Case "Toptal" - how Taso Du Val created the ideal development company

We all like to read beautiful stories about how people work and live happily doing their favorite thing remotely. Someone goes to warm countries, someone - away from civilization, the third, on the contrary, like to constantly be in the thick of things. Having the freedom to choose how to spend time is a great value for many.

It is all the more interesting to hear the history of the company, whose main task is to find a compromise between the desires and capabilities of talented freelancers and those goals to business that are presented by management and management.
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We had the opportunity to talk with Taso Du Vale - CEO and co-founder of Toptal , the world's largest company without a single physical working “place”.

Toptal combines, under its own flag, 3% of the most appropriate professional companies to companies that meet the highest requirements of professionalism. 5 years ago, Toptal, a regular freelance network, employed only 25 developers and the same number of clients. Today, the Toptal network includes thousands of programmers and designers (the company does not say the exact figure) and more than 2,000 clients. As development management costs have doubled over the past couple of years, the Toptal model is finding more and more supporters.

Taso has been leading the company's development since 2010, when, after Google’s takeover of the startup in which it worked (Slide), their development paths diverged. Strange as it may seem, but within the Silicon Valley, Toptal is one of those startups that are “talked of little”. First, because the founding team does not attract gigantic investment rounds. Secondly, because it doesn’t really need it - with such a demand for developers, Toptal with some reluctance took $ 1.4 million from Andrissen Horowitz, Adam Di'Angelo and Adam Rockwell from Quora. Now the company's turnover exceeds $ 80 million per year, and in fact it is only the sixth year.

Leonardo DiCaprio has a high demand and supply is low.

- Taso, our first question is classic. When did the idea and understanding come to you that it could be a new and successful company?

I worked in various companies on a variety of products, and the fact that I constantly paid attention to is formulated very simply: “There are many professionals in the market whose high level is obvious. At the same time, you yourself know many highly professional people in your own environment. They are just as cool. There is no real way to draw a parallel between them and compare who is a rock star and who is not, in the labor market, in specific companies or, in a general sense, on the Internet. ”

At a certain point I said to myself: “A solution must exist. People should be able to find out that there are cool specialists and they can be hired. And the way to find out about this should be absolutely scalable, and most importantly, all participants should trust it. ”

In principle, this was the moment when Toptal started as a company.

- I have a simple question in the continuation of the topic of specialists. On Toptal, are all talented freelancers, or are all talented freelancers?

We do not train people, we only identify highly qualified specialists. Perhaps in the future we will train specialists, and now we have a global mentoring program that brings together the best specialists in their fields in the world. Mentors help individual talents who want to improve their own positions on the labor market, to become the best engineers and designers.

Nevertheless - we do not teach, even if we train a little. This means that we cannot teach a person to work remotely.

Therefore, answering the question, our main task is to isolate the best talents, allowing them to work remotely on interesting projects.

- How do client companies relate to your talent screening methods? Do they believe you?

I would say that yes, they believe. Our level of success in delegating the company's talent is immense. This metric proves that all of our customers are extremely satisfied. Among our clients are companies such as Airbnb, JP Morgan, Artsy, Zendesk, and many other companies, from Fortune 500 to startups.

- On your website it says that only 3% of freelancers trying to get into Toptal, eventually achieve this. Does this mean that the remaining 97% is irrelevant? They are not talents?

They are not relevant to us specifically, for very specific reasons, which, in sum, are very many.

Our idea and technology (here Taso said “framework”, but in Russian this term is poorly applicable to professionalism assessment methods) exists to determine if we are right when we say that a particular freelancer has the highest talent, but therefore, it is a valuable specialist, the best professional on the market. And it can work remotely.

Therefore, we need to make a decision: do we take it, or not? There is a process that is designed to help us make this decision. We evaluate a person from all sides, customers are satisfied - it means that everything works.

Returning to your question that 97% percent is not talent. Some of them are good, we have “false positives” (false positive), because the person in the interview process is somewhere very close to the maximum requirements that we make to talents.

That is, 97% may be good, but we cannot take that risk. Nevertheless, more often we see that 97% have much less experience and skills (hard skills - technical skills) than those people whom we consider to be talents and who have successfully passed the selection process.

Given all the above, we conclude that, most likely, 97% are inferior to our 3%. In one way or another. In addition, do not forget that there are a lot of cool specialists who simply do not know how or do not want to work remotely.

From what you are telling, I understand that your goal is 100% coincidence between the talent and the company that seeks it. 99% match doesn't suit you, right?

Yes. You can be the best C ++ developer in the world, objectively you can, but this does not mean at all that you can work with us.

You can even be the creator of C ++ and again, this does not mean that you will become a part of Toptal. You can be the creator of PHP, you can be Linus Torvalds, all this does not mean that you will become a part of Toptal.

If a client wants to work with someone, he asks the other side: can we do it in time? Can we call each day to check status?

Linus Torvalds, in my view, will definitely answer: “I don’t want to do this.” And this, of course, does not satisfy our client.

And there are a huge number of customers who have no idea who Linus Torvalds is.
Therefore, no matter how cool someone is in your reality - the billionaire from another reality has no idea about it, he doesn’t make a difference.

