Startup Spotlight #183: Candor
Candor provides you with a professional profile to share how you really work.
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I got the chance to speak with Kelsey Bishop, founder and CEO of Candor, about what she’s working on at her startup, and any advice she has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Kelsey Bishop is the founder of Candor and has scaled partnership, operations, and growth teams at Vanta and Omni as an early employee. Kelsey started Candor as a solo founder in May 2021 after realizing through her own experience how important culture fit is for employees joining startups. Today, Candor is growing 25% WoW and is a team of 8.
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Startup Spotlight: Candor
Problem: True job satisfaction in tech comes when you can be yourself, in a team where you are included and accepted, but getting visibility on how a team really works together is hard. Tools like LinkedIn and Glassdoor are cluttered with spam, virtue-signaling and fake or toxic profiles; they don’t provide the data needed to make important culture-fit decisions. Employees and hiring managers end up in a high-risk scenario where people are making major career decisions without the proper data.
Market: We’re playing in the $12BN recruiting market that’s growing 8% per year.
Solution: Candor is focused on how people work not where they’ve worked. Where other networks show you job titles and work history, Candor shows you how someone is in Slack, whether they’re a morning person or night owl, and how they like to get feedback, creating a living document of how they do their best work.
Team: Our founding team is made up of Tyler Horan, our Founding Engineer and a 2x CTO with a PhD in social science, Felix Lau, our Product Designer who has a strong consumer background, and John Faulkner-Willcocks who runs Ops and Growth with a background operationalizing 0 → 1 in startups and as a professional development coach.
Recent Success:
Bishop: We’ve been incredibly lucky when it comes to recruiting - we’ve been able to bring on an all-star team, which I think is our biggest success. We recruit a bit differently - we do 1-2 interviews followed by a ~2-week work trial. We find that the work trial allows both us and the candidate to really understand what it’s like to work together (and feel confident once the offer is on the table!). The work trial also helps us close candidates - once they see our culture and their role themselves, it’s a lot less selling and much more exciting.
Recent Struggle:
Bishop: I think deciding to go directly to consumers presents its fair share of challenges. We’re bullish on the viral potential of Candor, but it requires a lot of experimenting to get right versus going b2b. In a traditional b2b model, it’d be easier to get a signal on revenue potential and show traction with a few customers. Going to consumers has huge upside potential, but it can also take a few more swings to get there.
Founder Advice:
Bishop: Make work your happy place! There’s so much freedom that comes with starting a company - you’re literally starting your own city, with your own citizens and ways of doing things. It’s underrated to be able to do this, so I think it’s so important to be intentional with it. Create a culture that’s your happy place at work - you’ll love it and you’ll end up attracting a team that loves it too.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Bishop: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Branick Weix, Founder of Aryeo: Aryeo is a leading content management platform for the real estate industry.
Austin Diamond, Founder of Alongside Finance: Alongside is building Vanguard for crypto-assets: Low fee index funds enabling the everyday investor to get passive exposure to crypto investing.
Nancy Dong, Founder of Roster: Roster helps Ops leaders improve their business system efficiency & ROI — surfacing actionable insights on how teams are using 3rd party tools & executing on processes.
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