levlandau

The alternative interpretation of what you have said is that $16B is actually too low and that Slack is undervalued or at the very least it has a lot of room to grow.

PW Anderson (Nobel Laureate, 95 yrs old) Condensed Matter Physics legend

i hear you. check out floydhub [https://www.floydhub.com/]

Cofounder here. Really appreciate the discussion and all of the feedback. The spirit of the contract's never been intended to be unreasonably restrictive -- though I totally understand the concern. We wanted to include certain terms since as part of our model, we do own the code written specifically for Gigster projects. We certainly don't want to own code folks write outside of Gigster projects.

We've received very similar feedback recently and were going to do a review of the contract with our lawyers highlighting this specific issue. We'll also consider adding an FAQ around any contract nuances. We care about doing what is fair and while a lot of terms here are standard we'll try to review terms to make our position much clearer. Will share important updates.

Thanks

Gigster | Fullstack Web | Full-Time | San Francisco, VISA

Come work on the problem of delivering high quality software reliably and at scale. We have hundreds of projects running simultaneously and collect data about all aspects of the software development process with the aim of automating repetitive aspects of sales, project management and software development itself.

The web work is mostly done in javascript -- React & Node. Some other languages & technologies we use: Postgres, Mongo, Flask/Python, Redshift, Angular, Docker, RabbitMQ

The company's business is growing pretty rapidly but the team itself is still pretty small and there's a very clear opportunity to make a big impact.

Apply at https://jobs.lever.co/gigster/d80b3bcd-fee5-44bb-b2ba-7ceae6... or send an email to debo at gigster.com with the subject HN: Gigster Engineering

Multiple developers are common on (mobile) apps that require custom backends and larger projects that need to hit a tight timeline. All projects have more than one person on them and typically at least 3 (dev, pm, designer)

We already do this @ Gigster. Except you don't get hired to be full time employees. You get "hired" to work on short term projects (that you can accept or deny) which is arguably more fun.

I don't think you need to partner with a bank to start making progress here.

One of the main developers of the Yahoo weather app is a gigster (developer on the platform). The statement is that it was built by "one of our gigsters" and is intended to showcase the quality of work developers on Gigster have done. Had that developer been on Odesk or TapFame they would have listed Yahoo Weather as part of their portfolio. In this case they actually do list it as part of their portfolio. Definitely do not intend to take away from your hard work and appreciate you for it. Happy to do better in making this clearer but it's a bit unfair to imply that we cant showcase the work of developers on our platform as an indicator of developer quality.

Thanks for the Feedback!

I am one of the cofounders and I'll be emailing you right away. This is absolutely not the way we operate and I'm happy to jump on a phone call with you to answer any questions you have! Very sorry about any issues you had in our chat. Techcrunch is definitely stretching us (in a good way) and so sometimes we mess up. Very sorry once again I'll be in touch!

This is correct. We price out the gigs ahead of time and match them with developers who like the price.

Hi! Not all clients, just a select few. We collect data on all the projects we do and infer prices automatically :) Generally you can expect a Gigster project to be way cheaper (we've seen 10X in some cases) than what an agency would charge and often times cheaper or on par with similarly curated services like toptal but with the added convenience you get from having a product manager like an agency would provide.

We actually plan to give all Gigster developers equity or options on projects!

Hi! We don't assign more people blindly. But what do you propose we do if a developer gets sick or has to travel? We are engineers ourselves and are certainly careful to not just load up a bunch of devs on a project. We've done that before and it was painful :) Thanks for the feedback!

Hi! A good developer can expect to make $10K - $20K per month on Gigster :) The developer also can expect to do no sales or management work on the project. You just write code on interesting projects and get paid :) Much like Uber hands drivers rides and they just have to accept them.

We actually do not make you fill out any forms is the great thing and we do have an engine that figures out a pretty detailed cost within minutes of chatting with you. Sorry if this isn't clear! What might you be looking to build?

Gigster (trygigster.com) | Founding Engineer | San Francisco | Onsite

Gigster is building the first distributed firm on the internet. By leveraging the best of human and machine computation, Gigster gives businesses on demand access to elite software engineering teams and enables the best software engineers earn sizable incomes while working on interesting part-time projects from anywhere.

The company is backed by Greylock & Bloomberg and has grown rapidly since its launch at the end of last year (http://producthunt.com/posts/gigster). We count top Silicon Valley companies as customers and pay out $15K per month to great engineers working remotely within and outside the US.

The founders (both engineers) have ported DDR to FPGAs, worked on silicon lasers and built apps used by 100M+ monthly users. As our first engineering hire you will earn sizable equity, own important initiatives and be treated as a partner in all regards. We are hiring for both Fullstack (Web) and Data/Machine Learning roles.

Please send a note to debo@trygigster.com to learn more.

