A Letter from the Talent Llama Co-Founders on Joining Ashby

When my co-founder Ben and I started Talent Llama, we didn’t set out to sell the company.

We were focused on using AI to help teams run better early-stage interviews in a way that was practical, fair, and actually useful in real hiring workflows. We were early in the AI interviewing space, but we were starting to see traction. We had a small set of customers, a clear roadmap, and were in the process of raising our next round.

So joining Ashby wasn’t something we were actively looking for.

What changed our minds from raising our next round to joining Ashby? Three things: the product, the team, and the long-term direction.

1. Product

We first got to know Ashby through an integration, as a number of our customers were already using their ATS. It ended up being one of the smoothest integrations we’ve ever worked on, which was an early signal of how well the product is designed.

From there, we spent more time inside the product and talking to customers. The feedback was consistently strong — not just on feature depth, but on how thoughtfully everything was built. Ashby felt like a system that was designed end-to-end, rather than a collection of tools stitched together over time.

As founders, that matters. We care a lot about product quality and iteration speed. Seeing how quickly Ashby ships, and how much attention goes into the details, gave us confidence that what we had built could evolve faster as part of their platform than it could on its own.

2. Team

The second piece was the team.

Over the course of multiple conversations with Benji, Abhik, and others across the company, we got a clear sense of how Ashby operates. The team is small relative to what they’ve built, but the bar for both the talent and the product they are building is very high. People are thoughtful, direct, and focused on doing the work well.

It also felt familiar. At one point, Ben and I joked that it felt like talking to a slightly larger version of our own team — similar pace, standards, and expectations around ownership.

That kind of alignment isn’t something you can manufacture. It made the decision feel a lot less like joining a different company, and more like continuing the same work in a more experienced environment.

3. Direction

The third factor was how Ashby thinks about where recruiting technology is going.

From the outside, it’s easy to think of Ashby as “just” an ATS. But the reality is that it’s a much broader system — and one that’s increasingly becoming the operating layer for how companies hire.

That matters for what we were building.

AI interviewing doesn’t work particularly well as a standalone tool. It’s tightly connected to scheduling, evaluation, candidate context, and downstream decisions. The more disconnected it is, the less useful it becomes.

Building this directly into a system like Ashby (where all of that context already exists) opens up a very different set of possibilities.

We came to the same conclusion independently, but Ashby is already much further along in building that foundation. Joining forces allows us to move faster than we could on our own.

What We’re Excited to Build

Since quietly joining the Ashby team a few months back, we've been rebuilding our AI Interviewer on Ashby's platform.

Outside the feature specifics, our goals are to:

• Design interviews that feel practical for candidates, not overly artificial or performative
• Make outputs useful for hiring teams, not just novel
• Integrate tightly with the rest of the hiring workflow

We’re also excited to contribute beyond just this product area as part of Ashby’s all-in-one suite. A lot of the work we’ve done has been around how to structure and run AI-driven interactions in a way that is reliable and transparent. Those learnings apply more broadly to where Ashby is heading with AI.

Closing Thoughts

For us, this wasn’t about an exit strategy. It was about increasing the scope of what we can build and the impact it can have.

We’re joining a team that shares how we think about products, moves quickly, and has already built a strong foundation in a space we care deeply about.

While we keep building with Ashby, you’re welcome to join the waitlist here. We can’t wait to show you more of the product over time.

Adam and Ben