Summary

Episode 99 is the penultimate Friday stream before the EP 100 special. First guest Vivek Ravisankar, co-founder and CEO of HackerRank (3,000 customers, 30M developer community, first Indian company in YC 2011) discusses how technical hiring is evolving from code correctness to AI fluency assessment. HackerRank's new 'plan-build-review' framework and Chakra AI interviewer evaluate candidates on how well they can delegate to and review AI agents. New grad hiring on the platform is actually up 25-30% YoY, contradicting the layoff narrative. India is HackerRank's fastest growing region, with GCCs at Nvidia, Amazon, Salesforce, Walmart all expanding product centers. Second guest Kanav Hasija, founder of MeltPlan, explains why construction — the world's second largest industry — has seen productivity decline for four decades due to hyper-fragmentation (35-40 teams, each using different tools). MeltPlan is an AI-powered pre-construction planning platform that consolidates plans across all stakeholders. Started commercializing 3 months ago, already at 6-figure ARR, building toward 7 figures. Prior founder at Innovesa (healthcare). The Empire State Building was built in 19 months in 1931; the Salesforce Tower took 7 years. MeltPlan believes better planning unlocks prefab adoption, reduces costs, and can make housing more affordable.

Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hey there listeners, this is Stream 99 and we're chatting with Vivek of HackerRank. Vivek, welcome to the show. Thank you for hosting.

Utsav Somani: How's it going? Good to have you with us. Thanks for dialing in from SF. Why don't we introduce HackerRank to our listeners?

Vivek Ravisankar (HackerRank): Yeah, HackerRank, we started the company over a decade ago with the belief that skills matter more than pedigree. That is still our core ethos in which we run the company. So we help companies hire AI-first developers using custom coding challenges and interviews and also help prepare developers for the AI-native era. So we work with over 3,000 customers and have a community of over 30 million developers.

Vivek Ravisankar (HackerRank): So the second is what are you evaluating? It's no longer about code correctness, it's about AI fluency and your software engineering fundamentals matter much more, your critical thinking, judgment, when do you do the right trade-offs. We're changing that to real tasks, evaluating on their AI fluency on an agentic developer environment.

Vivek Ravisankar (HackerRank): AI fluency is how effectively are you able to work with AI to accomplish the job? And the default mindset needs to be, if you're an IC, you got to think of yourself as an EM of agents. It's an interesting irony. Every engineering manager is now being evaluated whether you can actually be hands-on, that you can be an IC, and every IC is now being evaluated whether you can be an engineering manager of agents.

Vivek Ravisankar (HackerRank): The way that we try to evaluate is we have this construct called plan, build, and review. We give them a real world task. We ask them to plan with an AI agent, and we evaluate how effectively are you planning the task with an AI agent. And then how effectively are you able to review the output. Those are the important aspects.

Vivek Ravisankar (HackerRank): We launched an AI interviewer called Chakra. If you're a Naruto fan, Chakra is what like the superpower. So our goal is, we'll help you find the superpower of the candidate present.

Vivek Ravisankar (HackerRank): New grad hiring interviews and assessments are up 25 to 30% year-over-year on HackerRank. The kind of people that they are hiring is very different from what they used to. The skills that they are looking for is very different from what they used to. So that is the shift.

Vivek Ravisankar (HackerRank): In order for you to be the 10x engineer, 100x engineer, there are two aspects. One is you just need to be AI native, which is the default should be about, I'm not going to touch code. I'm going to ask an AI agent to work on. And the second part is you need to have judgment in terms of determining how to make trade-offs, how to make the right decision. New grad folks are extremely good at AI native, but you can't develop judgment overnight.

Vivek Ravisankar (HackerRank): The fastest growth is India. GCCs, which is when a company headquartered in America sets up an office here, it's becoming more and more critical. India is no longer viewed as a services organization. Every company that we work with, Nvidia, Amazon, Salesforce, Walmart, Adobe, they all have really big product centers, critical product pieces working in India.

