HN user
https://www.assembled.com
I’ll be interested to see how the merger goes. Although the products overlap, Fin <-> Agentforce and Intercom <-> Service Cloud, the Intercom/Fin stuff is mostly built for startups while the Salesforce stuff is much more enterprise. The play may be that Salesforce has the… salesforce… to bring Intercom to enterprises way faster.
Assembled | Software Engineer, Product Manager | San Francisco or New York | Full-time Assembled helps customer support teams resolve issues with the right agent, providing the right answer, at the right time. Over 300 industry leaders, including Etsy, Stripe, and Georgia's Department of Human Services, use Assembled’s workforce management and GenAI-powered automation products to make optimal staffing decisions, improve productivity, and reduce wait times.
Our co-founder & CTO wrote a post recently on how we're using RAG with Reciprocal Rank Fusion to automate support responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40524759
Our open roles include:
- Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/4957681004
- Product Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/5175807004
- And more: https://www.assembled.com/careers-at-assembled#openings
Assembled | Software Engineer, Product Manager | San Francisco or New York | Full-time
Assembled helps customer support teams resolve issues with the right agent, providing the right answer, at the right time. Over 300 industry leaders, including Etsy, Stripe, and Georgia's Department of Human Services, use Assembled’s workforce management and GenAI-powered automation products to make optimal staffing decisions, improve productivity, and reduce wait times.
Our co-founder & CTO wrote a post recently on how we're using RAG with Reciprocal Rank Fusion to automate support responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40524759
Our open roles include:
- Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/4957681004
- Product Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/5175807004
- And more: https://www.assembled.com/careers-at-assembled#openings
really interesting direction! my company, assembled, builds software for customer support teams. i could imagine being on either end of this. on the one hand, we've built applications to run in the curated zendesk/salesforce sandbox. on the other hand, we get tons of requests to incorporate custom workflows or metrics natively in our application.
I think super highly of the Airplane team and what they've built. Startups are a tough journey, especially so over the last year. There's never a good way to shut down so the criticism isn't surprising and perhaps fair. But I doubt anyone's walking to the bank with glee. The best they can do is to try and do right by their team, their customers, and their investors. I hope they take another crack at it again in the future.
Assembled | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | Software Engineer / ML Engineer — New Products
Assembled is building software to transform and elevate customer support teams. We help industry leaders like Brooks Running, Stripe, and Zoom get the right person, at the right time, with the right answers in front of their end customers. More specifically, our workforce and BPO management products enable efficient staffing of support agents and BPOs (outsourcing partners), while our AI-powered agent assist speeds up responses and facilitates deeper coaching. Founded in 2018, we’ve raised $70m in funding from the likes of NEA, Emergence Capital, and Stripe itself.
Our New Products team - a 4-person group led by our co-founder & CTO - is focused on bringing Cal, our bot, to more of our customers and into public launch. Cal's currently in private beta with ~10 existing Assembled customers. This startup-within-a-startup operating cadence is described more deeply in this post: https://johnjianwang.medium.com/how-we-built-assembleds-new-...
The specific job postings:
- https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/4957681004 (Software Engineer)
- https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/4980238004 (ML Engineer)
More about Assembled here: https://www.assembled.com/careers-at-assembled
Please feel free to email me at ryan@assembled.com if you're interested!
How feasible is it to build/launch your own probe? A la backyard astronomy.
Perhaps, but it's possible to invest in Google via the stock market. I'm not sure it makes sense to bake in the stock market performance of a public company when considering value of their "equity." It seems like you should be using whatever your standard discount rate (S&P 500 or NASDAQ)?
This is compellingly well-written but wrong, in my opinion. There's been a steady trickle of articles on the top of Hacker News that make essentially the same argument: your odds of choosing a successful startup are miniscule (2% in this one). I think this does people considering startups a disservice.
The conditional chance of picking a successful company to join is way higher than 2%, or whatever the median success rate of all startups is. In particular, I think really intellectually curious, ambitious, hard-working people can, for the most part, identify each other. This is really different from reading about valuations or what other people think in the news, which leads to a lot more noise. If you meet a bunch of people at the company, you can assess the their caliber for yourself.
