Rohan Mahtani built one of the most-used career tools on the internet out of a side project, took no outside money, kept the team tiny, and then, having helped tens of millions of people get the job, turned to a harder question: whether the job was the right one for the person. He is the founder of Coached, Resume Worded and CareerSet, the author of a weekly newsletter that has run for more than seven years, and the person who started this publication. What caught our attention is the arc itself: an engineer who began by scoring resumes and has ended up studying how people are wired.
A problem of his own
Resume Worded began in 2017 the way a lot of durable things do: a person with a full-time job and a frustration he could not put down. Rohan was a few years into corporate life in London, with a computer science degree from Imperial behind him and a habit of shipping small things on the side (a directory of no-code tools, a text-message concierge for Londoners). This one stuck because the problem was his own. Describing what you have done, in a few convincing lines, is harder than it looks, and nearly every product in the space was selling templates when the real difficulty was the sentences.
The first version took four months of evenings. He charged from day one. Eight years later, Resume Worded sees more than a million job seekers a month, CareerSet (co-founded in 2019) runs inside the career centres of over a hundred universities including Cambridge and LSE, and the whole operation is still run by a team small enough to fit around one table. There is a lesson in the pacing. Nothing here launched with a funding announcement. It was built the way you build something you expect to still be running in a decade.
Keeping score of things that aren't supposed to have scores
Keeping score of the unscoreable
Rohan Mahtani is an engineer who has spent a decade putting numbers on soft things: resumes, careers, and now personality. Swipe to see how the habit formed, and what he measures today.
Tennis, first
His university thesis at Imperial was a model for predicting professional tennis matches, built from statistics and machine learning. The instinct on show was already clear: look for structure inside something that everyone else files under luck.
Then the resume
Resume Worded's first tool parsed a resume and scored it against more than a hundred attributes, with rules worked out alongside hiring managers. He charged for it from the first day, treating payment as the only honest signal that the thing was wanted.
The score itself was never the point. It gave people feedback they could act on in an afternoon.
The number he watches now
Coached's north-star metric is whether someone comes away with an insight that changes how they see themselves. For a person who relaxes with poker and public markets, it is the most interesting bet of all: taking the least measurable outcome and refusing to treat it as unmeasurable.
A trading house, rebuilt in software
Rohan was born in Mumbai and spent his first thirteen years in Lagos, attending an American school, before high school back in Mumbai and eleven years in London from the age of eighteen. That itinerary is not random. Mahtani is a Sindhi name, and Sindhi families have run one of the world's great trading diasporas for well over a century: small firms moving textiles and goods between Bombay, West Africa, Hong Kong and London, financed from within, run lean, and held together by trust across long distances rather than by a headquarters. Lagos, in particular, drew Sindhi merchant houses through the twentieth century.
We would not presume to know how much of that history was discussed at home. But it is hard to look at how Rohan has built without noticing the resemblance. No venture capital, when a product with his numbers could have raised whatever it liked. A handful of people rather than a floor of them. A life spread across several cities (he spends time in Dubai and moves between the US, London and India) rather than anchored to one. These are the operating instincts of a merchant house, transposed to a world where the goods are software and the shipping lane is a search engine. Seen this way, his contrarian choices look like an older, portable model of enterprise finding its natural medium.
It may also explain a certain ease. Someone who has been the new arrival in three countries learns early that there are many ways to be a person and that none of them is the default. That is a useful thing to know before you set out to build a personality tool.
Seven years of Thursdays
The part of Rohan's work that is easiest to overlook is also the most consistent: he has written a newsletter, himself, nearly every week since 2018. It started as a way to keep talking to Resume Worded's users once their job search was over, grew to more than a million subscribers, and has since become Coached Weekly, roughly 350 issues in. The essays are about careers in name and about judgement in practice: how to make a decision, how to read a room, what to do when the stakes rise.
Plenty of founders at that scale hand the writing to someone else or let it lapse. That he has done neither tells you where his thinking happens. A weekly essay is a forcing function: every seven days you have to notice something true about how people behave and say it plainly. Seven years of that is a long apprenticeship in observing people, and it is the most plausible bridge between the resume business and everything he is doing now.
- Reading the documentResume WordedThe first product read what people wrote about themselves: a resume parsed into a hundred attributes and handed back as a score. The question was narrow and useful. Will this get you an interview?[3]
- Writing to the readerThe Career Supplement, now Coached WeeklyA weekly letter to users after the job search ended. Over seven years and some 350 issues the subject drifted from resumes toward decisions, nerves and how people read one another. The audience grew past a million.[5] [8] [2]
- Reading the personCoachedThe same LinkedIn profile, a different question. Coached reads for wiring rather than wording: what someone is built to do, and whether they are doing it. The data never changed; the depth of the question did.[6] [1]
From the document to the person
Coached, launched in 2025, calls itself a behavioral science lab. Strip away the label and the move is simple. For eight years Rohan's software read the document people wrote about themselves; now it tries to read the person. Coached's personality and career test draws on decades of personality psychology, and one of its tools builds a read of someone from the very LinkedIn profile Resume Worded used to grade. Same input, deeper question. It has moved from "will this get you an interview" to "what kind of game are you built to play, and are you playing it".
The metric he treats as the north star is whether someone walks away with an insight they will still be using years later. For an engineer whose university thesis was a statistical model for predicting tennis matches, that is a telling thing to optimise for: the hardest quantity to measure, pursued with the same seriousness he once gave to parsing PDFs. We suspect this is where the career tools were heading all along. A good resume is a description of fit. Coached is an attempt to understand fit from the inside.
Why Glimpse
Glimpse grew out of Coached and out of the same fascination, pointed outward. If Coached asks how a single person is wired, Glimpse asks what people have done with their wiring: the paths taken, the odd turns, the decisions that looked strange at the time and sensible later. There is an idea Rohan is fond of, that nobody ran a four-minute mile until one person did, after which many could. Paths work the same way. We tend to attempt only the lives we have seen someone else live. Showing more of them, in detail and with warmth, widens what feels possible.
That is the spirit in which he reads people, and it is the spirit of this publication. He organises founder dinners in whichever city he lands in, and the appetite there is the same as here: a real curiosity about how other people have arranged their lives, and a conviction that the arrangements are worth studying closely. For someone who began by helping people describe themselves on a single page, it is a fitting next chapter: turning the page over to find out who wrote it.