We each have a piece of this dream.

Everyone at Jane feels very passionately about the positive effects cannabis can have on a person’s overall well-being. Our co-founder and CEO, Socrates, is a U.S. Army Veteran and had never tried cannabis until he left the Army. Cannabis helped Socrates find balance in his life, connect with his loved ones, and connect with himself. As he explored the medical market in California, he was stunned by how little transparency there was regarding the medicine that may or may not be available to him. It was easier for him to order a burrito than it was to order medicine that was invaluable to his health. This led to the ideation and creation of Jane. The rest is history.

All of us at Jane, whether we consume cannabis or not, are bonded by the mission to transform the cannabis industry and help others. We’re creating a product that provides detailed analytics for retailers and manufacturers down to the SKU level, and has applications even beyond the cannabis industry. We can tell how products behave in each market, for example, how well an edible will sell in L.A. versus Santa Cruz versus Seattle, and dial it down even more to a specific timeframe, shop, and user demographic. Fun fact: when the vape news became big we noticed that baby boomers stopped buying vape products whereas millennials didn’t.

We’re currently the e-commerce provider for 1 out of every 2 stores across the US and recently launched in Canada. There’s clear product-market fit and in 2020, our e-commerce technology powered over $2B in cannabis transactions, representing over 17 million orders. In exciting news, we recently raised a $100M Series C and are hiring accordingly!

We’re united by the mission to transform transportation planning.

On the Remix team, we all share a deep appreciation for public transit and how technology can accelerate positive change in the space. We’re building a platform that enables cities to manage bikeshare programs, redesign bus networks, identify Metro Transit station improvement areas, and much more. Our team is composed of both technologists and folks from the private sector. Thanks to this powerful combination and our great customers, it’s easy for folks who don’t have a background in transportation to quickly feel inspired by the problems we are solving.

Whether it’s helping cities find efficiencies in street design or fueling the transition toward cleaner energy, we’re all driven by the fact that our work yields real-world change. It requires partnering closely with our customers, diving into what they do on a day-to-day basis, and understanding the pain points they are facing. The problem space is fun, unique, and complicated, but what keeps us going is knowing that we are helping many communities have the information they need to make decisions that help all of their members thrive.

We're making documentation and APIs better for everybody.

Everyone has felt the pains of poor developer documentation. It causes headaches for makers and users, and this frustration is what ultimately led us to build ReadMe. In fact, the company started when our founder, Gregory Koberger, was retreating in Costa Rica. He was supposed to be building another company with his friends, but kept finding himself reimplementing ReadMe’s functionality whenever he had to write documentation. This was in 2014… and we’ve been building ever since.

We love what we do because it’s so much more than just docs. We’re providing tools for teams to create and manage beautiful documentation with ease. We give customers the ability to login their users via JWT, we support custom variables to create personalized guides, and we have an interactive API Explorer, which allows users to try out APIs in the browser (check out our demo site!).

Documentation edits normally take days to push through, but companies can push out updates in seconds using ReadMe. Technical writers don’t need to learn how to use XML data models or make GitHub pull requests to author content anymore – they can simply make edits in our dash and save. For larger companies with stricter review processes, we have the suggested edits workflow to iterate on updates and deploy when they’re ready.

We serve customers of all sizes and love being able to help teams grow their developer communities by answering their questions and notifying them of changes. We’re currently working on a new product that gives both API creators and API users insights into how their APIs are used.

We all share the goal of restoring humanity to healthcare.

Iora Health was founded on the belief that the relationship between a patient and their provider should come first – and quality of care should never be secondary to billing. Much of the tech that healthcare providers currently use, however, is built entirely around documenting, coding, and billing. As a practicing physician, Rushika (Co-founder and CEO) was frustrated when healthcare was reduced to a series of transactions. He recognized the need to rebuild the system entirely and start from scratch. Thus, Iora Health was born.

