably chugging comfortably, for many more years. But ultimately, I don't think there were any significant rewards to win by building a tech-company-specific recruiting firm. I think the company was ultimately fated to wind down sooner or later. If you're in that situation, sooner is always the better option! Life is short!
The underlying idea behind Starfighter, about the right way (or, at least, a right-er way) to hire people, has proven out repeatedly since then. We hired resume-blind and with work-sample challenges at Latacora, the next company me and Erin started, and we hire resume-blind and with work-sample challenges at Fly.io. Recruiting this way is a competitive advantage. The degree of advantage varies with the market; when the market is weak you can hire good people with terrible processes. But the advantage is never marginal, because bad hires are expensive, and there's so much hidden talent out there.
> We took things very personally. You build relationships with your earliest users (candidates, in our case). Recruiting funnels at our clients had no such connection. The impedance mismatch was demoralizing; our lived experience was that every time a candidate we presented to a client got rejected, we had ourselves failed (I mean, really, we had!). Similarly, the idea that we were just another hoop that candidates had to hop through (but only the non-name-brand candidates who didn't know how to skip us to get an interview at a client) grated on us.
That sounds rough.
If you could do it over, do you see a way you could get more buy-in from some clients, such that they commit to "advanced placement" in their process, to candidates you provide? Or are pretty much all companies going to have their entire hiring process set in concrete?
What about interfacing at the hiring manager level, at companies where the hiring manager normally has some discretion to vouch for the candidate and bypass a lot of process? Could you get sufficient trust with those? Still the rejection problem?
No, I don't think we could ever have "fixed" hiring at companies with enough scale to be lighthouse customers for a business like Starfighter, which was I think a conclusion all 3 of us simultaneously landed on. The engineering team has to be committed to doing things that way. For instance: prior to Starfighter, I hadn't had the misfortune of working in a "leveled" engineering team (I'd worked at big tech companies before, but "levels.fyi"-style leveling, which is universal now, wasn't a thing back when I was still working at bigcos). Work-sample hiring doesn't just impact how you make yes/no decisions on candidates, but also how you level them.
If I was going to do it over again --- and, again, I wouldn't, because I feel like I also learned this just isn't a great business to be in --- I would have done something much closer to "Stack Exchange, but for CTFs". Run a couple of pure investment years, build up a base of users and some public profile, and then do lightweight recruiting stuff (probably just curated job ads for awhile) on top of that.
I remember you and Patrick hosting a meetup of HN folks once where we talked about Starfighter. I remember thinking that it was an excellent way to hire but every place I've been I've had trouble getting management and HR to buy into it as a strategy. Even when I made it up to VP I still made little to no headway.
It's very hard to shift companies that are eigher larger or with more internal history than a startup to try something like this.
For those of us that missed out, were the CTFs ever documented? Or otherwise recorded somewhere to see what the hoopla was all about? Curious minds inquire ;)
You basically got Stripe level documentation (high praise) of an API endpoint that would let you get open trade offers, and place trade offers. There was a minimal UI that you could manually operate the system with. Actually understanding what was happening in the markets required you to write something to visualize it with data from API calls.
Each level had an increasing level of what you needed to do, with the first level being to buy some stock (which you could do from the UI).
Most levels had you operating some kind of marketing making system, where you had to constantly update passive positions that made money as bots traded against them, and the prices shifted.
The last level required you to "hack" the system to get info you weren't supposed to have, in order to identify the insider trader in the middle of 50 other bots. It was quite different from all the other levels.
Here was the level solving code from my second run through:
* Our go-to-market was contingency recruiting; we'd get paid for placements. Our CTF and HN calling cards easily got us added to the recruiting funnels of big tech companies (I'm assuming any of you could have done that too; I'm just saying, we never had to cold call). But it didn't change anything about how those companies qualified candidates, so to make that business successful we'd have had to do the same dialing-for-dollars matchmaking work any recruiter does, with comparable results.
* We took things very personally. You build relationships with your earliest users (candidates, in our case). Recruiting funnels at our clients had no such connection. The impedance mismatch was demoralizing; our lived experience was that every time a candidate we presented to a client got rejected, we had ourselves failed (I mean, really, we had!). Similarly, the idea that we were just another hoop that candidates had to hop through (but only the non-name-brand candidates who didn't know how to skip us to get an interview at a client) grated on us.
* A lot of second-system-syndrome on the implementation side; we'd done successful recruiting CTFs before, and set what was in retrospect a completely bizarre goal of outdoing ourselves at that job. That mistake is all me.
* Japan/Chicago remote founding team was very difficult, most especially for Patrick. There are teams that could handle that, but their members are more punctual about routine meetings than I am. Both the US and the Japan side felt checked out to each other. This didn't kill us; other things did, and we could have pushed through this problem. But it made things miserable for everyone. Again: this is all me.
* Erin & I were self-funding the company, which was expensive (just in terms of paying everybody's personal bills). Towards the end, it had become clear that we weren't going to drive 3 FTE worth of revenue on contingency placements in the next 12 months. We could have switched up the business model, driven user growth metrics, and gone out for seed funding, but none of us at that point were convicted enough of the business to stake our reputations on that. For all 3 of us, our time was worth too much. I think we made the right call.
It's been almost a decade since we did this, and those years haven't been especially kind to recruiting startups. There are knobs we could have turned to keep things chugging, and probably chugging comfortably, for many more years. But ultimately, I don't think there were any significant rewards to win by building a tech-company-specific recruiting firm. I think the company was ultimately fated to wind down sooner or later. If you're in that situation, sooner is always the better option! Life is short!
The underlying idea behind Starfighter, about the right way (or, at least, a right-er way) to hire people, has proven out repeatedly since then. We hired resume-blind and with work-sample challenges at Latacora, the next company me and Erin started, and we hire resume-blind and with work-sample challenges at Fly.io. Recruiting this way is a competitive advantage. The degree of advantage varies with the market; when the market is weak you can hire good people with terrible processes. But the advantage is never marginal, because bad hires are expensive, and there's so much hidden talent out there.