Harj Taggar | |
|---|---|
| Born | Harjeet Taggar |
| Occupations |
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| Employer | Y Combinator |
| Known for | Startups: Auctomatic, Triplebyte |
Harj Taggar is a founder, entrepreneur, and investor. In 2007, he co-founded Auctomatic, a platform for online sellers, and in 2015, he co-founded Triplebyte, a technical hiring platform designed to assess the skills of those looking for jobs as software engineer regardless of background.
Taggar was also one of the first non-founder employees at the startup accelerator, Y Combinator, having first joined in 2010. After co-founding and leading Triplebyte for several years, he returned as a Group Partner in 2020. He is also an angel investor, having co-founded Initialized Capital with Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian.
Taggar attended the University of Oxford's law school for a few years. [1] In 2006, Taggar left law school in order to move to Silicon Valley and follow through on a business idea he had which would eventually become Auctomatic. [2]
In 2007, Taggar co-founded Auctomatic, a platform for online sellers to manage auctions and marketplace listings online, with his brother Kulveer as well as Patrick Collison and John Collison. [3] [4] [5] It was on-boarded to Y Combinator that same year. Since Taggar and his co-founders were "non-technical," Y Combinator accepted them with the condition that one of them learned programming; Taggar was the one who eventually learned. One year later, Auctomatic was acquired by Live Current Media. [1]
Taggar joined Y Combinator in 2010; he was one of its first non-founder Partners. [6] [7] There, Taggar was frequently interviewed in publications like TechCrunch , Business Insider , and Fast Company where he shared his thoughts on startup accelerators, what makes startup successful, and considerations for pitching companies to investors, among other topics. [8] [9] [10] In 2015, he coined the term "second-time founder syndrome":
... you've seen all of these ideas, and so you really want to obviously work on the one that’s going to be a huge success... you can start thinking a lot more about which ideas are going to sound impressive when you tell other people who understand startups that you’re hanging out with. [11]
In 2011, Taggar became an angel investor through the joint fund, Initialized Capital, which he co-founded with Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian. [12] In 2013, they pooled $39 million to put into startups. [13]
In 2015, Taggar, along with Ammon Bartram and Guillaume Luccisano, co-founded Triplebyte, a hiring platform to assess the technical skills of software engineers, especially those without established education backgrounds at "traditionally well-known colleges." While at Y Combinator, Taggar had begun envisioning new systems and processes to reach, interview, and hire engineers, including an "interviewing checklist" which Y Combinator still uses. Taggar's insights into how to modernize recruiting would thus inform Triplebyte's foundation. [14] Taggar also stated that the platform was intended to help software engineers identify how to grow their skills.
The same year that Taggar, Bartram, and Luccisano co-founded Triplebyte, it was on-boarded to Y Combinator. By 2018, the company raised $10 million in a Series A funding round spearheaded by Initialized Capital. [15] One year later, it raised millions of dollars in several other rounds of seed funding with backing from YC Continuity and other investors. [16] Over 500 companies have since have used Triplebyte to hire over a thousand employees, including Adobe, Box, Instacart, Uber, Dropbox, American Express. [17]
In 2020, Taggar returned to Y Combinator as a Group Partner. [12]