NewsBasis Is Hiring!

SmallJacob Rothstein NewsBasis

I'm excited to announce that NewsBasis is hiring hackers and software craftsmen. We're a company of two people that is funded and is building a company to scale. We're paying fair salaries to professionals (at any stage of their careers). Our mission is to build a web platform to make the relations between companies and journalists more efficient and relevant to all parties. We launched earlier this month and have been covered in a number of high-profile journals. Darryl and I invite you to help shape a company, culture, and product, not just write code.

You should either know ruby or javascript like your mother tongue or be ready and able to learn quickly. If you don't have a github account, I'll want to see a substantial piece of code you've personally written before an interview.

Chances are, if you're the sort of person we want to work with, you've got plenty of options and know that. We understand that this is just as much a matter of you choosing us as vice versa.

The technology

Ruby/Rails, Redis, jQuery, Solr, MySQL, nginx, & Ubuntu.

I've paired at Pivotal and have a good understanding of the methodology, but do not take their best practices as scripture. I write tests for models, keep controllers skinny, am happy to pair when we're both in the mood, use CI, deploy continuously, refactor mercilessly, and obsess about DRYness. I expect we'll move towards TDD as we move towards common code ownership. I don't prematurely optimize, but get excited when I have an excuse to focus on scalability. I want my code to be beautiful. I expect we'll develop a style of code together that is neither yours, nor mine, but hopefully is even more awesome. I expect you to kick me if I use the word synergy.

Instead of trying to push some sort of best practice kool aid on you, we'd like to engage in an ongoing series of experiments to more fully understand what works for us as a team. Everything is up for experimentation, provided it can be scoped and measured. I'm a student of process and culture and am keen to explore how best to efficiently achieve our common goals as enjoyably as possible.

The mission

The economic model of journalism is in trouble, yet few social institutions wield as much influence over civilization. Our economy is driven by companies that care deeply about their media perception, and seek to exert influence through the news. Journalists need points of contact in companies, in nonprofits, in academia, and with independent experts. Yet the interface between these groups is dominated by an extraordinarily inefficient industry known as Public Relations. Incredible resources are spent on what is largely a relationship-driven, direct pitch industry, wherein journalists are barraged with pitches for their client's products, interests, and perspectives. A large portion of the ten billion dollars spent on Public Relations annually pays for people to pick up phones and send emails and reach out to journalists. This inefficiency is largely due to a misalignment of relevance and/or timing to journalists. Our plan is do better by building software that matches company pitches, experts, and perspectives that are topically and temporally relevant to journalists. We're experimenting with several approaches towards this problem, and want you to help us solve it.

We are building a web platform that is easy to understand and use, but with carefully considered relevance matching algorithms. We expect that some of the data we'll be working with will take the shape of a professional graph between companies, PR professionals and journalists, as well as our burgeoning archive of news accumulated by our node.js news crawler. I hope you'll be as excited as I am about the challenges offered by a company built on the premise of algorithmic relevance. Current topics of interest include how news breaks, how misinformation spreads, what topics are relevant to which journalists and companies, and how to extract authority and subject expertise from interactions we structure. We intend to structure the application and user experience in order to provide the data most useful for relevance matching.

Our progress

We built a rapid news crawler and searchable index with email news alerts that beat google news alerts more often than not, an annotation and sharing browser plugin for chrome and for firefox, a dossier-based organizational system, and a question-and-answer system that matches requests with experts based on keywords.

We've got real customers from large companies and established media outlets. We don't have their permission to publicize their names here, but we'll give you a sense in person. We have over three thousand users on the company / PR side, and we're nearing five hundred journalists. We've been covered in The New York Times, Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, and several PR-focused journals.

Who we are

Jacob

Darryl

The deets

Until recently, we had an office in South Park, SOMA, but realized that we were rarely actually there. Usually, we work from coffeeshops (mostly in the Mission) and from our respective home offices in the Mission and Potrero Hill. We plan on renting an office as we grow, and you'll be able to help choose. We'd prefer for you to be local to SF, but we're willing to be flexible if you really knock our socks off and are willing to visit home base every once in a while.

We've raised over $600k thus far so paying a fair salary will not be an impediment to hiring the right people. Understand that your equity stake will be larger than employees who join after our upcoming Series A funding. If you're not familiar with the mechanics of that stuff, don't worry — we're quite transparent internally.

Some perks

Right now we're pretty small, so we won't be able to offer you in-house dry cleaning, yoga instruction or child care. Instead, we'd like to work with you to offer perks you actually care about. We're open to anything legal that helps you work better, focus longer, or love your job even more. Need a new computer? Done. Need a 3G dongle so you can tether from Dolores while drinking a Tecate? Done. Want some technical books or need to attend conferences? We're on your side. We can't give you all of these things, but tell us what want and we'll try to make it happen.

We're in the early stages of this company and expect you to help shape its future. You'll help choose the office and grow with us as we move towards our next round of funding, all while getting paid a professional salary.

If this sounds exciting, something you're proud of, whether it's a resume, an open source project you're working on, a paper you authored, a picture of your black belt or of you at the end of your first marathon. Please include some links to your internet presences, particularly github. I look forward to meeting you!