Work at a Startup Expo 2018

Keynote: Why Join (or Not) Startups

• Justin Kahn (Atrium Founder) presented the "unfiltered" reality of joining startups, citing three primary reasons not to join:
  • Management Quality: Early-stage startup management is often ineffective; mentorship must be actively extracted rather than passively received.
  • Wealth Probability: Statistically, joining a startup rarely leads to getting "rich" or financially secure; it is an unlikely outcome compared to stability.
  • Career Stability: The modern Silicon Valley trend favors stability and defined 5-year career paths; startups cannot offer these, making them poor choices for candidates seeking predictability.
• Reasons to Join Startups (Justin Kahn):
  • Access to Unqualified Roles: Startups allow employees to perform jobs for which they lack qualifications, accelerating skill acquisition; e.g., Guillaume scaled Justin.TV's backend to top-20 Rails status despite being unqualified initially.
  • Founder Pathway: Working at a startup serves as a gateway to founding one's own company by surrounding oneself with like-minded, high-performing peers; e.g., Finn Barr joined Exec, learned from the failure, and eventually launched the successful startup Shogun via YC.
  • Maximizing Learning Speed: The "slope" of personal growth is more important than the "y-intercept"; learning accelerates regardless of success or failure.
    • Success Case: Kyle Vogt (Cruise co-founder) learned to architect scalable live video systems at Justin.TV/Twitch from scratch, growing the platform to 90 petabytes/month by Twitch's 2014 Amazon sale.
    • Failure Case: Daniel Kahn (Cruise co-founder) learned high-stakes negotiation and deal-closing by managing a failed acquisition for the company Exec while Justin Kahn was on vacation, skills later applied to sell Cruise to GM for over $1 billion.

Keynote: Evaluation Framework for Startup Investment

• Sam Altman (YC President) outlined eight criteria for selecting a startup to join, framing the decision as an investment in one's own time and equity:
  • Product Love: Prioritize startups with a small number of users who love the product (spontaneous referrals) over those with many lukewarm users; this is a stronger signal of Product-Market Fit than vanity metrics.
  • Exponential Growth & Momentum: Trust in exponential growth models and momentum; if growth is real and not artificially inflated, it tends to self-perpetuate.
  • Market Growth Rate: Focus on the growth rate and future size of the market rather than its current size; the iPhone app market was $0 in 2008 but became massive due to the platform shift.
  • Platform Shifts: Identify emerging technological platform shifts (e.g., mobile apps, autonomous driving) where new capabilities enable entirely new business models.
  • Traction in Trends: Distinguish real trends from hype by observing if users spend "many hours every day" on the new platform (e.g., VR headsets currently fail this test as users remove them frequently).
  • Mission Excitement: A compelling, high-stakes mission is critical for attracting and retaining top talent; e.g., OpenAI's mission to solve AGI safety is a stronger recruiting pitch than generic "cool tech."
  • Founder/Team Quality: Look for founders and early employees who are "10x" performers and hold contrarian beliefs that are true but unpopular; early team quality is the strongest predictor of success.
  • "Bad" Ideas that are Good: Seek ideas that sound bad to large corporations (due to internal bureaucracy) but are viable for startups; startups only need one "yes" to proceed, whereas big companies need a chain of approvals where one "no" kills the idea.
  • Talent Sentiment: Monitor what smart recent college graduates are excited about, as they often spot trends years before investors.
• Equity Advice: Altman noted that most startups under-compensate early employees with equity; early employees create 100x the value of founders but often receive disproportionately small equity stakes.

Company Presentations: Trends & Specific Opportunities

• Hardware & Infrastructure

  • Armory: Deploying next-gen deployment platforms; revenue grew from $60k to $1.3M in one year.
  • Astranis: Building low-cost telecommunications satellites to connect the 4 billion unconnected; raised Series A from Andreessen Horowitz; focuses on a blameless culture and work-life balance.
  • Iris Automation: Collision avoidance for industrial drones using computer vision; raised over $10M; hiring for computer vision and C++ roles.
  • Level 5: Creating HD 3D maps for autonomous cars using crowdsourced data from 10,000 drivers; processes ~500TB-1PB of data; hiring for iOS and computer vision optimization.
  • Reach Labs: Long-range wireless electricity for IoT and robotics; raised Series A from Data Collective; hiring for embedded systems and RF hardware.
  • Voly (Valancy): Long-range high-payload drones for medical and emergency supply delivery; hiring for production and R&D.
  • Scope AI: Retrofitting autonomous cargo ships; pilot with a top-3 shipping line; hiring for intelligent algorithms and system integration.
  • Starsky Robotics: Driverless trucks for highway transport (tele-operated for first/last mile); hiring ML, control, and full-stack engineers.
  • Quartzy: Operating system for scientific labs (free software, revenue from supply sales); 4,000 customers; hiring for remote and in-office roles.

