🙏 no tsunami, but a wave of jobs (+tips from Delve cofounder Selin Kocalar!)

ChatGPT can't take that word from us!

Hey cutie pies, it me. The LAPD tried to get me to evacuate last night but I was too focused on hitting publish on this week’s edition.

Time for some more exclusive hot tea! Delve’s COO and co-founder Selin Kocalar opened up about the company’s interview process (it’s fast! 🏎️) and what kind of team she wants to build.

And if Selin won’t hire you, she might introduce you to her founder friends.

I love you, always forever,

❤️ Jordan

Company Spotlight: Delve

So maybe you don’t explicitly enroll at MIT thinking you’ll drop out and form your own startup worth hundreds of millions, but if that is your goal, it might not be a bad plan.

That’s what Selin Kocalar and her MIT classmate Karun Kaushik did with Delve. They were skipping class and staying up late to build an AI medical scribe, but they kept running into the pesky little problem of HIPAA compliance—and that’s how Delve was born.

Selin and Karun entered Y Combinator with their compliance automation platform in 2024, then closed a $3 million seed round in January of this year, followed by a healthy $32 million series A (with a $300 million valuation) in July. Most importantly: They’re hiring. Right now. Go. Run.

Here’s what Selin Kocalar spilled about how they’re building the team—and who they want on it.

The interview process:

I’m a vector, you’re a vector, we’re a vector:

We have an interesting take to hiring here, which is that we’re never hiring for “roles.” The way we see it is every person is a vector and every company is a vector. Our goal on that initial call is to help you find the next jump in your career, even if it means connecting you to other founder friends. (Even today I’m about to intro someone I met last week to another founder.)

Who are you and how can we help?

I tell everyone at the start of my conversations that my hiring hat is off, I’m not looking to hire, I’m looking to understand more about you, hear about your background and figure out your goals for the future and see if we can help at all.

We’ll start with a 30-minute call where you’ll meet one of the team members (if it’s engineering, you’ll meet with one of our backend engineers, for example). If we align, great, let’s talk about next steps. If that goes well, then it’ll go to a call with one of the co-founders. From there, we do a few day work trial where we’ll fly you out to SF. You’ll get to work with the team, or you’ll work with us virtually, and then we come to a decision super fast, a few days at the latest.

No startup experience? No problem.

No, but it is a really good green flag. It shows like they’re willing to break out of the mold and just get obsessed with something and grind, and that’s one of the biggest things we index for. Like founders, they oftentimes experience not just the technical parts, they experience the sales, they experience the marketing. There are so many different operational components and team collaboration components that go into building a startup. Anytime someone’s done that in the past, it’s like, okay, they’ve been there, done that.

Really? Not even about compliance or the healthcare industry?

Literally nothing. A lot of it you can learn on the fly. We have compliance experts on our team and we have folks that have never touched compliance before. It’s great because we get the entire perspective. A lot of the people that we’re selling to, they couldn’t care less about compliance, so it’s about having that kind of shared perspective, being able to resonate with the customer, being able to bring in a different perspective into the compliance industry.

I think being a team player is all it comes down to. It’s about having that shared drive to chase after the mission and encouraging the other people that you work with to join you in that journey.

Collaborate. Period.

I think one trait is always trying to include other people. I think that’s very important in a small team like this where every minute counts. That sort of collaboration, that kind of excitement within the team—it doesn’t matter if you missed out on shipping a line of code in that one minute, but if you had motivated a team member, got someone to feel more included, that goes way further.

Fresh j.o.b.s

Nico Christie of Fundamental Labs, makers of Shortcut, an AI Excel agent - went viral this week after previewing their newest product. Upper-decking finance bros are quivering in their loafers. They’re hiring a GTM Lead, and several engineering + research roles, all based in SF.

AI ad-making platform Icon has one mission: Make viral content. You can help them. They’re filling several founding positions now, all of them NYC-based. Jobs come with $1,500/mo to live near their NoMad office.

Helsinki-based Inven lets VCs, advisors, investors, brokers, and PE find info on private companies 10x faster than Google. They’re looking for a ML engineer, a senior data engineer, a data scientist, a UX designer, and a full-stack developer. Apply by sending your resume and cover letter to info@inven.ai.

🚛 Fully electric shipping company Nevoya has a new $9.3 million seed round and they’re looking for software engineers in SF (starting at $170K+).

Canadian fintech platform Keep is hiring a remote data engineering manager—could be located in the USA, Canada, Mexico, or LATAM.

MecAgent is building an AI CAD copilot for mechanical engineers, and they’re looking for an ML/AI founding engineer. Send your resume to: careers@mecagent.com.

The AI-powered data analytics platform Julius AI, which just announced a $10 million seed, is hiring engineers and a product designer in SF.

Thatch, the platform for personalized health bennies, is looking for engineers and a technical program manager. Head’s up: Their hiring process, start to finish, lasts just two weeks. Better move fast. 🏃🏻‍♂️

Bookkeeping automation platform Uplinq announced a $10 million series A in May, and they’re on a mission to make taxes suck less. They’ve got their work cut out for them. They’re looking for some full-stack engineers (one in Scottsdale, AZ, and one in SF).

The more you know 🌈

Late summer is supposedly a slow time for news, but I say August, Schmaugust. There’s been no shortage of juicy stories in the startup universe recently.

• The Windsurf/Cognition deal has startup talent worried about worst-case scenario buy-outs. Ben Bergman at Business Insider wrote about the questions employees should be asking about their equity.

• Varsha Bansal wrote about the downfall of Builder.ai for Rest of World and asks, was it ever an AI company at all? 👻

• Meta is going to let job candidates use AI during coding tests, according to Jason Koebler at 404 Media.

• Jack Dorsey is back, Bitchats. His new app is now available on the app store.

• TBPN launched “The Metis List” - a list of the top 100 AI researchers, as evaluated by other top AI researchers.

Don’t forget: This newsletter isn’t the only place you can find chic tech jobs in the world’s sexiest startups. I can actually make the introductions for you.

When you apply to the a16z talent network, real humans actually look at what you send us, then we match you to hiring startups.

👨🏻‍💻 See you next time.