Investors and advisors use Via’s referral-based hiring platform to introduce top talent to the companies they support.

Get referred to breakout companies via top investors.

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Get referred to breakout companies via top investors.

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Hiring software

Investors and advisors use Via’s referral-based hiring platform to introduce top talent to the companies they support.

Launch tags:Hiring•Venture Capital•Tech

Launch Team

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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 🤜🏻🤛🏻🤜🏻🤛🏻

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7yr ago

ConstitutionDAO (📜,📜)

Maker

@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!

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7yr ago

@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!

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7yr ago

On Deck

Unbelievably proud of this team! Just the beginning... 👀🚀 @julianweisser, @kunalsh23 @emmalsalinas @eriktorenberg

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7yr ago

ConstitutionDAO (📜,📜)

@julianweisser @kunalsh23 @emmalsalinas @eriktorenberg @brandon_taleisnik +1 on this! Really an incredible team that has inspired me for my whole career. Congratulations!

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7yr ago

ConstitutionDAO (📜,📜)

Maker

@kunalsh23 @emmalsalinas @eriktorenberg @brandon_taleisnik @kyle_billings wow Kyle it means so much to hear that from you. It’s been amazing to see you grow into the super talented designer you are today from way back when in music school. Grateful to have you as a friend and collaborator. 🙏

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7yr ago

Backchannel

Maker

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.

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7yr ago

The customer service guide for startups

@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?

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7yr ago

Backchannel

Maker

@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.

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7yr ago

Tech Twitter 2020 Yearbook

@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!

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7yr ago

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.

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7yr ago

ConstitutionDAO (📜,📜)

Maker

@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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7yr ago

SlidesUp API

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?

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7yr ago

ConstitutionDAO (📜,📜)

Maker

@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.

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7yr ago

Dropsource

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.

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7yr ago

ConstitutionDAO (📜,📜)

Maker

@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.

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7yr ago

Dropsource

@beondeck @julianweisser Awesome. Love the energy and movement. Sign me up for the Raleigh NC chapter :)

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7yr ago

SandStorm

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.

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7yr ago

ConstitutionDAO (📜,📜)

Maker

@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.

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7yr ago

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