“In short: if you needed venture capital to produce a viable small-scale business, you didn’t really have a viable small-scale business to begin with.”
Triplebyte’s FastTrack broke even at around $10 million a year, and engineers liked it. About three quarters of its candidates came from ads, paid for with venture money that demanded growth a recruiting shop never delivered. So it pivoted to a “LinkedIn for engineers” and burned the product people liked. The brand was bought, not earned. The VCs who paid for it wanted a unicorn and got a recruiter.