Officially Launching Taro Premium + Joining YC ✌️
Today we’re making two announcements:
Taro Premium is now generally available: https://jointaro.com/membership.
We’re taking part in Y Combinator, the preeminent startup accelerator.
The Taro Experience
After coaching software engineers for years and building a community of 10s of thousands of engineers through email, YouTube, and LinkedIn, Alex and I decided to leave our full-time jobs in January to see if we could make a living doing what we love.
Taro is designed to help SWEs get onboarded and promoted faster. Our thesis: there’s a severe lack of guidance on the non-coding parts of the software engineering job, which is what ambitious software engineers need to navigate their career.
If you don’t have a good manager or mentor at your job, you’re at a huge disadvantage in your career. Our goal with Taro is to provide high quality, contextual wisdom from tech veterans – we’re a coach that scales to all engineers, independent of company or level.
With Taro Premium, we package up the best career insights through personalized Q&A, bi-weekly sessions, and a community of peers. We feel confident that the cost pays for itself (many times over) if you fit in our target demographic of full time software engineers.
Premium is a great fit if you’re in North America and working at a fast-moving tech company. This is where we have the highest density of premium members already, and we’ve proven the effectiveness of our frameworks and tactics.
Premium is not a good fit if you’re a freelancer, part-time contractor, or if you’re learning how to code. Our members are full-time engineers operating within a team.
Thank you to the 60+ of you who have joined Taro Premium already (from companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and TikTok) — it’s been amazing so far 🙏🏽
The YC Experience
We’re currently taking part of the current summer batch of YC (S22), which has >200 companies. Two observations:
The $500K finally hit our company bank account. We just agreed on how much to pay ourselves, which is nice after having no salary for 6+ months 💰 If you’re interested in things like salary + equity in a startup, we’re happy to share more details.
The signaling from being a YC company is huge. Tons of people have reached out looking to invest, partner with us, or work at Taro. This has tremendous value, and it doesn’t even consider the network within YC. Getting into YC is like getting into a prestigious college: people assume you have it all figured out, even if you don’t 😅
Alex and I talk about where we are in this 4 minute video:
We’re always open to feedback — just reply! We want to create the “Amazon Prime” of software engineering – the membership will have immediate and sticky value.
Best,
ps. Thanks to the ~500 of you who joined us for “how to navigate your performance review” live session. You can find the full recording as part of Taro Premium.
Rahul and I chat personally with very new member of Taro Premium - Since we're so early, we can "do things that don't scale" and work super closely with every new member!