blader

Just - thank you.

Why does it matter who he is? Why not consider the merits of the ideas in their own right rather than relying on the authority of the author? One would think folks on HN would be inclined to treat ideas in a more meritocratically way.

Let's talk! Email me at siqi@herelabs.com - happy tp show you what we're doing too.

Well this is painful, but fair.

Recruiting while trying to stay stealth is like voluntarily punching yourself in the face. We're always happy to give demos to anyone who's interested in talking to us - we're just not ready to have it all down in a public forum yet.

I can understand where you're coming from and I agree, but we're going to just have to live with this until we're closer to launch.

San Francisco: product designers and mobile engineers. [So far, every member of our team (who we didn't already know) joined us via Hacker News]

Subscription based social hyperlocal mobile gamified dating discovery engine with loyalty coupons. For the enterprise.

Just kidding.

We're a stealthy team of product generalists, ML engineers, and even a neuroscientist filling a hole in the universe by building software that enriches the human experience. Everyone on our team codes and contributes on every level, front to back. We've all built web scale products and scaled them to millions of daily active users with zero marketing spend. 

The world is becoming a different place: everyone is going to be carrying around a network connected super computer with ambient sensors in their pockets. We can see the future that is enabled by these devices. We are making that future happen.

Real talk: We've been running our prototype for 5 months now and we all use it multiple times a day, every day. Every person we've shown it to has asked us if they can have it. Every single person who's installed ithas gotten mad when our testflights expire. This is, verbatim, what one of our investors had to say after running it for a week:

"Just wow. It's so magical. So easy. In fact, almost too easy. I'd insert something in the first time user experience that is whimsical and funny like: "making the magic happen..." And then boom suddenly your whole life shows up as an archive. I just can't get over this. So stunning. You've achieved what few could."

We are well funded by a long list of top tier investors: http://angel.co/herelabs

We're looking for a select few product designers (technical people with a portfolio of mobile work) and mobile engineers (who know iOS inside and out and have good taste in design) who can come in and contribute at speed on day one and who are world class at more than one thing.

Ideal candidates are brilliant, fearless, and passionate individuals who are uncompromising in their pursuit of building an incredible product that will positively affect the lives of every human being every day. 

As teammates we value commitment and accountability; honing our craft; building tools to create leverage; and seeking to learn from and understand each other.

We are offering founding team equity and competitive salaries. Office space in the heart of the SoMa in beautiful San Francisco. $10K budget for equipment ready the day you start. Exec budgets, gym memberships, team lunches. Willing to relocate. Willing to fly you in for interviews. Willing to tell you our stealthy secrets.

We are not your typical San Francisco stealth startup. We are NOT another me-too-social-local-sharing app. We DON'T sell condoms by subscription. We are NOT the place to share photos of your dog taking a leak. There will be NO gamification.

Life is short. Build stuff that matters. Email siqi at herelabs.com.

Fair question. We post simply because posting on this thread works.

It's worked great for us in the past (and made a hire) and we've been getting great candidates who are excited this time too. :)

I will echo that this thread works.

We work with a lot of recruiters and by far the most qualified candidates come from HN. We've hired 25% (i.e. 1 person) of our team so far from HN and I'd expect that number to increase to 50% over time.

That's fair, and we deserve the criticism since we're still kinda stealth, in the sense that we're not publicly talking about what we're doing.

In person we've always been happy to give a full demo and share everything we know about our company. We've shown our product to a lot of people and nobody has left disappointed (and many told me they expected to be).

Hi Andy, all of us are contributing code and product generalists need to be able to build what they design.

Thank you! We're trying our best and having a lot of fun. We will see. :)

San Francisco: product generalists and systems generalists.

What we do: subscription based social hyperlocal mobile gamified dating discovery engine with loyalty coupons. For the enterprise.

Just kidding.

We're a stealthy team of technical generalists filling a hole in the universe by building software that enriches the human experience. Everyone on our team codes and contributes on every level, front to back. We've all built web scale products and scaled them to millions of daily active users with zero marketing spend.

The world is becoming a different place: everyone is going to be carrying around a network connected super computer with ambient sensors in their pockets. We can see the future that is enabled by these devices. We are making that future happen.

Real talk: We've been running our prototype for 3 months now and we all use it multiple times a day, every day. Every person we've showed it to has asked us if they can have it. Every single person who's had it installed has gotten mad when our testflights expire.

We are well funded by a long list of top tier investors: http://angel.co/herelabs

We're looking for a select few product generalists (designer hackers with mobile expertise) and systems generalists (systems automation, machine learning, distributed computing) who can come in and contribute at speed on day one, and who are world class at more than one thing.

Ideal candidates are brilliant, fearless, and passionate individuals who are uncompromising in their pursuit of building an incredible product that will positively affect the lives of every human being every day.

