mayop100

Shortwave | Lead Designer & Sr. Software Engineers | Onsite in San Francisco | $150k-$225k base + generous equity

I previously cofounded Firebase (YC S11) and sold it to Google, and most of our team is ex-Google / ex-Firebase.

My new startup Shortwave is building an email client for professionals designed for stress-free productivity. We're borrowing concepts and features from modern modern messaging apps and productivity tools to help people handle and respond to emails faster.

We're well-funded and backed by Union Square Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. We launched in February, and The Verge called Shortwave "The Google Inbox successor I've been waiting for": https://www.theverge.com/22990303/shortwave-email-google-gma...

We're looking for a smart, ambitious lead designer to help us build a world-class productivity product and a top-tier brand. We're also looking for experienced software engineers: https://angel.co/company/shortwave-com

Roles are in-person at our office in San Francisco. Email me if interested: andrew@shortwave.com

Shortwave | Designers & Software Engineers | Remote (US) or SF $140k-$220k base + generous equity

I previously cofounded Firebase (YC S11) and sold it to Google, and most of our team is ex-Google / ex-Firebase.

My new startup Shortwave is building a new email client designed for stress-free productivity. We're borrowing concepts and features from modern modern messaging apps to help people write and respond to emails faster. Our mission is to ensure the future of online communications is decentralized -- and email is the largest truly decentralized communications network in the world. We're well-funded and backed by Union Square Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. We just launched in February, and The Verge called Shortwave "The Google Inbox successor I've been waiting for": https://www.theverge.com/22990303/shortwave-email-google-gma...

We're looking for smart, ambitious engineers who want to make an impact on how the world communicates. We work hard, but we have fun too, with a hybrid remote + offsite environment. Multiple roles open: https://angel.co/company/shortwave-com

Email me if interested: andrew@shortwave.com

I would have avoided the shameless plug here if it wasn't so very topical... :)

The author notes: "Finally, we need to talk federation. Does it make moving fast and breaking things more difficult? Yes, yes it does, and that can be a good thing."

The other, super-underrated feature of federated systems is that antagonistic parties are willing to use them together. For example, the US military, Russian government, major international banks, Google, Facebook, etc ALL use email and happily exchange messages over SMTP. There's no centralized service you could get all these parties to agree to use (not even Signal).

The result of this is that everyone has an email address, and that makes it the universal standard for business-to-business communication. I can loop in any number of parties on a single thread from all over the world and it just works.

My startup Shortwave is trying to build a messaging future that is email. We're trying to evolve and upgrade email to have the look and feel and features of a product like Signal, but with all the universal, federated goodness of the global SMTP network. It's a long project -- federated systems evolve slowly! -- but it's the bright open future I think we need. I go into some detail here: https://www.shortwave.com/blog/future-of-messaging/

Shortwave | Senior & Staff Software Engineers | Remote (US) or SF $150k-$240k base + generous equity

I was cofounder and CTO at Firebase, and most of our team is ex-Google / ex-Firebase.

Our new startup Shortwave is re-inventing email from the ground up to have the features and UX of modern messaging apps. Our mission is to ensure the future of online communications is decentralized -- and email is the largest truly decentralized communications network in the world. We're well-funded and backed by Union Square Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

We just launched in February, and The Verge called Shortwave "The Google Inbox successor I've been waiting for": https://www.theverge.com/22990303/shortwave-email-google-gma...

We're looking for smart, ambitious engineers who want to make an impact on how the world communicates. We work hard, but we have fun too, with a hybrid remote + offsite environment. Multiple roles open: https://angel.co/company/shortwave-com

Email me if interested: andrew@shortwave.com

Shortwave | Software Engineers & Product Designers | Remote (US) or SF | $130k-$250k+ base & equity

Shortwave is rebuilding email from the ground up to have the features and UX of a modern messaging app, so you can communicate smarter & faster. Our mission is to ensure the future of online communications is decentralized -- and email is the largest decentralized communications network in the world.

I previously cofounded Firebase (YC S11) and sold it to Google, and most of our team is ex-Google / ex-Firebase. We're well-funded by USV and Lightspeed and looking for smart, ambitious engineers and designers who want to make an impact on how the world communicates. We're looking for the best and are generous with equity.

Multiple roles open: https://www.shortwave.com/about/#careers Feel free to reach out: andrew@shortwave.com

My team just launched a product on Tuesday designed to solve this exact problem.

Email has a better threading model than Slack, but email clients lack the realtime features needed for synchronous collaboration. So we're trying to fix. The idea is to let you do long-form, async and short-form, synchronous communications using the same tool, and to do it over email so you can still talk to anyone.

Our product is Shortwave (https://www.shortwave.com/) -- we had a Show HN on Tuesday. We have a video here that walks through our team collaboration features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex_o2d1GXf4&t=5s

[founder here] I also founded Firebase and sold it to Google. I don’t plan to do that again.

[Founder & CEO here] We will never sell your data, track you, or advertise to you. We only share this information as necessary to provide the service (for example, by storing it on Google Cloud Platform).

Keep in mind that the alternative to sending an email is not sending nothing... it's usually to send a text, or a Slack message, or something else that is even less thought through. We try to consolidate all of your communications in one place and give you the tools to write thoughtful things.

Don't be confused by the fun examples. Everyone likes cats (those are my actual cats) so we put them in the post, but you certainly can send more important emails :)

Good question. Yes, we do sync your mail to our servers. We need to do this to provide many of the features we have.

We are taking security very seriously and are doing everything we can to dot our i's and cross our t's. Our engineering team is ex-Google / ex-Firebase engineers with lots of experience building high security, high reliability data systems at Google.

It's coming! Very top of our to-do list!

