rickyyean

Upbeat (formerly PRX) | Full-Stack Engineer, Full-Time Media Strategist, Part-Time Media Strategist or Intern | San Francisco | Onsite | Full-time

What is Upbeat?

Upbeat (http://upbeatpr.com) is reinventing public relations (PR) for companies by making it on-demand, transparent, and affordable. Unlike working with traditional PR agencies that cost tens of thousands of dollars a month and endless hours of meetings, companies can launch a campaign with Upbeat by signing up on our site and manage everything through our dashboard.

How are we able to do this? We’ve built an incredible platform that automates some of the most painful, manual parts of the process and leverages machine learning to build the world’s most powerful engine for connecting companies with stories to journalists and media publications. We’ve helped over 300 companies get featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Morning America, NPR, Fast Company, and much, much more.

Journalists are excited about what we're doing as well. Check out this Nieman Journalism Lab coverage of our innovative model: http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/06/pr-pitches-are-the-worst-th...

- Full-Stack Engineer (full-time): https://upbeat.workable.com/jobs/413395

- Media Strategist (full-time): https://upbeat.workable.com/jobs/499715

- Media Strategist (part-time) or Intern: https://upbeat.workable.com/jobs/499965

Thanks for including Upbeat in your Tools & Services section!

PRX is reinventing PR (public relations, not pull requests, although we create a lot of those too) for companies by making it on-demand, transparent, and affordable. Unlike working with traditional PR agencies that cost tens of thousands of dollars a month and endless hours of meetings, companies can launch a campaign with by signing up on our site and manage everything through our dashboard. PRX is looking for a full-stack software engineer to join our team in building and scaling our platform to tens of thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of journalists and bloggers and using ML to disrupt a very old-school industry.

Responsibilities

- You'll ship code to PRX’s core product

- You'll develop new features and improve our PR platform, which our PR managers use to conduct campaigns for our clients

- You'll work on our crawling engine that indexes millions of articles across the web and scrapes information to our media targeting system

- You'll use a wide range of technologies including React, Redux, Django, SCSS, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, Github and Git Flow, Redis, Celery, Heroku, lots of AWS services (RDS, SQS, S3, Cloudfront, ElastiCache)

Qualifications

- You have experience writing and maintaining code shipped to real users, whether for work or a side project.

- You have experience in writing web software and are comfortable working across the stack. However, it's okay to be stronger or have a preference for backend or frontend, as long as you're willing to learn.

- You have a firm grasp on CS fundamentals

- You are able to learn new concepts and technologies quickly

Valued, but not required

- Experience in our specific technologies. PRX is primarily built in Python using Django with Postgres and ElasticSearch on the backend and React + Redux and SCSS on the frontend.

- Experience in Numpy, Scipy and ML or NLP

Apply at https://prxco.workable.com/jobs/413395/candidates/new

PG once said "PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories." And it's a way for startups to compete because they can't outspend the big guys on advertising.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

When the bits become tied to the region somehow, like better transport through autonomous cars, maybe there will be more of an incentive for tech companies to invest like how Rockefeller pushed for mandatory public education to create the next generation of obedient, literate, factory workers and how Ford built an entire city around his manufacturing plants and created the idea of weekends and minimum wage in order to reduce turnovers. Nothing like that is happening or happening at scale in tech companies, but it's changing. Incentives are aligning.

Author here. I'm inspired by your story. The responses I've been getting so far has been overwhelming. People from around the WORLD are telling me that the story resembles theirs and that they face very similar mindset challenges. I know my experience at Stanford was transformative and I feel extremely lucky, but that's part of the reason why I wrote it. I may be in a better position to talk about than most. Thank you for sharing your story.

I wonder if this will eat away some of the time I spend on HN and if it'll stick. I'll give it a try.

San Francisco, CA - Full time - Full Stack Engineer

YC alum. Our product serves several thousand businesses in over 140 countries. Profitable, 4-person Stanford team. Recruiting for our new venture to power the Internet's business model for the next 20 years. The current model of display ad-supported media is rapidly falling out of favor. We are building a better way and getting rid of the idea of the starving artist online. Email hn@crowdbooster.com

IANAL but we're going through the H1B process now and I was told that we're hear about the lottery late May / early June, but the official visa issue is beginning of October. That's when the person can start working.

Palo Alto, CA and San Francisco, CA - Full time - Full Stack Engineer

YC alum. Our product serves several thousand businesses in over 140 countries. Profitable, 4-person Stanford team.

Recruiting for our new venture to power the Internet's business model for the next 20 years. The current model of display ad-supported media is rapidly falling out of favor. We are building a better way and getting rid of the idea of the starving artist online. Email hn@crowdbooster.com

If NYT specializes in the production of content, others would have to value their content over others. I think that's part of the problem. The kind of content the NYT produces is not that valuable. Investigative journalism, which is the hardest and most expensive part of what they do, is valued only by a very small number of people.

Not traditional ad space, therefore escapes "banner blindness" and works on mobile. Also what's happening here is also brands are paying to associate with the publishers' brand directly (and slowly eroding it if not done well). Chevron paid the New York Times to produce a post about an important topic like energy and gets to enjoy New York Times' authority and trustworthiness. It's not dissimilar to a Simpsons episode on Hulu "presented by Dove." It can be done really well, with clear separation, and the positive association happens when a reader associates quality content with a sponsor. Publishers know what's at stake and I think they are learning this balance.