As teammates we value commitment and accountability; honing our craft; building tools to create leverage; and seeking to learn from and understand each other.

We are offering founding team equity and competitive salaries. Retina Macbook Pro (or Air) & 30 inch monitor are standard issue. Office space in the heart of the SoMa district in beautiful San Francisco. Willing to relocate. Willing to fly you in for interviews. Willing to tell you our stealthy secrets.

We are not your typical San Francisco stealth startup. We are NOT another me-too-social-local-sharing app. We DON'T sell condoms by subscription. We are NOT the place to share photos of your dog taking a leak. There will be NO gamification.

Life is short. Build stuff that matters.

Email siqi at herelabs.com. Interns and H1Bs welcome.

Maybe entrepreneurial success is driven by luck in the same way that home runs in baseball are: Barry Bonds can swing 100 times and not hit a home run, but he's still a way better home run hitter than I am, in that he can hit home runs at all.

This article is kind of like saying that some baseball players overestimate their own skills and underestimate the effects of luck when they hit a home run. But you don't see people writing articles like that because hitting a home run is more obviously difficult than starting a successful company, and you have a lot more data with home runs than you do with companies.

Whenever there's an article like this, it can be tempting to conclude either: 1) "it's just a crapshoot, what's the point of playing the lottery?" 2) "it's just a crapshoot, anyone could have done Facebook." But the fact is luck is involved in everything - so perhaps a better takeaway is: 1) I need more practice and 2) I need more at bats.

I don't understand.

The man created the web browser, built multiple billion dollar companies, angel invested and sits on the board of Facebook, and is now one of the most well known VCs in the world - and this is saying what - that he's not as good as Felix thinks he could be?

What the hell has Felix Salmon ever done?

I'm seeing more and more of this: pundits and armchair entrepreneurs online who just can't help but tear down people who went in the arena and worked their asses off and built something.

Shut up and go build something people want.

I've worn my Vibrams exclusively (even to 2 weddings) for the past 4 years, and it's been great for my social life. It's probably the best ice breaker ever invented. Strangers regularly approach and start conversations.

Wow. Thanks for sharing that. This paints a really clear picture of why so much enterprise software are pieces of crap.

I agree with this. I'm now based in Beijing and the local Twitter clones (the largest with hundreds of millions of users on Weibo.com) have a 140 character limit, but in Chinese. Each Chinese character has roughly the same expressiveness as a full word in English, and it's a much richer experience. Changing the limit to something like 100 words would be a welcome change IMO.

This is great advice that I've found to be useful when applied to management too.

It can be valuable to look at mistakes in a team as not something that is created by individuals, but as something that is the by product by a larger system with a bug in it. You can fix bugs in a system and the system gets better, but it's much harder to try to fix people (short of the easy answer which is to fire and replace).

Those who can, do. Those who can't, blog about it.

"Making money" is not a one-dimensional state - there's a time element to it.

Officers in a business do not have a fiduciary duty to "make money" at any given point in time, they have a duty to increase the value of the property they are responsible for managing. As a shareholder, that is absolutely what you would want someone managing your property to do.

Taking an investment in order to increase the value of the company over the long term, even at the expense of making money today, can be the rational thing to do. And it's certainly more rational than without exception focusing on "making money" today.

You give me 10 billion page views like Tumblr's a month, I'll feed your 13 month old myself, out of pocket.

Yeah, I actually used Icecast as the backend. What I built was a downloadable client that scanned your music library and gave you a nice iTunes like-web frontend to broadcast and listen remotely.

Wow, can't wait for this.

4-5 years ago, for my first startup idea, I actually spent a few months and built a client that will scan your complete MP3 library, extract and normalize ID3 tags, and sync with a web frontend.

The frontend lets you control and listen to your library in real time, and also multiplex your stream to as many listeners as you want. You could also browse and control your full music library through this.

Relevant news.yc thread from 1631 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753

A more accurate title for this would be:

"Taking a pay cut that is more than the market value of your equity stake? You are probably getting screwed."

The full text of this link should be required reading for all anonymous internet armchair valuation experts.

Passion isn't something your employees can just choose to give you once asked, but it is something you can choose to give them by providing a meaningful purpose, the opportunity to learn new things, and the freedom to do great work.

"we are standing by"

Then stop standing by. Telling someone you will help is not the same as helping.

"I would automate myself right out of writing software all together."

Interestingly, the usual way to accomplish this is to become an employer.

You realize that Facebook is the highest rated company on the whole site?

Yes, with the notable exceptions of the designers of like, every successful social network ever.

“Right time, right place, right people on the team and whatever other circumstances you might want to describe as "luck" play a much bigger role than people like to admit because it would diminish their own accomplishments.”

True, but equally true is that initiative, experience, domain knowledge, persistence and hard work play a much bigger role in outsized success than most people would like to admit because it would diminish their own accomplishments.