Lydia Han

Somewhere right now a recruiting coordinator is staring at five calendars, three time zones, and a candidate who is very politely about to ghost. Lydia Han built a company for that exact moment. ModernLoop, which she co-founded in December 2020, is the software that quietly choreographs interviews - matching availability, balancing how many panels each engineer sits on, and nudging everyone over Slack before the whole thing falls apart.

Han is the CEO. Her title at the door reads "CEO, Co-Founder (YC W21)," which is a compact way of saying she took the idea through Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch and never looked back. The pitch is unglamorous and that is the point: the interview is the first real handshake a company offers, and most companies fumble it with reply-all chaos and double-booked rooms.

"Once you get a candidate in the pipeline, you have to convince them to take the job," she has said. "This process is the first impression someone has of the company." ModernLoop's bet is that the impression is made in the logistics - the speed of the reply, the polish of the schedule, the interviewer who actually read your resume.

An idea that came home for dinner.

The origin story is unusually domestic. While Han was a product manager lead at Brex, her sister worked there as a technical recruiter. Night after night she heard the same complaints - the manual scheduling, the workload juggling, the Tetris of interviewer availability. Han had spent her career building the tools people work inside. This time the problem was sitting across the table.

She brought in Chris Triolo as co-founder and CTO. At Facebook he had built the charitable-donations product, the one that moved more than $5 billion to nonprofits and personal causes. Between them they had roughly 15 years across Facebook, Slack, Brex and Salesforce - and a shared instinct for the unsexy infrastructure that makes large organizations actually function.

Founded in the pandemic, on purpose.

The timing was not an accident. "We ourselves were founded in the heart of the pandemic, and with companies going remote and staying remote, the interviewing experience also needs to be remote," Han has said. While other founders waited for the world to settle, she treated remote hiring as the permanent default and built for it from day one. Calendar, email, Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, every applicant tracking system - ModernLoop plugs into the stack a recruiter already lives in and removes the swivel-chair busywork.

There is a second, quieter conviction running through the product: that interviewers themselves are the bottleneck. "The better trained your interviewers are, the better your company will be," she has said. So the platform does more than schedule. It shadows new interviewers, balances who carries the load, watches for diverse panels, and turns recruiting-ops best practices into defaults instead of tribal knowledge.

The cap table that integrates with itself.

Investors noticed early. Accel led a $3.3M seed in 2021, then came back to lead a $9M Series A in August 2022. The supporting checks tell their own story: Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and Zoom founder Eric Yuan both put money in - the same Slack and Zoom that Han had spent years connecting from the product side. Webb Investment Network and Quiet Capital rounded it out. Total raised sits around $12.4 million.

By the Series A, customers including Brex, Benchling, Chainalysis, Ramp and VSCO had scheduled more than 18,000 interviews through the platform. Chainalysis grew from 200 to over 300 employees in the months after coming aboard. The numbers are the kind that never make a headline and quietly run a company's growth.

Product first, code second.

Han did not arrive by the usual engineer-founder route. Her degree from UC Berkeley is in business administration. She came up through product management - a product extern at Adobe, a co-founder at the early-stage Navilife, a PM on Salesforce's IoT Cloud, then Facebook's competitive PM rotational program where she built automated ad-campaign tooling and small-business ad products.

Slack was the proving ground. As a senior PM she shipped the Google Calendar and Office 365 calendar apps and led the Zoom + Slack partnership, launching email and calendar integrations on the Slack Frontiers 2019 keynote stage. The throughline is hard to miss: she has spent a decade connecting the apps people work in to each other, and ModernLoop is that instinct pointed at hiring.

She still works the conference circuit on behalf of the unglamorous middle of recruiting - HR Tech, the DECODE Innovation Conference in 2022, and UNLEASH America in 2026. The talks tend to land on the same fundamentals: candidate experience is operations, operations is software, and the company that respects a candidate's time tends to win them.