Sargun Kaur, co-founder of Byteboard, aims to revolutionize the tech interview process, which she believes is flawed and ineffective. In an interview with The New Stack for our Tech Founder Odyssey podcast series, Kaur compared assessing technical skills during interviews to evaluating the abilities of basketball star Steph Curry by asking him to draw plays on a whiteboard instead of watching him perform on the court. Kaur, a former employee of Symantec and Google, became motivated to change the interview process after a talented engineer she had coached failed a Google interview due to its impractical format.
Kaur believes that traditional tech interviews overly emphasize theoretical questions that do not reflect real-world software engineering tasks. This not only limits the talent pool but also leads to mis-hires, where approximately one in four new employees is unsuitable for their roles or teams. To address these issues, Kaur co-founded Byteboard in 2018 with Nicole Hardson-Hurley, another former Google employee. Byteboard offers project-based technical interviews, adopted by companies like Dropbox, Lyft, and Robinhood, to enhance the efficiency and fairness of their hiring processes. In recognition of their work, Kaur and Hardson-Hurley received Forbes magazine's "30 Under 30" award for enterprise technology.
Kaur's journey into the tech industry was unexpected, considering her initial disinterest in her father's software engineering career. However, exposure to programming and shadowing a female engineer at Microsoft sparked her curiosity, leading her to study computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Overcoming initial challenges as a minority in the field, Kaur eventually joined Google as an engineer, content with the work environment and mentorship she received. However, her dissatisfaction with the interview process prompted her to apply to Google's Area 120 project incubator, leading to the creation of Byteboard. Kaur's experience with Byteboard's development and growth taught her valuable lessons about entrepreneurship, the power of founders in fundraising meetings, and the potential impact of AI on tech hiring processes.
Check out more episodes in The Tech Founder Odyssey series:
A Lifelong ‘Maker’ Tackles a Developer Onboarding Problem
How Teleport’s Leader Transitioned from Engineer to CEO
How 2 Founders Sold Their Startup to Aqua Security in a Year
