NYCFC: April 2026

Vrijen Attawar of CareerSpan's founder spotlight, NYC Founders Club Quarterly Dinner recap, events, and more.

NYCFC: April 2026

NYCFC: April 2026

Vrijen Attawar of CareerSpan's founder spotlight, NYC Founders Club Quarterly Dinner recap, events, and more.

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NYC Founders Club, Jordan, Aakash, Adam & Mike
March 26, 2026

Opening Remarks

News from Members

Love seeing all the incredible stuff our members get up to :’)

This edition:

  • Vrijen Attawar of CareerSpan’s full Founder Spotlight

  • April events

  • NYC Founders Club Quarterly Dinner recap

  • New roles from NYCFC members

Let’s get started! 🚀

Member Spotlight: Vrijen Attawar, Co-founder and CEO of CareerSpan

Who are you and what are you building?

"My name is Vrijen, also go by V, founder of CareerSpan. We use conversational coaching to help candidates understand their deeper value, or their true strengths. And then we map that onto jobs that folks are looking to find candidates for. It's essentially a way for us to get much better quality applicant data and use that in a more effective way to match."

What do your customers get out of CareerSpan?

“On a really simple level, what are we all trying to do in that seed to Series A stage hiring? You have a certain amount of time you can allocate to going through the talent pipeline. We're all trying to optimize for how many promising, worthwhile candidates do we see for the least amount of effort. Now, historically, our options have been just accepting that we have to read a lot of resumes. But before AI, the resume meant something, right? It meant something because the words on the page couldn't just be generated out of nowhere with complete ease. When AI comes around, people are like, great, AI can reason, AI can read this, AI can handle this for me. Unfortunately, the problem is that AI can also generate a fake resume, or help someone figure out what to say to pass an ATS, which is a completely questionable technology in many ways.

So what are you really supposed to do? And so I think for us, where we found a lot of alpha with recruiters and with employers is you actually need to know someone deeply. You need to be able to match them not just on the skills you're looking for, like Node.js, but what we really care about is: are they going to be a cultural fit? Are they going to add to the team dynamic, or is it going to be subtractive to bring them on? And the stat I'll end with is 46% of hires fail by the 18-month mark. And 90% of the reason they fail is a values, mindset, or soft skills mismatch. So what you can conclude is that we're actually very good at figuring out whether someone can do the underlying job. Most founders at our level are capable of discerning who's able to do the thing. It is whether they're able to do the thing at this company, on this team, in this position, under these constraints. And that's something that is a qualitative judgment on who someone is in a dynamic where that person is self-interested. So we respond by just throwing in more resumes, more assessments, more rounds of interviews. But all you're doing is adding more data to the pile without actually cutting the Gordian knot and saying, what are the most essential things to know about this person? Which are essentially, what are the trade-offs? Bring this person in — what are they going to add to the environment? What do I lose?”

What’s the future of recruiting going to look like?

"You know how in strategy games there's a fog of war — you can only see so far ahead? Everyone's fog of war is basically the first 100 to 300 candidates you give a shift about reading the resume, right? Because everyone that applies after that point — they're not hearing back. We know they're not hearing back. Even out of the first 300, which I'm being very charitable in implying that a busy founder will read 300 resumes with less than a 1% conversion rate, it just is more frustrating than anything else. And so I think in truth, the real question for me is: who is going to set up the infrastructure to collect human data at scale? Obviously, we would like for that to be us. But what society needs — to avoid some sort of scenario where your dream candidate could be five blocks over from you but you would never know — is this: that candidate is no longer just competing with everyone else in New York City. They're also competing with someone in Sri Lanka where the AI just chose to apply to your job. They're competing against basically everyone under the sun trying to fit through a small pipeline. And so I think once we get rid of some of these old practices and beliefs around what it takes to understand people, hopefully we'll have a more positive hiring landscape."

What’s your biggest ask right now? How can others help?

V: "One of the things I've been starting to realize is the extent to which it isn't just about getting people jobs anymore. It is quite literally about figuring out how people stay relevant. And so on a personal note, what is most interesting to me and where I'm looking to figure out things next is not just helping people represent themselves better, not just getting the job — but actually helping people that are high agency but lack maybe the context or the insights or just the structure to become technical enough to be dangerous. That's the new goal for any non-technical person that wants to stay relevant: be technical enough to be dangerous. That's going to be a moving target. Luckily, it's only going to move in a direction where you need to know less technical stuff to be effective. But that is still the direction to go in. And what we're looking to do is figure out whether that's through acquisition or through partners that we work with — who are interested in either helping their non-technical staff level up in that way, or find non-technical or technical staff with those specific attributes that you actually have to make the effort to cultivate the data on. But then you can really know how to put together a team at a much higher success rate than 46%."

Mike: "So if I heard this correctly, you are looking for companies or people that are not necessarily technical now, but are looking or striving to become more technical. You're trying to help bridge that gap."

V: "That's right, that's right. Or to be most specific, founders that want their technical teams leveled up collectively, but in a way that makes them more effective and more employable. But by and large, I think those are sort of the two directions that we're looking at."

If this sounds like you or someone you know, reach out at me@vrijenattawar.com or via LinkedIn.

Read our full interview with Vrijen here.

March Highlights

Last week, we brought together a group of our members for our inaugural Quarterly Dinner at Le Crocodile in Williamsburg. As one of our members said best:

“Just wanna throw out some gratitude for yesterday's dinner:

Sometimes I forget how important it is to talk to other founders because we kind of have tunnel vision and don’t see outside of our own worlds a lot. When in reality, all of us have a lot in common.

While we have, as I like to call them, ‘platinum-plated problems,’ they are still, at the end of the day, problems.

It was nice to talk with people and be real rather than having to feel like we're salespeople for our company all the time aka ‘the mask’ if anyone can relate.

The dinner was great.”

Something every founder can surely relate to!

Coming Up 🔥

Events:

🗽 = NYCFC Event

Subscribe to our Luma calendar here.

Email jordan@nycfounders.club to have us feature your event!

Roles at NYCFC Companies 👩🏻‍💻

‼️ = just announced

See you next month!

Thanks for tuning in!

– Aakash, Adam, Mike, and Jordan

P.S.

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