Juicebox

SF recruiters - we're hosting one last hangout before the year wraps! We're opening up the Juicebox office next Wednesday, Dec 10th for a small end-of-year Holiday Mixer with the SF recruiting community. What you can expect: 🌱 Plant-your-own holiday succulent that you can take home ☕ A full-service hot chocolate cart with seasonal toppings 🍕 Slices of the best pizza in SF (as crowned by Eric Lee) … and legend has it, there are gifts under the holiday tree for attendees. RSVP before spots run out - link in comments ↓

We spent the week in Los Cabos for our yearly full-team offsite. Five days that reminded me how far we’ve come, and how much fun it is to build with this group. There were yacht dinners, ATVs through the desert, jet skis next to humpback whales, and somehow, the team still closed >300K from the villas. Last year around this same time, our “retreat” was just four of us: Harsh, Minchu, Ishan, and me - sitting around a table talking about what Juicebox would become. This year, there were twenty of us. And we have five more new hires joining us in the next few weeks. It’s easy to measure company growth in numbers. But it feels different when you see it in what happens between the product launches and demo calls - the laughter, the slack jokes, the random board games, and the way everyone just shows up for each other. Special thanks to Angela for planning every detail and celebrating her birthday weekend with us in the middle of it all. Grateful to be building Juicebox with this crew.

I still see teams sending a single recruiting email - and wondering why response rates are flat. It’s one of the most common mistakes we come across. People put so much energy into that first email - and then stop there. In reality, one or two steps rarely move the needle. Every additional touchpoint improves your response rates. It’s such a simple, high-impact change - just adding another email or two to keep the conversation alive. The other mistake? Treating follow-ups like reminders. A “just bumping this up” message doesn’t add any value. Each email in your sequence should bring something new: a different angle on the role, a new reason to join, a fresh story that helps the candidate see what makes your company different. The best sequences ensure that every touchpoint adds value and candidates start to actually engage.

TechCrunch just covered our $30M Series A raise led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Coatue Management, Y Combinator, Lux Capital, and NFDG. When David and I started Juicebox, we were 19 and 22, convinced that large language models could change how recruiting works. Recruiters were still relying on keyword searches, but we believed AI could understand profiles more like a human would, surfacing incredible candidates who’d never show up in traditional search. Fast forward to today: 2,500+ companies use Juicebox to find and hire faster, from seed-stage startups to teams at Cognition, Ramp, and Perplexity. We’ve grown to $10M ARR — with word of mouth driving the majority of our signups and subscriptions. Juicebox is becoming the default tool for teams making their next hires, and this TechCrunch article captures why we are so excited about the next chapter. Huge thank you to TechCrunch and Marina Temkin, CFA for capturing our story. And thanks to everyone who has taken a bet on Juicebox — customers, partners, and our small, but mighty engineering team behind the feature launches everyday. Link to the article in the comments!

One mistake founders make is hiring too many people too early. For a long time, Juicebox was just three people. Then three plus our founding engineer, Minchu Kulkarni. We didn’t make another hire until the beginning of this year. In the early days, adding people slows you down. You’re still changing direction constantly. You’re rewriting assumptions every week. You’re deleting more than you’re shipping. Our philosophy is simple: you hire when adding people makes you faster, not when you have money. We only started scaling the team after revenue was growing consistently, crossed $1M ARR, and felt confident in our product direction. Fast forward ten months later, the engineering team is now seven team members strong, and on a trajectory that we’re very excited about. If you want to join a team where the momentum is compounding quickly, reach out - we’re growing!

The best people for most jobs never even apply. They’re not scrolling job boards or chasing job alerts. They’re out there doing great work, often invisible to the companies that need them most. That’s the paradox of hiring today. Most roles get filled by whoever shows up, not by whoever’s best for the job. Outbound recruiting was meant to fix that. But even now, only a small fraction of roles are actively sourced. For everything else, companies still wait and hope. We built Juicebox because we believe the future of hiring combines human judgment with tools that work quietly in the background to search, sort, and surface the right people. That means recruiters spend less time finding candidates and more time connecting with them. It means every company can actively search for every role. And it means candidates start getting opportunities that actually fit, even for jobs they never would have looked for. When that happens, hiring stops being about luck or timing. It becomes about fit, curiosity, and potential. In fact, many members of our own team were sourced using Juicebox. We use it every day to do what it was built for: to help great people find each other faster.