Our innovative care platform, called Chirp, is uniquely centered around the patient. We’re pioneering a payment system that’s based on each individual’s care needs and building our technology around people, not process. The COVID-19 pandemic only underscored the need for providing quality care for the elderly and people on Medicare, which is the main population we serve. The desire to get solutions into the hands of our users is what drives most, if not all of us, at Iora. We love the fact that our users are also our colleagues – the doctors, nurses, and health coaches on the front line of care – and that we’re building a product that keeps people healthy.

While some engineering groups like to build tech for tech’s sake, we’re not chasing the shiniest new library or buzzword out there. Instead, we’re actively dogfooding our own product and remain focused on how we can solve real world problems for patients, doctors, and providers across the country.

We want to ensure every student has an equal opportunity in finding a job, no matter what school they went to, what their major is, or who they know.

Handshake was started in 2014 by three computer science students from Michigan Tech who were struck by the inequality in access to opportunity. Along with many of their friends, they were having trouble finding internships outside of their local area. After persistently sending 100 LinkedIn emails to different employees just to get connected to a recruiter, Garrett, one of our founders and CEO, finally landed a summer internship with Palantir in the Bay Area. He spent that summer connecting his friends from Michigan Tech to different Bay Area companies, making $60,000 from referral bonuses alone (which he then used to pay off his college tuition). Bay Area companies didn’t know about Michigan Tech students despite the fact that they were qualified for their roles and many Michigan Tech students didn’t know about these Bay Area companies without Garrett’s connections. Thus, Handshake was born.

The problem we’re solving is one that many of us have personally faced, too. A lot of the employees at Handshake also ran into issues when we were starting our careers out of college. We all believe opportunity can be and should be democratized, and we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think Handshake would be the one to do it.

Doppler is a product built for engineers, by engineers.

As developers ourselves, we know firsthand what a pain it is managing environment variables. It’s something we’ve encountered as individual engineers working on side projects and also as devs on larger teams at larger companies. In fact, we faced the issue once more when we first started Doppler, which began as a crypto machine learning marketplace (we know, all the buzzwords in one). Whether it was a silent outage due to using our Stripe staging API key in production (we couldn’t make any transactions) or figuring out how to securely share our API keys with short-term contractors (we didn’t want to give them access to all of our customers’ bank accounts), we realized this was a universal problem for developers without a universal solution.

We love being able to build a product that not only solves problems we face, but also makes development easier for all engineers. In the same way that Figma abstracts away all of the complexities of Photoshop while still maintaining its power, we want to do the same with Doppler for the dev community and their secrets. As we grow from a 5-person company, we hope all of our early engineering hires are as passionate as we are about solving such an omnipresent headache!

We believe in building a product that works over smart sales strategies.

Software allows few people to have a large impact and that happens through a great product. We talk to our users every day, and they share their enthusiasm for Peergrade with us. This is what get us up in the morning. Peergrade is a tool for teachers and students that allows them to run peer feedback sessions. Students submit work and provide feedback to their peers - a process where students train critical thinking, giving feedback and learn to take ownership of their own learning. Peergrade started as a tool for a class we taught and we keep dogfooding our own product to ensure it stays relevant and great. In the end, we are our product.

Our mission is to nurture critical wisdom for the sake of the world.

Education has the power to transform individuals and enable them to solve the world’s most critical problems. We deeply believe that it’s critical to invest in education. We get the opportunity to do this every day and are transforming education at every level. We started with higher education, as that is the category the world looks to as the pace setter in education but we are branching out from there into professional learning and high schools.

We actively engage with our users at all levels. We are in the rare position to have a technology team working hand-in-hand with a stellar academic team asking how to make education better every day. In addition, we get to directly interact with students at Minerva Schools, watching them grow and thrive as the result of our work.

We get to work on hard and challenging technology problems. We are creating Minerva Forum, which is pushing boundaries of WebRTC and dynamic real time web applications in order to create a compelling education environment. You can see a video of Forum at work, learn more about the future of our platform, its latest features, and how it supports our global partnerships as part of this panel discussion at the ASU GSV Summit 2019 with our CEO Ben Nelson.