Your email will still come back, and you'll see it in your inbox, but you won't see it in search results. And emails from more than 90 days before you signed up won't be imported.

Noted!

Thanks for the detailed thoughts! And for the kind words in here :)

Re: team features -- we have Workspaces and Channels that let you solve many of the same use cases as Front. Check out our guide here including a quick video intro: https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/team/

To clarify -- while you can use Channels / Workspaces for general team chat, the main purpose is to help you collaborate on emails, like Front does. Front is more focused on the support use case. We're trying to build something a bit more general purpose, for people like founders, PMs, UX researchers, biz dev, etc to bring visibility to their external emails to their teammates.

You can manually group threads with drag-and-drop to create custom bundles today. You can't yet have those filters apply to future emails, but we'd very much like to do this (and a bunch of other powerful bundle features).

Many of us were Inbox users and miss it! We're trying to do more than Inbox did, but we were certainly inspired be it :)

We would very much like to support other services in the future.

Rather than using IMAP, we integrate with Gmail's APIs from our servers. This allows us to have a new client-server protocol that supports a bunch of new stuff -- like faster real-time updates, better latency compensation and offline handling, bundled inboxes, more interesting triage flows, emoji reactions, presence, etc.

The downside of this is obviously that we have to do a customer integration with Gmail to do this. But fortunately it's not too complex, and we intend to support other services in the future. And maybe, in the _long term_, improve the protocols so this integration can be more standard.

Shortwave | Software Engineers, PMs & Designers | Remote (US) or SF $125k-$225k+ base & equity

Shortwave is rebuilding email from the ground up to have the features and UX of modern messaging apps. Our mission is to ensure the future of online communications is decentralized -- and email is the largest truly decentralized communications network in the world.

I previously cofounded Firebase (YC S11) and sold it to Google, and most of our team is ex-Google / ex-Firebase. We're well-funded and looking for smart, ambitious engineers, designers, and PMs who want to make an impact on how the world communicates. We're looking for the best and are generous with equity.

Multiple roles open: https://www.shortwave.com/about/#careers

Shortwave | Software Engineers & Product Designers | Remote (US) or SF $130k-$220k+ base & equity

Shortwave is rebuilding email from the ground up to have the features and UX of a modern messaging app. Our mission is to ensure the future of online communications is decentralized -- and email is the largest decentralized communications network in the world.

I previously cofounded Firebase (YC S11) and sold it to Google, and most of my team is ex-Google / ex-Firebase. We're well-funded and looking for smart, ambitious engineers and designers who want to make an impact on how the world communicates. We're looking for the best and are generous with equity.

Multiple roles open: https://www.shortwave.com/about/#careers

The url https://.to also works, but HN apparently doesn't support emoji domain names...

Shortwave | Software Engineers & Designers | Remote (US) or SF | $125k-$210k+ base & equity

Shortwave is rebuilding email from the ground up to have the features and UX of a modern messaging app.

I previously cofounded Firebase (YC S11) and sold it to Google, and most of my team is ex-Google / ex-Firebase. We're well-funded and looking for smart, ambitious engineers and designers who want to make an impact on how the world communicates. We're looking for the best and are generous with equity.

Multiple roles open: https://www.shortwave.com/about/#careers

(Shortwave founder / previously Firebase founder here)

Thanks for the love Hacker News!

Our blog post covers the mission of the company: https://www.shortwave.com/blog/future-of-messaging/

We’re not just trying to make a better email client — we’re trying to make email so good that it reverses the trend towards centralization of internet communications. We want a future is that is open & decentralized, where developers are able to innovate without permissions. And we want the governance of messaging to give users control, so their free expression is protected. The products to beat here are Messenger, iMessage, WeChat, Slack, and so on.

Happy to answer any questions — ask away!

Subspace | Mobile / full-stack | SF | Remote

I'm one of the Firebase founders. We have a team of 11 mostly ex-Firebasers working on a new product. We're still stealth so can't share the details, but it's cool I promise :) We're very well funded.

We're looking for software engineers with strong CS fundamentals and a lot of hustle. We're primarily looking for generalists, but mobile experience is a plus.

Email joinourteam@subspaceteam.com if interested.

The drivers want 22. Overwhelmingly. Let them work!

Drivers deserve to be able to make their own choices about what work they want to do. Yes on 22!

The title is inaccurate. This does not require a backdoor. The agreement changes nothing about the use of encryption.

https://twitter.com/mmasnick/status/1177979730932297728?s=21

I’m sorry you feel I was arrogant.

I really do want to hire people “that I like and wanted to work with” though. I would hope most managers do.

FWIW we never technically interviewed internal transfers inside Google (we counted on Google’s normal interview process to maintain the bar). We were just looking for team fit in those discussions.

I’m disappointed you would belittle bootcamp graduates. Many of them are awesome, and we were lucky enough to hire one amazing one. And yes he did have a “history of working on challenging problems with real deliverables”, just not the CS kind in this case.

Ahh, I understand what you're saying.

My blog post goes through the process for inbound candidates, which accounted for the majority of our hiring. We did actively try to poach folks as well. I spent literally 4 years trying to recruit one of my friends out of Microsoft.

For these folks, you need to sell, sell, sell your vision, product and team. They're not going to switch unless they're really pumped. All of this work to get them excited happens before the interview process even begins.

I think for these people the difficulty of the interview process is a small issue relative to the risk of switching away from a job they already like.

[author here]

If you're already happy with your current job, and we can't convince you that our company is potentially a much better opportunity for you, then this is working as intended.

Interviews are expensive for the company too, so it only makes sense to invest time in someone who really is excited about switching.

Well, then perhaps the test is working as intended! Candidates who aren't sufficiently excited about your company will drop out at this stage.