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vivekpreddy

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Currently People Ops at Benchling. Formerly at Segment, Abnormal Security, and Entelo.

You can reach me at vivek@benchling.com

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Promising Startups 9 years ago

The Breakout List seems to be a better list of "hot startups." It's still VC heavy, but there are a few other companies listed that aren't your traditional VC-backed startup. The companies listed are going after large markets (for the most part), growing fast in terms of revenue and generally have good financial backing (although that's not a prerequisite from what I can gather).

https://breakoutlist.com/

I'd look into Berlin and Hamburg. Berlin is changing rapidly with a lot of opportunity and Hamburg is already quite wealthy with a ton of resources available to it.

I'm not the biggest fan of Linkedin, but this strikes me as quite cynical. I've been recruiting internally for a number of good startups and I've used salary transparency to advocate for better offers for prospective candidates. There will be a few bad actors as there already exist, but I do think this is a step in the right direction towards at least giving prospective employees a better understanding of their own worth.

Exactly. Good companies understand the value of great employees and I've found these tactics are for companies that penny-pinch and can't/won't budge. No better way to lose out on great talent that to only offer 10% more when other companies realize the value they're getting and offer significantly more.

I've been recruiting for a few years now, and I've always hated asking how much someone is making currently. Have always found it better to ask "what are your compensation expectations?" Puts the ball in the candidate's court and I prefer asking this early in conversations as to make sure we're aligned and no one wastes each others time.

I'm a heavy Lyft user, and I only tip when I have a particularly impressive ride (i.e. Driver goes above and beyond to be accommodating or I had a very insightful conversation). There is no expectation to tip, and I have never met a driver that's been offended with there being no tip. This with over 1k rides...

Talking About Money 11 years ago

I head up recruiting at the company I work for. The biggest reason I ask this is that I'm worried a candidate's expectations are outside of what our budget is. There really is no other legitimate reason to ask in my opinion. Having said that, I'm always happy to share a range (depending on experience level and how the interview process goes of course). What I don't understand is that most startups do put ranges on AngelList these days, so I'm confused as to why there's so much of a cat and mouse game. I'm running an experiment right now to simply be transparent about our ranges, even in initial reachouts. I'm curious what the data suggests in terms of my response rates and ultimately hires made...

Entelo - San Francisco (SOMA), CA - Full-time - http://www.entelo.com/ ; we're unfortunately are not hiring remote or part-time at the moment as we're committed to building a strong internal engineering culture at this stage before opening the doors.

Entelo's mission is to help organizations build great teams. Our goal is to help any organization recruit for any of their open roles. We've currently built a powerful people search engine that indexes hundreds of millions of social profiles and looks for signals to predict who may be more receptive to a career change. It's our belief that the the HR/Recruiting world deserves many of the same powerful tools that sales and marketing organizations have had, and it's our responsibility to deliver.

The Hacker News community has been great to us as we've made 4 engineering hires through the HN community. We care about building a thoughtful and considerate engineering environment with true work-life balance and personal flexibility (no one works more than 50 hours in the office and we're flexible with work schedules).

We're currently looking to rapidly expand the engineering team. Here are a few of our open roles:

-Sr. Data Engineer. Salary Range: $130k-180k

We're looking for our first data team hire. The ideal candidate will have had experience building out analytics frameworks for which we can run large scale data analysis on. The person that fills this role will work alongside our VP of Engineering to build the data team long term and will be expected to have their own opinions on how to build an analytics framework from the ground up. We're currently using a combination of Scala, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, AWS, Amazon Redshift and are open to "big data" technologies such as Hadoop, Storm, Kafka, etc.

-Sr. Backend Engineer/Architect. Salary Range: $140k-180k

We're looking for someone to own our backend infrastructure. We index hundreds of millions of profiles, and this requires crawling, parsing, normalization (data is semi-structured) and matching of these social profiles. We're currently using a stack that includes Scala, MongoDB, Golang, Java and AWS although we've been considering using Amazon's new Postgres solution.

-DevOps Engineer. Salary Range: $110k-140k

We're looking for our first dedicated DevOps engineer as we've currently been doing DevOps by committee. We're looking for someone that isn't rigid in thought and is open to using tools/technologies to solve our internal upkeep problems. We take a software-centric approach to DevOps and do try to use a modern stack here: Docker, New Relic, Loggly, PagerDuty, Rails, ElasticSearch but we're open to those that may have more traditional DevOps experience but open to using newer technologies.

-Full-Stack Rubyists. Salary Range: $100k-$170k (wide range depending on experience and ability to play some of the other roles)

We're always in the market for talented full-stack engineers. Our stack includes RoR, MySQL, AWS, Javascript, Bootstrap, Redis, ElasticSearch

If you're interested, please don't hesitate to reach out to me directly at vivek at entelo.com. I head up recruiting here and will make sure to get you in touch with our VP of Engineering as quickly as I can!

Those statements don't necessarily contradict each other. For example, there are a lot of junior sales development (or business development) reps that have these artificial ceilings put on them where it takes a lot longer to get promoted into a true closing role. Their skillsets are still quite aligned with what you'd want in a closing rep in that they have to prospect, cold-call and drum up business in a similar hunting fashion as that of a true closing rep.

On the other hand, you do have to be wary of those that are extremely used to having inbound flow for their calls or were more of account managers. It's a completely different style of sell- more farming and less hunting. For earlier stage companies, you almost always are looking for hunter-types, and that's what the author is trying to point out.

tl;dr: Hire up-and-coming SDRs/BDRs whose growth pattern is too limited at larger companies but avoid farmers when what you actually need are those with the hunter gene in them.

