This is planet money from NPR.
In the 1970s, professional orchestras started holding blind auditions.
So if you were a young cellist or whatever youd play your audition behind a curtain or a screen so that theoretically the hiring people would evaluate you solely on your musical ability.
I mention this because it sounds a lot like the thing that Ibba Massoud wanted to build.
Just instead of evaluating cellists, she wanted to evaluate software developers.
The idea is that could we use your existing work to really determine your overall quality of code and your overall quality of work?
And so that was the research that I was doing.
And I felt very strongly about this too, because I never had the pedigree that most Silicon Valley founders have, frankly.
Iba grew up in the UAE and Pakistan, where her family's from.
She was the first in her family to finish college.
And this kind of software developer evaluation idea, it had earned her a last second interview at maybe the most prestigious incubator in silicon Valley, a program called Y Combinator, or YC.
So she and her co founder, they scramble to get flights to the US.
They go to the interview, they leave the interview and wait.
We're actually, we're at the mall because we're buying $5 shirts from old Navy that say California.
Because I'm like, hey, if nothing, I can at least sell these shirts back home to make some money.
Very smart.
And that's when we get the phone call that we got into YC.
This was a huge deal.
It meant Iba would get mentoring from important people and startup lectures from experts and seed money for her new company.
It was $120,000.