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.

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.

Our mission is to democratize software creation.

We believe software is the most important innovation of the past century, but that its potency as a medium for economic value creation and creative expression remains inaccessible to most. (People typically experience a finished software product, rather than software as a medium.) As engineers, we know how empowering it can be to create software, and we intend to bring this power to everyone.

Instead of designing features for narrow use cases, we create fundamental building blocks that can be assembled to model any workflow. For example, rather than building a “kanban board” product, we allow users to organize any data in Airtable as stacks of cards; and rather than building an “organization chart” product, we allow users to visualize any data hierarchically. At the same time, we strive to make this complexity as accessible as possible, sweating the details of our user interface and creating the best possible experience even when it means more work up front.

This combination of flexibility and accessibility has enabled people from all walks of life - from magazine editors and TV producers to architects and cattle ranchers - to find value in Airtable. Our users love what we’ve built; they praise us on social media and publish amazing templates on Airtable Universe. It's motivating to work on a product that has such wide, deep, and positive impact.

As ambitious as our current product is, we know our mission demands far more. In Niklaus Wirth's classic formulation, Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs; Airtable starts users with a rich, highly accessible canvas to describe their data, and then layers powerful tools to add functionality (algorithms) over that data. By scaling both of these dimensions — further enriching the data and layering progressively more powerful tools — we have a unique opportunity to gradually teach users to build fully-realized applications.

Building that general-purpose toolkit comes with a unique set of hard engineering and design problems. Whether it's finding the right level of complexity and expressiveness for a new feature, or thinking through how it might intersect with the existing dimensions and building blocks of the product, the opportunity and challenge embodied in these problems inspires us to do our best work.

Finally, we're enthusiastic users of Airtable ourselves! Many of our internal processes run on Airtable, including our issue tracker, recruiting process, team gallery, and product roadmap. And if you're ever at a loss for a conversation topic with one of us, ask about our personal bases for our travel plans, parenting responsibilities, or books we're reading. This shared passion for our own product unifies our team and ensures that we're all invested in continually improving it.

Hipcamp Founder and CEO Alyssa Ravasio started Hipcamp because she loved the outdoors and was frustrated by how difficult it was to book a campsite despite spending several hours researching. At the time, 30% of the California State Park system was being threatened with closure due to lack of revenue. This had to change.

Alyssa started Hipcamp to get more people outside. Hipcamp makes it easy for people to explore, adventure, and find the best campsite. Hipcamp is passionate about creating equal access to the outdoors and providing a revenue stream to landowners so they can remain autonomous and protect their private land. We are passionate about sustainability and getting more people outside to connect with nature.

Like Alyssa, many of our employees have a passion for camping and want to help build a product they love using. Most people who want to work with us are concerned about increasing access to the outdoors while also protecting it for future generations. It’s no surprise that all of us use our own product to go camping on the weekend. We participate in a ‘Summer Camp Challenge’ and each employee receives a large amount of Hipcash (Hipcamp credit) that refreshes annually to allow them to get out, experience nature and use the Hipcamp product!

To learn more about Hipcamp’s origin story, take a peek at this documentary created by REI.

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

Well, first, you focus on phones, the computer that everyone has. Next, you design an interface that makes the process of building the internet – building a website – easy, fun, and open-ended.

There’s a reason why this hasn’t been done yet: it’s hard. How do you fit a full-featured web editor into an iPhone app? You need to start from first principles and invent a new kind of user interface. Our grid editor is exceptionally simple – just move blocks around, like Lego – but also extremely open-ended. We accomplish this by revealing complexity only as it’s needed.

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

[Applicants should make a site before reaching out 🙂]

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 4 stores across the nation and our goal is to be in 1 out of 2 by 2021. We recently raised a $21M Series B and are growing our team accordingly!

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 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.

We want to make families healthier, happier, and stronger.

