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