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Via by On Deck — Referrals to breakout startups from top investors
Via’s referral-based hiring platform lets top investors introduce world-class talent to the companies they support. Talented people looking for their next thing can browse opportunities inside an investor's portfolio and request to be referred to top startups.
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@rrhoover Thank you Ryan, excited to have you and @vedika_jain representing the Weekend Fund on Via! ☀️
Love this concept & congrats @julianweisser @eriktorenberg 👏
Question - How will you keep the amount of referrals manageable for the investors/entrepreneurs receiving inquiries? I assume well known investors will get a wave of referrals.
@eriktorenberg @stvmcg thanks Steve, it’s been a long while - great to see you on here!
We have a number of methods to detect spam or people who submit poor quality referral requests. In pre-launch beta and since launching here we’ve luckily had largely super thoughtful high-quality referral requests. We’re not worried about volume of submissions investors receive, only the quality—as long as the referral requests they receive are great investors will be grateful to get them.
Since we launched On Deck a few years ago, our mission has always been to help top talent start or join their next company.
A few months ago, we launched On Deck Fellowship, to help people start their next company. (https://medium.com/@beondeck/the...)
Now, we’re thrilled to announce a product dedicated to helping people join their next company.
We all know that the best hires come through trusted referrals.
Via’s hope is to streamline & boost the amount of referrals that people are able to make, and thus the new opportunities candidates are able to find.
Let us know if you have feedback and hopefully we can help ya’ll find your next thing, whenever that time is.
@beondeck @eriktorenberg Very cool. Would be extra nice if you could also browse by company and company location (in order to get all the results for a particular city, and then find the relevant connectors through that).
What steps do connectors make to vet the applicants? Do you guys have some kind of checklist or process or is it gut-feel?
@beondeck @iamabirdlawyer Definitely building that in very soon. Good call.
Re: Connectors, that's up to them! whatever their criteria would be for recommending talent to their startups.
@beondeck @eriktorenberg @julianweisser - congrats on the launch!
question - why did you chose to make browsing investors the first / main action users take? On one hand starting a job search looking at great investors' portfolios makes a lot of sense. On the other, not everyone knows all of those investors / they usually care about role/company first.
Either way, allowing people to filter for role early on would be a valuable feature!
This is brilliant. As someone living outside the SF/SV area, I can see this being a very useful tool for not only learning about what companies to join, but getting that critical "vouch/cred" from influential contacts which previously felt quite challenging to get due to lack of proximity.
Question:
- Is there any paid/monetization play here? Long term?
I clicked around and didn't see anything obvious.
Wondering if it's truly altruistic and self-sustaining (via funded backers) or perhaps will be revenue-generating through placement fees or premium subscriptions of some kind.
@mcwbernz Hi Will, really appreciate you taking the time to check out Via and post such thoughtful questions/comments!
Via is part of On Deck (https://beondeck.com) more broadly so we're not necessarily concerned about generating revenue from this and we don't have any plans for it at the moment. The goal of On Deck is the be the place top talent goes to figure out what's next and we've come a long way since Erik launched the first website 3 years ago on PH. If you are the place where top talent congregates there are many opportunities to generate revenue while being strongly aligned with what's best for the community.
The community is everything to us. Like the fellowship, (https://medium.com/@beondeck/the...) we'll continue to build things to make On Deck the place to go for smart people who want to figure out their next move.
@beondeck @julianweisser Awesome. Love the energy and movement. Sign me up for the Raleigh NC chapter :)
Like this focus on referrals as that's how most of hiring seems to happen nowadays.
I wonder how @beondeck team think about two things:
1. If the product helps get referrals from impressive folks how do you avoid it creating even more for for people who have limited time? Meaning if the top investor is the bottleneck isn't me asking for a referral just making more work for them. If I'm the young scrappy up and comer who wants a referral I presumably have more time than the top investor. At some level is asking for referral shifting the burden up the chain?
2. Vetting. I think I'm a decent entrepreneur. But it probably takes weeks (or hopefully days) of working with me to prove i'm not full of it. If I'm asking for a referral from someone I only follow on twitter and have no real connection with how do you/they process the vetting aspect. I can write a great referral request and a stunning cover letter . . . . . but at the end of the day the real work is not sending the referral but determining if I'm worth referring.
Hiring is such an fascinating challenge and only getting worse. Very interesting to see how your team approaches this
🤜🏻🤛🏻🤜🏻🤛🏻
@beondeck @mrmikesmith love how you are thinking about this, Mike!
1) wrt creating more work for investors: helping source talent is the #1 ask founders make of their investors so this is the exact type of value-add work investors want to be doing.
2) re vetting - this is why it's so critical for people to submit thoughtful referral requests - even more so when they don't have a pre-existing relationship with the investor. Luckily it seems like people understand this as the vast majority of requests that have come through are thoughtfully written and focus on why they a referral makes sense.
At the end of the day, vetting talent is subjective (so is vetting early stage startups!) and it's up to the investors so I expect this to be variable. Fwiw I don't think this is a bad thing! This is a very human process as opposed to some code that parses submissions and tries to make a determination without a human being involved.
It's our goal to bring humanity and community into hiring and we're thrilled to have so many amazing investors on board to build something positive-sum with us.
Thanks again for your questions and comments!
