Harj Taggar (born 1984 or 1985) is an entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Auctomatic, a platform for online sellers, in 2007, and Triplebyte, a technical hiring platform, in 2015. Taggar was also the first non-founder Partner at the startup accelerator Y Combinator, having joined in 2010, and returned as a Group Partner in 2020. He is an angel investor and co-founded Initialized Capital with Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian.
Education
Taggar attended the University of Oxford's law school for a few years. In 2006, he left law school to move to Silicon Valley and pursue a business idea that would eventually become Auctomatic.
Career
In 2007, Taggar co-founded Auctomatic, a platform for online sellers to manage auctions and marketplace listings, with his brother Kulveer and Patrick Collison and John Collison. The company was on-boarded to Y Combinator that same year. Since Taggar and his co-founders were "non-technical," Y Combinator accepted them with the condition that one of them learned programming; Taggar was the one who eventually learned. One year later, Auctomatic was acquired by Live Current Media.
Taggar joined Y Combinator in 2010 as one of its first non-founder Partners. During his tenure, he was frequently interviewed in publications like TechCrunch, Business Insider, and Fast Company, where he shared insights on startup accelerators, what makes startups successful, and considerations for pitching companies to investors. In 2015, he coined the term "second-time founder syndrome," describing how experienced founders may overthink idea selection and focus on ideas that sound impressive to peers rather than those with genuine potential.
In 2011, Taggar became an angel investor through the joint fund Initialized Capital, which he co-founded with Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian. In 2013, they pooled $39 million to put into startups.
In 2015, Taggar, along with Ammon Bartram and Guillaume Luccisano, co-founded Triplebyte, a hiring platform to assess the technical skills of software engineers, especially those without established education backgrounds at traditionally well-known colleges. While at Y Combinator, Taggar had begun envisioning new systems and processes to reach, interview, and hire engineers, including an "interviewing checklist" that Y Combinator still uses. Triplebyte was on-boarded to Y Combinator the same year. By 2018, the company raised $10 million in a Series A funding round spearheaded by Initialized Capital. One year later, it raised millions of dollars in several other rounds of seed funding with backing from YC Continuity and other investors. Over 500 companies have since used Triplebyte to hire over a thousand employees, including Adobe, Box, Instacart, Uber, Dropbox, and American Express.
In 2020, Taggar returned to Y Combinator as a Group Partner.
References
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