The Very Late 2024 Shareholder Letter

What's to come in 2025 and a review of Interview Query's 2024's performance

Introduction

Dear Shareholders and Interested Parties,

We have crossed the sixth year of building Interview Query.

At the end of the day, we are interested in one thing: landing as many people as we can into the jobs of the future.

For me, there is no better mission to work on. And 2025 will hopefully be our best year yet.

What’s up 2025?

The theme for 2025 is AI + vertical market expansion. While in previous years we stayed within our niche of data science interview preparation, in 2025 our goal is to expand past data science into any jobs that require technical assessment of a candidate’s ability in the interview.

While there are many jobs that hire based on just historical qualifications or an ability to breathe and show up on time, we can safely say those industries are not for us, nor the future. As the world rapidly changes, we see two truths that remain constant: people will always want better jobs, and companies will always want top-tier talent.

Which is why the rise of these AI interview cheating tools is a paradox. There are now many apps out there that allow candidates to cheat through their remote interviews using LLMs. And as AI gets better at solving problems, it presents itself as disruptive to archaic interview processes.

Bad actors will always strike first, but does help light the fuse that will force many companies to adapt. And just as companies adopt AI to improve their business workflows, they will also adapt their interview processes to reflect this. We are well primed to also adapt ourselves, towards teaching the candidates the skills to navigate this new employment paradigm.

Say hello to Interview Query’s newest mascot - Felix the Fox.

We’re not oblivious to the risks to our business that AI and LLMs have though as they slowly turn the cost of generating content to zero. The question for us is if the effort to learn and get better remains. Even before ChatGPT arrived, almost all of the content on Interview Query was freely available on the internet. Most people undoubtably know that they have to put in effort to learn.

So our goal is to build a platform where people will actually see results. There’s a difference between the person reading about diet plans and the person who actually loses twenty pounds. And we want be the business of the latter.

The Changing Business Philosophy

When starting Interview Query, I’ve gotten very lucky with timing. My disillusionment with my job happened at the same time as finding a friend that could build, and then consequently quitting to go all-in right before the explosion of tech hiring during Covid, all combined together to propel Interview Query into something that could grow from 0 to 1.

In last year’s letter, I wrote about my goal in building a holdco, and doing so with a second business that was a marketing agency. But of course a few months after posting my shareholder letter, I had stopped working with all clients. And this created a fundamental understanding about myself: one where a new 0 to 1 business couldn’t be manufactured if I didn’t want to pay the price.

In my view, a new business required energy, grit, passion, and other intangibles. Interview Query was formed by the excitement of playing a new type of game for the first time. But after sailing through the first section, it was getting harder to pick myself back up after facing defeat by the same bosses.

For some time, I wanted to teleport to a completely different map entirely. It was easy to be excited by the uncertainty from building something new, rather than playing the existing game that was getting harder to make progress in.

Did Interview Query really need my own specific skillset? Was there a better owner for the business as a whole? Am I still interested in being an entrepreneur?

Over time, it’s been apparent that these questions and struggles are all part of the challenges that every entrepreneur faces. But finding ways to make the business exciting, to take breaks and explore new paths, to find new opportunities in the rough, all require facing down a path of continuous uncertainty.

I don’t have any answers here, but one thing continues to become clear: survival means not quitting. It is quite easy to quit, if you’re doing the same thing over and over again. And so in many ways, the pain of stagnation pushes towards growth as a necessity of survival.

Review of 2024 and the path forward

Last year we hit our financial targets, validated the market’s opportunity for growth, and re-energized our team into 2025.