HackerRank – Startup Story

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HackerRank, delevoped by InterviewStreet, a social platform for coders, was launched at TechCrunch Disrupt Event. The Y Combinator-backed company, which was founded by the same team as job coding site InterviewStreet, wanted to create a community of hackers based around puzzles, game bots and real-world challenges. HackerRank, as the name implies, will also offer leaderboards and other competitive elements.

Interviewstreet began as a college project at NIT, Tiruchirapalli. The founders Vivek Ravisankar and Harishankaran K, set up a forum for mock interviews with college students during placement season, helping to filter out promising candidates from the larger pool. On graduating, they were hired by Amazon and IBM, respectively, but continued to work on their start-up idea in their free time. In July 2009, they quit their jobs and sought mentoring from The Morpheus, a Chandigarh-based seed fund. But even this boost was not sufficient. They were not getting any traction even after working on it for many months but they were, however, not ready to abandon the venture.Instead the two friends locked themselves up in a room for 10 days and launched Interview Street in December 2010.

They started with mock interviews, articles section. But it didn’t work. They applied at Y Combinator(YC) in 2010 for first time and rejected. They started Q&A site for interviews but it did not help. They had interacted with a number of companies and convinced them that their top problem was hiring. They decided to build a tool to help companies for screening the programmers with coding tests. They used to mail hundreds of companies in the valley about their tool. None of them used to reply and one day Dropbox got back to them. They once again applied at YC Winter batch in 2010 and got rejected. After that amazon decided to try their tool. Facebook also used their tool to screen the programmer. They applied to YC (Summer 2011 batch) for the third time and got selected. Interviewstreet has become the first Indian company to be chosen for an incubation programme at Y Combinator, the iconic Sillicon valley seed fund. InterviewStreet is the second Indian startup after Pallav Nadhani’s Fusion Charts to win a project from the White House. The programme to promote equal pay for women in corporate America is powered with technology from InterviewStreet. They raised their funding from an amazing set of investors – Vinod Khosla, Jawed Karim, Zenshin Capital. InterviewStreet Team had moved the existing challenges in Interviewstreet onto HackerRank in 2013.

HackerRank, a coding challenge site that also pits programmer against programmer in tournament-style competition. Programmer could write a bot (programme) that plays the game/puzzle for him. Then getting to the top of the leaderboard depends on who started their bot first and the quality of bots’ network connections. One interesting aspect of the site is its ranking system. Problems aren’t categorized by level when they are posted. Instead, the ranking is always relative and levels from 1-10 are assigned to problems after that fact and based on how many people managed to solve the problem. There will also be real-world puzzle-like problems on the site that the company plans to source from leading figures in the various programming language communities. In their business model, a company puts up a challenge, then HackerRank can charge for this as the companies want these problems solved.