“How do you empower everybody to build the Internet?”

While nearly everyone is on the internet, very few of us have the high level of education and skills to build it. We are changing that. We believe that the internet is more fun – and more powerful – when everyone creates it. This mission has brought us all together, and watching what people build with our tool inspires us every day.

But how do we make that possible? Step one is to primarily focus on phones – the computer that everyone has in their pocket. Next, you design an interface that makes the process of building the internet – building a site – easy, fun, and open-ended.

But how do you fit a full-featured web editor into an iPhone app? You need to start from scratch. From first principles you invent a totally new kind of user interface – a language everyone can understand. Our grid editor is exceptionally simple. You just decide what kind of block you want and move blocks around. It feels like building with Legos. This simplicity holds infinite possibility. A straightforward way to make anything possible, with a phone in hand. (Try it out, build even the most basic site, and be sure to turn the sound on – it’s a bit addicting!)

We get a massive kick from knowing that our product helps people get outside, be active, take part in life-changing experiences, and conquer personal challenges.

Our team members span the whole spectrum in terms of athletic ability, from new hires who've never run a 5K (but quickly get the running bug) to an Olympic gold medalist, yet we are all united by a shared love for physical challenges. We know how impactful endurance events can be on people’s lives. Our passion to get more people on their feet participating in them transcends the walls of Let’s Do This. If you’ve heard of Serena Williams (the 22-time Grand Slam Champion and G.O.A.T 🙌) or Usain Bolt (world record holder for the 100m, 200m, and 4 x 100m sprint 🥇), they’re fully behind our product, too, and are proud investors of LDT.

Let’s Do This is a passion project. Normally, you either get an opportunity to build one of the biggest companies in the world, or you get an opportunity to work on something that you really love. It’s super rare that you get both. For most of us, we are creating a product that we always wished existed. It’s a beautiful thing to spend every day building a platform for yourself, something your closest friends will use, too… and call it “work.” We feel lucky to be in this position, and are grateful to have awesome people to do it all with.

We're determined to create a product that transforms VC.

We’ve built a platform that allows accredited investors to invest in startups with just a few clicks of a button. In doing so, we’ve enabled a new generation of “solo capitalist” VCs, who are able to raise funds and start leading investment rounds into startups as individuals.

We encourage our team members to become investors themselves. We waive platform carry (fees) for our employees when they invest on our website, set up test accounts for employees to dogfood product flows, and provide networking opportunities for team members to start building relationships with the investor community directly.

We love solving problems in original ways that delight our customers and scale as we pursue our mission to build trust on the internet.

We have two products. The first is Deploy, which automatically implements the security controls you need to achieve regulatory compliance and pass customer audits. The second is Comply, which organizes and automates security and privacy management into clear, simple processes that give businesses and their customers confidence. We lead with design, meaning we hold every feature accountable to the day-to-day experience of the person whose life that feature is intended to improve. We talk in terms of loving our customers and building product that they can’t live without.

We set an equally high bar for maintainability, evolvability, and performance. We codify our engineering principles in an Engineering Manifesto, and we acknowledge and accept trade-offs involved with keeping high standards.

Below is a view of Aptible Comply.

Our shared vision is to raise the standard of trust online.

We’re the second largest mobile search engine in the US and UK, with over 5 million monthly downloads and 3 billion private monthly searches. Everyone at DuckDuckGo shares the belief that your personal data is nobody’s business and we’re always looking for ways to improve our users’ experience. For example, we’ve provided users with mapping features within DuckDuckGo Search for many years, improving them along the way with greater accuracy, dark mode, local re-querying, and more. We were able to take that even further by adding route planning. As with all our search features, we protect users’ privacy when using these directions.

While our roots will always be the search engine that doesn’t track you, our mission to secure online privacy doesn’t stop there. Our goal is to protect users wherever the Internet takes them. As a new engineer, you’ll work to improve and optimize the user experience in our all-in-one privacy solution. With three innovative projects slated for release this year, and more on the horizon, you'll also be responsible for helping us launch new features into the marketplace. Your work at DuckDuckGo will have a direct impact on our promise to deliver privacy, simplified.

