Building Taro Q&A and Videos

One common complaint I get from my friends to who I pitch Taro is why they should trust a company that is "Selling shovels during a gold rush".

I personally believe there is a ton of value in joining Taro but I can see their perspective since not every coaching/mentorship service has their clients' best interests in mind.

This question is more for Alex and Rahul but others are free to chime in. What is your response to this?

I know this is different for Alex, Rahul, and Charlie, but am particularly interested in Charlie's answer since he's the main developer (right?)

When I was young, I was taught that I shouldn't be too helpful or transparent with my friends/classmates/coworkers because I would be "helping my competition" or attract jealousy from others. For as long as I can remember people would

• Hide their grades or what universities they were applying to
• Hide what companies they were interviewing for
• Hide their compensation
• Not help others with homework/work projects/preparing for interviews

I get the impression that Alex and Rahul are pretty transparent people, so I wonder why. It's certainly different from what I have seen in my life.

Reading is generally a far more effective+faster medium to learn from.

You can skim, revisit it, take notes, summarize with AI, learn on the go

Curious why Taro courses have no video medium

I was wondering what exciting new content is coming on Taro for 2025. After reading multiple posts, I noticed that many courses are planned such as

• Code review course
• Giving feedback
• Creating a startup
• Side project course #2
• etc

I wanted to ask if there are any other courses planned or any other exciting new content. Thank you!

I'm curious since you now have the opportunity to design and interview candidates as you see fit, how would you design the interview for your next hire?

How many rounds?

Any takehomes?

how would you source your candidates?

what are things you would do to avoid doing the terrible interview practices companies usually do?

How would you interview a candidate for a backend role vs a frontend role?

I love our Slack channel. I also joined quite a few others helping SWEs get hired into tech, and byfar, Taro is one of the most superior ones due to the quality of its founders both on the forum itself as a product, courses (a wealth of information) and very supportive Slack channel.

How much is Taro investing monthly on supporting paid members through Slack? In general it seems Taro is investing in what it builds for members quite well, and it is no question why they are a YC-backed company.

I was shocked to find out another platform spent $100K on their members to keep it free, but the quality of everything they provided was completely lackluster, with many people complaining asking to be removed from their channel. I found this quite alarming and decided no longer to participate there as I think the founders don't really know how to run a business, treat highly technical people with the services they were providing, and don't know how to do the basics of online community management.

Both Alex and Rahul have mentored a great set of engineers while being at Meta and starting Taro seems like a natural extension to their expertise to mentor 1000s of engineers.

I'm curious about the early life of founding a startup. What are some of the troubles you faced when starting the startup? Was getting into accelerators like Y Combinator and raising funds pretty easy as you were at a very senior level at Meta? How hard was convincing co-founders, early employees, customers and investors? Looking back in the journey, are there any things you would have done differently?

Questions for Alex and Rahul which I know were covered in some videos somewhere in snippets, but maybe not all in one question. Taro has amassed a lot of great content in its courses and blogs -- how long did it take to create initial MVP of quiz app before the Taro founders quit their jobs to go and work on Taro full time as a startup entrepreneurs?

• When did the founders pivot?
• How long did it take to create initial content (blogs over the years, lots of videos, powerpoints etc.)?

It's impressive to see the amount of rich content, how long did it take for Rahul and Alex to conceptualize Taro (in its early form, name), what ways did they test the success metrics of various pieces of content for a single feature (video series, single video/blog etc.) - how well did they perform over a given period of time?

Is there a leaderboard for power users who give the most referrals compared to others? I thought it might be a cool feature request to grow our community of paid users, and people who actually are active.

I'm curious about your journey at Y Combinator.

• What's the accelerator program like? What's your daily schedule while being part of Y Combinator?
• What are the resources Y Combinator provides to startups? What is the skillset Y Combinator intends to teach?
• What are your biggest learnings or takeaways after graduating from Y Combinator?
• Did being part of Y Combinator open up any new opportunities that you wouldn't have otherwise gotten?
• What's the success ratio of startups in general vs startups part of Y Combinator?
• As both Alex and Rahul have a high income before starting Taro, I'm guessing raising $500K money isn't the primary motivation to join Y Combinator. You also have a lot of technical and leadership experience being staff engineers. My feeling was that YC teaches entrepreneurship skills to founders in early stages of their career who doesn't have much expertise and financial base. So, I'm curious about your motivation to join YC. Is giving away so much equity at such an early stage worth it? Would you encourage other senior enginers who want to build startups also to join YC?

Congrats on building such a wonderful platform! I really enjoy the content and have personally benefited a lot from it :-)

I heard that fundraising is a really tough thing to do and usually takes pitching to 100s of VCs to get the funds. I'm curious about Taro's fundraising story. How many VCs/angel investors you had to pitch for your first round? How did you meet the investor that finally funded you? How long did the whole process take? How long did it take to sign the contract and get the funds after the verbal agreement?

I'm curious what the vision for Taro in the next year will be and also what Taro will ideally look like after 5 years. Also curious what the roadmap looks like

It'll be fun to follow up on this and see how far off it'll be :)

Is there a way to review different parts of a course?

For example, I'm finding a lot of missing information in some of the DSA courses, like entire fundamental pieces explaining simple stuff like "what is the Fibonacci approach," and it really bothers me a lot because it feels really incomplete each time I started one, it's so bad that I don't even want to bother continue watching the course.

On the opposite end, I also find that some of the courses have really GREAT material where I want to do more than <3 it and make a suggestion/comment.

Is it possible to do this?