interview-prep
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Leland puts a price on the right advice
Getting ahead often starts with knowing someone who has done it before. Leland turned that advantage into a marketplace - and is taking the same idea into AI training.
Formation
Formation is a San Francisco–based, A16Z-backed virtual fellowship that trains experienced software engineers to land senior roles at top tech companies. It pairs adaptive AI assessments with one-on-one mentorship from engineers at Meta, Google, Stripe and Airbnb to drill candidates on algorithms, system design and modern AI fluency.
Manara
Manara is a Silicon Valley-backed edtech company training and placing software engineers, AI and cloud talent across the Middle East and North Africa. Through cohort-based learning, mentorship from senior engineers at companies like Google and Meta, and partnerships with AWS, Manara has trained over 300,000 learners and helped hundreds land jobs at global tech firms.
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.
Alex Xu & Sahn Lam
Alex Xu and Sahn Lam are the co-founders of ByteByteGo, the premier technical education platform for system design. Together they built a newsletter with 1M+ subscribers, a YouTube channel with 500K+ subscribers, a GitHub repo with 82K+ stars, and a bestselling book series used by engineers at every major tech company to crack system design interviews. Alex, a CMU grad and former engineer at Twitter, Apple, and Zynga, handles the newsletter, books, and social media. Sahn, a UC Berkeley EECS grad and 25-year veteran of NetApp, Zynga, Ubiquity6, and Discord, leads YouTube content creation. Together they've turned a niche interview-prep subject into a global movement.