hiring
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Nicolas Walker and the 11:30 p.m. conversation
After Stanford, Spotify, Amazon, Microsoft and Linktree, Nicolas Walker started MochaCare with Pranav Uppiliappan. His new job comes with customers, code, a late-night operating schedule and rather a lot of talking.
Mohit Bhende and the value of one more chance
Twelve colleges turned him down. Years later, the Karat co-founder helped make the second-chance interview part of the hiring process. His career runs through a literary magazine, Xbox, and a very well-used Honda.
Victor Luo
Victor Luo is the CEO and co-founder of Perfectly (YC W26), an AI-native recruiting operating system that automates sourcing, outreach, screening, and qualification for high-growth tech teams. A former machine learning scientist at TikTok who worked on large-scale recommendation systems, Victor sat through more than 800 agency-sourced interviews before deciding that hiring should work more like a recommendation engine. He is a two-time founder, a University of Virginia computer science graduate, and builds recruiting agents named Paul and Parker that deliver interview-ready candidates straight to Slack.
Daniel Chait
Daniel Chait is the co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse Software, the New York-based recruiting platform he started with Jon Stross in 2012 to help companies make hiring a competitive advantage. A University of Michigan computer engineer who spent more than a decade as a software consultant and previously co-founded the investment-banking tech firm Lab49, Chait built Greenhouse around the idea of 'structured hiring.' He is co-author of the book Talent Makers, a frequent conference speaker, and a vocal commentator on how AI is reshaping recruiting - including his warning about an 'AI doom loop' flooding both job seekers and employers.
Max Wang
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
Surya Midha
Surya Midha is a 22-year-old co-founder and Chairman of Mercor, the AI-powered talent platform valued at $10 billion. A Thiel Fellow, national debate champion, and Georgetown dropout, Midha co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon into a company paying 30,000+ contractors over $1.5 million daily, matching elite human intelligence with AI labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. In 2026, he became one of the youngest people ever to appear on the Forbes World's Billionaires List with a net worth of $2.2 billion.
Aline Lerner
Aline Lerner is the founder and CEO of interviewing.io, an anonymous technical interview platform that has hosted over 100,000 practice sessions and helped engineers get hired at companies like Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, and Lyft. A former MIT engineer who spent years as a professional cook before returning to tech, she ran hiring at Udacity, launched her own recruiting firm, and discovered through data that resume typos predicted candidate quality better than Ivy League credentials. Her data-driven writing on the dysfunction of technical hiring has been read by millions and featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company (which named her one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2018). In January 2025, she co-authored Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, the official sequel to the seminal CtCI book, co-written with Gayle Laakmann McDowell.
Desmond Lim
Desmond Lim is the co-founder and CEO of Workstream, an HR, payroll, and hiring platform built for the 70 million hourly and deskless workers in the US. Born in Singapore to a delivery driver father and part-time cleaner mother, he became the first in his family to attend university, went on to Harvard and MIT, and built a company that now serves 46 of the top 50 quick-service restaurant brands — including McDonald's, Burger King, and Dunkin' — while raising over $120M in venture funding.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Jacob Kaplan-Moss is one of the co-creators of Django, the Python web framework that powers Instagram, Pinterest, and thousands of other sites worldwide. After 25+ years building and leading software teams - from a Kansas newspaper where Django was born, to Heroku's security org, to 18F's government tech unit - he walked away from the tech industry in 2024, training as an EMT and volunteering with search and rescue. He remains a board member of the Django Software Foundation, publishes the 'jacobian' newsletter on engineering craft, and is known for his influential writing on hiring, documentation, and the 'programming talent myth'.