Distill

» see distill.cc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Yahoo announced the purchase on 13 February 2014, and what it had actually bought was seven engineers. Distill's two founders, Ken MacInnis and Deng-Kai Chen, went into Yahoo's mobile advertising division, which had nothing to do with anything they had built. The company they were leaving behind made software for conducting technical interviews, and Yahoo had no interest in selling that to anybody.

Distill had been founded in San Francisco in 2012 by two people who had put engineering teams together at Tapjoy and StumbleUpon and had opinions about how badly the process worked. They shipped two things. Distill Schedule handled the calendar misery of getting an interviewer and a candidate into the same half hour. Distill Interview was the interesting one: a video call with a code editor and a file drop sitting next to it, so an interviewer could watch somebody actually write something instead of listening to them describe writing it over a phone line.

Money arrived on 17 September 2013, $1.3 million from a group led by Felicis Ventures that also included DN Capital. Five months later the company was gone. Scheduling was cut off during February, and the platform itself stayed up until 30 March 2014 so existing customers could get their data out. The site told users to contact support with requests, which is how a two-year-old startup says goodbye when its engineers are already working somewhere else.

~ the record ~

~ the interview in a browser tab ~

The pitch on Distill's own about page is worth reading now because it has become the default. The founders argued that they could judge a candidate properly once that person was in the building and could be put in front of a whiteboard or an interactive coding problem, and that everything before the on-site visit was a phone screen doing a bad imitation of it. Their product was an attempt to drag the on-site experience into a browser tab. The marketing copy said it plainly: replace the phone screen.

Eleven years later that is just what a software interview is: a video window with a shared editor both people can type into, and a problem that appears in it at the start of the hour. I have been on both ends of that setup more than once as an engineer in Ankara, and the geography is the whole reason it matters: the shared editor is what made it possible for a company in one country to assess somebody in another without anybody getting on a plane. In 2014 a startup had to build that by hand and then fail to sell it.

~ two buyers for one company ~

The split is the part worth recording. Yahoo took the team in February under an acqui-hire and had no plan for the software. In April, Gild, a company selling tools for finding and evaluating engineering candidates, bought Distill's products and its technology so that existing customers would keep being served. For a while afterward distill.cc kept serving the old marketing site with a banner across the top explaining that Gild had acquired Distill and its products, and the stylesheet carried an image file named distill-gild-logo-white.

There is one artifact of the ending that nobody ever crawled. Among the assets served from Distill's CDN is a background tile living under a directory called goodbye, and the archive picked it up on 14 February 2014, the day after the Yahoo announcement. The farewell page it belonged to was never captured by anyone. All that survives of it is a piece of its wallpaper, timestamped the morning after.

Gild did not last much longer itself. The hedge fund Citadel bought it in October 2016, which was another purchase of a team rather than a product. distill.cc now answers with a redirect to a domain marketplace, where the name is for sale to anybody who wants it.

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