If you are a freelancer and you have a reputation, it does not matter who you will work with: with a rich individual customer, vice president of products at Google, or in a startup. Every professional should be assessed and work regardless of whether he is known or not (in his reality).

- Interesting. Another question - over the past 10 years we have seen a huge competition for hiring the best programmers and developers, hundreds of methods for evaluating and motivating employees have been developed. And when I see companies like Airbnb or Pfizer among your customers, the only question that overtakes me is: “Why don't they hire these people?”. What is the motive for companies to use your services, the time of your, let's say, freelancers?

As you said, companies and corporations are always looking for ways to improve their own products. Therefore, as a rule, they use many ways to attract the best talents.

We provide the best service on the market, our metrics are trusted by each of our clients. There is no way to find the best brains in development and design as quickly and successfully as can be done with Toptal.

As I said, companies use many ways to attract the best employees. But at the end of the day, when the company had 10 vacancies, and it was we who filled them as quickly as possible with the best staff, whose experience and skills were tested and not questioned, the company does not want to try other services. Most often it happens.

Of course, companies are looking everywhere and looking for the best people everywhere. But we almost always win.

- You are talking about talent on your side, I hear that you are quite convinced of this. How do you find your people, which turns out to be the most important thing in the end - the frelaser motivation or some secret ingredient in the work of your company?

There is not a single skill that would make someone a unique employee. You can work perfectly remotely, but you can be a bad engineer and so on, the example is clear. It all depends on the combination of all your skills and experience.

We analyze and decide whether to accept or refuse.

- What are your plans for 2016?

This year we will grow, most likely, in many different directions.

Right now we are working with designers and engineers, but we plan to expand in many other areas, including outside of IT.

- You have many competitors, albeit with reservations. There are a lot of freelancers, and those who work with you will certainly use other solutions. Do you have any special relationships with those talents that you eventually select?

You can have 5,000 accounts on different platforms with different audiences, Toptal will exist. And, most likely, we will remain the best source of clients for the best professionals.

No site guarantees anything to two parties, no rights to goals. We do this: a freelancer is a talent, will always put us on the top of the working and career hierarchy, since in Toptal he has the opportunity to work with world industry leaders, such as Airbnb or JPMorgan.

As for companies, they simply trust us more than others.

- Is it possible to compare you with high-level consultants, for example, legal, auditing or financial services on a different scale from a full-time accountant?

Yes, of course, in the sense that by our own name and reputation we give guarantees to our customers.

And the truth is that all world leaders are terribly frightened by what we are doing. I talk with many representatives of companies, and this is true. The problem of any such company is that it is sufficiently focused - no consultant can advise in all world industries at the same time. We only “yet” do not advise in the field of finance and taxes, but we will do this soon enough.

But companies, large and small companies, tens and hundreds of thousands of companies, know what Toptal has achieved during its existence. We have shown and proved that talents can work effectively without “sitting out” their time in the office. Many hire employees who do nothing.

This is the main achievement of our company - we have created the best software in the world, which allows us to perform our tasks without significant human intervention.

Take the example of Deloitte or PwC: they need a lot, just a huge number of people just to start communicating with a client. A lot of documentation, many employees, a large number of meetings. This is not Google, where you just clap your hands, call the boys and everyone starts to work.

In the end, any “corporation” gives a quality workforce. Medium or good executive power with a surface product / project management layer. If you think that software cannot be done for this - you are crazy. Sure you may.

A layer of team packing, task delivery and game plan - what needs to be done and everything. 5 years, maybe earlier, and this will make software, no doubt.

- I want to believe in it when you are so confident about the story, especially when your example proves it effectively. Now the classic question is what do you advise to a hypothetical own child who tries and is mistaken and asks for advice in creating some kind of product?

Learning to program is useful. It’s not at all necessary to want to become a developer, in the end it will just give you good knowledge and useful experience.

I love to write code from my childhood and this has always been a kind of self-expression for me. At the same time, it makes my thoughts more rational, built according to a certain logic.

I always felt and knew that it would help me in life and in everything that I do. Starting from the assessment of any situation and ending with the management team, means, everything else.

It makes you smarter, it makes your thoughts and actions more rational. Constantly I notice a huge difference between engineers and everyone else - most people are completely irrational.

And most often, it works negatively.

So my advice is to learn, learn complex things, learn things that you cannot understand, and work in complex systems. This will greatly help you in life.

- A career advice?

From my own experience. I left the university, everything that I achieved, I achieved myself. Work as a developer, find out what a software company is.

I can safely say that Toptal is the best company I've ever worked for. This knowledge gives me an understanding of where we are. Since I have worked in many companies and got very different impressions. Someone is growing fast (Slide, bought by Google, from where I left after the takeover) and actively develops the culture of developers.

In Slide, we had weekly iterations in a team of dozens of people. And at Toptal, a team of 5 engineers who develop technology that will seriously affect how dynamic systems work. It will take us a year and a half, but we will change the way we manage software, developers, and development.

Other companies simply can not afford to do this, they lack neither flexibility, nor employees, nor talents. And you can work with us.