rbucks

Shovels | Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE) | Remote | Full-time

Shovels is the intelligence layer for the built world. We're venture-backed, trusted by some of the largest Fortune 100 companies in the world.

We have a lot of customers and a lot of technical needs from those customers. That's why we're hiring a true Forward Deployed Engineer: a real engineer who wants to work shoulder-to-shoulder with customers and turn their hardest questions into working solutions.

You'll embed into our most important enterprise accounts, understand what they're actually trying to do, and build the maps, models, and data products that make Shovels indispensable to them, working alongside AI agents the way the rest of our engineering team does.

This is not a hand-off role: you own the relationship and the build, from the first "what if we could see…" to the moment the customer says "wow."

Check it out: https://www.shovels.ai/careers/forward-deployed-engineer

Construction is perhaps the world's second oldest profession, so it's easily overlooked. It doesn't help that the TAM is so large it defies computation.

Small and large VCs are paying more attention.

- https://1984.vc/ - https://www.beatventures.com/ - https://www.metaprop.vc/ - https://www.buildtech.vc/

This conference crosses over into real estate but it's all pretty much the same network of entrepreneurs: https://blueprintvegas.com/

Point is, this is not a vacuum. It's just not getting a lot of attention due to the points above.

I believe (and am biased, see profile) that climate and housing crises combined will bring a lot more attention to contech/proptech/climatetech in the coming months and years.

Can you do it on 3rd party apps or do you need raw access to the build files? I ask because we at MightySignal have an API to provide decrypted APK and IPA files that you could use to run Emerge on any app in the stores.

I interviewed Josh for my book, The Parallel Entreprener (on Kindle etc), and can attest that he’s done all this experimentation for the love of the game.

For some of us the glory is not in the exit but rather in the building.

Currently doing ~$20K combined from https://www.toofr.com and https://www.inlistio.com.

Also have these in the hopper - https://www.thinboxapp.com, https://www.enps.co, http://www.glist.io, https://www.voxloca.com

Idea is I'd love to cycle through them, sell whatever's working after a couple years. It takes time to find the right business at the right time so I advocate 'incubating' a project in the background, building SEO, seeing if it catches. It just takes time.

I'm polishing off a book about it now -- http://www.parallelentrepreneurship.com. It incorporates a lot of the wisdom in the comments here. (And I'm taking notes on the stuff I missed.)

That Sidekiq is a one-man business which allows me to exist as a one-man business (by simplifying a critical processing function and being free) is beautifully meta.

Thank you kind sir for sharing your wizardry with us mortals.

Wholeheartedly agree with this. The hardest thing about being a solo founder is the loneliness. In times of joy, in times of grief, it's just you. Sharing your successes and your failures with a group of supportive entrepreneurs as you plod along is the next best thing (or maybe even better) to having a co-founder.

Which libraries did you use to run the positivity analysis?

Are there any other writing APIs that can compare? I haven't seen them.

As a self-taught Python and Ruby programmer, I really appreciate this.

I'm cofounder of Scripted.com and we're probably subledger's first major integration. We did it because we didn't want to put an engineering FTE on dealing with money in our app. Timing was good so we went for it! And I'm glad we did. All told I think we deleted some 9,000 lines of code.

Great team but integration needs some work. I'm sure they'll get there and I'm glad we could be the guinea pigs. Go ahead, AMA!

Great question! Probably not very many.

Great point. As co-founder of Scripted, I whole-heartedly agree.

I think Leah is great -- I've never met her but have heard and read good things. However it's hard to be one size fits all anymore. Craigslist and oDesk may be the last two marketplace leaders without single focus.

If you want to crush it, start a winery. Otherwise get ready for the ups and downs of real startup business.

This article is absolutely right. At the office, put your head down and work in reality. The only time you get to play in the "crushing it" vortex is at VC meetings.

Rather than have them host this on Elance, we've offered to help them get that prior art written on Scripted.com.

In most cases, we'll take an outline from a business owner along with a style guide they produced or had produced by their agency, and choose a writer as close as possible to their industry. You can't fake insider knowledge, but you can transfer the details and have a great writer build in the details.

Maybe a better analogy is like a head chef and his souz-chefs. Our clients create the recipe, but our writers prepare the dish.

Let me take the discussion up a level.

There's huge demand for great writing, that's been made clear in the comments (and we see this every day at Scripted HQ).

There are millions of underemployed professionals in this country, thousands of whom are exceptional writers.

Scripted bridges the two, allowing businesses to get great writing (not just blog posts, also white papers, landing pages, status updates, case studies, and product descriptions) by someone who actually knows the industry.

I totally understand the skepticism surrounding ghostwriting, but it's not so different than hiring a PR agency or marketing firm. We're just making these services available to any business a la carte, and using a distributed workforce of real American professionals.

Where's the scheming in that?

Price isn't shown because it depends on level of account support and job customization. We try not to run package deals for less than $500/mo.

Valid points, but what Scripted does is not much different than hiring a blogger intern. To keep the content genuine, our clients have to be engaged. We simply promote them from writer to editor. Scripted helps businesses take the time spent from idea to publishing down from hours to minutes.

I know Doug and Matt really well and they are great guys. Fully support what they're doing with DA.

As a co-founder of another tech company, I still get barraged by inbound tech recruiters claiming they have the next great Ruby engineer for us. This approach is much more transparent and fair from an employer perspective, and I think it's friendly to developers too.

Fair point. But as someone who went to 3/4 of these meetings with the author, I can say with some certainty that the 120 number is an exaggeration. Total intros was probably in the 40s, and total calls and meetings were maybe 20. We ended up with around 10 new investors in the last round.

Batting 1000 (4 investments from 4 intros) is unique. If your product and pitch is that good, then congrats! I think for most startups with good performance metrics, expecting 1/5 of your pitches to convert is a good benchmark.

I agree 100%. The struggle is far more common in startups than most valley publications portray it to be. If you're B2B, you need customers. If you're B2C, you need users. Just put your head down and keep working.

This is awesome. Thanks!

Has anyone ever seen Steve Jobs where a suit and tie?

There should be a rule that if you have to write a wrapper for the API, then it's either poorly designed or poorly document, or both. Eg PayPal, Google, LinkedIn.

With the Scripted API, you can build a self-publishing website in < 50 lines of code. We're publishing to our own magazine sites using this API!

Basic flow:

Use a feed to parse and generate topics Push blog article jobs to Scripted Pull finished content from Scripted Post content to your CMS

We'll write another blog post about it in a couple of weeks.

Can there be such a thing as semi-technical?

I have built products, coded them myself or with some oDesk help, and can at least read Python, PHP, and (less so) Ruby. I got the most technical MBA you can get (MIT Sloan) and have utmost respect for engineers.

I've run a chown -R from the root dir when I thought I was in my Wordpress dir and effectively killed the server. I've spent hours troubleshooting CodeIgniter problems and http 500 errors. For this, I have a Clintonian "I feel your pain" view towards programmers/coders/engineers/so-called-technical people.

So my point is this: I think it IS important, if you run a website, to try to build stuff on your own. But just because you can't build your own libraries doesn't mean you can't say you're "technical".

If someone asked me, I'd probably say "yes" but qualify it. I'm not a technical builder, but I understand what it takes to get technical things built.