We’ve borrowed this mission statement from Sesame Street (who also happens to be one of our investors). Moms and dads take dozens of photos of their kids every day. Their phones and cloud storage accounts get so flooded with photos, but they can’t find the time or stand the thought of deleting any of their precious moments in time. As a result, they hoard photos with no real plan to use or even share them. With Precious, a digital journal is automatically created for you which you can then easily share with family. It allows grandparents that live far away to watch their grandchildren grow up, and gives parents the ability to reflect on parenthood without any work. Family means a lot to us, so it’s easy for us to love our own product too. (If you’re curious, check out the app for yourself. We’d love to hear what you think!)

Looking at the back end, we also have a deep interest in computer vision and artificial intelligence. We use AI to help parents manage their photo libraries: facial detection identifies photos of kids and finds the best ones, discarding those that are blurry or poor quality. We also consider age and gender to differentiate between siblings (if a family has more than one child). In addition to our love for our product and end users, we’re also excited to be facing technically challenging problems every day.

Our mission to help older adults is our north star.

Home care, on the surface, may seem like something that’s not particularly exciting. However, if you take a few steps back and look at the global trends, the number of people reaching the age of 65 is exploding, and most nations don’t have a good solution for how to take care of them. We want to take care of our parents–and yours–as they age, and what we build affects their lives on a very personal level. We’re equally passionate about providing better working conditions for the Care Professionals that care for them. If helping people improve their quality of life is meaningful and fulfilling for you, then you’ll fit right in.

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.

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 love what we’re building and who we’re building it for.

We believe artificial intelligence has the power to transform every aspect of our lives, from healthcare to agriculture. Learning about new use cases for Labelbox and new ways of expanding our impact is never-ending. We’re excited that our product is accelerating the development of AI, which in turn accelerates our customers’ ability to quickly and accurately detect cancer, identify when disease hits their farms, and build safe self-driving cars. Labelbox is a catalyst and we pride ourselves on saving companies from having to create their own expensive and incomplete homegrown tools. Instead, they can rely on our training data platform that acts as a central hub for humans to interface with AI. When humans have better ways to input and manage data, machines have better ways to learn.

While it’s great if you’ve personally felt the problems we’re solving for, we don’t need you to be intimately familiar with machine learning. It’s more important that you are excited about the future of machine learning and can get behind our views on craftsmanship.

We value our craft, but we focus on impact.

Today, consumers rely on software for everything from banking to hailing a taxi, and with that reliance comes a trusting relationship. As internet services store increasingly sensitive data about their customers, it’s even more important than ever that companies store and use that data properly.

We all love playing with the latest technology, but we recognize that it’s in service of our greater mission. Focusing on impact allows us to zoom out, decide what we truly value, and have a common language to discuss our roadmap and product.

We’ve built some really cool technology and we put intentional time toward developer tooling and battling tech debt, but it’s with an eye toward making us more productive. This isn’t the sort of company where an engineer will insist that we rewrite our entire codebase in Scala – we look to our product goals and work backwards.

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.

We started the company because we realized there needed to be a platform for people, their doctors, and developers.

Today, the healthcare market has no data interoperability. Data is siloed in on-prem EHRs (80% of the market). Patients don’t have access to their doctors or their data. Doctors don’t have access to patients. Developers don’t have access to patient data.

We’re laying the foundation and infrastructure to connect people with their doctors and third-party developers. This means NexHealth has the potential to be the infrastructure where all digital healthcare innovation is built on. If this excites you, we want you on our team!

Cameo makes people insanely happy, and this makes us insanely happy!

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 priceless 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.

One thing that can’t be overstated about working at Cameo is that it’s fun. (“Make it fun” is literally one of our company’s core values.) We don’t want coming to work to feel like walking into a corporate office every day, and if there’s ever an opportunity to make something fun (or funny), we do it. As one of many examples, we used some of our recruiting budget to fly a banner over Facebook’s headquarters that read: “Tell Mark You Quit. Join Cameo.”

Our goal is for users to receive conversational recommendations that feel like they’re coming from a friend.

