2 brothers who worked at Facebook are on a mission to help engineers avoid terrible startups and make a boatload of money (FB)

Two brothers are trying to help tech workers find jobs at hot startups most likely to increase tenfold in value.
Ling and Thomas Bao are the cofounders of FutureEngine, a recruitment startup aimed at Silicon Valley.
It showcases promising job opportunities to job-seekers that pass its screening tests, and the pair often take a fee for placing candidates.
"There's no faster way to impact the world right now and generate personal wealth than to join a hypergrowth startup," CEO Ling Bao said.

Ling Bao knows how life-changing working for a buzzy startup early can be.

He joined Facebook back in 2010, before its IPO. It was a hot commodity — it had around 400 million users by the end of that year — but it was still a fraction of the size it is today, with a staggering 2.5 billion people across all its apps.

Bao didn't become wealthy overnight, he said; the value of Facebook's stock crept up slowly after it went public. But as the years went by, it became clear to him that he now had considerable financial security: "Our family went without income for a year or so [in 2017]. It felt great going to sleep at night not having to worry about paying the bills or about some horrible life event like having a health issue and getting fired."

He and his brother Thomas — another Facebook veteran, who worked at Instagram — are now on a mission to help other tech workers in Silicon Valley find work, and make big bucks in the process. They're launching FutureEngine, a job-hunting startup that tries to connect engineers to the startups that are most likely to "10X" in value — that is, to increase tenfold in value, (hopefully) making their employees filthy rich along the way.

"We fundamentally believe there's no faster way to impact the world right now and generate personal wealth than to join a hypergrowth startup," Ling Bao told Business Insider in an interview.

FutureEngine hunts for 'rocket ship' startups

FutureEngine is, simply put, a recruiting platform for the tech industry. It screens job-hunters with tests, then provides them with curated lists of opportunities at what it describes as "rocket ship startups" — a reference to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's remark about job-hunting that "if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat!"

Its website lists openings at buzzy outfits including electric scooter startup Bird, blockchain biz Coinbase, "Pokémon Go" creators Niantic, payment processor Stripe, and DNA testing lab 23andMe, among others.

Some of the businesses listed have partnerships with FutureEngine, paying them fees equivalent to 15-20% of a candidate's base first-year salary — a hefty sum in Silicon Valley, where technical role salaries often stretch into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But FutureEngine also lists firms that it doesn't have a relationship with and doesn't draw fees from (unlike its competitors, Bao said).

"We will connect engineers to the best companies that are fit for them, period. Now some companies then, on top, pay us this contingency fee because we do additional vetting for them," Bao said.

FutureEngine Product Screenshot

FutureEngine tracks down next-big-thing startups using a number of metrics. There's headcount and employee growth (1,230, or 40% year-on-year for work messaging app Slack), and venture capital funding raise ($97 million, in the case of sneaker marketplace startup GOAT). Reviews on GlassDoor, the employer reviews website, are also taken into account — like video conferencing tech firm Zoom's 4.9/5.0 rating from 193 reviews.

"All of these companies have a very good shot of being a 10X," said Bao, "but nobody can make guarantees right ... we try to prune the list to those that we think have a credible shot based on your growth, history, funding."

The data scientist-turned-entrepreneur say he and his brother's stints at Facebook and Instagram leaves them well-placed to identify capable candidates. "We were both lucky enough to work with very, very amazing people, to interview a lot of people to figure out who is gonna be successful at Facebook or Instagram. And just having that experience, I think, gave us a very good eye for talent, and a very good understand of why having good talent at a company is so critical."

14,000 engineers have used FutureEngine so far (though only a fraction have actually been placed into jobs), and the startup has raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding, which the brothers intend to use on hiring. For now, though the team is just two people — Ling and Thomas Bao, who sit in CEO and CTO roles respectively.

"We can be very candid and then attack with two brains against these problems, rather than have to, a lot of times, ... play optics and make sure everyone stays motivated," Bao said of working with his brother.

"I know we're going to have this relationship for the rest of our lives, so our incentives are as aligned as you could be."

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