Verse Medical | Full Stack Software Engineer | NYC preferred, remote (US or Canada) also works | Series A startup
It costs nearly $12,000 a night to spend a night at the hospital in the US. We're building software that allows patients to recover at home sooner and with better results. We're backed by top investors in technology & healthcare (e.g. Y Combinator, SignalFire, Paul Graham, etc.)
We have a product & engineering focused culture with minimal bureaucracy. We use Python and Typescript with GraphQL to tie it together. But, we're confident good engineers can learn new technologies so we don't require any particular language/framework background.
We're growing fast, are well-capitalized and growing our engineering team!
Hiring across a range of experience levels (new grad to staff). Email dhaivat AT versemedical.com to apply.
Please correct me if wrong, but these are likely measured via the book value of the investments which reflects the private market valuations of the companies you mentioned.
The target market for Google Hire was probably Lever's (https://www.lever.co) customers, i.e. mostly funded startups and other companies hiring white collar employees. For these businesses, $200-400/month for an Applicant Tracking System is pretty inline with market. Lever's pricing is higher as far as I've seen.
As someone working in this area, this is an interesting article.
The core issue of compliance is somewhat buried in the text, but worth pointing out. Optometrists' chief complaint is that very few offices seem to be prescribing the Hubble contacts brand specifically and yet, Hubble seem to be selling them to customers. This implies to them that either all prescriptions aren't being verified or are somehow being "passively" verified. Within the current rules set in place by the FTC, they believe it's unlikely quite so many prescriptions are passively verified.
The FTC is actually actively working on developing new rules around prescription verification to address some of these concerns. [1]
You could make this same argument to argue that Slack would fail against email.
Something like: there are all kinds of email integrations, user-specific and group-specific setups, etc. at companies. How can Slack ever compete?
The answer was that Slack was so much better for many companies that it made sense to suffer the pain of switching.
The company that beats Slack will likely be 10x better communication software or something very similar but distributed much more effectively (maybe Microsoft Teams in the enterprise).
Chat is a complement to email, not a replacement. Over time some people may take their formerly-email activities to chat, but no cutover is required.
Running two chat systems side by side, on the other hand, is a huge pain. There really is a pressure to get everything migrated and the old one turned off.
Depends on the company. At our 6 year old startup, email is dead except for external communication. Everything is on slack including ops, stand ups and informal communication. At Google, hangouts was lightly used but everything was on email.
Yup. I can't think of last email that was sent within my startup. Only clients and partners. Though some partners we have shared slack rooms, so even that may be going down.
Email is for outside the boundaries (outside-of-company, outside-of-division in a silo'd company), chat is for inside - there's still people who do prefer email especially in partner facing roles, but I think its fair to say that most prefer using chat if they had a choice.
Not necessarily true. For example the enterprise I work in doesn't allow saving chat history. This makes email better for technical discussion that needs recorded.
Legal. When we are sued (we make equipment used in dangerous environments, and we have a lot of money, so if there is the slightest chance we can be blamed we will be sued) US law says we need to give all relevant information to the other side. That includes any saved chat logs and emails. However if something was deleted before we are sued we don't have to give it out.
We lost a law suit once because a [not native English speaker] wrote "the bearing will fail with disastrous consequences", he meant the shaft would need to be replaced, but when a fire started in the area of the bearing that email was part of discovery and the jury decided the bearing was at fault for the fire not the user failing to clean the area which was our story. (legal would rather I not give you the case to read for yourself)
Chat tends to be less formal than email, thus more opportunity exists for something that is easy to take out of context. By not allowing saving chat logs we ensure they they will never get to court.
We have strict rules that emails must be deleted after a few months (unless we legally need to keep them). Any information in the email that is worth keeping longer than that is put in a formal system where legal can examine the words to ensure they won't be taken out of context and used against us.
Sounds wrong to me. Hiding chat logs or other business information from the company itself as well as customers (albeit suing ones) seem stupid. How would the company ever be able to audit its own operations? Getting sued is sometimes also not too bad as it can reveal bad practices within an organization. An analogy would be an X-ray, not entirely healthy but very revealing.
