AngelList Talent CEO Amit Matani on Silicon Valley From the First iPhone Apps to Today

“The Blind Ambition with Jack Kelly” provides a candid look into the top tech companies. Go behind the scenes with tech and workplace leaders and explore engineering and work culture, what it takes to land a role at these companies, and how to build, scale and succeed as an engineer or technologist.

Amit Matani is the chief executive officer at AngelList Talent. AngelList Talent is a startup and remote-hiring talent marketplace. It recently made it easier for international job-seekers, including people outside of the U.S., to look for remote work.

Below are some highlights of the podcast featuring Amit. Listen to “The Blind Ambition with Jack Kelly” above or on your favorite podcast app.

Building one of the first iPhone apps

I built Hot or Not’s app for the iPhone. I built the apps for the Facebook platform before anybody had done anything. We were one of Facebook’s launch partners…

There’s a 21-year-old kid building apps that are being seen by a million people. At the time, [it] was crazy. Now, everybody can do it, but back then, it was… so awesome.

The thing that Hot or Not did that kind of spawned all of the dating sites… was… a product called Meet Me… You could say yes or no, and on the other side, the person would say yes or no… And if you were matched, then you could actually talk to each other. It was a precursor to Tinder, Hinge, all these other things [with] swiping interfaces. Hot or Not was kind of the precursor to that. The company was making a few million dollars a year, and it was five or six people throughout the entire time.

Getting featured on the App Store

It was weird in 2009 when the first app store came out; there was just not much out there. I don’t remember the exact name, but it was basically just… a Tamagotchi-style pet, and it just moved around the screen. It was one of the top apps in the App Store.

… This is crazy. We could probably do better. We [thought]: Look, let’s build something for the iPhone. We don’t know what it is, we know we want to start a company, but we don’t know what it’s going to be. Let’s set a goal of making maybe $100 a day.

We went to Apple’s website, printed out all of the documentation they had to build apps, and we built this game. We were working crazy hours. It was the two of us; we were living together but had a basement area where we could write code and stuff.

It was Pokemon meets Mafia Wars… We built this game called Epic Pet Wars. We started coding in January or February, built the game and got the approval from the App Store in April, and you know, that $100 a day, we reached in a week or two.

… It started gaining steam. It got to the top of the game section in the App Store… because the competition was so easy back then. Then, Apple called one day [and said] we love your app; we’d love to feature you. They featured our app at one of their primary spots, and it kind of took off from there.

Startups don’t need to raise venture capital

First of all, if you have an idea, you should build it without raising; the further you get, the more you can prove out that it’s working [and] the better valuation you’re going to get. They’ll take less of your money because you have something that’s working, and you can show real users and everything else.

… But I think overall, right now, it’s just so easy to start something. You can put up stuff on AWS. You can start coding right now. There [are] so many [software-as-a-service] tools out there that there’s not that fixed cost that you would have before to really get something off the ground.

I would put [fundraising] off as much as possible. But then, the moment that you see it working, raising money allows you to move faster in a lot of different ways. It allows you, first of all, to move faster by just paying people… and paying for infrastructure and everything…

It’s so easy to create something [that] a lot of people end up having similar ideas, and it’s usually whoever can go faster at startups is going to be the one that wins, and money is a big… component of being able to go faster.

Will tech salaries keep increasing?

Obviously, it can’t keep rising indefinitely, right? I don’t know what the end rate is.

What we have seen over the last few years is this kind of acceleration of tech. I think over the pandemic… a lot of tech companies were vital to getting us through.

… What we see is an all-time high in demand for new startups, as it’s an all-time high demand for just investors putting money into startups… So we’re seeing this increasing… demand, and the supply is not quite there yet…

… In the U.S., we’re seeing that companies are really excited about going international because they’re not necessarily finding enough talent in the U.S.

… I think it’s a great time to be an engineer. Honestly, it’s probably one of the best times because the skill set that you have right now is just so in demand. And honestly, I think it’s one of the best times to be a founder too…

How international job-seekers can get hired in the U.S.

There [are] a few things that… we find are really effective for talent on our platform.

• Great English skills
• Have worked for a U.S. company

So obviously, the first one is under your control… If you have great English [skills], do everything you can to show that you have great English.

• A great well-written resume is one big piece.
• We’ve seen a lot of people… make videos to show off or answer some questions. I think that’s a really good way of showing your English skills.

Because ultimately, communication is incredibly important to these companies, especially the smaller ones that might not have a local presence.

The other one is having a U.S. job already. Now, people like that because it de-risks. Oh, they’ve worked for [a] U.S. company [and] understand the process and everything else.

But not everybody has that, so I have a few recommendations for that.

• You can do contract work for [a] U.S. company—that’s a good way to start.
• I think the best thing you can do is explain your experiences more than you would say, for a local thing… because ultimately, a recruiter in the U.S. might not know what the best companies, the best schools and everything else are.

It’s really on you to not only explain what you did there but why the company is awesome and legit because I think that’ll get you further ahead.

… The other [thing] that we’ve seen work really well is an experience in [a] high-demand, but less popular… programming language… I think it’s just being able to find… those mismatches in the market and being able to fill them essentially…

Hybrid work isn’t the future of work

I don’t see it working… If your entire leadership team is on-site, you’re an on-site company. You’re not a hybrid company.

… The most ambitious people are going to… want to be near their managers, be near leadership, because they want that kind of back and forth.

The other piece is if you’re on-site… you have all these little moments where the remote workers are just not part of it… that’s what I think is going to drive people over. The other piece is as much as you want to try to create a balanced environment, I think it’s really, really difficult to maintain the same benefits… I think it’s going to be hard to be in-between…