The NYU Dropout Who Decided to Kill the Resume

What we talked about.

This episode of Sunny Ray's interview series features Maher, an NYU dropout who founded Velric, an AI native hiring platform built around what he calls the Velric Score. Raised between New York, India, and Canada, and trained in a professional acting school before turning entrepreneur, Maher explains how a chaotic hiring crunch at his family's company exposed the flaws of resume based recruiting. Velric replaces resumes with personalized, AI generated work missions that test execution, logic, common sense, and integrity rather than credentials. Maher discusses why he refuses to build AI powered interviews, how cold calling and personal networks helped him land early customers, and why revenue matters more to him than chasing venture funding. He also touches on partnerships with Hunter College and Northeastern University, plans to let candidates share their Velric Score publicly, and his broader philosophy that younger founders must learn from generations who still control the economy. The conversation blends founder story, product philosophy, and a critique of resume driven, AI flooded hiring.

An NYU dropout explains why he built Velric to replace resumes with AI generated proof of work missions.

The questions, and the answers.

What are you building? What is the Velric Score, give us the elevator pitch.

We work with companies to help them find talent through AI native work missions and assessments. Recruiters put links out on job boards and social media, candidates upload their profiles, and our AI creates a personalized assessment for them within seconds. From that, recruiters can see common sense, speed, logic, integrity and execution, things a resume or normal assessment cannot show. It is proof of execution and proof of work, removing bias from hiring.

Is this a two-sided marketplace or built for recruiters?

It is not a marketplace at all. It is fully for recruiters, we are recruiter centric and candidate friendly. The vision is that every company uses Velric assessments to hire, so candidates do not have to keep doing repetitive take-home tests. Unlike platforms that only do technical assessments, ours covers the full range of skills.

How did such a young person come across this idea and go build it and get customers?

Unlike most recruiting founders who applied to hundreds of jobs, I never applied to a single job. I was working at my family's company after high school when we had to hire over 200 people in two months with only 35 to 40 recruiters who could not even eat lunch. Mishire rates jumped from 10 to 15 percent up to 50 or 60 percent, and I knew there had to be a better method, prevetting candidates before interviews so hiring could happen in 10 to 15 minutes with better retention.

What convinced a college freshman that the resume was broken?

I saw the stress in the room and watched my friends apply seamlessly using AI apply tools that blast applications to a thousand jobs at once. That makes it worse for recruiters because these AI platforms do not properly assess ability, and then it is AI assessing what AI wrote, a loop you have to break. Our assessment has an anti-cheat and integrity layer plus AI proficiency scoring, since we want people to use AI but show they understand what happens behind it.

What does the Velric Score measure that a resume, LinkedIn profile, or transcript together cannot?

When an applicant drops their profile, resume, social media, or GitHub for technical people, it scans it and creates a personalized assessment on the spot. It tests execution, speed, logic, and common sense, and how you use information differently. For technical roles it might ask you to combine two projects and show what makes your code unique, and for marketing it recreates a similar growth scenario, so you do well if you are truthful about your profile.

Why missions and simulated real work instead of a skill test or portfolio review?

That is what recruiters already do, matching resumes with AI in their ATS, but that raises legal issues like the Workday lawsuit involving disabled applicants. Velric only measures your proven capability, not race, gender, sex or skin color, so recruiters make their own decisions instead of letting AI decide. We have also refused client requests for AI interviews because you cannot find real culture fit without a face to face conversation.

What are the real numbers today, missions completed, enterprise customers, university partnerships, and how did you get there this fast?

My unfair advantage was my family's network, which let us run an early beta when nobody else would trust us. We are now up to almost 20,000 completed missions and roughly the same number of screened candidates. Cold calling turned out to be huge since almost nobody does it anymore, and we also partnered with Hunter College and Northeastern University, running a career fair with about a thousand students.

How do you keep the Velric Score from becoming exactly what it replaces, a gameable proxy?

A completed mission does not represent you forever, because every couple of months you learn something new. When a candidate applies again through a company using Velric, they can update their profile and will get a new mission generated. So it keeps evolving with the candidate's actual current skills rather than staying static like a resume line.