shafqat

Good post. Brought me back to HN after a long time. I’m 2007!!!

SEEKING FREELANCER: Must be in NYC. Looking for someone to build a simple Python/Django app for a huge customer of ours. You'll have to come by the NewsCred NYC office (or you can work here). Contact Asif : asif at newscred.com

NewsCred (http://www.newscred.com)

The following line is not correct: "it has to be a UK co owning a branch in the States, not a US co with a UK office"

It can be either way around. But your general point is true: the L1 visa is great. I moved over on an L1A visa (the US company is the parent, with branch in UK). I just got a 2 year extension after the first year. Now in the process of getting an expedited green card.

100% agree.

It took us 2.5 years to get to product market fit. We raised a seed round and kept burn incredibly low for a long time while we figured things out. There were a couple of product adjustments along to way based on customer demand.

It took us 2.5 years, to reach out first million of recurring sales. It'll take us less than 3 months now to double that. Patience certainly is a virtue.

NewsCred - New York City, H1B okay

Lots of positions, but our main focus is to find engineers who are passionate about information retrieval and big data. So any interest or experience in Solr, Lucene, NLP, Machine Learning, etc would be a great fit for the types of problems we're working on.

We're disrupting the news industry, have amazing investors, real revenues in the millions, growing very fast.

And we have unlimited vacations!

http://www.newscred.com/company

I find it ridiculous that a significant percentage of the population here equate raising VC money with selling your soul. I know you cite the SvN post, but that is one opinion. Raising VC is good for some businesses, bad for others. So is your hiring plan. So is your product choices. And a hundred other things.

We struggled for a long time, and our business came perilously close to the end a few times. But you know what got us out? Funding. VCs. Amazing investors that were thoughtful, supportive and value accretive. The marketing that we could invest in with our funding. We're doing millions of revenue now, and it is all because we were able to light the rocketship with our VC fuel. And did I say our VCs became great friends and mentors, even through the tough times?

It's not for everyone, and my experience may be an outlier. But let's stop with the snarky ant-VC comments.

I agree with the rest of your points and good luck with the pivot!

There is a decent market.

While its not our core business, we host content APIS for some large publishers. Because we're ingesting their content anyway (content syndication is our main business) and we already have a robust API, we've productized it to provide APIs as a service back to our content providers.

I think content and ecommerce APIs are where you will see the most traction.

If anyone wants licensed Bloomberg financial news content, we have that in our News API and can give to you guys at HN rates. Can be used for commercial use. We worked hard to get this agreement done with Bloomberg since we know a lot of finance startup could use this.

We did an L1 and it was straightforward. You need to be trading for one year in the uk.

Contact me and I'll set you up. We (NewsCred) have fully licensed news and archives from 750+ news sources. All available through an API. You can use it for commercial use but there is a fee. I can give you a HN discount ;-)

FYI - your email address in not (visible) in your profile.

Honestly I don't know. I would guess it's slightly under the average at most companies. Cetainly less than 20 days as an average. But we've had people take a month and work in Thailand which is not counted as vacation. So this is not some scheme to get people to work more. It's simply offering flexibility and empowering our team to make their own choices.

We have always had unlimited vacations at NewsCred and have never had anyone abuse it. We are approx 20 people now. People love it.

What is the underlying tech? Can you talk about your listening and topic modeling algos?

Hootie and the Blowfish website on Geocities in 1997. Made decent money through advertising. Tickets.com was my number one advertiser. Those were the days....

I tried a bunch of my competitors but for each one, it said "No Active Ads Found." Although I know they have ads running on Google. For example, try Yellowbrix.com.

If this actually works for the competitors I want to track, this is an awesome product!

You can use the NewsCred API (developer.newscred.com) if you want. We'll make it free forever if you email me.

Very helpful benchmarks. Anyone know why there should be a premium per employee for a platform as a service company? Why is PaaS any different from any other startup with regards to a per employee burn rate?

NewsCred - New York City

We're hiring information retrieval engineers and sales people. More here: http://platform.newscred.com/jobs.

We've created a single API for all the news in the world. We are backed by three top-tier VCs, have a product in the market and real revenues.

Lots of perks, plus unlimited vacations! Email me: shafqat at newscred dot com.

Interesting story for those of you on HN who have seen my startup (NewsCred) go through a bunch of pivots. We are now licensing and powering a lot of the premium content on the app!

We provide API access to more than 20 million articles (headlines, excerpts). People have done all sorts of interesting things with it - http://platform.newscred.com.

NewsCred is hiring in New York City.

Lots of positions, but our main focus is to find engineers who are passionate about information retrieval and big data. So any interest or experience in Solr, Lucene, NLP, Machine Learning, etc would be a great fit for the types of problems we're working on.

And we have unlimited vacations!

Full listing at http://platform.newscred.com/jobs

NewsCred is looking for engineers in NYC.

We're looking for engineers interested in Information Retrieval, Solr, Lucene, Machine Learning, NLP etc.

We're also hosting the NYC Hadoop meetup tonight (Thursday) at our offices at General Assembly. Come by!

NewsCred - New York

We're looking for an information retrieval engineer. If you're interested in solr, lucene, machine learning, NLP or solving big data problems, get in touch! We're in the General Assembly space, have a great team and a product in the market with revenue. Also, backed by some great investors!

Is that 100K/month gross? If so, what cut actually hits their bottom line? Is it a small fraction?

20-30% fully diluted is typical if you are taking money from a VC in a seed or A round. There are always exceptions (i.e. you are a "hot" company). In fact, a lot of VCs care less about valuations and are more focused on their percentage ownership after the financing.

Fully diluted means after they carve out an option pool from your pre-money. Venture Hacks has a great post about the Option Pool Shuffle that you should read if you're not familiar with it.

We're a B2B company. We charge other web publishers a monthly fee to access our content API. Depending on what kind of content they need and how big they are, the pricing starts at 1K/month to 5 digits/month...

Yes - what kind of tech are you interested in? Email me (email in profile)!

NewsCred is hiring - we're looking for information retrieval engineers. So any experience (or even interest) in search, IR, solr, lucene, machine learning etc would be great. If not, willingness to learn.

We'd love on site, but would consider the remote option if the fit is great, and the remote location is near NYC.