Dear Future Teammates
Pipewise is hiring, and I was just sitting down to write job descriptions. You know the drill:
- “Job duties include . . .”
- “Five or more years experience required in . . .”
- “BS or equivalent required . . .”
- “Team players, good hygiene . . .”
But job descriptions are like cubicles: we all hate them but build them anyway. They don’t bring in the best people and may even attract the wrong ones (see Mike’s blog: don’t hire by keyword). They also tell you little about us. No mas!
Instead of communicating with you via job description, we will just flat out tell you why you might want to join us:
We are a five-person team and growing fast. We all sit in the same room together and talk about all aspects of the business. Each of us knows how much money we have in the bank, how much stock we have in the option pool, what our biggest opportunities and risks are, and we review all board meeting notes. It’s like a startup MBA where you get paid.
This makes Pipewise a particularly great opportunity if you want to start your own company someday but aren’t ready yet. You will get to see a lot of things up close: getting to product/market fit, how to run an engineering effort, working with customers, handing competition and partners, and how to manage funding, boards, and strategy. (We already had one teammate go on to launch his own thing. We even share some investors.)
We have experience, multiple successes behind us, and we have fun. We also have strong backing from some of the best investors in the valley. Benchmark, SVAngel, Floodgate, Felicis, Ariel Poler. We’ve all done web metrics, CRM, and B2B software companies before, successfully. We test, iterate, and fail plenty, but are also pretty damned focused on building a big business in a new market.
Some companies solve old problems with new technology. Some solve new problems with old technology. We solve new problems with new technology. Many e-commerce and consumer web companies struggle with the best infrastructure and methodology to handle their user base. This is a problem of big data, mass personalization, and integration between many solutions. To do a good job we also need to apply the latest and greatest technology. We use MongoDB, Ruby/Rails, Backbone, SCSS, CoffeeScript, and are always on the lookout for the latest and greatest.
We have a strong focus on quality and security in our products. Nothing goes out without passing a battery of automated unit and functional tests and code reviews. But we deploy multiple times per day, constantly improving our product.
We work hard and are very focused. But we all have hobbies, friends, family. It’s not 9-5, but we also don’t think you win a market by sleeping under your desk and churning out sleep-deprived crap.
We don’t have an army of product managers out in the field lobbing requirements back to an engineering team. We work with customers to make them happy and vet requirements. It is not easy, but it is the only way to build strong relationships and understand the market. As a bonus, our customers are other web and mobile companies, many of whom are growing new businesses. Working with customers you like is an added bonus.
Sure, if you want to max out your cash comp, you can go sit in a cubicle at Cisco. But we also don’t ask you to take a huge pay cut for the privilege of working for us. We know a small team of rockstar/ninja/10x/assassin engineers will outperform a larger team of B players, so we put our money towards building a small but elite team.
Good, we haven’t lost you yet. You may be wondering if you can get in on this. Let us answer:
Our top priority is great engineers, especially ones who love to work on front-end features. Our ideal candidate is good at working with designers and users, is a guru at HTML/CSS/JS, and believes that business users deserve products that are just as beautiful as the best consumer ones.
We will also be opening up positions for web marketers, community managers, interns, and designers in the following months. We may not have a position open just yet, but please reach out to us anyway just in case one opens up.
Mail us at jobs@pipewise.com or Tweet at us, and we’ll go from there!