Archive for July 2021

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Jobs in Software/Technology Activism?

July 31, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Jobs in Software/Technology Activism?
Ask HN: Jobs in Software/Technology Activism?
3 by nixpulvis | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I'm currently looking for a new job and in addition to the many more typical jobs I'm applying to, I'd be very interested to hear about positions in what I'm tempted to call "activism". I'm not 100% sure what it is I'm even asking for, which is part of the motivation for this thread; hoping that someone more knowledgeable might be able to guide me in the right direction. What I'm looking for is this: - Champions of Free and Open Source Software / Hardware, Right to Repair, and other like causes - A full-time or part-time role (with other programming responsibilities) within a product or consulting company which gives time and resources to a team of like-minded folk, or - A full-time position as a writer / evangelist / technology new reporter, or - A policy oriented position with a US politician, or - Everything else that I'm not thinking of... I'm a coder by training and at heart, but I currently am having a hard time turning a blind eye to the state of our industry. I'm thinking I should at least try and ask about way I can devote my time to the solution. On that note, if a paying job addressing these issues isn't really in the cards, I'd be curious to hear how others are making meaningful impact in their free time. Thanks.

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Do you have a process or a framework to learn specific skills quickly?

July 31, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Do you have a process or a framework to learn specific skills quickly?
Ask HN: Do you have a process or a framework to learn specific skills quickly?
7 by hypnotist | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Any suggestions/ frameworks on how to learn specific skill, retain the knowledge and be able to share it(in for ex. written form) I usually jump in straight away and start learning "on the job" but I realised that I forget too much and i do not have any notes to refer to later on. Examples of specific skill: - How to write a good cold email - how to learn some snowboarding trick - how to store your bitcoin safely etc.

New top story on Hacker News: Why is YouTube adding “&pp=sAQA” to video URLs?

July 30, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Why is YouTube adding “&pp=sAQA” to video URLs?
Why is YouTube adding “&pp=sAQA” to video URLs?
18 by pdkl95 | 9 comments on Hacker News.
YouTube started adding a new parameter "pp=sAQA" to video URLs on most index style pages (e.g. /feed/subscriptions, search results, the /videos page on any channel). The actual video pages (/watch) strip the pp= parameter, and it doesn't appear to be added to the URLs for the "recommended" videos. Does anybody know what this parameter does and/or why it was added? It's really annoying; using YouTube URLs in the shell now requires quoting due to the "&".

New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Sane IT, mobile mechanics, chat teams, Zoom events, spas and beauty

July 29, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Sane IT, mobile mechanics, chat teams, Zoom events, spas and beauty
Launch HN: Sane IT, mobile mechanics, chat teams, Zoom events, spas and beauty
5 by dang | 5 comments on Hacker News.
Here's the second issue of our new Launch HN format ("Meet the Batch") - previous one was https://ift.tt/3y0lxgF , meta is at https://ift.tt/3rk92ub . There are 5 startups in this thread. The order is randomized. Here are direct links. Odiggo (YC S21) - Connect car owners with mobile mechanics in the Middle East https://ift.tt/2WyaAW1 Genuity (YC S21) - SaaS for companies to manage IT and buy business software https://ift.tt/3l8Ief3 DailyBot (YC S21) - Chatbot and toolkit for team collaboration and asynchronous work https://ift.tt/3faShwp Virtually (YC S20) - Easily manage Zoom events https://ift.tt/2UVcgIO Glitzi (YC S21) - At-home beauty and spa services for Latin America https://ift.tt/3ygpLkz

New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Legion Health (YC S21) – Smarter Staffing for Mental Health

