🍍 Vamo: finding a co-founder on Tinder, 8-figure exit at 22, and the future of recruiting

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I am going to tell you a fun story about my friend Bolun Li today.

Every time we hang out, he tells me a story that makes me think, "There’s no way that’s real."

Bolun found his co-founder on Tinder and sold his first startup Zogo (completely bootstrapped) to Peak6 for 8 figures all cash at 22. 

I wrote about his story building Zogo last year and it got close to half a million views.

I caught up with him recently and he told me about his second venture, Vamo. It’s just as epic.

This whole story starts with one problem Bolun couldn’t solve: finding good developers.

Round 1: 8 Duke CS students, zero shipped product

Back at Duke, Bolun needed someone to build the Zogo app. He posted in the CS Facebook group and recruited CS students aggressively. At one point, he had 8 CS students working on Zogo. Some of them had offers from Facebook and other big tech companies.

BUT none of them could actually build it. They'd try for a bit, then give up.

Round 2: Finding the one on Tinder

Bolun was frustrated. He also happened to be on Tinder, so he added "tech founder looking for developers" to his bio as a Hail Mary.

He matched with a guy named Simon. Simon's bio also said "tech entrepreneur."

Simon had zero credentials, didn’t study CS, dropped out of college because he did not do well in classes.

Despite not having formal credentials, he had a strong track record of building viral apps. Simon built two Chrome extensions that each reached millions of users, and one was acquired for $250K.

Bolun's brain clicked. Simon had actually built things that people used. The 8 Duke CS students had only done coursework.

He recruited Simon as Zogo's co-founder. Simon built the entire app.

Zogo went viral and grew to 150+ bank customers and sold to Peak6 for mid 8 figures all cash.

Round 3: The Stanford engineer who couldn't fix a button

After selling Zogo and retiring early, Bolun started traveling the world for a year. He eventually got bored and un-retired himself to start something new, initially in the car dealership space.

Same wall immediately: he needed a technical person. Simon and the whole Zogo crew had already started their own companies while he was doing the world tour.

Bolun tried everything — dev shops in China. A recruiter with a $30K placement fee. Had a Stanford friend post in their CS Facebook group.

Eventually, he found a woman who went to Stanford and had spent 12 years at Facebook as an early employee.

However, issues quickly arose. The app they were building for car dealerships had a broken sign-up button. She couldn't fix it for a week. When Bolun asked how they'd solve it, she said: "I wish I still had my 60 engineers at Facebook who could get this done for me." 

It did not work out…

Bolun made the same mistake again. A fancy resume doesn’t mean someone can actually build.

Round 4: Startup acquisition at a house party

Desperate, Bolun started showing up to random parties in San Francisco. 

At one of these parties, he met Alec. 

Alec didn’t have any fancy resume and last worked at a small IT consulting company.

Alec showed Bolun a tool he'd built that scraped GitHub to evaluate engineers based on their actual code. He pulled up a profile of Bolun's previous co-founder Simon and broke down exactly why the data showed Simon was good.

Bolun got obsessed by this idea and eventually acquired Alec's company and founded Vamo.

The thesis is that people should be judged by what they've actually built, not where they went to school or what company they worked at. 

1/ MVP 

GitHub is where developers store their code and projects. The problem is that it's massive and messy. There's no easy way to search through it and find the best people.

The first version of Vamo tried to search GitHub projects and contributors behind them in real time, but it was slow and could only return ~30 results per search.

Bolun's reaction was very Bolun: why don't we just download the entire thing? AND they did. 

They scraped every single profile on GitHub and built their own database, allowing search to be a lot faster. 

2/ The PageRank moment

Then, they hit a new wall. 

A lot of great developers don't have any public projects on their profile, so how do you know they're good?

The solution was inspired by PageRank.

Google ranks websites by looking at how many quality websites link to them. The more respected sites pointing to you, the higher you rank.

Developer networks work the same way. On GitHub, most people only follow like 30-60 other developers. It's a tight circle. If you map out who follows who, who endorses whose work, who collaborates with who, you get a really accurate picture of who's actually good. 

If Elon Musk follows a developer, that one signal alone tells you a lot.

Code quality + social graph = how cracked a developer is

3/ Outbound machine

Another huge unlock was adding outbound email sequencing. 

Recruiters can send hyper-personalized emails to developers referencing their actual work. 

NOT the "I came across your profile and thought you'd be a great fit" LinkedIn spam that every engineer on earth has learned to ignore. 

This targeted approach has led to 30%+ in reply rate, dwarfing the <1% response rate for LinkedIn spam. 

The funny thing is Bolun initially didn’t want to show this product to anyone.

He wanted to keep it to himself and use it quietly to find developers for his own projects.

Out of nowhere, recruiters from big firms started calling him through word of mouth. They told him this was going to change the industry because everyone hates LinkedIn Recruiter.

Those signals eventually convinced him to go all in on Vamo.

Bolun hired an AE from Paraform and started signing customers. The customer base quickly expanded beyond recruiters. Founders looking for co-founders. VCs sourcing talent. Mercury using it to find startups to sell banking to. A gaming chair company using it to target developers.

Right now, they’re signing 3–5 recruiting firms every day.

Bolun’s vision for Vamo goes beyond a recruiting tool for developers. The end game is a world where talent is discovered by what they’ve actually built, not what school they went to or what logo is on their resume. Think vibe-coders evaluated by the projects they shipped, designers by their portfolios, and marketers by their campaigns.

Merit > logos.

—

See you next Tuesday,

Leo

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