While it's not a perfect predictor of success, it's at least the case that such people are usually working on cool, worthy projects. Based on this, it's possible to get conviction on a group before their likely success becomes common knowledge—granted it's getting harder to do this because of how much money is floating around.
To put it another way, there are a handful of companies out there right now at Series A/Series B with a dense accumulation of talent. It's probably a reasonable bet to try and join them before they hit unicorn valuations, when room for growth is smaller. And in these cases, you could be #10-#40 at a relatively de-risked company and have a really great outcome.
On the flip side, if you even remotely enjoy learning and autonomy, working at Google/Apple/Amazon/etc is probably a great way to set yourself up for existential frustration. It's not even a great financial proposition. Even at $500k/yr, it's 20 years—a whole working life—to make it to $10m, the hypothetical number from the article. Even if your first startup doesn't make it after 2-3 years, you can try again a few times and still come out ahead. This is a classic pg argument—I can't remember which essay—but the point of a startup is to compress decades of working life.
Caveat: I happened to join a startup whose success changed my life both financially and in terms of career trajectory. I'm very biased. But this is also why I feel passionately that this article's advice is bad.
Assembled | San Francisco, CA (Distributed until at least September 2021) | Full-time
Assembled (https://www.assembled.com/) builds tools to transform and elevate customer support. Our workforce management platform helps modern support teams save time and staff more efficiently. Our customers include companies like Stripe, Harry's, and GoFundMe. We're backed by top Silicon Valley investors, including Stripe itself.
Open roles:
- Software Engineer (Fullstack): https://www.assembled.com/careers/software-engineer-fullstac...
- Software Engineer (Frontend): https://www.assembled.com/careers/frontend-engineer
- Product Designer: https://www.assembled.com/careers/product-designer
Filling out questionnaires is such a time suck. It's extra painful because different companies use different standards (CAIQ, SigLite, VSAQ). Hopefully they solve the near-term questionnaire problem, but I'm also excited to see them eventually tackle the underlying problem—we want to prove to potential customers and users that we take security seriously, but right now it's prohibitively tedious and time-consuming to do so.
This was a great read. Allison Pickens is the former COO of Gainsight, so she definitely knows what she's talking about when it comes to Customer Success/Customer Support.
Think this topic doesn't get covered enough in the startup world, even though this is a direct quote from Sam Altman's Startup Playbook: "have great customer support."
Assembled | USA (Plan to reopen office in San Francisco, CA) | Full-time
Assembled (https://www.assembled.com/) builds tools to transform and elevate customer support. Our workforce management platform helps modern support teams save time and staff more efficiently. Our customers include companies like Stripe, Harry's, and GoFundMe. We're backed by top Silicon Valley investors, including Stripe itself.
Open roles:
- Software Engineer (Fullstack): https://www.assembled.com/careers/software-engineer-fullstac...
- Software Engineer (Frontend): https://www.assembled.com/careers/frontend-engineer
- Product Designer: https://www.assembled.com/careers/product-designer
+1 for Monzo. On a slightly different axis, their customer support is excellent and they invest a lot of resources, including technical ones, into making it so.
We had a few minutes earlier this week where a machine saw packets in/out go to zero for no discernible reason.
I wish they had spent more time describing how/why Go's built-in build tool stopped working. Or perhaps that's part of the basics of Bazel. Anyone able to share more on that?
My hot takes...
1) Fast adoption of GoLand/IntelliJ (and death of Sublime/Atom)
2) Nearly complete adoption of modules (my company is behind!)
3) "I feel welcome in the Go community" dipped from 82% to 75%. Anecdotally most people in Go are really nice but some people are aggressively pedantic (don't call it the Golang community!)
That is a great video! It also reminds me of Dan Wang's essay on How Technology Grows: https://danwang.co/how-technology-grows/. It introduced me to the Ise Grand Shrine, which is a wooden temple that's rebuilt and torn down periodically so that the knowledge of how to maintain it doesn't get lost.
Is the narrative that big companies are safe havens for job seekers actually true? Isn't Airbnb a "big" company?