July 28, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Legion Health (YC S21) – Smarter Staffing for Mental Health
Launch HN: Legion Health (YC S21) – Smarter Staffing for Mental Health
3 by ympatel | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We’re Yash, Arthur, and Daniel, the founders of Legion Health ( https://legion.health ). We're an online marketplace for health care professionals, starting in mental health. Basically, we sell psychiatrists' and therapists’ time to telehealth companies by the hour. Professionals sign up for shifts that fit their schedule, and telehealth companies can scale more quickly by not needing to hire them full time. Telehealth companies and other health care organizations (hospitals, medical groups, home health, etc.) face huge problems around recruiting, managing, and scheduling clinicians to meet patient demand. This is getting worse because of a large (230,000+) shortage of mental health professionals in the US. Staffing companies exist, but they solve only one piece of that problem, are expensive, and don’t mitigate risk for their customers. We heard how bad things were during a 2-hour call with the Director of Business Operations at a large telehealth company last December. She told us in amazing detail how difficult it is to recruit doctors to her platform and how much gets spent on that sole task. In addition, she talked about the weekly fluctuation in patient demand and the pain felt when scaling her physician workforce up and down. Independently, over the next week, Arthur started thinking about "Uber for doctors" and Daniel conceived "AWS for doctor time," and then we realized they were two sides of the same marketplace. While honing our idea, we found that it is most applicable to mental health. In the US, mental health has undergone a boom in demand in recent years (whether at hospitals or telehealth companies, like Modern Health, Daybreak, and Ophelia—all funded by YC). However, supply has not kept up—there just aren’t enough professionals. Mental health is also a field that is quite suited to care delivery via telehealth. So we started there. Our product solves problems on both sides of the market. On the supply side, many mental health professionals are looking for additional work to supplement their existing part- or full-time jobs at a hospital, the VA, etc. On the demand side, health care organizations are looking for a more affordable and flexible solution for their staffing problem. We find out what time is available from our network of clinicians, divide it into hour-long chunks, then sell those hours to our customers (the health care organizations) who only pay for the time that they use—that is, the hours when the clinicians are actually working with their patients. Unlike staffing companies and in-house recruiters, we turn health care companies' fixed costs into variable costs, significantly reduce hiring risk, and have no upfront fees. Compared to other telepsychiatry solutions, we are much less expensive because our network consists mostly of psychiatric nurse practitioners and social workers who, in many states, do almost everything that psychiatrists do but (for historical reasons) charge lower rates. Unlike other telehealth staffing solutions, we are obsessed with quality (in regard to both clinician performance and building our product to facilitate long-term clinician-patient relationships), ease of integration, and not having minimum usage amounts. Our product doesn’t exist in a public form. Rather, health companies white-label our network to better meet their patient demand. We currently have a network of 131 mental health professionals whom we match with our customers manually (“do things that don’t scale”). We are building software for scheduling, clinician-customer-patient matching, clinician onboarding, notifications, etc. COVID-19 has made telehealth normal for patients, clinicians, and institutions, so the opportunity here is huge. Even traditional institutions (hospitals, rural clinics, home health, assisted living, hospice, etc.) need a smarter staffing solution because hiring health care professionals is incredibly hard for them as well. At present, we are figuring out where to show traction first as we scale. So far, we’re seeing that the organizations with the shortest sales cycles tend to be smaller, more agile, more tech-friendly companies. If I could end on a personal note: although all this marketplace talk sounds cold and fungible, all three of us first encountered this problem from the patient side. My father had brain cancer last year, and getting ahold of his hospice nurses to do simple tasks like refilling his meds was a pain. The nurses wanted to help; there just weren't enough of them. For Arthur, when he was a child in rural Colorado, his brother had a nasty string of epileptic seizures brought on by inadvertent exposure to chemicals from a meth dealer down the street. It took 2 months (after over 150 seizures) for his brother to see a specialist in Denver who could treat him. For Daniel, it was when a close friend in crisis tried to schedule an appointment with her psychiatrist and found that the earliest she could see him was in 3 months. The latter experience hits closest to what we’re tackling first at Legion Health, but the fact that we all know how desperate it feels when care is needed, but not available, gives us motivation to keep going, even when running into the notorious intractability of the US health care system. We'd love to hear what you think, even if it’s constructive criticism on our approach. If you or a friend hires health care professionals (especially in mental health), we'd love to talk to you to figure out what parts of our tech product you find most valuable, so we can figure out where to build next. If you or a friend is a mental health professional, thank you for doing such important and necessary work during these difficult times. Excited to answer any questions and hear your ideas, feedback, and experiences in the comments!

