Take Homes

SaaS platform for turning production stacks into interviews

Doug Doan, Co-Founder & CEO (doug@takehomes.com)

Sam Mishra, Co-Founder & CTO (sam@takehomes.com)
Team

Doug Doan Sam Mishra

CEO CTO
CMU, Palantir, Meta, Bridgewater NYU, Bridgewater

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Problem
Assessing technical candidates is
1. Error Prone
• Companies rely on basic questions that don’t map to real skillsets
• Making a wrong hire is costly
2. Difficult
• Creating great interview projects is a specialized skill
• Companies often lack this skill with their in-house talent
3. Time Consuming
• Substantial fixed costs in creating great interview projects
• No amortization benefits unless making a huge number of hires

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Solution
With Take Homes, assessing technical candidates is
1. Accurate
• Administer interviews that exactly mirror a production stack
• Hire with confidence
2. Easy
• Connect with highly specialized interview project creators
• We incentivize creators in a way companies cannot
3. Fast
• Buy an assessment on our marketplace and deploy it immediately
• Fixed costs amortized over all companies looking for the same skillset

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Why Now?

To capture this growing trend of companies and engineers rebelling against algorithm interviews.

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Why Us?

• Doug has interviewed nearly 1000 candidates and has a super power in
recruiting (95% close rate across 100 engineering hires)

• Doug built one of the highest performing teams at Palantir, with several
alumni becoming founders (raising $100M+) and VCs

• Doug & Sam worked well together at Bridgewater, famous for having a
culture of extremely transparent and direct feedback

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Competitors Overview

No Marketplace Marketplace

Programming
Assessments

No Programming
Assessments

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Product Comparison

Take Homes Hacker Rank Coder Pad Code Signal Test Gorilla

IDE

Source Control

Run/Build
Configurations

Full Stack
Assessments

Marketplace

Text editor with syntax highlighting

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Market Size

$14B $3.5B $450M

Annual Spend on Hiring Annual Spend on Assessments Hiring w/ Take Homes

(TAM) (SAM) (SOM) 9
 Business Model

Base Subscription Custom Interview Add-On Marketplace

$10,000 - $30,000 $10,000 - $20,000 $200 - $500

per year per project per assessment

DIY Customer SMB Customer Enterprise Customer

Subscription Subscription Subscription
Marketplace Add-Ons
Marketplace
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Fundraising Goals

We will be raising a pre-seed round of $2.25M to provide 18 months of

runway to reach $1M ARR

Use of Funds Engineering

• Expand the engineering team (3-5 hires)
Operations
10% • Continue building core product
• Build the marketplace
• AWS infra costs

Sales & Marketing

Sales & Marketing
30% $2.25M • Bootstrap a sales & marketing team (2-3 hires)
Engineering
60% • Find & develop content creators for marketplace
Operations
• Bootstrap a customer support team (1 hire)

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Ask

Phase 1 (current — over 90% committed): $150K SAFE ($5M val cap) to fund
R&D, pilots and 3-6 months runway to provide time to close Pre-Seed Round

Phase 2: Pre-Seed Round

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Appendix

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Product Comparison

Take Homes Competitors

• VS Code, PyCharm, Jupyter Notebook Web • Basic text editor

• Import from GitHub / GitLab / Bitbucket • No import from git providers
• Custom setup / run / debug / test configurations • No run configurations
• Real developer tools • Limited proprietary tools

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