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Interviewstreet’s Role in Recruiting Software Developers

Launched in 2009, Interviewstreet’s recruiting tool helps companies hire software programmers. It was the first Indian company to be chosen for an incubation program at Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley seed fund. Co-founder Vivek Ravisankar discusses the company’s journey to a differentiating recruitment product. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.   

Please give me the elevator speech about what your company does. 

Vivek Ravisankar: We are on a mission to connect great talent with great opportunities in the fastest, efficient and the most fun way. We use coding challenges and contests to help companies hire programmers. Our product is used by startups (Drchrono, Matterport, etc.), fast-growing companies (Palantir, Evernote, Box, Quora, etc.) and large companies like Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, etc.

Is the contest aspect what differentiates your product in the recruiting marketplace? 

Vivek Ravisankar: There are a lot of testing platforms on the Web, but most of them focus on testing through multiple-choice questions, poor programming questions or good programming questions with no customization to the hiring company.

We worked around these parameters to build the best platform to screen programmers. It includes theoretical and real-world coding challenges that are customizable as much as possible by every customer to match their bar. Performance is measured on both speed and accuracy.

Has the tool made a difference in your own company’s recruiting? What challenges have you encountered as a startup that you didn’t anticipate?

Vivek Ravisankar: I didn’t anticipate that hiring people would be so tough. A good guy has at least three companies competing for him. It takes a lot of convincing and a lot of people talking to get the person on board.

If you could go back and start your company all over again, what would you do differently the second time around? 

Vivek Ravisankar: I would fail fast. We took a long time to figure out that our first product (mock interviews) wasn’t working well. 

Please describe one of your company’s lessons learned and how it affected your product development. 

Vivek Ravisankar: We learned to test the app thoroughly before we make a major production push. It’s very easy to get hooked into the “move fast, break things” model, but it may not work if you are in the enterprise business. Your product is being used by large enterprises and any change breaks their process and flow, which is hugely unproductive for them.

This was a big learning when we almost screwed up a good relationship with a customer because of a component that broke. Since then, we have constant tests that run in the background testing every part of the application to ensure nothing breaks.

Read the complete story at Sandhill.com

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Where is Dropbox headed?

Having started in September 2008, Dropbox today is a leading cloud storage provider (CSP). It has over a 100 million signed free users and about 4 million paid users (4% conversion rate as quoted often by Houston). Assuming the lowest payment tier (100GB at $99 per year), this translates into annual revenue of about $400 million. Based on Amazon S3 costing and estimates of Dropbox employee costs, the EBITDA works out to $250 million. Its costs are always going down and its revenues are always going up. The company is valued at $ 4 billion. Dropbox is making money hand over fist. Right? But consider this –

It now has more than ten competitors several with deep pockets e.g., Amazon CloudDrive, Apple iCloud, Google GoogleDrive, Microsoft Skydrive, Box, Spideroak, Ubuntu One, MediaFire, Mega.  Its other competitors, purely in enterprise space include HP Cloud Objects, Rackspace etc.

Dropbox offers the smallest free quota – 2GB plus referral bonus. All its competitors offer 5GB or more (Skydrive -7GB, MediaFire and Mega – 50 GB).

Dropbox pricing is probably the highest ($99 for 100GB). For same capacity, competitor prices are much lower –CloudDrive ($50), GoogleDrive ($60), Skydrive ($50). Box ($480), iCloud ($160). Spideroak ($100) have a higher pricing but have more powerful features (see below).

Dropbox is merely a folder service. Its competitors have other value-adds and lock-in mechanisms. For example, iCloud allows streaming of music, apps, books, and TV shows you purchase from the iTunes store, Google and Microsoft have GoogleDocs and Office WebApps respectively. Documents created through these apps do not count towards the drive quota. Box is designed more as a business-collaboration and work-flow solution that a CSP. SpiderOak is the only service that offers data encryption before your data hits their servers. Perhaps, acquisition of AudioGalaxy should enable Dropbox with music streaming feature.

The  giants like Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft see storage as a way to lure customers into their respective cloud and then “upsell” them on higher-level and more profitable services that they have in the portfolio. They have been aggressive in launching or responding to price cuts from competitors. Dropbox cannot win against these Goliaths in the theatre of feature and price wars.

The Dropbox differentiator was the near seamless experience backing up and syncing files to cloud on multiple platforms. That differentiator is rapidly evaporating with the competitors catching up. Moreover, what happens if all your files are already in the cloud for example music (iCloud, Spotify), Documents (GoogleDocs, Office 365), Pictures (Instagram) and so on. There are umpteen such scenarios that make Dropbox redundant.

I am sure Dropbox product managers are having sleepless nights. Do you have a product strategy and roadmap for Dropbox’s future?