Eric Ly has a storied career: He started as an engineering intern at IBM, and 20 years later found himself co-starting and serving as the founding CTO of LinkedIn. After that, he went on to start a slew of companies, including his most recent one, KarmaCheck, which uses AI-driven technology to make background checks easier.
Ly sat down with Becca and Dom on Found to chat about the journey to starting KarmaCheck and how much technology has changed since he started out decades ago. Background checks, for example, traditionally were a manual process, with people filling out forms and bringing in physical records. Today, much of the process has been automated.
“It’s really important for them to be able to hire quickly,” Ly told TechCrunch, adding that speed is now a currency for companies looking to hire effectively.
He also spoke about his early days at LinkedIn, recalling a time before people had online identities and said even back then during the dawning days of the internet, he never could have expected for the world to become what it has. Some big differences he’s noticed involve how different the role of CTOs is as technology has changed and how the process of raising venture capital has globalized.
“When I started LinkedIn 20 years ago with other co-founders, the investor industry was really much smaller than it is now.” He said you almost had to live in the Bay Area in order to engage and have conversations with further investors. “What’s happened since then, in 20 years, is that VC has really become a global phenomenon.”
After LinkedIn, Ly went on to work on an app that helped facilitate networking and built a blockchain project that is no longer active but that he calls a precursor to KarmaCheck.
“What I realized was that in each of these instances, there was this kind of underlying problem around how people are able to connect with each other and how do they establish a basis of trusting each other, such that more interesting interactions can occur?” he continued. He said that starting companies become addicting and that from an early age he wanted to be a founder.
“Even my dad was an entrepreneur,” Ly said. “He had started his own companies in the civil engineering construction business and it became very successful.”
Tune in to our conversation with Ly to learn more about the lessons he’s learned over the years starting a company and what his plans are to scale KarmaCheck.