Recruiting works like dating. Success depends on timing (who else is in the market), what both sides need (role responsibilities vs. your skills), chemistry (value alignment), and whether you're both genuinely excited about what comes next.

We sat down with Alex Cui, CTO and co-founder of GPTZero, to understand how he evaluates technical talent. GPTZero serves over 10 million users as North America's leading AI detection platform. Their technical bar is high, their team is growing fast, and Alex faces one of a founder's hardest jobs: building an A-player technical team. What separates good from great?

None of that cramming LeetCode the week before interviews, or spinning up a portfolio project because applications opened. He wants to see that building, shipping, and solving problems is just what you naturally do, whether it’s interview season or not.

Here's how that shows up across the four-stage gauntlet: a take-home assignment, two technical rounds, and a behavioral round.

GPTZero hands you a React project with open-ended requirements. You get an API and a prompt to build something similar to what GPTZero offers, then are asked to display the build in an interesting way.

Exceptional candidates show creativity in how they present the data and intuition for what users actually need. People who regularly build React projects and ship things move differently, and quickly, through this assignment. They're not performing to get the interview, this is just how they work.

Next, you’ll build a new feature on top of your take-home, live during the interview. Alex deliberately picks a problem that AI gets wrong. You can use AI tools, but he's watching to see if you understand your own code and know when and how to test versus just prompting Claude without actually knowing what you built.

Can you write well-organized, testable, production-ready code that makes sense not only to you, but that others can easily build on? Usually in the interview, this involves implementing a simple computer game in an object-oriented programming context.

This round separates people who've built real projects from those who've ground through LeetCode problems. The difference appears in your architectural choices, how you organize code, how you think about testing and, perhaps most importantly, how you think about others who will have to work with your code. 

Edward Tian, CEO and fellow co-founder of GPTZero, asks about your mistakes and what you learned from them. He's looking for humility and self-awareness, two of GPTZero's core values.

He also asks what you'd build at GPTZero if given a hackathon. The question tests whether you've actually thought about their mission or you're mass-applying to every startup you can find. Genuine curiosity shows up in how you talk about their product, not in how well you memorized their website the night before.

Alex and Edward hire people who spot problems and start solving them without waiting for permission.

They’ve brought on former founders who pivoted their startups after learning from failures. An engineer who, at their previous company's hackathon offsite, proposed using LLMs to handle customer support workflows differently while everyone else enjoyed the break. (That company built an entire team around the engineer's idea). And GPTZero hired each because they saw someone who takes initiative.

You can't rehearse that behavior for an interview.

Technical skill is the baseline. Focus on building a track record that shows you were already doing this work before the job posting went live. Build because you're curious. Ship because you want to see your ideas in the world. Solve problems because they're interesting to you. The interview is just where founders gets to see what you've already been doing all along.

If your club wants a window into early-stage product growth, our team can share what we’ve learned working alongside founders through a VC lens.

Whether that’s judging at a hackathon, dropping into a fireside chat, or giving your members an early look at upcoming jobs across our 130+ portfolio companies. If this sounds like something you’re planning, email our team at [email protected]. 

Until the next push,

Valentina on behalf of Reach Capital

Reach Capital invests in early-stage founders redefining how we learn, live, and work. Our portfolio of 130+ startups includes tools you might’ve used in school (ClassDojo, Desmos, Brilliant) and next-gen, AI-native disruptors shaping how future generations build, work, and thrive (like Replit and GPTZero). 

These teams are constantly on the lookout for talented builders. Share what you’re studying, building, or exploring, and we’ll intro you to projects, people, and paid opportunities for you to build upon.