Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Andy Baio screened early Kickstarter developers because founders couldn't review code

Perry Chen · Kickstarter: Perry Chen (2018) · Dec 31, 2018 · at 21:04

Perry Chen, co-founder of Kickstarter, explains how bringing in technologist Andy Baio solved the non-technical founding team's inability to evaluate developers and code.

0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.8s
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“One of the people we met was Andy Baio, who really helped us kind of figure out what kind of technology we should be using, and helped us interview the developers that we Would hire, and he eventually became our first CTO. That was tremendously helpful because none of us could review the code that we were, that developers were on the right track.”

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