It’s also not always the case that Alice is the loser. If SpaceX stock jumps up again after the position closes, then Alice is making money and both parties are winners.
Sequoia Capital | Menlo Park, CA | Venture Capital - Data Science & Engineering | REMOTE during SiP, On-Site One Day A Week Afterwards | Full Time
We are a small group of senior technologists operating in Sequoia Capital. Our group’s mission is to use data and software to invest in the world’s most promising startups.
We seek senior software engineers. Most of our work is in the backend and centered on data infrastructure. However, we also have opportunities to work on consumer-grade frontend projects. Ideally, you will have 10+ years of industry experience and feel confident building large distributed systems.
We are a small team and hope to remain small for a long time to come. We operate on high degrees of trust and autonomy. This is a fantastic opportunity for engineers who want startup-like camaraderie while enjoying all the benefits of a large employer. Just like a startup, there is an opportunity to share in the financial upside.
Sequoia offers robust benefits, team volunteering opportunities, and invests in training and personal development for all team members. The work you do at Sequoia ultimately drives returns for our Limited Partners, many of which are nonprofits and schools like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT.
tl;dr - A16Z is reclassifying themselves as an "investment advisor", which will allow them to make riskier bets (crypto, real estate, etc). They'll still invest in startups like any other VC firm.
I think @rsweeney nailed it. Your product is one that _should_ sell itself.
You only needs a complicated sales cycle if you're selling deep infrastructure or where high degrees of trust are required. But in your case, users can look at your website and immediately determine if they need your product and how much they're willing to trust you.
Re: your product --- It looks super cool. It's not something I need at this point in my career, but maybe down the road. Good luck!
I was in your shoes ~15 years ago. My biggest fear was to become a corporate programmer for some bullshit company.
Here's what I did about it:
1. I asked the most attractive & wonderful girl out on a date. Mind you, I am a geeky programmer and nobody's going to mistake me for a sex icon anytime soon. Nevertheless, she was impressed by my boldness and said yes. Now we're married with three kids.
2. I started a company as CEO. It failed. But being CEO stretched me into a new role and I grew immensely.
3. I'm now working on a project that I think has a huge potential for positive impact on the world. I'm not motivated by money or glory this time around, but just want to see if I can grow and pull it off.
I guess to sum it up: know what you want out of life and then be bold and take risks.
Two decades ago, when I was learning to code, the career path for engineers was to eventually become a "software architect". The architect was to be the god among mortals who would "design" large systems and dictate how these things fit together.
Fast-forward a few years and it turned out the "architects" were the biggest waste of of time and money. The best system designs came from the low-level engineers who were actually building the individual components.
In my humble opinion, the best way to learn big system design is to just put in your 10,000 hours of coding. The principles necessary for multi-thread concurrency are not so different from multi-datacenter concurrency. I suspect there are 1,000s of subtle design patterns that one can perhaps never fully articulate.
I've felt your pain. So much so that I took 6 months off and put a lot of groundwork into starting a company that would solve this problem. But in the end, I decided to abandon it.
I realized that in order to be 10x better than the alternatives, I was going to need to solve some very tricky AI problems. For example, acurately deduplicating a customer record "John Doe" vs "Johnathon Doe" is not straightforward. Maybe it's two different people?. Maybe it's just a spelling mismatch? The system must have a great deal of context to accurately determine if the data is indeed duplicated. And even if it does, perhaps there's a perfectly good reason for the spelling mismatch. (e.g. perhaps one table is his preferred name, while the other is just referential, etc). In the end, deduplication often comes down to the requirements of the company and it's hard to generalize.
I think there's space in the market for this kind of business, but it'll be a slog. Unless you have a 10x solution (i.e. super AI), you'll be competing with the likes of Trifacta, etc. And it's hard to compete with that kind of sales force.
Have you thought of doing a map of the whole nation and seeing what other cities are showing tech growth? Might see some interesting cities pop up that way.
Web scraping is just one example of what Zillabyte can do. The open source libraries out there can be a good solution, but our cloud platform lets you scrape the web at scale. That's the main value we can provide in terms of web scraping.
We also support analyzing internal data such as logs. We also provide a pre-scraped web corpus for our users to mine.
Zillabyte is hiring Full Stack Engineers and a lead UX designer.
Full Stack Engineer:
* Help us use data science to model the global economy.
* Backgrounds in machine learning, AI, web development, and big data are great.
UX/Product Designer:
* Take the lead on architecting the product, thinking about the user first.
The right people will be generously compensated with both stock and salary.
About us:
Zillabyte helps sales and marketing teams model their ideal customers and find more of them. Through a combination of machine learning and rapid human-curation, Zillabyte builds algorithms and custom filters that allow business customers to identify high-potential sales leads and to analyze customers based on external data.
Our culture emphasizes hard work, autonomy and creativity. Reach out to us and let's see if there's a good fit!
The patent in question[1] is far from a clear case of infringement. The closest thing is Apple's app-rating system. And even in that case, there are clear cases where the patent's claims do not hold water (Claims #5, #6, etc)
That said, I'm glad Apple is moving in. There's no way a small indie developer can even begin to mount a defense.
It depends on the personalities involved. The old-school mentality is that business-people tell the programmers what to do. The modern approach appears to be the inverse. Perhaps in a few years things will stabilize to a nice equilibrium.