Bolun Li learned the struggle startups face recruiting top engineers when he founded Zogo, a financial literacy platform. Great coders, he told The Hustle, “are not great at marketing themselves” on LinkedIn.
A lot of gifted candidates are left undiscovered, and that’s the problem Li’s latest startup, Vamo, is trying to solve. It’s an AI-powered B2B recruiting platform that surfaces top developers from their public GitHub repositories, where their raw code — not their pedigree — is on display.
“If you hire a content creator to do videos for your company, obviously you’re going to look at the videos that they’ve made before versus the resume,” he said. “It just seems so obvious to me. Why are we not looking at GitHub for engineers?”
Since launching just over a month ago, Vamo says it’s attracted ~2k customers, including companies like Autopilot and Cognition, largely through word-of-mouth and Li’s LinkedIn posts highlighting the “cracked” coders — that’s slang for highly-skilled developers — Vamo has surfaced. One highlights a teenage Chipotle worker who’s been coding since he was a child.
How it works
Because many hiring managers, recruiters, and founders are not engineers, AI does the heavy lifting.
- Vamo’s AI analyzes GitHub profiles, then ranks engineers using an algorithm that factors in things like how many stars — how GitHub users bookmark and favorite projects — they’ve received, their followers, and community engagement. Those that rank highly get a “cracked” badge.
- Subscriptions start at $159/month, and allow users to search GitHub’s millions of profiles in plain language to find developers who’ve created similar projects. They can contact potential candidates directly through their GitHub emails.
Vamo is currently tailored to find engineers over “vibe coders,” though Li has plans to build similar projects aimed at other kinds of creators.
“I think the future shouldn’t be defined by your job titles and your LinkedIn profile. It should be what you actually built,” he said.