EDIT: Actually I thought about it some more. Maybe native advertising only works for entertainment content. A brand can present it, and because there's relatively little scrutiny on the part of the readers, it's fine. New York Times writing about energy policy is on the other side of the spectrum. Massive scrutiny. Any brand influence will be flagged.

If you're not happy about the results, here's a way to restore your faith in humanity: http://www.quora.com/Cancer/Can-I-use-the-internet-to-save-m...

The post linked to in the article from Facebook's ad engineer is here, for easier access: http://www.facebook-studio.com/news/item/news-feed-engagemen...

Facebook has been ranking the posts in your News Feed for a long time. The incentives are aligned, Facebook wants you to engage with items in your News Feed. Page owners want people to engage with their posts. If you don't like it as a user, you can change the News Feed sort to "Most Recent." Advertisers who don't want engagement can potentially buy different kinds of ad units to accomplish whatever it is that you care about (clicks, sales, etc).

I do think Facebook wants to keep you on Facebook, so they paid attention first to making "native" ads that work on Facebook. If you are only going for traffic to your site, you are not using your Facebook Page for what it's best at, which is helping you naturally become part of a conversation that people are having with their friends. I think that's very meaningful and a much better advertising experience. If you care about traffic, Twitter's promoted tweets are very good at sending traffic to your site. If you think about it, that also makes sense because that's what's "natural" on Twitter (i.e. we use Twitter to discover interesting content online that we can then click on to go consume).

With that said, Mark Cuban did recently get really angry about this too (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=460717227304430&...) and I understand why. He worked hard to get 2.3M fans on Facebook for the Dallas Mavericks because that's what Facebook was about before. But then a post only reached 27k fans organically and he was asked to pony up $3k to reach ~50% of his fans. That just sounds too much like blackmail. Facebook failed to communicate and manage the expectations of Page owners. They didn't know that their posts were never reaching 100% of the fans, and when that became apparent, they noticed that the algorithm was updated and depressed the reach numbers significantly. With the recent IPO, Page owners think Facebook is money hungry, and then they noticed the new Promoted Posts so they fired back. Facebook could've just communicated more to manage people's expectations along the way.

We are! We are hiring our first employee at Crowdbooster (YC S2010).

We've built the best way for businesses to get fast, actionable data about their social media accounts. Tens of thousands of businesses use us every day, including Fortune 500 companies, advertising agencies, coffee shops, sports teams, rappers, politicians, and more.

Some more things about us:

-We have a legit technical team including two Stanford engineers with backgrounds in machine learning, human-computer interaction, and databases.

-We believe in simplicity, minimalism, and creating things that are a joy to use.

-We're here to help businesses use social media to build real relationships, not spam, and we’ll never compromise on that.

-We're funded by some of the best early-stage investors in the valley, including SV Angel, Charles River Ventures, Y Combinator, and several early investors and employees of Facebook, Twitter, and Slide.

What we'd like to see from you:

-While your peers might describe you as a rockstar, the term embarrasses you. We love rockstars (many of them are Crowdbooster users!), but we've made a conscious decision to have a culture that revolves entirely around our product, not our egos.

-You've wrestled with big data before. Crowdbooster requires storing terabytes of data, extracting insights using statistical learning techniques, and making it available to our users in real-time.

-That said, you like working at every level of the stack, not being pigeonholed as a backend developer.

-You care a lot about the products you ship, and don't need a manager or "product guy" to motivate you to get every detail right.

-You're familiar with several parts of our stack, and willing to learn the rest. We use Python, Django, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, jQuery, Protovis, RabbitMQ, Celery, HAProxy, EC2, git, and more.

-You have projects of your own to show us. It doesn't matter whether it's an open source project, a startup idea, or just a really fun toy project. Just as long as you shipped it.

If this fits you, definitely email us at jobs@crowdbooster.com

Good point about how people think about social. They say, "hey let's create a viral campaign," and dump all this money to agencies to create them. When campaigns fail, they say social doesn't work. What they don't get is exactly that, social is an on-going series of experiments, you're basically trying to create something that will get carried on and shared by a number of individual human being. Optimizing to Google's search algorithm is a relatively simple task compared to optimizing your message to one that resonates with hundreds and thousands of human beings.

lol

Well done, guys!

This event "Incubate 2.0" here is real, and sold out. Some of my friends are speaking =P http://startupcause.eventbrite.com/

Cornell's got a good showing in the valley. Nice! Congrats Euwyn! Now impress me with your reality distortion on the Disrupt stage.

Do it. David and I reapplied after getting rejected the first time. Stay determined - getting in is a huge enabler but stay tough and you will have a company.

Awesome. If I reply stop does it stop everything? I want more granular controls! Nice job though.

overcoming the financial challenges to be able to pursue my dream

Please get well soon, Paul. Thanks for the hard work.

Was just talking to David Hornik briefly about this today. I think it's fine. I wish I was smart enough and grew up in a good enough background to aspire to be CEO at 16. The thing to know is to work hard to live up to the title and be a GREAT CEO.

One thing that I want to tell them is to keep their eyes open and explore new interests. I hated the idea of business because I thought it was evil, but college opened my eyes to the startup world because I kept an open-mind and tried out different things. Since then it's become a big part of my life and I love it. =)

Hey all - you should have gotten the email, but sign up here if you need a ride from Stanford area. http://bit.ly/startup-school-rides

Stanford's BASES (http://bases.stanford.edu) is getting interest from people riding up from South Bay to see if we can get a bus. Sit tight you'll get a notice soon. =)