How One Idea Could End Job Borders Forever

What we talked about.

Sunny Ray sits down with Ilya, founder and CEO of VanHack, a Vancouver based global tech talent marketplace. Born in Siberia during the Soviet era, raised briefly in Israel, and settled in Vancouver as a child, Ilya shares how a lifetime of feeling like an outsider shaped his empathy for immigrants and his mission to connect talented engineers worldwide with jobs abroad. He traces his path from door to door recycling hustles as a kid, through an applied economics degree at Cornell, to a corporate stint at mining giant Vale in Brazil, and eventually into Rio's startup scene, where he first noticed brilliant engineers held back by English and communication skills, not coding ability. That insight became VanHack, now eleven years old with over 2000 hires and half a million registered engineers across 100 plus countries. Ilya opens up about an early cofounder equity mistake, building the company alongside his wife and co-founder, and how VanHack is using AI to speed up vetting and matching while tackling the deeper, still unsolved problem of trust, language, and time zones in global hiring.

VanHack's Ilya on turning his immigrant childhood into a global engine for connecting overlooked tech talent with jobs abroad.

The questions, and the answers.

What does home mean to someone who's been an immigrant their whole life?

Home for me is here in Vancouver, where I moved when I was five. But when I first arrived there was always this feeling of being different, of being an outsider. I struggled at first, and even though it was over 30 years ago, it shaped who I am. It made me empathize with people who are relocating, and it's cool to see someone else get that same experience when we help them get hired abroad.

Was the entrepreneurial itch there early? What did young Ilya want to be?

I always told people I wanted to be a businessman, I didn't even know the word entrepreneur yet. My parents were into Amway and MLM stuff, and even though the business side didn't work out, the self-help books and training tapes really influenced me. I ran a little recycling business door to door for candy money, did lemonade stands, always trying something since I was five or six.

How does a Canadian econ grad end up in Brazil working for a mining giant?

A group called AIESEC, kind of like what VanHack is today, connected me to Vale, the big mining company. They emailed me on a Wednesday saying I had an interview in Toronto Friday, and I was in Ithaca, New York. I drove overnight for a 9am interview then drove back. Getting that job was life changing because it let me move to Brazil and learn a new culture.

Can you walk me through the moment you realized the coding-but-not-communication gap was a problem worth solving?

There wasn't really one moment. I had a company called Brazil Career Blueprint helping people move to Brazil, then my Brazilian friends said I was doing it backwards, I should help Brazilians move to Canada. That reframed it for me, the real pain point was senior engineers who were great at coding but not so good at communication. That's when we realized there was a recruiting business there too.

What happened when you hit publish on that first ugly Portuguese landing page?

Honestly nothing too much happened. It was focused on people who wanted to learn to code and come to Vancouver for an in-person boot camp. I posted it in Brazilian Facebook groups, which shows how long ago this was. The people who signed up already knew how to code and just wanted help with resumes and interview prep, that's when I realized what the real market was.

What was one of the hardest failures or wrong turns in the early VanHack years?

Having three other cofounders from day one with no vested equity, we didn't even have a contract. I thought it was just a side project so I gave everyone 25 percent to be fair, thinking we were all friends. That blew up in my face. My wife and cofounder Giselle still brings it up to remind me.

Your thesis is that great talent is everywhere but access isn't. Why is that still broken in 2026?

It's really hard to build trust online, vetting an engineer is a huge problem especially with AI now. English is another barrier, if every great engineer spoke English there'd be millions more available to North American companies. There's also a hidden time zone bias, most developers are in the Eastern Hemisphere while most jobs are in the Western Hemisphere. It's a big, complicated problem.