I go into the background because I don't want to assume people are familiar with a specific company that hasn't even existed for a year-plus, and because I wanted to emphasize that these were the mistakes made by smart, serious people doing their best. If people who have done this before, people in whom very smart, very incentivized people are willing to place their trust, can make these mistakes, I sure as hell can, and so can you.
I certainly do NOT intend to say "the founders had cool credentials and that's why they were right about everything". The previous poster to whom you're replying has legitimate criticisms, although I don't think they're correct that those were the reasons for Triplebyte's failure (since we did indeed acquire many candidates with considerable skills, and since the public-profiles incident was a consequence of pivoting, which we did because we couldn't solve bigger problems).
> As a product, Screen was wildly successful (granted, it helps to not be charging anything).
As early as 2015, I just screenshotted the questions from TripleByte and gave them to people to take.
> The one where companies came to us (particularly post-pivot) to hire the candidates (senior engineers in the US, especially ones from top schools or with FAANG-like experience) that are hardest to acquire? Well, it turns out that companies also don't feel much need to pre-screen such candidates and want to avoid putting barriers (like, say, an online quiz) in their way.
I used my ad-hoc TripleByte screen on a lot of top schools, Harvard & MIT students.
Using the quizzes revealed to me that the average MIT or Harvard CS student was like 4 years ahead of knowledge in same-class Berkeley student. Way, way bigger than I ever expected.
This is the real reason the Screen product failed and recruiting is hard: programming skills are not normally distributed, they are exponentially distributed. If you didn't believe in the 10x engineer, you better start believing now.
If you had worked as a recruiter, you'd know the most successful ones do not "just" source better candidates, which you have been belaboring is impossible for a while. They either have tremendous volume, or they are worm-tongued with hiring managers: while skills are exponentially distributed, an average CTO can be persuaded by a very basic, LA Central Casting-level of charisma and good looks.
To be clear: it was a bad decision both ethically and tactically, and I am not in any way defending it. I am explaining it, in the same way that one might explain why a bridge collapsed. (I will also note that one piece of the backlash somewhat misunderstood things - the profiles were "public" to subscribers, not to the internet at large, insofar as that distinction is meaningful.)
The reason it was a consequence of pivoting is that that decision was made in the context of that pivot. Getting the hypothetical "linkedin for engineers" network up only made sense in the context of existing data, so there was a powerful incentive towards grey/dark-patterns in getting it up and running and, as relevant here, towards motivated reasoning about how it would be received. Or at least, I think it was probably motivated reasoning, because as far as I can tell the surprise at the backlash was sincere (I was not part of the leadership at the time, so this is a retroactive best guess on my part, but one I'm fairly confident in.)
That incentive pressure only existed in the context of a company trying to figure out what to do next in somewhat desperate circumstances, and it's in that sense that it was a consequence.
A meaningful explanation of why a bridge collapsed would be: "Facing financial pressure, the board voted to re-open the bridge despite advice from its own experts that it was unsafe and faced a high chance of catastrophic failure."
What I'm hearing instead -- is a categorical focus on "incentive pressures", rather than on the obvious lapse of sound judgement on the part of those responsible. As revealed, quite plainly, by their decision to not go with what should have been seen as the only reasonable course of action here -- to resist the temptation to resort to dark patterns, despite the incentive pressures to do so.
You say you're "not defending it", but by attempting to but more focus on external factors ("incentive pressures") rather than on the poor judgement on the part of those responsible -- you're doing just that. You aren't denying that an error was made, but you are very clearly attempting to minimize the significance of it. The point of literally saying it was a "result of" external business conditions.
If I gave that impression, I apologize. It wasn't my intent. So let me say clearly: it was a lapse of sound judgement, I disagreed with it both then and now, I've said so both publicly and internally since the day it happened, and I think a lot about how to avoid such errors myself.
I don't want to minimize the error. I want to show it in the light in which it was made, because no one ever comes up to you in business and says "hello, do you want to sell your soul today?". That's not what moral compromise looks like. It looks like trying to do a good job and not fully processing the decision you're actually making. That's an error that you make with normal human levels of normal human failing even though that error is abnormally costly.
To return to the bridge analogy for a second, the board that votes to re-open the bridge isn't sitting there going "hmm, should I kill fifty people today?". They've got a dozen people telling them a dozen things are immediate crises, and this one is particularly costly to listen to. So it's a little easier to believe that the civil engineer's report is just someone being alarmist than it is to believe that you've got a really hard decision to make, especially because you're not thinking about it too hard. And that's doubly true when you know it's likely to get you voted out of office, replaced by someone who cares about infrastructure less than you do, who definitely wouldn't close the bridge.
