John Kim

“We realized the real problem was trust, access, and relationships,” John Kim said in 2026. “I could find a great engineer at Facebook or OpenAI right now, but that doesn’t mean they’ll respond to me.” He is co-founder and CEO of Paraform, a San Francisco, California hiring marketplace that puts specialist independent recruiters on hard-to-fill roles.

Four Countries and a Health Scare

Kim moved around from the age of four for his father's job, living in Singapore, Australia, Los Angeles, and Korea. At 18 he spent three months sick, and a doctor in Korea told him there was something in his lungs. It turned out to be a false alarm, but it changed how he thought about time. “I have 3 years to make this happen, so let’s do it now,” he recalled thinking.

Recruiters Themselves

Before Paraform, Kim launched and sold a recruiting startup, RulerNetwork, to Crimson Education. He met his co-founder, Jeffrey Li, on a business trip to New York. Founders kept naming hiring as their biggest problem, so the pair became recruiters themselves, scraping public profiles, and then tried a referral marketplace before independent recruiters became their most loyal users.

3 a.m. in the Library

While waiting on a US visa in Australia, Kim worked overnight from the library of a college he had dropped out of to match San Francisco hours. Paraform filled a director of engineering role for Hightouch that had been open for 18 months, which led to its seed round. “If you think you’re going deep, you’re probably still not deep enough,” Kim said.