New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Atmana (YC S21) app to help cut down on compulsive porn usage

July 27, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Atmana (YC S21) app to help cut down on compulsive porn usage
Launch HN: Atmana (YC S21) app to help cut down on compulsive porn usage
9 by zero_billion | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN, I'm Tejas from Atmana ( https://atmana.org/ ). We have an app and community to help people cut back on their compulsive (or just excessive) use of pornography and other digital activities like social media and gaming. Our community currently has 100k members. Compulsive porn usage is a taboo topic. Millions of people want to get away from this behavior, but it's an embarrassing problem to discuss socially. Those who are struggling tend to get anxious and lonely which increases the chances that they further indulge in compulsive porn watching. This is the classic addictive cycle. After discussing with many psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as our users, we have built features that help the user with: (1) Accountability: accountability to one's goals is quite important to succeed. With this in mind, we have a buddy system. User adds a friend who controls the content allowed on the device and gets daily reports on what kind of content was accessed. (2) Judgement-free support: we have a community of over 100,000 people who are trying to overcome their porn problems. Users can participate anonymously in our community. This reduces shame/stigma and helps users get support from peers. (3) Blocking: We have an inbuilt blocker in our app which cuts out all ways to access porn and we have built it quite robustly so that there are no easy ways for most users to bypass it. I've spent the last 3.5 years working on apps to do with habits. Me along with a colleague got started with building apps that I myself needed to become healthy, like an app to gamify going to the gym everyday and an app to wake up early. After failing to monetize any healthy habit apps, I decided to take away harmful habits, hoping this would be easier to monetize. I had personally benefited by cutting down porn in my life and it was quite difficult to quit this behavior. I hence, decided to help others who had a similar problem and launched NoPo - porn de-addiction app. After an year of building many features, I closed it down due to lack of engagement. But after speaking to over 200 users of NoPo, I realized what our app didn’t do, which was: not showing user his/her progress, not having a process to keep user accountable and not blocking porn on the device. After fixing all these issues, I launched BlockerX ( https://blockerx.net/ ), my fifth app, which users are finding valuable in overcoming their porn related problems. Blocking adult content effectively is quite challenging as users will always find ways to bypass the blocking. The difficulty is to make the blocking robust enough that the user can't bypass it, but at the same time that the blocking only happens on adult content and not others (minimising false positives). We have done a bunch of optimisations on our android and iOS apps to make it just right – we consider multiple signals before blocking to ensure the blocking is accurate most of the time. We have a freemium model. Advanced features on the app require a premium subscription (like ad free experience, unlimited blocking, syncing of blocked items list across devices). The main functionality, e.g. blocking of adult websites is free to use. Also, our marketing is currently oriented towards 18-to-30 year olds but this is just a starting point. We recognize that these problems are not limited to any age group and want to help everybody we can. We would love to hear from all of you. If you have faced problems with porn or have seen someone you know face this problem, feel free to share your experiences and feedback. Thanks!

The Riddle of Riley Keough

July 27, 2021 Add Comment
The Riddle of Riley Keough
The “Zola” actress has a knack for inhabiting working-class characters who feel real, even though her own family history is as outrageous as it gets.

from NYT > Top Stories https://ift.tt/3eWutwr

New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: InstaKin (YC S21) - Help immigrants to manage tasks in home countries

