tomjacobs

HomeShare | Potrero Hill San Francisco

We're fixing San Francisco's housing crisis. We allow people to live near their work, in very nice apartments, and not spend their whole paycheck on rent. Part of how we do this is by converting new luxury apartments.

We're looking for an ambitious developer to help launch this early-stage venture, and work in the trenches with an experienced founding team. The founders have launched and run several companies before. Though we are bootstrapped, we're processing over $1M / year in annualized transaction volume. For the hungry individual, this is a crash course on how to found and launch a new venture.

At the heart of our service is the ability to introduce compatible housemates to one another, and do this automatically from our growing pool of people looking to move in. That's where you come in; improving our automated matching system. Can you build a basic web service similar to a spreadsheet or trello? Great. Do you love APIs? Double great.

Skills: Docker, AWS, Datatables, Javascript, PHP, HTML, CSS, jQuery, Bootstrap, Rails.

Apply: tom@thehomeshare.com

HomeShare (www.thehomeshare.com) enables you to live in the heart of the city without breaking the bank. We match you with compatible housemates, secure spacious units and install privacy partitions so you can live with awesome people and enjoy your own private space. We are currently piloting with luxury apartments in SoMa / Potrero Hill for $1,200 / month. Our mission: to make cities liveable again by providing attractive yet affordable housing. Based in San Francisco. Founded in 2016.

12,000 people moved to San Francisco in 2014. 4,000 homes were built. What's the problem?

https://medium.com/@TomPJacobs/what-housing-crisis-3c0568a5d...

Very nice. I've been building something like this with C9. It needs to be done!

12,000 people moved to SF in 2014. 4,000 new homes were added. I think we need more homes. https://medium.com/@TomPJacobs/what-housing-crisis-3c0568a5d...

Uber: a clever hack. That people loved. Using new tech.

Airbnb: a clever hack. That people loved. Using new tech.

Sprig, munchery, doordash, postmates, spoonrocket etc don't feel like a clever hack. Just a business.

Both hacks were tricks to get around regulation put in place long ago to protect various financial interests. Once the people have spoken about what they love, it all topples down.

What other regulation / situation seems "dumb" at the moment (but is being held in place by $/power protecting it) ?

Data download limits, speeds, etc, i.e. consumer fixed and mobile internet seems like a big one.

The other huge one is the SF housing supply market. Heavily restricted because of various interests protecting value. Once a group figures a clever hack around not being able to supply more units of housing, and people LOVE it, and tech scales it, it all topples down.

12,000 people moved to San Francisco in 2014. How many new units of housing were built? Almost 4,000!

What housing crisis? https://medium.com/@TomPJacobs/what-housing-crisis-3c0568a5d...

How about we do something about it today? Instead of waiting for new apartments to be built, we make better use of existing apartments:

https://medium.com/@TomPJacobs/what-housing-crisis-3c0568a5d...

Thanks Corey,

Yes indeed GPS sucks on the sidewalk. Outdoor feature-based SLAM is the way to go. Congrats on getting the robot to go navigate 12K by itself with no loss of localisation.

The human operator is the backup, similar to Starship.

A separate mapping operation needs to be done first to pre-learn routes.

Recovering from lost localisation is tough and will need people to go recover the unit.

The Zed 3D camera operates better outdoors than the Asus, and solid state lidar sensors like Quanergy's are coming to market at a rapid pace and lowering costs. http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sens...

Crowds are tough too. The robot would not want to move too much in a crowd, and perhaps is best for it to just stay still until the crowd passes and it can re-localise.

These solutions and technologies are only going to get better with time, not worse, so it'll be a much easier problem given some short time.

Yeah, I don't see any of them targeting food specifically. Starship does groceries, which is close, and Dispatch as well.

I see more scooters on the road currently with meals in them than groceries.

DoorDash would never deliver you a single coffee from down the street. A robot would be happy to.

Bike lanes are the happy medium here.

