The one that surprised me is to learn that virtually all health insurance companies sell your personal health information. Most people think this is illegal because the data is sensitive. But it turns out that if it's generated by a business transaction (i.e. a claim between your doctor and your insurance company) then it's not considered PHI and it's not protected.
PillPack is simplifying the process of managing medications for the 30M+ Americans that take 5 or more prescriptions a day. We have a full service pharmacy in NH (with robots) and a beautiful office in Davis Square (no robots, yet). We are currently a small team (~12), and looking to grow both engineering (frontend, full stack, ios) and marketing.
We are backed by top tier VC's and are one of the few consumer startups in the area that are both a technology company at heart and delivering a real product and service that changes people's lives.
https://www.pillpack.com/careers
Send an email to elliot at pillpack.com if you're interested or want to find out more about us / what we're looking for.
PillPack, Inc - Somerville, MA - http://pillpack.com
(both engineering and marketing)
PillPack is simplifying the process of managing medications for the 30M+ Americans that take 5 or more prescriptions a day. We have a full service pharmacy in NH (with robots) and a beautiful office in Davis Square (no robots, yet).
We are currently a small team (~10), and looking to grow both engineering (frontend, full stack, ios) and marketing.
We are backed by top tier VC's and are one of the few consumer startups in the area that take design seriously (we've been living in IDEO for the last 4 months and just moved into our own office a month ago).
At PillPack we are on a mission to reinvent pharmacy. We are using design, service and technology to change the way people think about medicine. As a software engineer at PillPack, you’ll be developing systems that improve the health and wellbeing of our customers.
PillPack is a young, rapidly-growing company, so we’re looking for engineers with an entrepreneurial mindset that can work independently, rapidly learn new tools and proactively contribute in unexpected ways. Most importantly, we want people who are a delight to work with! Our team is full of interesting, friendly, reliable people; we’re going to keep it that way.
Whether you love hacking data, structuring the architecture of applications, working in mobile, or focusing on front-end and design, we have interesting problems for everyone.
Our mission is to build the next generation of a technology enabled healthcare service and its going to take machine learning experts, hackers, and front-end fanatics to do it.
Opani is actually a huge step in the right direction. I think Marcio's post is fantastic. I would in fact add an additional idea to it.
In addition to the open prestige inherent in GitHub, there is also the fact that one's work is vetted by a community. It becomes very difficult if not impossible to publish crap and claim that it is quality. In science this is not the case. The peer review system is supposed to protect us against that. However, my understanding is that a surprising percentage of research in top ten journals can't be reproduced either because key details about implementation are missing or because it is actually not reproducible.
A GitHub for science could also meaningfully move the ball forward in making science reproducible as it should be easy to wrap ones scripts in a specification of an "environment" that can be readily setup, deployed, and run. A lot of work would be required to develop corollaries for non-computational scientific domains, but it would be a hugely valuable effort as discussed in the general reproducible research community (http://reproducibleresearch.net/).
I wrote the blog post. I suppose you guys are right - poor choice of terminology. I read Kane's post - which was mostly about why he isn't going to release his software for free anymore. I started thinking about the business reasons why i release software for free (which i do sometimes, but not always) and it occurred to me that i use it as a tool to allow me to more quickly test out an idea. That was really the main point i was trying to make. I will try and update the post tonight to make the language more consistent with the point i was actually making (focusing on testing hypotheses to mitigate risks as a startup and using a freely available product to help test those).
I think this is a great idea though i did think it was worthwhile to comment on some of the things that I think are actually problems versus the ones that aren't really problems.
Real Problems:
1. Difficult for students to find startups interested in interns. Sounds like a number of folks are working on this which is awesome.
2. Speed. Startups and universities move at different speeds. A y-combinator like organization could go a long way toward solving this problem.
Things that are not really problems:
1. "Many of the best college students at MIT are risk averse and think short term." I work as a Program Manager at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and was a CS grad Berkeley and neither place is short on risk-oriented CS students. In fact most of the CS students i went to school with either wanted to start their own company or work at a startup. If they ended up at Google it was because they couldn't find a startup that was a good fit or because the startups that would have been a good fit didn't want to hire straight out of school. I graduated about 5 years ago and i think students are even more interested in startups now than they were then.
2. "Startups are missing brand value for parents, relatives, and friends. This is also highly cultural." This certainly isn't true for "friends" and i think it is largely untrue for parents/relatives. With a whole generation now of young and successful entrepreneurs like Gates and Zuckerberg, I think many parents are starting to realize the prestige of working at a startup. Obama's National Entrepreneur's Day this has been brought even further into the mainstream. There is plenty more we should do here to continue celebrating entrepreneurs, but i don't think this is what prevents people from joining startups fresh out of school or for an internship in school.
I did some .NET development in college and after years of Python and PHP development, I finally started working on a Rails project about a month ago, and a couple of weeks ago I had to do some .NET development for a client. Obviously you can do anything in any of these environments, but I really did find .NET to be the most difficult to work in.
My issue is mostly around tools, not any of the languages themselves. In my ubuntu/rails environment i was up and running in 5 minutes with a text editor and a couple of sudo aptitude commands. With .NET i had to spend hours downloading and installing two different versions of the .NET framework, VS 2010, and SQL Server Management Studio. This was to say nothing of any external libraries. Now that i am up and running and my environment is setup its fine i suppose but frankly it took days just to be able to do hello world. With Rails I was there in 5 min, and it scaled with me. It was proportionally just as easy to get hello world going as something more complicated. The base bar to getting moving in .NET by comparison was several days - and if i wasn't being paid to do it, i never would have just for the sake of playing around.