That doesn't make fifty people any less dead when the bridge collapses. But it does change the solution that helps you not collapse bridges, a solution that - as a newly-elected board member in this analogy - is a question that I am deeply concerned with.
I agree, fundamentally, with what you're saying: that you have a responsibility to overcome your incentives, that if you're one of those board members you have to get over your fears and close the bridge. I get that, and I agree with it. But to accomplish that requires understanding the kind of mindset in which one opens the bridge, which is usually not the mindset of deliberate malice. We don't have to compromise our moral principles or our understanding of right and wrong to understand the human weaknesses that lead people astray.
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<warning: unfocused rambling ahead>
I'll give you a concrete example from my recent history. On my very first sales call for Otherbranch, which did not go well, I asked the person I was talking to (who happened to have been a salesperson) for advice afterward.
His advice? Lie more.
Of course, he didn't say it in those words. He said something like "listen to your prospect's concerns and needs, and then talk about how you're a really focused solution to them". So if your prospect says they're concerned with candidate quality, you talk about how candidate quality is the focus of your process, the thing you're really specialized at. Or if your user says they're concerned with time investment, you talk about how that's the thing you're really specialized at. And so on.
In the one sense, this is totally expected behavior. Everyone already assumes a person on a sales call is already doing this. I would imagine that, to most people, this isn't really even a moral blip of significant size. And yet the advice fundamentally is "you should lie more", even if it's lying in this localized, normalized way.
Now, I don't do that. But I don't know how much that costs me. It almost certainly does cost me something, at least in the short term. That's a cost I am, provisionally, choosing to pay. But suppose that I knew for certain the decision was "if you don't do this, your business won't exist, and someone who does lie - a lot more than you do - will take your place". Would I be justified in bending to the fact that this is just the reality of doing business? I'm not sure I would make that argument, but it's not like a reasonable person couldn't make it. Is it better to be uncompromisingly moral and fail to be effective, or to win by being as bad as everyone else? It's not a trivial question.
One of the first things I wrote, when I started planning Otherbranch, was:
> Do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern.
That gets tested every single day. Every single day. It's tested on every call, every conversation, every sales pitch, every email, in ways large and small. I've been amazed at just how often I catch myself wanting to spin just a little teeny bit, because it's obviously the best approach to take in terms of getting Otherbranch off the ground. And if I think I'm a more ethical businessperson than most (and I do), isn't that better than the alternative? Those are the thoughts in my head.
And the thing is, I might be wrong about this. This might be fatal to running a company. It might just not be possible to win by those rules. I might have doomed my entire company and every bit of work I and others are putting into it when I wrote those words on like hour 60. And if I did, and the next person who comes along sees my failure and recognizes that fact from my next company postmortem, would you be able to blame them if they lied just a little?
I struggle with this kind of question a lot. Because I share your moral convictions and your belief that, ultimately, we need to call a spade a spade and call out when people are harmed or their autonomy disregarded. But I also want my moral convictions to have teeth, and that means not completely sabotaging my ability to get anything done. I don't think this is a particularly new moral conflict. I cannot possibly be the first person to try to navigate these waters, which should scare me even more, because it looks like the sharks ate the last guy. But I don't get a choice about navigating them if I want to get anything done.
Does any of this make any sense? This is already way longer than I'd intended to write and is definitely not my best work, but I'm trying to articulate something complex and personal because it's the only response I have to what you're saying. I think we agree on the moral principles, but I think I'm arguing for a nuance in their application that you aren't.
"... because no one ever comes up to you in business and says "hello, do you want to sell your soul today?". That's not what moral compromise looks like."
Actually. it looks exactly like that. It can also be more subtly, but is usually more up front.
Yeah, that didn't seem like a clever move by an ascending company so much as a desperate move by a descending company. Therefore it can't be the reason for the failure.
It’ll be interesting to see how much “founding pedigree” actually matters now that free money is gone. It’s not to say it was ever easy (and I’ve certainly never done it), but I’d bet even folks with past successful exits are going to have a hard time these days. Hell, the market has shifted so much that I wonder if having done it before matters a whole lot now, when you fundamentally today need a different attitude toward free cash flow early on versus 5 years ago.
I remember Triplebyte for saturation advertising and paying off bloggers to write spammy articles with titles like “hiring is broken”. Nothing destroys a brand more effectively than ineffective and annoying advertising.
(I think of the otherwise great milvlogger who does his own product placements for his own caffeinated gum which I get disgusted just thinking about)
While the blogpost starts off with -- its "impressive founding pedigree."
That's the first thing these people think of in their root cause analysis.