We use Orbit to build Orbit.

Since we’re building a tool for managing and growing communities, we rely on our product to help us grow, too! We coined the term “Orbit Model,” which is our framework for building the most powerful communities, or what we call “high gravity” ones. To retain existing members and attract new ones, much of our approach focuses on welcoming and responding to community members across different channels and providing tailored interactions. We’re able to do this using our automatic Twitter and GitHub integrations, the Orbit API, and one-on-one outreach based on the data. You can learn more about how we use Orbit to build Orbit, here.

Today, software is adopted through personal agency and community plays a huge role in this. Unlike 10 or 20 years ago, software isn’t sold the same way – people aren’t going to fill out a lead gen form or download a white paper. There’s a real commercial opportunity to help businesses transform the way they think of their customers and community.

The applicants who stand out to us the most are people who feel connected to the product and what we’re building in a meaningful way. Maybe they’ve been a developer advocate or community manager already. Maybe they are involved in local or online communities. Or maybe they just have a shared interest in learning more about how the product works and are excited about building this particular tool. If this resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you!

If you’re passionate about product, you’ll be happiest at a company like Cameo where we live or die by our product.

We do not have clients, and we don’t have physical hardware. We are a highly digital, highly scalable, consumer tech company. We believe Cameo is one of the best companies in the world for product-focused engineers to work and that we provide one of the best opportunities to create magical consumer experiences.

It’s impossible to work at Cameo and not wake up feeling excited every day. Our fans and talent are constantly sending us their ideas and amazing feedback. We’re in the business of creating unforgettable memories and making people happy, and that’s pretty awesome. One of the coolest perks of working at Cameo is that everyone on our team is bookable as talent! Not only do we get to fulfill fun, silly, and sometimes heartwarming requests, we also get to dogfood our own app and understand firsthand the pain points and joyful moments.

Connected by our mission that meaningful learning can happen anywhere.

Co-founders Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham have been working together for over 15 years. They first met at Google where they worked together as Product Managers. When they left Google, they started a company together that was later acquired by Facebook and spent a few years at Facebook together before leaving to create what is now Seesaw.

Carl and Adrian have always had an interest in the education space but were reluctant to create an education product given neither of them had an education background. Their initial product, Shadow Puppet, was launched with a desire to make it easy for anyone to be able to share photos, information, and ideas, in creative and easy ways on a phone or tablet.

By chance, Shadow Puppet became very popular in the teacher community and led Carl and Adrian to dig deeper into the types of problems educators were facing. Initially, several of the pain points teachers brought up were mechanical. For example, providing an iPad to a classroom where the iPads rotated from class to class was an issue because students weren’t necessarily able to save information on a device. However, from these conversations, it became clear that the product teachers actually wanted was one where students could interact, get excited, and engage with their work on a different level. Out of all of this, Seesaw was born.

Seesaw has since evolved into a platform where teachers can create engaging lessons and activities, students have total creativity in how they interact with and complete those lessons (like drawing, coloring, and recording presentations) building a portfolio of their work over time, and parents can see, participate, (and cherish!) all of it.

One of our team members, Taek Yun, joined Seesaw after seeing how transformative it was for his own family:

“A week before school started for my 7-year-old daughter, the teacher invited parents in and asked us to download two apps: one of which was Seesaw. I did as told, but truthfully didn’t look at either app for several weeks. Then one day, I got an email notification saying my daughter had uploaded a video to Seesaw. I clicked the link, which opened the app, and I watched her narrate a story she had both written and illustrated titled: “How to Make Friends.” I was so thrilled to see her talk so excitedly about, well, how to make friends!