Lyft 11 years ago

That's a curious statement. I could easily say the only reason Uber had a chance to steamroll anyone was because they've been injected with billions in venture funding...

The problem as with reducing the number of games for any sport always comes down to money. Reducing a season by 62 games for each team is a huge loss in revenues which owners will never go along with, especially owners of the highest grossing teams like the Yankees, Red Sox and Giants.

I like the idea of off-setting that with more teams in the playoffs, but that would be the biggest hurdle to climb in terms of reducing the number of games in a season. You could argue that maybe the players union could strike, citing to grueling of a season, but their compensation is directly tied to revenues, so they'd be opposed to a reduction in games as well.

If you're a startup selling to the enterprise, I would highly encourage billing upfront. Collecting cash upfront has huge ramifications for cash flow and how fast you can grow the business.

In terms of payment, it really depends on the company and size of deal. For some companies you can send an invoice and they'll send you a check back quickly, but the larger enterprises usually will need you to fill out a PO, you'll certainly go through procurement, and then you'll be able to invoice. I've typically seen Net 30 days for payment due date, but some companies may push back to Net60.

Credit Card usually only works for smaller transactions (<$10k) or monthly recurring charges.

Stop Using LinkedIn 11 years ago

Likewise with us. Hypocritical to claim that Linkedin takes anti-competitive practices when Hired.com employs similar tactics. At least Linkedin still allows competitors to have Linkedin profiles.

Yup, we saw this coming years ago, and have taken a number of steps to move away from them and leverage other networks more (Github, Twitter, Crunchbase, AngelList, etc.). If you're interested in chatting about this, shoot me a note.

Lyft Plus 12 years ago

In my experience the friendliness permeates the entire company. Lyft (as opposed to Uber) has heavily invested in Customer Service that is absolutely top notch. To my knowledge, this is a quality they actively look for in every hire they make regardless of whether that's a driver or a developer.

Lyft Plus 12 years ago

Lyft allows you to input the address yourself right after you book a ride. The driver simply has to click on "Navigate" and he/she gets directed by their default maps application.

And I've never understood why people get so turned off by the driver talking to you. It's not that hard to tell the driver that you have to take care of some work on your phone- I've done this a few times before and the drivers have all been very respectful...

Had a similar experience with a Lyft driver recently. Thought he simply didn't want to talk, but realized he was deaf shortly after.

Decided to navigate him myself and didn't have any issues at all. Glad to see that those less fortunate are finding more opportunity due to improvements in technology. Hope to see more of this in the future.

Jason Calacanis has his Launch Ticker (http://launch.co/) that sends a couple emails per day with summaries of the day's top tech news. It's now a subscription only service, but it definitely cuts the time I spend looking for Tech News.

Not 100% sure, but I think he's launching Inside.com that may have a similar take...

Love the direction these companies are taking. Food delivery as a whole tends to be unhealthy, expensive and takes a ton of time to get delivered.

Couple other options for those of you in SF/East Bay:

-Sprig (eatsprig.com)

-SpoonRocket

Personally, I haven't had SpoonRocket before, but I've loved Sprig's service and the food. Having Google's former Head Chef doesn't hurt :)

Sick of the recruiting industry? Want to make it better and help great companies continue to grow?

Here at Entelo we believe that a primary barrier to growth for most companies is the difficulty associated with discovering and assessing talent. Entelo helps make proactive recruiting more efficient and effective and is currently helping fast-growth companies like Square, Yelp, and Box grow their teams.

We're looking for motivated engineers, salesmen (or women!), and marketers that are passionate about seeing the recruiting industry evolve.

For Engineers:

-Our current stack includes Ruby, Rails, Scala, MySQL, MongoDB, Resque, and elasticsearch and other big data technologies.

-We're also contributing to open source as much as we can (e.g. https://github.com/gip/resque-telework) and eventually plan to have open source contributions that don't start with "tele". :)

-In addition to Github we're using Asana internally to manage projects and we operate in a very flexible way.

-We provide competitive compensation, generous benefits, a beautiful office working environment in the Mission (SF) and catered lunches. We're backed by Battery Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

For Sales we're looking for people with:

-Experience selling to enterprise customers, particularly SMBs

-Evidence of outstanding performance (e.g. exceeding quotas, sales awards)

-Prior experience with recruiting or selling to recruiters

For Marketing we're looking for people with:

-Experience creating wonderful, educational content for business professionals

-A proven track record of scaling various marketing channels and analyzing ROI on marketing spend

-Ability to implement an maintain an analytical marketing framework that expands and improves conversion at each stage of the funnel

If you're interested in learning more, you can check out our jobs page (entelo.com/jobs) or please send us an email directly at jobs@entelo.com

I have a Nexus 4 and the dock. Honestly, it was an impulse buy and doesn't add much value, but it's worked great for me so far. I haven't had a problem with the phone getting dusty so haven't noticed slippage. The dock does charge incredibly fast and the design is wonderful, but it doesn't really provide the value that you'd expect for the extra $30, but it is still pretty cool.

I've personally met one of the founders, and it was a damn shame how difficult it was for him to get a Visa to continue growing the company in the US.

We always hear this crap from politicians about how we have to help the "job creators" in the US. Well, Udemy's founders are a shining example of job creators that could use congress's help. Maybe they'll get the memo and finally do something about allowing the world's brightest to start and grow companies here in the US...