Normal companies do not operate voice recorders in offices/conference rooms or even telephone wiretaps, except for specific regulated positions. Text may be more convenient to collect and search but I don’t think it’s morally any different.
It doesn't matter what sort of business you are in, you need to have some ad-hoc communication that isn't part of a "permanent record", or else you incur communication friction everywhere.
Having it broken down by system is a pretty practical approach.
On the flipside: if you're a person that's convinced Uber should be valued at a fraction of what it is and you're not shorting it, why aren't you?
You might argue the market will remain irrational, but this is unlikely to be the case for 25+ years. This should mean that most people set against the Uber IPO should hold a short position with at least a small portion of their net worth. Doesn't seem like this is the case.
You can't easily short Uber yet, it is not traded yet. You'd need to find a) a current stockholder that will borrow you shares, and b) a new potential stockholder to buy it from you. And even after it starts trading it'll take a few days for options and shorts to become available.
Tip: if you want to short via options (when options trading becomes available) wait a few hours to let the market makers settle their positions. Source: I've shorted BYND and paid a higher than necessary options premium because I was impatient.
Bearish because an upcoming recession seems likely to have three effects
1) make money more expensive and harder to justify subsidizing rides
2) increase the supply of drivers.
3) decrease the demand
Less demand, more supply, but possibly higher overall prices due to subsidy withdrawal feels like a dangerous thing
On top of that regulatory pressure to treat drivers as employees could decimate Uber at any moment.
Not shorting because gambling on the stock market is not worth the effort. God could declare the true present value of a company’s future cash flows to be $10/share and I still wouldn’t count on the market to get it right- among other bothers.
Whether or not a company is a "tech" company is kind of a muddled question, but taking even a brief glance at https://airbnb.io/ (their engineering blog) makes it clear that AirBnB does some pretty serious engineering.
For example, their post about their work in search ranking is quite interesting [1].
I'm not suggesting they don't have engineering challenges, but if you stack ranked the engineering challenges by difficulty across Airbnb, Uber/Lyft, Google, FB, Netflix, Amazon, Dropbox, Pinterest, etc. I don't see how Airbnb would not very easily rank last by a long shot.
Airbnb is basically just a prettier craigslist with a payment transfer mechanism and messaging. It isn't to say it isn't a great business, just that the "tech" part of it is not really much more than a web app.
Not sure where the threshold between tech and non-tech would be though... Dropbox is just unison on the cloud, Pinterest is just a photos website etc.
Also engineering challenges aren’t always obvious from the consumer facing product. It is true that AirBnB founders have design backgrounds rather than engineering ones, but from what I’ve seen of their engineering and data science work, they would qualify as a tech company in my estimation. They did come up with Apache Airflow which is a well regarded data pipeline management system.
Well like every tech company the entire purpose of an externally facing engineering blog is to maximize their "tech/employer brand." That's the whole point. I would also guess that some of the projects highlighted are could probably fit into "complexity for complexity sake" e.g. teams of bored or overzealous engineers who are trying to justify their jobs by working on complex things that are probably overkill for the actual problem their trying to solve. That's pretty common.
I'm just pointing out that the nature of Airbnb's business means that there's no real-time, no streaming, no billions of concurrent users, etc. The tech boils down to a 1) web app 2) payments mechanism and 3) messaging. Nothing particularly revolutionary on the tech side.
I'm not saying a "tech" company has to be defined by how "hard" the tech is, or that a "tech" company isn't a "tech" company because it isn't working on LIDAR or AI.
I'm just pointing out that Airbnb's application of "tech" isn't necessarily "hard" tech, relative to other companies that it's usually associated with or compared to in the SF startup scene.
Fair enough. I guess your original statement was more that AirBnB shouldn’t be consider a tech company in the same breath as FB and Netflix, and not that it isn’t a tech company.
Not to take a stance either way, but pretty much any org will find a way to justify the salaries of the people it employs. It’s neither informative nor surprising that a company that employs lots of engineers will have lots of engineering problems.
