Career Advice About Taro

For people not in US looks harder to engage with this community. So I wonder how taro has helped you in your journey?

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?)

I am trying to get better at System Design and trying to understand the design of various systems. I'm very curious about the System Design of Taro, and how Taro is built.

• What technologies are used for frontend and backend?
• What is the backend architecture used? What are the databases used?
• How are the videos streamed, payments handled, user logins handled?
• How does Taro scale with users and give a smooth experience?
• How is the platform optimized from the perspective of cloud costs?
• When the number of users on Taro increases by an order of magnitude, what are the changes to the architecture you would consider doing?
• Is the website built from scratch? Or are there any libraries and frameworks available to make it easier?
• Taro seems like a well-built platform with smooth user experience and a lot of features. I'm surprised that all of this built by just one engineer (Charlie). What's the secret sauce? What are the tradeoffs made to still make things work with less resources?
• What is the decision-making process that went into making all these decisions?

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?

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?

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?

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 :)

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?

If I would like a feature request, where would I post this? For example, my feature request would be a time elapsed text for Taro course videos. It would be great to see our progress even more visualized as watch videos (in addition to seeing the percentage bar so we know how much time we have left to complete a course)