In 2015, I joined a startup that had just received $25m in funding and was excited to triple the engineering team. Hiring became my top priority and consumed most of my waking hours. “Painful” would be an understatement when describing the process of recruiting for top engineers in the red-hot San Francisco market. To hire 25 new engineers, I worked evenings and weekends for over 6 months.

It seemed all my CTO friends had similar issues, so I began trying all the recruiting services and tools on the market, yet realized there’s nothing close to a magic solution. After slogged through the pain of vetting and working with 50 different services, it was exhausting to build so many relationships and handle duplicates. I wish there is a single place I can go to find all the engineers I want to hire across all the agencies. I was looking for an “Open Table” for recruiting agencies that would aggregate all the talent in a single platform. This led me to found 10×10 – to build a product for all the fast growing companies that struggle to hire efficiently.

I have hired and managed 1000 engineers at both startups and public companies with teams that built many industry leading products. Although I love building products, I realized that what I have more passion for building teams and help people grow their careers. Starting a recruiting company means that I can do that not just for my company, and also for all of 10by10’s customers. So, I quit my job and went through YCombinator to transform recruiting with 10×10.