July 26, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: InstaKin (YC S21) - Help immigrants to manage tasks in home countries
Launch HN: InstaKin (YC S21) - Help immigrants to manage tasks in home countries
3 by yshirazi | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, we’re Yasir and Zain introducing ( https://ift.tt/3zAjr7D ) to you. We’re a platform to help immigrant communities manage tasks in their home countries. Zain and I are originally from Pakistan and have been living in the US and Europe for 12 years. Personally, we have regularly sent funds back home to pay for tasks for ourselves and family members. Whether it is for paying home bills or a home renovation, we have done it all – just like millions of other migrants in the US – and experienced all the problems: funds getting misused, vendors pushing for advance payments and then disappearing…you name it and we have seen it. This got us thinking about a platform where we could connect migrants with vendors back home — something to reduce misuse of funds and ensure that vendors perform tasks as agreed. Every year, 250M migrants send $550BN back home to pay for tasks for themselves and their families. Migrants far away from their native countries are dependent on family friends or unknown vendors to make decisions on their behalf. What many folks don’t know is that it is common for these funds to get misused, or for migrants to send funds to a vendor back home and receive poor service or get cheated. We talked to hundreds of migrants from India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Uganda, and more, and found that lack of access to reliable vendors and misuse of remittance funds back home are common ‘migrant’ problems. Just last week, we came across a migrant from Senegal living in the USA who mentioned the same challenge. Initially we operated on WhatsApp to receive orders from migrant customers and also get their feedback. Thousands of migrants contacted us within the first few months of launching our startup. That validation convinced us to build a full product—a solution for migrants built by migrants. We have focused on two key features: (1) provide migrants with access to services back home, and (2) pay vendors based on milestones to eliminate payments fraud. Historically, companies focusing on the migrant community have pushed for making it easier to send remittances back home easily though even today it can cost between 2-8% just to remit funds. Our key insight, though, is that money transfer is not enough. It is only transactional. What’s needed is to ensure last-mile fulfillment. With InstaKin, migrants don’t send funds back home ‘blindly’ hoping that things will get done — you pay for fulfillment directly. Migrants use us to do things like: hiring a ‘runner’ to manage last-mile tasks for their aging parents back home; connecting to a vendor for verification and attestation of educational documents; ordering personalized gifts and having them delivered; paying contractors for home renovation project. We started off with helping Pakistani migrants but our goal is to become the platform of choice for migrants globally. The best part is that while we were reaching out to Pakistani migrants, we started getting requests from other communities (Indian and Bangladeshi migrants). We’ve been surprised at how strong immigrant networks are globally. When we launched, we thought we would receive orders from migrants in a specific city or location only. Turns out that is not true. We have had referrals from all over the world (example: a migrant customer living in London referred us to a migrant living in Chicago who referred us to a migrant living in Singapore). We hope what we are building will help migrants not just from one country but from everywhere in days to come. We would love to hear back from the community. If you are a migrant yourself, please share your experiences with us and feel free to reach out.

The Pandemic Rush on Prison Weddings

July 25, 2021 Add Comment
The Pandemic Rush on Prison Weddings
With Covid-19 restrictions lifted, many inmates who had to postpone their weddings last year are hoping to finally tie the knot. However, the increased demand could mean a longer wait.

from NYT > Top Stories https://ift.tt/2W9zBGZ

Love at First Photo Sighting

July 25, 2021 Add Comment
Love at First Photo Sighting
Bryan Scotland became enamored with Alexandra Giniger after first spotting her in his sister’s photo. But it took six years for his sister to finally give him Ms. Giniger’s phone number.

from NYT > Top Stories https://ift.tt/3zqop71

New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Hotglue (YC S21) – Easy user-facing SaaS integrations