At EyeLevel.ai, we believe the relationship between humans and computers is evolving from one based on browsing, tapping, and clicking to one that is conversational, personalized, and contextual. Similar to what transpired with social, mobile, and video, we understand that many digital industries will be completely disrupted by this transformation. We recognize the moral responsibility of our industry to value transparency and to respect individual privacy. We are seizing the opportunity created by the confluence of these market forces to reinvent what digital advertising will be in a future where we talk to the computers around us.

This vision for EyeLevel.ai came from an unrelated project at IBM Watson & the Weather Company where Ben, Ryan, Stephanie, and Jason worked together in 2016. We led teams that collaborated to build a weather-based digital assistant experience for the Weather Company that, once shipped, quickly grew to over 1M daily active users. Basically, three years ago, we were chat application developers that built a (relatively) successful conversational experience and we learned three important things from it:

1. The experience more closely resembles human relationships. Our users knew our responses were automated but still, consciously or subconsciously, reacted to our weather chatbot like it was a sentient thing. They would interact with the chatbot as if it were a friend, thanking it for keeping them up to date, sharing pictures of weather events in their area, and telling it about how the weather impacted their lives.
2. The user interactions are rich with data and content. The things people were saying and doing created a far richer data set than could be inferred from browsing, clicking, or even searching. However, as with any successful relationship, trust and transparency are critical components to the chat experiences. We hypothesized that the future of conversational UI/UX was wildly misunderstood and that tools and platforms would have to be built – similar to mobile/video/social/desktop – from a conversation-first, relationship-first perspective.
3. There was no easy way to make $$$. We began to think about how to build a business from our experience and realized that there were no easy-to-use tools to monetize. What incentives do developers have to build experiences of these types? How would the experiences ever get better without a sustainable way to build a business?

EyeLevel.ai is the product we needed when we were developers to build a sustainable business. We recognized that dropping a banner ad into a chat would be a terrible idea – no one wants that: brands, users, or developers. We started EyeLevel.ai to reinvent the advertising technology stack for conversation, where advertisements will be more like contextually-relevant recommendations. We believe moving the industry from display advertising to something more like a personalized recommendation will be better for everyone: users, brands, and developers.

Every engineer at LaunchDarkly has personally felt the pain of shipping and breaking something in production.

Feature flagging is something that is critically important to every tech company, and many companies have been forced to develop their own tools to prevent major issues. We proudly serve customers like CircleCI, Atlassian, and Microsoft and know how valuable it is to have a safety net when releasing new products. Strategic and careful deployment is incredibly important for developers, and we love being able to empower development teams to collaborate more effectively, maintain stability, and deliver software faster.

We serve hundreds of billions feature flags daily to companies big and small. Developers and operations teams use LaunchDarkly to eliminate risk from their software development cycles, and we (of course), use our own product to ship code with confidence.

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.

The world has been moving toward mobile and we’re in a unique position to help move it.

Whether you love data, mobile games, or staying relevant with tech industry trends, everyone at Sensor Tower truly loves what we’re building. We’re at the bleeding edge of a quickly moving mobile frontier and see trends before they even become trends. As one example, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we could tell which companies (and therefore which industries) were getting hit the hardest and which were booming. We could approximate how much revenue companies were losing or making by approximating app usage, too, and we knew ESPN’s “The Last Dance” was going to be popular even before the first episodes aired. (There was a spike in downloads for ESPN’s app!)

The mobile app market is constantly growing, and we are lucky to work on a product that gives a bird’s eye view of the entire mobile ecosystem. We have multiple products that lend unique views into what is happening in the mobile world. which is quickly expanding to mean the world at large, and everyone at Sensor Tower has access to them. Everyone goes through product training within their first week of joining. This ensures that every team member is knowledgeable and familiar with every part of our product, even the ones they won’t directly work on, and sets things up so that everyone can submit issues via GitHub throughout their time at the company.

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.