Vivek Ravisankar (HackerRank): HackerRank was the first Indian based company to get into YC. We got into YC in 2011. Hari, my co-founder, he couldn't get his visa because he told his salary was zero dollars, which is, by the way, the truth. So I had to go alone. It was a 10 minute interview. We got in. It was just life changing. And it still is. My YC interview panel was Pete Polgram, Jessica, Paul Bouquet, Sam Altman, and Arch. It was like Madame Tussauds in real world kind of thing. I had 10 minutes to prove that we're worth taking a bet on.

Vivek Ravisankar (HackerRank): I think the work that we're doing is getting even more important and critical because the question that everybody's asking right now is what human skills are going to be valuable in an AI first world? Skills certainly matter more than pedigree. That's how it manifested.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, we're moving on to our next guest. We have Kanav from MeltPlan joining us. Kanav, welcome to the show.

Kanav Hasija (MeltPlan): Hey, what's up? That's why I'm here.

Utsav Somani: At MeltPlan, you're repeating an innovative playbook, which is unify a fragmented industry, organize the data and then put intelligence on top. So let's introduce MeltPlan.

Kanav Hasija (MeltPlan): Yeah, actually, it's the opposite. We are adding intelligence to a broken system, a war-fragmented system. Construction is the second biggest industry in the world, but the one that's least productive. The productivity is going down for the last four decades. It's very tough to believe how can the same labor build less houses or less office buildings now than they used to build four decades ago? The answer lies in fragmentation of team sites. There are like 40 skills required to build a building, architect, mechanical engineer, plumbing expert, and so on. And then these are now becoming like, these used to be housed under three companies and now they're housed under 40 companies. So fragmentation is a big issue. We are fixing the planning layer of construction.

Kanav Hasija (MeltPlan): Empire State Building was built in 1930, in 1931. And it was built in 1931 in 19 months. It was six months in designing and 13 months in construction. And it is such a remarkable feat, because even today, no one can do this. No one can build a building, a 100-story office building in 19 months, both planning and construction. And the only reason they would do that is because there was one master planner, one team that planned it all. Today the problem in planning is it's not one team, it's 35 teams. A system needs to come in and say, give me all your plans, let me match them up and tell you what's off.

Kanav Hasija (MeltPlan): Salesforce Tower in San Francisco was built in seven years. It's 20% shorter in height than Empire State Building. So 19 months to three years sure from regulations, but not seven years.

Kanav Hasija (MeltPlan): In construction in the pre-AI world, construction is full of documents and images and SaaS could not even read those documents and images. The AI world is flipping that. The AI world is saying, you have documents and images? Sure, give me those. Let me make some intelligence and give some back to you. It's the coordination of people, the collaboration between them and the intelligence coming out from documents and images versus them putting a bunch of data into the software.

Kanav Hasija (MeltPlan): We started commercializing three months ago. We have reached two or six digits of ARR. We are planning to go to seven pretty soon. And it's low. Construction is slower than other industries, but we want to be the fastest in the slow race.

Kanav Hasija (MeltPlan): Enterprise customers don't buy products. They buy trust in people. They are depending their promotion on your success, on this contract success. Trust cannot be won by selling more than what you have, and trust cannot be won by not being authentic in any way.

Kanav Hasija (MeltPlan): Well, one thing for sure is the cost goes down. Because there's less waste. Affordable housing is a big issue in the US or in the Western world. That gets better. The ROI on building things becomes bigger. More stuff gets built. The third big impact will be prefabrication will become big. Today, prefab is not big because of planning issues. Better planning unlocks prefab adoption.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, that's it from us. We'll see you on Monday for our stream number 100. It's a banger 2.5 hour special. We're going to tease out some of the guests that are coming and the full reveal on Sunday. So do tune in on our socials and we'll see you on Monday. Bye.