Lessons From Doing YC Twice - Harj Taggar

TL;DR

Harj Taggar went through Y Combinator twice (2007 with Automatic, 2015 with TripleByte) and worked as a YC partner. He founded TripleByte, a marketplace that screens engineers without resumes and matches them to companies. His core conclusion: traction is the only thing that matters; everything else is fake until you have real users and growth.

Key insights

• The most in-demand engineering trait at internet software companies is the "product engineer": someone who thinks about problems in terms of user impact and revenue growth, not just interesting techni
• Technical interviews are shifting from whiteboard algorithms to hands‑on coding projects that test productivity with real tools (e.g., Stripe’s approach).
• Boot camps are controversial; the top tier of boot camp grads can be on par with or better than top CS grads in certain dimensions, especially if they already have an engineering background.