The question is: if you sacked everyone but the core team who keeps the trains running, what would happen to the business?
Do you mean private with respect to the host or private with respect to other guests (e.g., booking a single room in someone else's place)?
I'm trying to understand the underlying problem you're getting at. I haven't had trouble with getting places with my own bathroom though I do not stay in Airbnbs with multiple concurrent guests much.
Airbnb traditionall had three, now four "Home types": Entire place, Private room (Have your own room and share some common spaces), Hotel room, Shared room. The entire place will (almost always) come with your own bathroom and kitchen and living room etc. It's an entire place, after all.
A private room typically means you get your own bedroom but there are others living in the same home, maybe the owner, maybe other guests. Living room, kitchen are shared. The question is whether you also get a bathroom for your own use or not. This is displayed even in the listing (4 guests · 1 bedroom · 1 bed · 1 shared bath vs 2 guests · 1 bedroom · 1 bed · 1 private bath) but you are unable to filter on it. They understand this detail is important enough to put it in the listing but you still can't filter on it.
And the reason this matters, well, that should be pretty evident: multiple strangers can be in a kitchen or a living at the same time but not in a bathroom. A shared bathroom is a botttleneck in the morning and an overall pain in the neck to be honest. And in some places the private room-private bath combo is by far the best value.
I like Airbnb but I am surprised by their reputation as having expertise in front-end web development. The web UI is very slow to load and during on-page interactions, it is confusing to navigate between listing and related pages, and there are other badly designed aspects, such as the way that in order to select a menu item, one has to move the trackpad horizontally and then vertically to avoid dismissing the open menu while en route to the desired menu item.
Not meant as a critique to this book, but the fact that RL-based approaches rarely work for optimal control problems (in, for example, robotics) came as a surprise to me, given the hype and focus on RL [1]. It turns out that model-based methods for optimal control (e.g. linear quadratic control) invented quite a long time ago dramatically outperform RL-based approaches in most tasks and require multiple orders of magnitude less computational resources. Maybe there's some hope for RL method if they "course correct" for simpler control methods. At the moment, it seems like RL for robotics and control lies to the side of "research" and not "engineering."
for linear systems modern control theory is already optimal (?) so given a linear system I'd assume an RL method would just approximate the optimal control method. I think the potential for RL methods is in capturing nonlinearities in actuators like artificial muscle.
Apple Music, et al. license content and there are few companies that are able to do this. This creates a barrier to entry that wasn't present for the "content clubs" Gates discusses. In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player.
>In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player.
Well, we have at best 2-3 "dominant players" in each field, so not much better. And doesn't already Kindle dominate in eBooks? Surely iBooks is not that much of competition.
Gates doubted verbatim that the whole industry would exceed 4$ billion in total, thus no single player could reach that point.
> Apple Music, et al. license content and there are few companies that are able to do this. This creates a barrier to entry that wasn't present for the "content clubs" Gates discusses.
That's not true, because Apple licensing anything is still not a barrier to entry into that market even today. Also, such licensing wasn't available to anybody back then.
> In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player.
No, that was another point he made. The fragmentation of the market and he was certainly right on that one.
However, that was still not the point he mad I was talking about, the total size of the market.
One of the keywords you're looking for is "statistical forecasting."
It's a fairly specialized data science skill since it requires experience with some fairly specific techniques (e.g. dealing with seasonality, autocorrelation, etc. within data has all kinds of interesting solutions).
It costs nearly $12,000 a night to spend a night at the hospital in the US. We're building software that allows patients to recover at home sooner and with better results. We're backed by top investors in technology & healthcare (e.g. Y Combinator, SignalFire, Paul Graham, etc.)
We have a product & engineering focused culture with minimal bureaucracy. We use Python and Typescript with GraphQL to tie it together. But, we're confident good engineers can learn new technologies so we don't require any particular language/framework background.
We're growing fast, are well-capitalized and growing our engineering team!
Hiring across a range of experience levels (new grad to staff). Email dhaivat AT versemedical.com to apply.