My son and I are working on a spending journal which puts forth a new kind of form factor for tracking expenses. Our emphasis is less on the accounting angle and more on the behavioral side. We use the journal for self-evaluation of individual spending decisions and as a tool to communicate spending intent within our household. It turns out that between myself, my wife and our teens... not everyone naturally geeks out with spreadsheets, and this collaborative journal has been a decent middle ground to coordinate spending.
I remember near the start of HashiCorp, Mitchell and I spoke about buying one of his side projects. In seeking to rustle up some funds, friends asked me why anyone would offload a profitable project at such a price. Mitchell essentially explained that he was moving on to focus on bigger and better things. Boy was he right.
Someone else beat me to the punch on buying the website, but Mitchell’s clarity of purpose was profound.
My 13-year old son and I have been working on a behavior-oriented personal finance tool. I've kicked this idea around for years, and we had a chance to use it as our subject for a 12-week entrepreneurial program. I built a version of it for personal use years ago, but had fun looking at it through the lens of a more serious endeavor.
It's not feature complete, but the demo of the SMS-based journaling input works pretty well: https://spendlight.app/demo
Get in on the ground floor (2nd hire) of a new B2B, data-heavy venture.
We're looking for someone with hard-earned street smarts, and can help establish an outstanding working relationship between engineers (me for now!) and our subject matter expert (a 30+ year lawyer). Experience in finance, legal and data viz are a plus. A fruitful previous working relationship with DataSci professionals is a mega plus.
At the heart of our company, we seek to manifest a new business paradigm as usable (sells like hotcakes) SaaS. Big challenges, big potential reward, and (to shoot you straight) plenty of pitfalls on the product front that you can help us avoid.
We've got a good support network for both funding and advisors, all with legit unicorn-level chops.
There are some founders who are aware that their early employees are invested in the financial security of the company, and not only aren't scared of these questions, but openly discuss company finances.
Asking them to name the bank is a bit of a weird one, only because the answer can't be SVB anymore, and I'm not sure what OP would do with that information. (So it's FRB, then what? Unless you have inside info that they're about to fail, and you're interviewing this week, I don't see how their banking partner's material) But if a startup you're interviewing at won't answer what their runway is, or the rest of the reverse interview business questions, then that's a red flag and you should run far, far away from them.
* Are you profitable?
* If not, how long is your runway?
* Where does the funding come from and who influences the high level plan/direction?
* How do you make money?
* What's preventing you from making more money?
* What is the company's growth plan for the next 1 year? 5 years?
* What are the big challenges you see coming up?
* What have you identified as your competitive advantage?
Mostly interested in nascent data product work. If your data asset strategy is critical to your organization's success, you'll find me to be a capable, thoughtful contributor.
About a decade ago, I was part of a startup trying to disrupt crew scheduling. It's a non-trivial operations problem when you aim to honor crew preferences, union-negotiated affordances, FAA legalities, etc. We were only involved in the pre-planned schedules. At that time, the airlines we were courting had entirely different human-hravybsystem to resolve real time issues. There was some level of reserve redundancy baked in so the human planners had some wiggle room to work with... but redundancy is expensive to maintain. As a relatively new engineer at the time it was a pretty neat domain with big $$$ at stake. As it turns out, pretty much nobody wanted to take the risk on a new system even if it had provably better schedules for all parties. All it takes is one snafu for the whole thing to turn into a major regret.
We ran a pilot with one carrier for a subset of their crew for maybe a year, but eventually failed to gain further traction. Very tough sales and implementation cycle in spite of the fact that we could convince many individuals (bothe crew and management with their competing concerns) of the benefits of our system.
In what way was it a tough implementation cycle? e.g. resistant to change, or outsourced (e.g. could not get close enough to the fire/ talk to the right people) or was it something else?
Would love to pick your brain because I can relate to what youre saying.
Integrating into the operations on a provisional evaluation basis is a whole lot of work and the stakes are high. As my grandpa used to say, "There's nothing easier than doing nothing." Both parties (our company and the airline) brought the right people to the table, but for the system to really be evaluated we needed an entire crew base to use the system in a "realistic" fashion. There was a fair bit of understandable skepticism about how the system would perform under the stress of real user input, but due to the overall complex nature of the system there was a non-trivial learning curve and lots of crew members didn't see a lot of value in spending their time help us put the thing through its paces. As an example, the system would allow crew members to specify a highly detailed, specific set of flight preferences that were either declared as ranked priorities and/or they could select specific flights. If a crew member was forced to "try" our system, they could put in a generic set of input ("I like the Vegas flight."). However, we suspected that once they were faced with the opportunity to share their real schedule, they would have a lot more incentive to put in a lot more particulars, which would stress our optimization engine differently.
Im actually working at a startup that wants to use an algorithm to plan transport on large scale. ( Different Industry though). Got any tips or insights on biggest challenges?
The biggest challenges we had were more political. Getting buy-in across the airline as well as _support_ from the airline side to integrate their data and system into ours.
Sadly, it was a people problem, not a tech or algo problem.
So, did you manage to "tackle" the people problem in the end? How did you get them to move and integrate with your system in the end? Was it a bottom up (from the end users) or top down (making it part if company strategy) approach?
Sadly, I don't have these answers. I ended up quitting to go on a long sabbatical.
Last I heard, the airline scrapped the entire project to continue doing things the old way because they felt it was too much work on their end. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Does the algo work? Is it better than the status quo and under what circumstances is it susceptible to failure? Does it know when the whole system is over-constrained?
If we assume the algo rocks (because you have operations research veterans), what stage of planning does your system address? What is the experience required and cost of manual intervention?
Fun problem. Human factors and edge cases abound. So much is at stake for a system that already works (to any predictable degree).
The algo works. We have two algorithmic experts onboard, of which one is a professor and one is already working with algos each day (e.g. worked on patients/beds capacity challenge when covid began).
The startup focusses on assigning goods to transport. (As in its not part of the commercial sales process.. only execution of the required capacity planning that comes after it) .Something that has been tried 20 times and failed. It currently is done manually.
I built https://www.spendlight.com/ for my wife and I to not just track spending but to get a handle on our sentiment around our spending choices. While we still have different reactions to spending decisions, it at least gave us the language and ground rules to work towards our personal finance goals.
If you really want to gain knowledge and confidence in the fundamentals, spend some time watching (in real time, NOT sped up) an excellent artist. Good art is often very slow. I saw a huge improvement in my own (self-taught, hobby-level) art when I began to get comfortable spending 10 hours on a drawing instead of one. I enjoy drawing portraits and can recommend this guy's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenbaumanartwork
My son and I are working on a spending journal which puts forth a new kind of form factor for tracking expenses. Our emphasis is less on the accounting angle and more on the behavioral side. We use the journal for self-evaluation of individual spending decisions and as a tool to communicate spending intent within our household. It turns out that between myself, my wife and our teens... not everyone naturally geeks out with spreadsheets, and this collaborative journal has been a decent middle ground to coordinate spending.