Assembled | Frontend Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | https://www.assembled.com
Assembled provides the tools for modern organizations to scale great customer support. We’re transforming and elevating support as a function, helping such teams prove their value to the rest of the company. We’re 8 people (5 engineers) and founded in 2018 but already count innovative companies such as Stripe, Harry’s, and GoFundMe as customers.
Some examples of our recent work include: - Improving performance of our team calendar with better lifecycle management - Connecting Webflow’s CMS to templated pages for our blog - Upgrading drag-and-drop UX to speed up schedule management
Our frontend stack consists of React, Flow, Figma, and Webflow, but we don’t require any prior experience with any of them.
If this sounds exciting, please send us a note with a bit about yourself to careers@assembled.com.
I've used LibraryThing since my senior year of high school and have always loved it. As others have noted, unlike Goodreads, LibraryThing isn't a social network. I'm an obsessive about what books I own, how to categorize them, where/when I bought them, where/when I read them. I don't care for my friends to know what I've been up to and I don't need their recommendations (at least not through the web).
As an aside, I vaguely recall that at some point their memberships were pay-what-you-can. Super curious what the distribution of payments looked like.
Assembled | Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Full-time
Assembled (https://www.assembled.com/) builds software for modern customer support teams. Our workforce management platform allows teams to forecast volume, manage a team calendar, algorithmically generate efficient schedules, and much more. We’re a small team (6 total, 4 engineers) founded in 2018 but already count forward-thinking companies such as GoFundMe, Slack, and Stripe as customers. We’re looking for foundational members of the team who like building useful and perhaps unsexy technology.
Some examples of our recent work include:
- Tuning our schedule generation algorithm to find ideal times for lunches and breaks
- Dogfooding our API to implement flexible CSV exports
- Adding timeoff requests on top of our base scheduling functionality
If this sounds exciting, please send us a note with a bit about yourself to jobs@assembled.com.
For the last several months, Guido and Sushma have been meeting once a week to talk about all things programming. But Sushma says the biggest takeaways were not just about how to do things, but how to become more confident and learn how to figure things out on your own.
The part about Guido personally mentoring women engineers is, despite his (obvious) technical contributions, the most impressive part about his Dropbox tenure to me. The article mentions him leading by example and it's inspiring to see someone of that stature and level of accomplishment willing to spend time with individuals. It's one thing to talk about fostering a welcoming community, it's quite another to offer up his time so generously when he could be doing "higher leverage" things with regards to diversity.
Really interesting report! And love the idea of benchmarking against similar stage companies :) Do the burn rates include spending on payroll?
Collaborative Fund suggested that we account for these various paths within the structure of the Series A funding. We added downside protection for the Series A investors, in the form of a right to claim a return of 9 percent annual interest on their investment at any point starting five years after the initial investment. At the time, I didn’t appreciate how important this clause would become. Even our legal counsel commented that this was not something he saw too often.
The wording suggests that this was a decision he regrets / a feature of the agreement he didn't think was important at the time. Is that the case? Would it have been less onerous with a lower rate? In general, I'm curious if / how they would have redone this decision.
I've been happily using LibraryThing for over a decade: https://www.librarything.com. I've tried at various points to switch to Goodreads but always find myself back there. It looks and feels like a relic of Web 1.0, but that feels somehow appropriate for my book catalog.
There's another section of the Nobel site that provides background on the work, both a popular version and an advanced version. The advanced version amounts to a fairly substantive literature review. In general, you can find both documents for all Nobel Prizes, and the writing is very good.
Popular: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/la...
Advanced: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/la...
One thing to note: Visa Europe and Visa are distinct systems[0] and were distinct entities until Visa Europe was re-acquired[1] by Visa in 2015.
[0] Source: I used to work in payments [1] https://www.visaeurope.com/newsroom/news/vi-to-acquire-ve
Carnegie Mellon was the first university to offer a PhD in Machine Learning (via the Machine Learning Department which, again, I think is relatively unique in its existence). Regardless of how you feel about the hype, they made an early bet on the field and adding an undergraduate degree seems consistent.
This reminded me of a really fun article from an AMS publication a few years back about harmonic functions and animation in Ratatouille: http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fcarc-harmo.... Turns out it was the same guy, Tony DeRose!