We started the company with $200 out of our university study room. AMA!

Hi TIA family!

We are Iba Masood and Syed Ahmed, the co-founders of Gradberry. Gradberry (YCombinator W15) gets talent discovered by fast-growing companies, through their abilities.

We envision a meritocracy in the near future, where talent is recommended and hired for their skillset, rather than where they went to school or their background. We’re excited to see this future happening right now, where candidates with brilliant apps and coding skills (who would typically be weeded out through conventional recruiting processes) are getting hired at awesome companies through Gradberry.

I’m Iba, the CEO, my day to day involves business development, sales, partnerships, recruiting, product development and anything and everything related to growth hacking.

Syed, the CTO, who is responsible for managing our engineering team, UI/UX Design and coding is also here to join the conversation!

We’re happy to answer any questions, specifically on the following topics:

• Building global platforms with international audiences
• Breaking into the US market as foreign founders
• The YCombinator experience
• Recruiting technical and non-technical talent

Fire away!

Note from Daniel, TIA’s community manager:
The idea for Gradberry came about when Iba, couldn’t find a stable full-time job after graduation. She then recruited Syed, who was also facing trouble finding jobs in engineering. Together, they built an early version of the platform with $200. The initial funding for Gradberry came from equity-free grants: the UN ITU, Cartier, MIT and even the US State Department.

Sub note: The host may choose at his/her preference to not answer particular questions. This AMA is moderated by the community managers, so lets keep the questions friendly. 🙂