HN user

HeyTomesei

45 karma

Recruiting Engineers for startups since 2010.

Career goal: fit the words "disrupt, DORA, democratize, DEI" into one coherent sentence. And live to tell about it.

linkedin.com/in/bradlazarus/

brad@tomesei.com

Posts3
Comments26
View on HN

Great find. I noticed the photos disappeared yesterday, but didn't catch that footer reference change.

Sadly, Ryan Hudson knows how to play the game and Pie (with its charming .org domain) is on a roll --- already hit 1M downloads just 9 months after its launch and grown to 10+ Engineers/20+ employees.

Shameless.

On the bright side, LegalEagle also called out Pie in the video. Hopefully that'll help shine a light on them.

Ryan Hudson, the founder of Honey, launched a new company that's already under scrutiny for similar practices:

Pie.org (despite being for-profit).

Founded in March 2024, it already hit 1M downloads and has 20+ employees/10+ Engineers.

Created by dbt Labs, it's a hugely popular tool that "enables data analysts and engineers to transform their data using the same practices that software engineers use to build applications."

Last I checked, their Slack community had 50,000+ members.

Based on their LinkedIn profiles (I found 6, 5 of which are Engineers):

- Nobody went to an Ivy League school.

- Ben and Anthony only joined Google by way of acquisition; they co-founded Kaggle. Otherwise, one Engineer came from F.

Yes and no.

Western Europe's economic, tax, regulatory, and social welfare systems are a positive and negative, depending on who you ask.

Compared to the US, only a small segment of the population is either very poor or very rich. Everyone is basically lower- to upper-middle class.

But there's a price to that large safety net. The above policies create a disincentive to innovate and build wealth - the reason behind the stagnant you mentioned.

America: the sky is the limit. Western Europe: lower-middle class is the ground floor.