Yeah - cheap, reliable, and less problematic than humans. Then it crosses from novelty to practical daily.

I didn't know legal documents could be funny.

"Mr. Guillory emerged from the shadows with his hand out within days of the March 11, 2016 news that General Motors Company (“GM”) intends to acquire Cruise. As explained below, Mr. Guillory should put his hand back into his pocket; he does not have any stake in the Company."

Maybe Jeremy could go build his own company. There's plenty of wealth to create, you don't have to take.

Rents in SF are out of control.

https://medium.com/@TomPJacobs/what-housing-crisis-3c0568a5d...

This is one of our top problems we're working on.

Ultimately: This. With a cooler.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gehrAhflQ&nohtml5=False

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyZE0psQsX0&nohtml5=False

Don't steal people from the street.

Let's start with closed off areas and known paths. Then we can expand out.

Indeed they are, next up, self navigating RC cars, ala https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfJHgSNx_vY

Still looking for cofounders; so a lot.

Think of it like this: Don't steal people from the street; likewise, don't steal delivery robots who yell for help when you do.

Right, it starts off somewhere with a clear closed path, and a daily need for small item transport.

I agree, it seems like this will happen in some closed area for a practical purpose soon, and then slowly expand out to more public areas.

A team with machine learning, computer vision and robotics experience is indeed what we need. People like this are currently in high demand, but there are more people quick to learn who are learning in these areas now.

If speed is an issue and it needs to travel by bike lines and road, perhaps some design based around this this or this will work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPP7StCMYJg http://cdn.ndtv.com/tech/xiaomi_ninebot_mini.jpg http://www.motherearthnews.com/~/media/Images/MEN/Editorial/...

Count Zippy in! He'll bring the food. http://meetzippy.com

Also, the SparkFun Autonomous Vehicle Competition is similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfJHgSNx_vY https://avc.sparkfun.com/2014

Yes, they're electric, so a depot with a solar array brings the cost down here.

Zippy hasn't worked out apartment buildings and the city, so is best suited at first to the suburbs. A few miles is that distance that seems silly to drive but too far to walk.

That's right, we already have manned wheelchairs roaming the streets, so it's not too different.

We bet there are cases where not having to wait on a human to be available will be a very good experience for the customer.

There's enough market for everyone. Once it does the job of getting it there, with enough location coverage, other factors inform the decision.

Would you like your spicy calzone delivered in a grey box, or an Italian sports car?

Not saying it's all about the looks - but either way, robot logistics is coming.

It's best for short distances.

The items are locked in a cooler bin (not in videos), and the robot acts as a human would if it were being kidnapped.

The robot is happy to run back and forth along a route all day, humans usually get paid for this. If you've flown a drone, you'll know that you don't want that anywhere near people in public. Think flying weed-whacker. Times 4.

What's really new here is that it makes it possible for the first time to have something physically be somewhere else in the neighborhood at the push of a button, with no employee or friend taking it there. Skype isn't teleportation, but we're getting closer.

Zippy self driving meal delivery robots, in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444797

Zippy - Delivery by robots. | S.F., Melbourne | Remote, visa

We're building self driving robots who drive along the sidewalk to deliver you things.

We're looking for people with interests in ROS, SLAM, robotics, LSTM+CTC speech recognition, GPS, 3D modelling, and customer delight.

http://meetzippy.com

hatsmagee@gmail.com

camera on raspberry pi zero - is it possible? usb webcam? any line into the csi camera bus?

Yeah, just paid AU$20 for it. So it's $5 in theory, right?

Nope, we have hundreds of Pi2's with two wipis in them, yeah it's fine.

Plug a wipi into it via the USB OTG cable. Done.

This seems like an important moment for humans and computers. The cable to connect the computer now costs more than a 1GHZ computer.

It feels a lot like a tipping point for something.

http://makezine.com/2015/11/25/raspberry-pi-announces-5-comp...