Seed Round

Today, we are very excited to announce that we have raised our seed round and are starting to hire founding team members!

What is Outtalent?

Outtalent is a 3-month program that helps top engineers from emerging markets get jobs at companies like Google in Europe and the US.

Our mission is to help people from all countries set and achieve ambitious career goals.

Why Outtalent?

I got extremely lucky in my career.

Back in 2006, when I was still living in Kyrgyzstan, I got an email from a Google recruiter. I was so surprised that I first thought it was a scam. It turns out he found my resume online, where I had posted it with the sole purpose of recording my accomplishments. I wasn't planning to use it to apply for any jobs abroad as I didn't think I was good enough at that time.

After I realized it was actually Google, I started preparing for my interviews like it was my last shot. With a lot of luck, I managed to get a job there and moved to work at the European HQ in Ireland. There, I was surrounded by many smart, positive, kind, and fun people. I started feeling that I was finally utilizing my potential. My annual income went up by more than 10x, and I eventually became a Project Lead at X, Google's "moonshot" division in Silicon Valley.

What a crazy ride it has been!

Now, my brother Meder and I have started Outtalent to help people around the world achieve similar goals systematically and not just by chance.

Our Approach

We believe that for ambitious people in most countries, a great career and immigration come hand in hand, and we are proud to be a company that helps them with both.

We take an unconventional approach in our space:

  1. Our main and only paying customers are candidates, not employers
  2. Our customers pay us only if they achieve their goals, not by hours or months of our time
  3. We help people immigrate rather than find outsourced or remote jobs
  4. We help people set and achieve inspiring and ambitious goals

How Does It Work?

  1. We find great engineers by using our algorithms and international network. In other cases, engineers individually reach out to us.
  2. To get accepted, applicants have to pass our Google-caliber interviews and a 1-month trial.
  3. Successful engineers sign Income Share Agreements. In this way, they commit to paying 7% of their future base salary for 2 years, but only if we help them get a high-paying job in one of their desired companies and countries.
  4. Our program is led by engineers from companies like Google and Stripe. Many of those engineers have conducted hundreds of interviews or even helped redesign interview processes in their companies. In addition to sessions with mentors, a huge part of our program is peer-to-peer sessions. These sessions help engineers (or fellows, as we call them) learn from each other and practice interviewing.
  5. At the end of the program, we help successfully graduated engineers get noticed in the sea of global applicants. We do that by vouching for them to companies - either directly or via our community.
  6. This community includes our alumni and friends from emerging markets who now work at Adobe, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Atlassian, Bloomberg, Booking.com, Cisco, Coinbase, DeepMind, Dropbox, Meta, Figma, Google, IBM, LinkedIn, Lyft, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, PayPal, Reddit, Salesforce, Segment, Slack, Snap, Spotify, Square, Stripe, Tesla, Twitter, Uber, UpWork, and Yelp.

Our Results

Within our first year, we helped engineers from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and Russia get jobs at Amazon, Bloomberg, Meta, DeepMind, Google, Microsoft, Stripe and many other great companies in countries like the UK, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Poland, Canada, and the US.

Our fellows now include senior software engineers with multiple years of experience at top companies in their countries, like Yandex and EPAM.

A Star Graduate

In addition to senior engineers, we work with young stars like Aliya too.

Aliya is also from Kyrgyzstan. There, she spent a large part of her childhood without her parents, surrounded by many people who thought it's better to invest in men's education, while women should spend more time doing housework. Regardless, she managed to become one of the top students in the country, received multiple scholarships, and got a great Computer Science education abroad.

Aliya went through Outtalent twice. After the first time, she got an internship at Bloomberg. After the second, she got full-time offers at Bloomberg, Cisco, Meta, and Google DeepMind. She ultimately decided to join DeepMind, where she is possibly the first ever employee from Kyrgyzstan and maybe even from Central Asia.

Her success story is becoming famous in her country as well as the larger region, and she continues to partner with us after graduation. She now started a series of talks called Outtalent Women to find and share more inspiring stories like hers.

Our Investors

We are very proud to bring on investors that are aligned with our mission and values.

They include YCombinator, Night Capital, Stray Dog, TUZ Ventures, executives from Meta and Google (AJ Frank, David Lieb, Kevin Weil, Morgan Beller), entrepreneurs & angel investors (Bob Suh, Elizabeth Weil, Kevin Carter, Linda Xie, Maksim Stepanenko, Mikhail Kokorich, Seth Ginns) as well as other investors we respect and admire.

This seed investment allows us to hire the founding team members who can help us with software engineering, program management, and recruiting. If you are interested in helping us out full-time, part-time, or just joining our community, please fill out this short form.

With love from San Francisco,

Tilek