As a parent, the biggest pain point is knowing what my kids are doing in school. Every day, I come home and ask, “How was your day? What did you do in school today?” and the answers are always a quick, one-word: “good,” “fine,” “fun.” But when I got home that day to ask my daughter about “How to Make Friends,” her face lit up and she didn’t even let me finish my question before enthusiastically telling me ALL about it. We talked for over 30 minutes! She was so engaged and so excited. Beyond that, I could see firsthand how her reading and writing improved throughout the school year through the Seesaw app. I knew right then and there that Seesaw was amazing and I wanted to be a part of it.”

The education industry tends to attract people who are human-centric, compassionate, and empathetic. While Seesaw sits at the intersection of education and technology, we’ve found the same to be true for us, too. We love what we’re building and deeply believe that Seesaw not only improves education, but also creates better relationships between teachers, students, and parents, creating a more holistic circle of learning.

Creating financial freedom and prosperity is our unifying mission.

Everyone at CoinTracker uses CoinTracker to track their crypto and stay tax compliant (everyone on the team owns cryptocurrency or gets some after joining). It’s also easiest to build an amazing product when you are a user of the product yourself. Our mission to make crypto more accessible, improve the financial system, and democratize wealth and tax management is a unifying driver. We’re saving users thousands of dollars a year in taxes and that’s just the beginning.

As avid users of our own product we have a strong empathy for users and when we hear their struggles with the product, it hits home. Looking forward, crypto will be fragmented across many services and use cases, which makes the work we’re doing more important than ever.

While many of us have experience in personal finance and fintech, it’s not a requirement to join the team. As long as you’re genuinely curious and interested in learning more about crypto and working to increase people’s financial empowerment, we’d love to hear from you!

We’re committed to our mission to transform the employee leave experience.

All of us want to make paid leave a seamless experience for both companies and employees. It is the unifying thread that ties all of us together and why so many people choose to join our team. The company started when our CEO and founder, Deborah, had six of her close friends have children at the same time. She saw all of them struggle with the paperwork and some made mistakes, didn’t get paid properly, and had to file appeals. She realized if her friends (highly-skilled Harvard and MIT grads with great jobs in tech) were struggling this much with the leave process, chances were so many other people would, too. Thus, Sparrow was born.

No matter the size of the company, employee leave is a complicated process and there’s a clear market fit. The COVID-19 pandemic has only further highlighted the need for Sparrow’s modernized platform, as Deborah shares in this podcast. With so many companies moving to remote work, employees are now living in multiple different cities and states. This makes things even more complicated for companies to manage employee leave because they have to look at multiple regulations in different locations. What’s more, companies have seen a rise in medical leave and mental health leave during the pandemic. With HR teams spread thin, there’s never been a more important time to make real world change and improve people’s lives, and everyone at Sparrow is driven by this mission. (We also receive thank you notes and baby pictures daily – how awesome is that?!)

In many ways, Dark was started to solve our own problems.

We wanted to be able to ship products without having to spend the majority of the time setting things up, or re-writing code we already had for other projects. We believe that the speed of developer iteration is the single most important factor in how quickly a technology company can move. We’re so passionate about this that in Dark, deploys take fifty milliseconds!

We’re still developers building a product for developers. Everyone at Dark likes the idea of making engineering easier so more people can do it.

We’re on a mission to accelerate science.

As a PhD student in the U.K., Richard Price (founder and CEO), wanted to have a homepage where he could share his work and build his reputation as an academic. However, to do so, he needed to write his own HTML. He realized this problem must extend to many others, too. Thus, Academia.edu was born.

While most engineers here don't come from an academic background, we're united by our shared belief that research needs to be more accessible to better the world. And this isn’t hyperbole, we mean it literally. Whether it’s finding the cure to cancer, solving climate change, or evolving artificial intelligence, sharing research is paramount. We have over 160M registered members on our platform and have uploaded over 22M papers. We figure there’s around 100M papers in the world, so we’re around 20% of our way there.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve continued to increase our revenue 50% YOY and are excited to be growing our team to support our growth. Fast. We’re currently at around 75 people and plan to hire another 30 by the end of 2021, then double our team to around 220 by 2022. If you’re mission-driven and ready to make a huge impact by accelerating research, we’d love to hear from you!

