Tangentally related - We deal with this a lot in Wingsuit BASE jumping (well, in wingsuit skydiving as well, but wake vortices and turbulence (aka 'burbles') have killed more than a few extremely talented pilots in the last year).
It's fucking wild how small of a wing can put off a sizable wake. With wingsuits, if you fly behind and slightly above a buddy, you're going to hit his burble and you're going to immediately lose lift and possibly start spinning. There's a clip floating around of a bunch of us on a training jump in race suits and one of the guys hits a burble from the group and just gets dropped a few hundred feet damn near immediately.
Constructor.io | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full-Time
Constructor.io is building the future of search. There are many parts of a search interface — from autocomplete to analytics to recommendations — that every website currently has to rebuild (often poorly) from scratch. At Constructor.io, we want to change all that, let people stop re-inventing the wheel, and offer them outstanding search and search enhancement features in a form that's dead simple to integrate.
Offering that simplicity is challenging. We have to hide bleeding-edge NLP and machine learning behind an easy-to-use interface. And to do that, we need clever engineers with a mind for turning complex algorithms into delightful user interfaces.
We’re looking to add a few members to the team as soon as we can find the right person. Key needs are:
- Senior Javascript & Rails Engineer
-- Deliver the next generation of search enhancement services to our customers. You'll build new features into our Javascript client and help develop our customer-facing website in Rails.
- Senior Full Stack Engineer
-- Develop outstanding back-end performance to power intuitive user interfaces. You'll be building front-end search features and configuring search engines to deliver lightning-fast performance.
- Data Scientist / Engineer
-- Build search and discovery features using massive amounts of click data. Your goal will be to help make our customers' websites awesome and bring our customers more revenue. You'll develop algorithms to improve search efficiency, deliver recommendations, and power self-learning search results.
If you're interested in joining the team, please send your resume and/or LinkedIn and/or Github profile, ideally including links to source code of projects you’ve worked on, to jobs@constructor.io and we’ll do our best to reply within a few business days. We’ll usually start with a technical interview over the phone or via video chat, followed by an in-person interview at our offices.
Echoing a lot of the other sentiment here, I think a lot of these points are good, but some are pretty broad statements that apply to a lot of early stage tech. The paid acquisition one stands out in my mind - early stage SaaS or social gaming apps can successfully POUR money into paid acquisition for a long time and be successful.
Same can be said for the 'is the product of high quality' line. I don't think the first four iterations of my last product were of particularly high quality, but we were shipping things and it worked just enough to make users happy.
The one that stands out the most to me is the 'Would you be afraid to hire your smartest friends.' This is IMO the end-all gut check. If you wouldn't try to sell your best friend on leaving whatever they're doing to come join you, you don't believe in the company. If you don't believe in the company, find another one. There's plenty of work in SV.
+1 for "Would you be afraid to hire your smartest friends".
It's also worth considering whether you would help find your replacement. If not wanting to invite your friends is a bad sign, what does it say if you wouldn't tell people you don't even know to work for the company?
Maybe. There are other reasons you might not want to help find your replacement. Maybe you are more junior than the company needs and you don't feel comfortable interviewing someone more senior than yourself. Or maybe you've never interviewed anyone before, and don't feel comfortable for that reason.
Very few things are obvious, when you think about them.
This doesn't seem unreasonable. As a data point, we're just shy of 10k customers with one full-time support person (and two part-time). In my experience, it was the process of setting up the KB and process by which you'd answer tickets that was the most arduous. 0-10 users, easy. 10->100 OMFG EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE. 100->n becomes just an optimization problem.
Isn't the supply side of this being neglected? This article (and tbh a few others I've read on it) feels as if they're trying to say the following, but in 500 words: "They couldn't increase revenues enough."
The piece of this equation that I'm much more interested in is the cost side. By handling the training & bookings all in-house, it just feels like they couldn't get a low enough unit cost per job. Especially in something as low-skilled (read: low-margin?) as house cleanings, it sounds like what actually happened was that Handy couldn't get costs down low enough to deal with the true market equilibrium.
While I'm not disagreeing that the legal fees from lawsuits may have made the next round of funding a challenge and was likely a heavy drain on cash on hand, I think jumping on the 1099 vs employee debate is a bit of a cop out.
It's another company failing to launch a double-sided marketplace, which sucks for all parties involved, but I'd be really really interested in reading about what actually broke.
There are to very specific versions of how a presentation should be made: As a supplement to a live presentation or a replacement of it.
If you're using it as a supplement to something you're saying live, the slides should be simple, limited, and support the big points which you should be making verbally.
If you're using it as a handout (or essentially in lieu of a live presentation), it should be much more information-dense.
Startup cofounder here who spends ~20 days/mo on the road - also don't forget about BD meetings, meetups, happy hours, etc. A ton of deals get done over a few drinks, and when you're stacking a meetup, a dinner, cocktails, latenight, and a hotel bar together regularly, it's pretty easy to hit the 15/20 drink figure.
Also, when i'm out drinking with friends, I tend to keep a bit of a mental note of how many i've had because the tab's coming out of my pocket. When i'm on the road i'm on the company's tab, and the moral hazard totally wipes out my concern for how many i've had and instead i'm focused on whatever I'm at that meeting for (close deal, increase client expenditures, lock in investment, whatever).
The solitude also definitely plays a role, and like the top commenter on here it's really easy to be totally oblivious to how much you're drinking as it just becomes part of the routine. I had a mentor once point out that the best salespeople are usually alcoholics with shitty relationships who work too much, so I think there's a lot of parallels between the personality traits that are helpful for an entrepreneur but can be wildly destructive if pointed in a negative direction.
I was a double-major at a party school and in a top fraternity, so over the last decade i've become rather accustomed to being a borderline functioning disaster. However, over the last few months I really peeled it back and have instead spent a ton of time getting back into the gym, running, rowing, and doing crossfit.
Going out all night is fun, but getting up at 5a and cranking out a workout while it's still dark, running back to the office, and having breakfast while most people are just getting out of bed has become my new high to chase.
