Agreeing to retire ‘ye old shire’ font for good
Hi friends,
As you may have noticed, we messed up. Last week, we were trying to spread the word about our favorite orange juice branding failure (correctly linked here) but instead, we referred 7% of you to a (gripping) NYT profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love (she has recently been involved in a few whirlwind romances).
Both are ultimately good stories :-)
Onward:
You’ve definitely heard of The Skimm: they are the original e-newsletter masters. Every day, they send out a witty and exciting debrief on global news that talks about everything from Bitcoin to Georgian civil conflict, all in a fearless aquamarine color scheme. They most likely have zillions of subscribers.
We also believe they’re probably a pretty cool place to work. Here’s the argument in three parts: (1) Bread-and-butter advertising revenue is shifting away from traditional platforms to Facebook et als, splitting the future of the free press wide open. (2) As the world is ramping up to be ‘data-intensive’ and ‘metric-driven,’ regular people are starting to really crave content that feels human (like your favorite podcast and (hopefully) this newsletter). And (3) we’ve discussed daily news in masculine voices and ye old shire fonts since the dawn of civilization. It’s time for a change. The Skimm continues to be one of the good guys pushing through that change.
They’re hiring across all disciplines (sales, marketing, data, product, editorial, engineering).
Imagine you are a megacorporation: Siemens or AT&T or Pfizer. Every year, you go through a monstrous amount of trouble to find the brightest minds and bring them into your company. But after you make the hires, you stick these top-caliber contributors into the throat of a bureaucracy, siloed four or five levels away from strategic authority. They might have great ideas, but you (the CEO) will probably never hear about them. Obviously, the separation between yourself (the CEO) and entry-level is a productive funnel, a reality of scaling. But still, if you’re smart, you’ll want to harness the brilliance you scoured the labor market to find so that you can better solve big, company-wide problems. How do you do it?
This is the universe that Spigit specializes in; they are “innovation management for the enterprise.” Their software is like a really powerful Google Forum; it’s an infrastructure that manages pipelines of employee ideas and helps see them through to execution: peers vote, experts contribute, teams form, solutions go to market. At the end of the day, Spigit can enable thousands of employees in different locations to all work on solving problems together. It’s a system that democratizes the power landscape of companies in a major way.
Their parent company, Plainview, is hiring for quite a few positions.
This is a start-up that makes start-ups. They’re responsible for some of your favorite 21st century tools: Giphy (lets you search gifs), Poncho (the “sassy” weatherbot), Tumblr (known for myriad uses).
There are many, many incubators and accelerators and VC firms out there; we like Betaworks because they push a lot of wacky but beautiful consumer products. They often work on the fringes: their latest project is synthetic reality. We’re going to let them speak for themselves on the topic: “[We assume that] we should always know, and care, that machines are machines, and humans are humans. That we need to keep our physical and digital realities distinct. But the last few years have challenged this separation, and the boundaries between the two places have become porous. We have wholly-digital creations entering the real world [like Alexa] … And we often enter, and spend hours, in digital worlds — Fortnite has become a place to hang out, not merely a game to play. This…has given rise to a third place — Synthetic Reality — in which the lines blur, or no longer matter, and our human experience is enhanced, augmented, and challenged, by our interactions with intelligent machines” (source).
We know some of you must be pioneering your own synthetic reality technology; apply here to be considered for their intensive camp. They are also hiring a product manager, a game director, a user acquisition specialist, et al.
Dandelion’s feat of magic is scalable yet agile geothermal HVAC installations that bring new energy autonomy to the American consumer.
Some background knowledge: 10 feet below the Earth’s frost line, it is always a cool 55°F, no matter what’s going on at the surface. Geothermal energy is the idea that we can harness that temperature differential to heat and cool our homes. In theory, this is relatively simple: you just need a system of pipes that burrow deep into the earth and transport water. In the summer, you push warm water from the surface into those pipes; their heat is dispersed into the ground and cool water is connected back to the house. In the winter, the opposite occurs; chilly water absorbs earth heat and pushes warmth into the house. Every house sits on a patch of land (these days), so we can all theoretically leverage the ground-surface temperature differential for heating and cooling. And if we do that, we can spend less money on big-energy grids that rely on cocktails of coal, nuclear, and oil (and also maybe change the competitive landscape of energy production).
For the most part, though, things only become cheap when they are easily reproducible (ex. Made in China toys), and custom geothermal is a highly idiosyncratic task. Every plot of land has a different topographical gradient; every lawn has a different soil composition; every home has nooks and crannies that require bespoke ventilation. We’re not really sure how they’ve done it, but Dandelion has equipment that can respond to the varied problem space and processes that allow them to execute that variation at scale: magic.
They’re hiring at their multiple NY offices in engineering, sales and ops. They also have some killer infographics on their website.
See you next week.
Love,
Your Caring Parents
(Dana & Lea)
4cooljobs@gmail.com