Academia.edu: looking for technical co-founder | Hacker News Reader

Academia.edu: looking for technical co-founder

18 pointsRichardPrice20 comments

http://www.academia.edu is a Facebook/MySpace style site for academics. It launched in alpha version last week.

It's a site where academics can create an academic webpage, and upload their papers and research interests. You can see a sample webpage here: http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardPrice

We have also built a paper-tracking engine that tracks the latest papers uploaded to the web in a given field. You can see the results for Computer Science here: http://cs.academia.edu/categories/2/papers

Academia.edu's founder is Richard Price. Richard's previous ventures include http://www.liveout.co.uk and http://www.peopleradar.com (the #1 Facebook API application - recent page views per day have been around 1 million).

Richard is looking for a technical co-founder to join Academia.edu. He's looking for someone who:

- Is super smart - awesome at problem-solving.

- Is super driven - pushes themselves, and everyone else, to meet high standards.

The site is built in Rails and C#. Knowledge of those is a plus, but not essential.

The team is based in SF. We're offering a significant equity stake, and a competitive salary. We want to be surrounded by super smart people, all of whom are driving each other to create a great product for our users. We'll pay out whatever equity it takes to hire the most brilliant people. If you are interested, please contact richard@academia.edu.

My big question is how did you manage to score a .edu domain?

http://www.educause.edu/edudomain/eligibility.asp

Why do some institutions that do not meet the eligibility criteria have .edu domain names?

According to the Cooperative Agreement between EDUCAUSE and the U.S. Department of Commerce, all .edu names in existence as of October 29, 2001, are "grandfathered." This means that everyone who already had a .edu name by that date (October 29, 2001), regardless of current or past eligibility requirements, is allowed to keep those .edu names. --

Sounds like he bought it on the open market.

Maybe he got it from this guy... he "OWNS" the internet :): http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm?postversion=2007052205

Before 2001, anyone could register a .edu domain; a handful of .edu domains were registered - academia.edu was one of them.

Wait a second. Isn't Facebook a "Facebook/MySpace style site for academics?"

You mean: Isn't Facebook a "Friendster/MySpace style site for academics?"

Facebook is primarily about social interaction - sharing photos from last night's party, listing what music you like etc.

Academia.edu has an exclusively academic focus; it's about creating an academic webpage, uploading your own papers and research interests, and finding others around the world who have the same research interests as you.

Although most/all academics are aware of facebook. If they had an interest in this they would be using facebook to do it.

Can you give a quantitative degree to which someone should be driven to count as "super driven"? I think I'm driven, but possibly just "very driven" or "pretty driven".

These things are hard to quantify :). We're looking for someone who relishes the idea of working really long hours on building a valuable product.

This is an interesting idea. I wonder how you will grow it? Most University IT departments are understaffed and overworked. Even though they should provide these services, they often can't. Are you planning to charge universities for providing this service?

It seems to me as if academia.edu has plans to provide library services. Personally, I don't like the commercialization of libraries, especially when library scientists are coming up with excellent solutions (like http://xxx.lanl.gov/ .)

Either way, there are many directions academia.edu can go, must be an exciting time for you. Good luck.

Thanks for your thoughts - they're extremely interesting and I really appreciate hearing them.

The site will be completely free for universities and academics. Our business model is to sell advertising on the site.

I go to McGill and our email addresses end with .ca, I think similarly for some other universities in Canada. Interestingly, mcgill.edu does go to mcgill.ca (not emails though, I tried).

I think its a cool idea. A long time in coming but just at right time. If nothing, the site name is prime real estate.

Thanks for mentioning that. We'll add in allowances for McGill and other universities in Canada.

are you funded? How to plan on paying a salary?

How do the click through numbers work out nowadays. Peopleradar.com had 1m pv/day assuming 1% click-through at 50c per click works out to... $5k per day. That sounds like a lot of money, are my figures way off?

PeopleRadar makes about 12 cents CPM with ValueClick - I'm going to try out TribalFusion, as apparently they offer higher CPMs.

We're raising funding at the moment.

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