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Weiting Liu. Photo credit: Codementor.
When Weiting Liu saw people using his startup in an unexpected way, he decided to embrace it rather than clamp down on it. Some users on Codementor, where programmers pay gurus for advice on their coding conundrums, “wanted to hire these veterans for freelance projects,” he says.
For Weiting and his team, that became the basis of a new platform, which rolls out today. The spin-off CodementorX has roped in its “top 2 percent” of mentors – “elite developers” who work freelance or moonlight from the likes of Google or Amazon, explains the Taiwan-born entrepreneur – so that startups of all sizes can get them to work on projects.
It allows startups to get expert input on building apps and services from the kind of people that they simply couldn’t afford to hire full-time.
Upending Upwork
Top developers in Silicon Valley are not only expensive, they’re difficult to find as they receive no shortage of job offers. One Californian startup caused a stir by straight up offering new hires US$1 million over four years. With six-figure salaries the norm, a startup with little or no funding can only afford an experienced dev for, like, a weekend or for a brief project. And that’s exactly what CodementorX has in mind.
Photo credit: spaxia / 123RF.
“Some fast-growing companies cannot grow as fast as they want because it’s difficult to hire,” he says.
Along with the new product, Weiting has just secured US$1.6 million in funding led by WI Harper, he tells Tech in Asia. Previous investors include Techstars and 500 Startups.
Usually they don’t do this for the money.
While some startups turn to what Weiting calls “traditional freelancing platforms” to find people to design logos or code a few things, the founder sees CodementorX as very different – the main divergence being that he wants to focus on only the cream of the coding crop.
“You’d never find them on Upwork or Freelancer,” he says cheerily of the experienced mentors. Only the top-performing ones are invited to be freelance coders.
But they won’t come cheap.
“Usually they don’t do this for the money,” counters the CEO. Rather, they take up the projects to stay sharp and to work with startups they genuinely find interesting – since they get to pick and choose from the assignments on offer. “They find it very rewarding to do do,” he adds.
The new service goes up against Toptal, a site that’s a lot more specialist than Upwork.
See: The tech startup roadmap for non-technical entrepreneurs
Taiwan roots
A Stanford alum in the mid-00’s, Weiting splits his time between Taiwan – where his startup has 17 staffers – and Silicon Valley, where so many of its mentors are based.
The startup team on an outing. Photo credit: Codementor.
Its customers – the less experienced programmers and startups who need help or who want to hire the veteran devs – are spread more widely, with 55 percent in the US, 30 percent in Europe, and the rest in Asia. That’s “despite no globalization effort yet,” notes Weiting. The site has 150,000 developers and over 5,000 vetted developers.
See: Y Combinator vs Techstars: startup incubator comparison by a three-time alum
At the Ivy League college, he got turned onto the idea of building something big.
“Mark Zuckerberg went to Stanford and did a panel called ‘Finding the Next Google’ with Sean Parker and Peter Thiel. At the time, Zuckerberg just looked like some young college dropout. As I watched this panel back in 2004, I thought to myself, ‘Hey, it’s not impossible for someone to build a big company right after school,’” the Codementor boss told us back in 2014 when the team got US$600,000 seed funding.
His first startup, SocialPicks, tracked the performance of stock market bloggers. It performed well, getting acquired in 2009. Then he decided to return to Taiwan. As he built a social media marketing agency with his brother, Weiting noticed that many of his junior developers sometimes got stuck, which spawned the idea for the paid coaching that Codementor launched with in 2013.
The entrepreneur is staying put on the island, determined to “build a Silicon Valley startup in Taiwan,” which is often overlooked by investors and the media as it’s squeezed between the mammoth mainland China and the huge but largely untapped potential of Southeast Asia.
“Taiwan has so many successful startups, like Acer and Asus, which were startups once. I want to see more startups, globally known, employing thousands in Taiwan,” says Weiting. “We have an opportunity to do it. It can be extraordinary for the [startup] ecosystem in Taiwan.”
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