We leave no stone unturned and no pixel unexamined to make our product the best it can be.

Everyone at Curai is deeply passionate about our mission and making our product the best it can be. On the engineering team specifically, this manifests itself in the form of attention to detail and passion for making improvements. The team leaves no stone unturned and no pixel unexamined in our efforts to build the absolute best product that we can. Part of the magic at Curai is how directly impactful one can be on real users. Many of our engineers ship code to production within their first few weeks of joining, code that then finds its way into the hands of thousands of real people who are actively using Curai to help improve their health and wellness.

This calling ends up being one of the core reasons why people join the company. For example, Anitha Kannan, founding member and our Head of Machine Learning Research, came over to Curai from Facebook AI Research (FAIR) because of Curai's mission and the chance to build a world-changing product from the ground up. In her words:

"It is a deeply humbling opportunity to touch others' lives at the right time and in ways that matter to them. At Curai, I know that I am focused towards that North Star of equitable healthcare access to all, by joining forces with world-class Curaians who truly care and have the diverse expertise required to realize this goal."

Grouparoo was founded by people who have all experienced the pain of not getting data syncing right.

At previous companies, we’ve been unable to meet objectives and created bottlenecks for our marketing and ops teams. We have experienced both the organizational and technical hurdles of not getting data syncing right. As technical founders, we want to make sure that no engineer ever has to worry about vendor rate limits, obtuse APIs, or accidentally sharing PII with the wrong vendor again. We hope everyone who joins Grouparoo can share our goal of turning the slow and tedious task of data management into something that ‘just works’.

Curiosity about bioprocessing and accelerating the world’s research is a shared trait.

Curiosity that turns into a shared interest around the product is something that bonds everyone at Culture. Our customers rely on our product to create advanced medicines, compostable plastics, agricultural bio-fertilizers, and so much more. Helping bring those bold visions to fruition and promote sustainability is what unites and drives us. It’s this mission to do good in the world that motivates us in our day-to-day work. For example, during the height of the pandemic, our product allowed many people to continue their research at home without missing a beat. When we were able to safely return to the lab, one of the first projects we worked on was a COVID antiviral project. We also helped in the development of a vaccine component.

If you hear ‘biotech’ or ‘bioreactor’ and you have no idea what that is but you’re interested in learning more, you can absolutely do that here. Not only are people willing to take time out of their day to share knowledge with one another, but many also lead classes. For instance, Satshabad, (software engineering manager), led an intro to coding class for the bio team and Dorothy (a hardware engineer) recently started a class on how to CAD. We also have several Slack channels dedicated to keeping up with industry news and offer an educational stipend of $1500 that has been used on things like ML courses, bio conferences, and other work-related classes.

We believe it’s a particularly exciting time to bring cloud software and data science to bioprocessing, because we’re enabling a Cambrian explosion in research. It’s similar to Moore’s law, but for biotech research. There’s a future where every big brand you know is investing in biomaterials and we’re building the platform to speed up that research in a very fundamental way.

Whether you know a ton about biology or can’t remember anything from your high school science class, we’d love to hear from you so long as you have a curiosity to learn more!

Our product and development teams live and breathe Amplitude.

We literally use Amplitude every single day to help us do our own jobs, which makes it really easy to feel proud of and love what we do. The positive feedback loop of building a product for customers that will help them build better products for their customers is so gratifying. Furthermore, we’re empowered to build features to make our product better rather than features that will make us money. Being able to say “no” to customers gives us true ownership over our product, and that type of agency both unifies and invigorates us!

Don’t worry if you’re not already a fan of Amplitude’s product – you will be soon enough! We invite everyone who’s interested in what we’re building or learning more about who we are to check out our open roles! We’re at an interesting stage right now, too. We have product-market fit, are well funded, and provide a tremendous amount of job stability/security. Not yet a public company, we still have a lot of potential and latitude, too.