@beondeck @julianweisser thanks for the replies. hope my comment didn't come off as critical. just trying to have a discussion.
I would be super interested to learn how these top investors use this platform. I would imagine when this pops they will have hundreds or maybe even thousands of requests. Would love to know their filtering process for my own professional development.
re: vetting. yup that is the ultimate problem in hiring. everything I hear from recruiters is that the first step they always take in the hiring process is taking the stack of 200 resumes and narrowing down to 10-20 that were referred in. So this solves a big paint point.
Will be playing around with via later this week excited to dive in. Wish me luck!
The team at Via is building something really really cool — I was an early beta tester and it's been awesome to have a place to send talented folks to when they're looking for ideas on the next step in their career.
If you're talented and looking for the place to take the next big step in your career, here are the companies I'd recommend (and would be happy to connect you with): http://via.beondeck.com/tylerwillis
@tylerwillis 🙏 thank you Tyler. I wanted to take a moment and acknowledge how supportive you have been to me and other founders I know. You're one of the most conscientious and helpful angel investors in tech and I'm grateful to have you as a friend.
Folks reading this: Tyler is brilliant at seeing the genius in people/ideas earlier than most - if you're looking for your next thing you should 100% go look at the companies he can refer you to as many are current or future breakouts.
First off, thanks to @nickabouzeid for hunting Via! Nick (and @nivo0o0) are making referrals to their portfolio companies alongside 150 investors from Sequoia, Benchmark, LSVP, a16z, General Catalyst, Susa, Box Group, and many more. We’re also grateful to angels like @justinkan, @jonathanswanson, @briannekimmel, and @delk for raising their hands to participate in Via from day 1.
On Deck launched 3 years ago on Product Hunt. We're excited to be back on PH sharing our first digital product here today!
The team that built Via is @emmalsalinas, @kunalsh23, and of course @eriktorenberg.
We’re happy to be here to answer your questions. We’re especially delighted to be here to help you find your next thing!
@eriktorenberg @julianweisser well done! congrats on the launch! excited to help more folks find roles through this 🙏
@eriktorenberg @benln thanks Ben! We’re excited to have you involved as a connector!
Have seen this idea flourish in Spain with trycircular.com and could not welcome more this type of product. Wish you the best with it!
This is really valuable, especially for VCs who don't have a platform team to build things like this for them.
Also great value prop for employees and startups. What's on the roadmap to make the experience stellar on both of those sides @eriktorenberg? It's generally highly dependent on the referral quality, the startup's process, and other factors outside your control. Anything you're doing to ensure these interactions are high quality regardless of the outcome?
@eriktorenberg @kunalslab thanks for this - great insight! Worth noting that even firms with talent functions tend to spend most time on executive recruiting as this is the highest-leverage activity for an individual to focus on. Via helps funds that have no platform/talent team and provides additional tooling to those that do. We're delighted to be partners with Susa (Natalie Arora Fleming), Costanoa (@mishshell), USV (@matt_cynamon), Lightspeed (@luke_beseda), and other funds that have amazing talent/platform folks.
Currently, we're focused on the top of the funnel - how we can help investors drive great talent to their portfolio companies. We don't touch or try to change the current process startups use for hiring. Our goal right now is to boost what is happening already - talent referrals - and increase the efficiency there.
Congrats @julianweisser @eriktorenberg ! Love the mission and excited to be a supporter. https://via.beondeck.com/maychuang
This is awesome! Was hoping to connect with investors in a non-aggressive manner online. How will you ensure the quality of investors across levels of funding (angel seed focused vs series D etc)?
Wow this is impressive!!! Congratulations on the launch!!! Well done. I just bookmarked this
@fajarsiddiq awesome, thank you. If you want to be notified about new investors and opportunities through Via you can sign up here for updates: https://beondeck.typeform.com/to...
I needed this before going full-time on GigLoft ! Great idea. Looking forward to watching the results.
Editing my comment to compliment the On Deck team on a beautifully organic and effortless multi-step Typeform onboarding. Scott Belsky would be proud.
Great work! Looking forward to using this when looking for my next thing.
For v2, it would be nice if I could create a user profile with a name, email, LinkedIn/GitHub url, etc. so it's auto-populated for every application.
@priv16 thank you! Talent profiles coming soon. You and @singareddynm are spot-on about this being super useful.
This is so exciting for On Deck - V.1 of Via looks fantastic. Some things I'd like to see in the future...
1) Ability to search by company, job role, location.
2) Strength of investor referral. We know that multiple investors can refer to one company (Superhuman is a good example of this), are there certain investors who get back to a candidate faster? That could appear in the ranking.
3) At some point, user profiles / something to carry over so candidates don't have to repeatedly populate the referral cards.
👏👏 Excited to see how this evolves.
@singareddynm thank you for this Nikita, so grateful for your support and this amazing feedback. It's being added to our feature board as I type this.
1) we're working on it. :) you can currently search by location on an individual investor's page - for instance @bfeld has 59 companies all over the world https://via.beondeck.com/bfeld - we're working on making it so you can search across all 2,500+ companies on Via
2) yes! we're going to be ranking investors. We currently have a tease of this on https://via.beondeck.com/browse where the top connectors are determined by the number of referral requests that their companies have accepted.
3) talent accounts on the horizon :)
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