Crazy reading your answer after i responded. I gotta say we're definitely on the same page here :)

Less an explicit set of questions but more recursively/iteratively asking why/what/when/how at increasingly deeper levels of the problem they're talking about. It requires the interviewer to be at least familiar with the general domain but you don't have to be an expert. It's borrowed from how Elon Musk says he does assessments. People who know their stuff remember everything about every part of something they worked on. They know why they did /didn't do something all the way down to the most trivial level of detail and they have intelligent thoughts about how they would improve and what tradeoffs they made. Most people fail after one or two levels of this "interrogation".

I think the other thing to look into is what "talking about projects" means. I'm willing to bet that there's some version of talking about projects that correlates well with programming ability. I've had to screen ~ 500 engineers and we basically use the same method aline describes as a first filter and then talk about the project. Imo it's other things like reliability, speed in real world conditions etc that are a bit harder to verify but those are hard to verify in a programming interview as well.

Agree that the bias is to overestimate the power of a name but disagree with the notions that a) the name doesn't matter that much and b) the wasteful process of going through a ton of names to arrive at something close to what they started with was not actually necessary for coming up with and feeling satisfied with that name in the first place. I'm pretty sure Hippolist wouldn't have worked as well as Trello in a quantifiably material way.

Its corpus is existing songs but I think it's more like it generates lines based on the previous lines while aiming to stick to the subject matter and optimize rhyme density.

"Musk is no different from the huge number of people involved in startups except that he is investing more money. Many of us are investing all of our valuable time and money in risky ventures instead of saving and taking the rational path in life."

Seriously? Like Are you actually serious when you write this? You seriously believe that the only difference between Musk and the huge number of people working on startups is that he is investing more money?

You do not think that it has something to do with working on hard problems that nobody thinks are worthwhile until later on. You also do not think it has to do with him actually solving said hard problems. You also do not think it has anything to do with him being smart enough to manage multiple fields like a physics, computer science, engineering and design and have in depth discussions about rockets and space explorations at the same level as he can about electric cars and software? You also seriously believe that someone who is motivated by money would go and try to start a private rocket company that can deliver people to Mars and is reusable? Seriously? They wouldn't just go make some web app and "flip it"? This response is atypical for me but it's hard for me to read this sort of response and respond normally.

https://www.palantir.com/ | http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/?co=Palantir

Really cool. Question: Assuming that your algorithms will become known or can be replicated, how do you think about your defensibility? What is proprietary here that improves via network effects? How does the licensing model work and what are some comparable (old school/current) companies?

I agree with the statement that startups are like biological organisms evolving in the broth of an economic environment. In @pmarca's words "the market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled". Once we move on from this fact (that we can't create startups out of thin air without there being an underlying wave ...without a "why now"), the rest of the actionable advice here will work better for an investor and/or the entrepreneur who views herself more as an investor than say a hacker. Alternative advice is to "live in the future" as PG would say it or to be different as Peter Thiel would imply. What I think this means is to ask yourself how similar what you do for fun/ for projects is to what everyone else is doing[similar --> bad]. How often do you work on that stuff? Do you collaborate with people? I am convinced ideas emerge as a natural consequence of working on ideas at the fringe with interesting people. What is hard is a) working on ideas and b) finding interesting people to work with. Another thing that doesn't help is committing to a company prematurely. Easier said than done, but i think if we as entrepreneurs took it a little less serious...we'd net out with more successful companies.

How does this change the point that there are entrepreneurs who have instincts about the market AND timing that turn out to be right?

The broader point is Peter Thiel's --> You are not a lottery ticket.

The best example might be Jeff Bezos and his business plan. Elon Musk has been consistent for ~ 20 yrs about the areas he set out to work on since college and he's followed that through. It's not dumb luck. It's skill + luck. The skill part of the equation is oft dumbed down in favor of the randomized success algorithm. People who are able to repeat their successes multiple times e.g. Joel Spolsky, Elon Musk, David Duffield, Rich Barton are especially skilled and it would be disingenuous to attribute their successes to some luck/timing that they were not ultimately mostly responsible for creating or noticing.

While he didn't know Microsoft would pioneer it, Bill Gates says he knew that there'd be a software industry.

While he didn't know Facebook would pioneer it, Mark Zuckerberg says he knew that all software would be social.

While he didn't know Google would pioneer it, Larry Page said he knew that the fast growing web would eventually need a good way to search.

While he didn't know Viaweb would pioneer it, Paul Graham said he knew that ecommerce sites would eventually be created by software.

And so on....

I respect the fuzziness and path dependence of startup growth but boy do I respect people who can see the future now, make it happen and end up being correct. Even more props to people who make it happen multiple times [e.g. Joel Spolsky, Elon Musk]

I'm pretty sure what people mean by "Blockchain not Bitcoin" is "Bitcoin 2.0" and not "Bitcoin 1.0" i.e. people think that the killer apps will be complex programs running on the blockchain that enable things like smart contracts etc much like search & social apps were more of killer apps than email which is the analog of bitcoin the currency. The point this article goes into detail to explain is likely not lost on people as smart as Sam Altman or Fred Wilson who say this.