• Software, AI & Data

  • Atrium: Tech-enabled law firm using AI to digitize legal documents; $400B market; hiring software engineers.
  • Chartio: Visual SQL for data exploration; profitable with 800+ customers and <10 engineers; hiring mid/senior engineers.
  • Checkr: Background check API processing 1M+ checks/month; addressing industry unfairness; hiring for ML and platform reliability.
  • CoinTracker: Crypto portfolio and tax manager; $350M+ assets tracked, $300k revenue; hiring for founding engineers.
  • CrowdAI: API for change detection in aerial/satellite data; trained on 126+ countries; placing in CVPR; hiring ML engineers.
  • Enzyme: Software to automate FDA submissions for life sciences; reducing approval time by 1-3 years; hiring full-stack and NLP/ML roles.
  • Focal Systems: In-store hardware/software for inventory and checkout; working with top retailers; hiring deep learning and mechanical engineers.
  • Her: LGBTQ+ community app with 3M users; hiring mobile engineers for recommendation systems and NLP scam detection.
  • HoneyLove: DTC fashion brand with built-in compression; profitable out of the gate ($30k revenue in week 1); hiring a founding CTO.
  • Iris Automation: Collision avoidance for drones; computer vision focus.
  • MakeSchool: 2-year CS degree with income-share agreement; focusing on hiring teachers/coaches to train junior developers.
  • Meadow: Cannabis SaaS for POS and compliance; $10M monthly processed volume; hiring frontend/engineers.
  • Mystery.org: Video explanations for children; "Visual Wikipedia"; hiring engineers for collaborative video wiki software.
  • Neighborly: AI-based credit scoring for renters; free to users, revenue from insurance; growing from 1k to 350k rentals in 18 months.
  • Notable Labs: Personalized drug discovery for blood cancer using AI and robotics; hiring engineers and scientists.
  • Nova Credit: International credit history platform for immigrants; creating a unified API for global credit data.
  • Pathrise: Career mentorship for students (income-share model); hiring for student-facing roles.
  • PlanGrid: Construction software (iOS/Android/Web); profitable with 1M+ projects; diverse team of 350; hiring across all stacks.
  • Poppy: Childcare marketplace connecting parents with caregivers in Seattle; hiring smart engineers for matching algorithms.
  • Precious: AI-powered photo organization for families; $3M annual revenue with 3 employees; emphasizes work-life balance.
  • Promise: Software to help people avoid jail; recruiting from Uber and Stripe; aiming to scale justice via data.
  • Replit: Zero-setup online IDE supporting 40 languages; mission to onboard the next billion programmers; hiring for distributed systems.
  • Retool: Drag-and-drop platform for building internal tools; 50% of all code is internal tools; hiring first engineer.
  • Scale: "AWS for AI" data labeling platform; serving all US self-driving car companies; hiring for active learning and UX.
  • Science Exchange: Marketplace for scientific collaboration (Uber for experiments); Series C, tripled revenue; hiring across product and engineering.
  • Scope AI: NLP analytics for customer feedback; automating decision-making via text analysis.
  • Shown: Autonomous cargo ships; pilot with top shipping line; hiring for intelligent algorithms.
  • Starsky Robotics: Driverless trucks; hiring for ML and controls.
  • Universe: Mobile-first website builder; 175k sites created; hiring iOS engineers.
  • Volley: Voice-controlled games for Alexa/Google Home; #1 game on Alexa; hiring for NLP and serverless AWS.
  • Instacart: Same-day grocery delivery; hiring 200 new engineers to scale; "Solve for the Customer" value.

General Hiring Trends & Observations

• Talent Acquisition: Every company presented emphasized the critical bottleneck of hiring enough talent to scale.
• Remote Work: Several companies (Quartzy, Universe) explicitly offered remote or distributed work options.
• Impact-Driven: Many pitches highlighted social impact, including housing (Neighborly), justice (Promise), education (Mystery.org, Pathrise), and life sciences (Enzyme, Notable Labs).
• Equity Negotiation: Sam Altman's warning about equity undersizing was a recurring theme, with founders of smaller teams (Enzyme, Retool, Precious) emphasizing ownership and responsibility.
• Growth Stage: Presentations ranged from seed-stage (Astranis, Reach Labs) to late-stage/pre-IPO (Instacart, PlanGrid), showing a diverse market for talent at various maturity levels.