Yahoo just acquired a San Francisco-based startup called Distill, which was working on a way to make technical recruiting easier by pairing video interviews and programming challenges. They had raised $1.3 million in funding from investors including Felicis Ventures, China’s Innovation Works and DN Capital.
The startup’s two founders, Deng-Kai Chen and Ken MacInnis, came from Tapjoy, StumbleUpon and Google. They created Distill because they had built up engineering teams before and were familiar with the frustrations that come with managing and scheduling technical interviews.
Distill’s product paired the basic features of a video chat service like Skype, and put them alongside a text editor and file upload space so that an interviewer could walk a candidate through a collaborative coding session.
We hear they’ll be working on mobile ads products for Yahoo.
Here’s the memo the company just posted to its website:
We are excited to share the news that the Distill team is off to start a new adventure! We are joining Yahoo. Prior to creating Distill, we were part of the original team behind the creation of Tapjoy, a mobile performance-based advertising platform that drove deep engagement and monetization opportunities for mobile app publishers. We’ll be drawing upon our expertise from the Tapjoy days to help build out Yahoo’s mobile advertising solutions.As of today, we have stopped development of Distill Schedule and Distill Interview. You will still be able to schedule interviews through the end of February, and the Distill platform will remain available through March 30, 2014. If you have any questions, concerns, or data requests, please contact us at support@distill.cc, or reach out to your account manager directly.We want to express our sincere thanks and gratitude to everyone at the awesome companies we have been working with, as well as the candidates who have met their future employers through Distill. It’s been a fun ride for us, and we couldn’t have gotten this far without your help. Thank you!!