July 22, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Hotglue (YC S21) – Easy user-facing SaaS integrations
Launch HN: Hotglue (YC S21) – Easy user-facing SaaS integrations
10 by hsyyid | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, we’re Hassan and David from hotglue [ https://hotglue.xyz ]. We make it easier for developers to build user-facing integrations. In this context, an integration is a way for users to sync their data from their business apps, like Salesforce and Quickbooks, to another. For example, if I wanted to use an app like Mailchimp, I’d use their Salesforce integration to sync all my contacts over automatically. We came across this problem while working for a startup that was struggling to scale the Salesforce integration they built in house. We needed a tool that would sync the customer data from Salesforce directly to our backend, but there were very few solutions available. After talking to other engineers who had dealt with user-facing integrations, we found many teams were frustrated by building their own integration solutions from scratch (not to mention maintaining them). This inspired us to build a tool that helps engineering teams add integrations to their products without taking on more tech debt. Often people are surprised this isn’t solved yet – what about all the data movement tools like Meltano, Airbyte, Fivetran, Stitch, etc.? The difference here is that the integrations we're talking about are not back-end things like pulling your own Google Analytics data to BigQuery so that in-house analysts can work on it. Rather, it’s things like importing a user’s Quickbooks or Salesforce data into your product so that your product becomes more useful to them . That’s what we mean by “user-facing”. There are a few reasons why building such integrations in-house is tricky. SaaS platforms and their APIs vary widely—while products like Stripe offer stellar APIs and resources, other platforms run on legacy software requiring more involved integrations (such as closed-access APIs or legacy SOAP/XML systems). Second, reliability while syncing at scale can be a challenging task when onboarding users with higher volumes of data – no engineer wants to spend their weekend debugging why their infra crapped out. Lastly, building auth flows and handling API tokens can be cumbersome: catching permission errors and expired tokens can take hours of debugging when dealing with the more "enterprisey" business products. In short: it’s a pain to have to build one of these for several different apps, and not the sort of thing anybody wants to specialize in. Projects to build these usually end up on the back burner, frustrating customers who expect your product to integrate cleanly with all their other business apps. We make it easier to build user-facing integrations by providing a scalable framework that minimizes maintenance. Our integrations are built on open source Singer.io connectors that eliminate the need for you to directly interface with APIs (saving you from dealing with breaking API changes, rate limits, authorization, and more). We provide a catalog of all the data each source provides and allow you to pick the data you need without having to grok long API docs. This also means you aren't locked in to our library of connectors – you can write your own connectors in Python. From there, we orchestrate syncing data for you. Just set a schedule, or kick off a job via our API – we provide the infrastructure, so you don't need to worry about building a data pipeline from scratch. Although we are minimizing the dev work to build an integration, we are *not* a no-code solution. In our experience, no-code tools can be powerful for simple use cases, but are often too restrictive to handle custom logic. hotglue features a Python transformation layer to enable you to manipulate the raw data from third-party apps before it gets to your backend, cherry-pick the data you need, and implement more complex logic. For example, you can join multiple tables, filter out data based on a complex expression, make API requests, write custom logic for specific users, and more. We are super excited to share hotglue with the HN community. We’ve created a quick demo for you to see what a hotglue-powered integration looks like: Video: https://youtu.be/ZzSsL66fSUE Interactive demo: https://bit.ly/3rsLR0G We’d really appreciate hearing your thoughts, experiences, ideas and feedback. Your feedback is vital, as it is our dream to make hotglue the standard for building user-facing integrations. Also, in case you’re thinking of adding new integrations to your product, we would love to help – sign up for a free trial at https://hotglue.xyz (we have a startup plan) Thanks for reading this far, and happy Thursday! :)

New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Bedrock AI (YC S21) – Using ML to identify red flags in SEC filings

July 20, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Bedrock AI (YC S21) – Using ML to identify red flags in SEC filings
Launch HN: Bedrock AI (YC S21) – Using ML to identify red flags in SEC filings
11 by kbennatti | 4 comments on Hacker News.
We’re Kris, Suhas, and Heather (YCS21) and we’re building Bedrock AI ( https://bedrock-ai.com/ ). We use machine learning to extract hard-to-find information and assess risk in public company reports (SEC filings). Our platform is used by investors to improve portfolio returns and mitigate downside risks. Most public company data is unstructured and textual. Because relevant information is hard to find, a lot of corporate data is radically underused, to the detriment of investors. For example, our research shows it can take 12-18 months for corporate malfeasance to be incorporated into stock price after clear warning signs appear in financial text. Hard-to-find information that we extract includes accounting and governance choices, product defects, regulatory issues, customer/market reliance and much more. One example is Sino-Forest, Canada's Enron. Sino-Forest was a darling of Canadian investors until an infamous exposé, by short-seller Muddy Waters, in 2011. It turned out it was a forestry company that didn’t actually own any forests. Months before the exposé and crash, there were obvious red flags in the company’s disclosures including buying and selling from companies controlled by their directors and problems with the review of their bookkeeping! Our algorithms picked up these red flags and more, and assessed Sino-Forest as high risk when we ran our models on the company’s historical filings. I’m a CPA and a developer (odd combo). The tech community has largely ignored public company financial disclosure. A few years ago, I published a basic piece using computational methods to analyze cannabis disclosure. The local regulatory agency contacted me to give them a workshop on text analytics. It was then that it hit home how little was being done in the field. Information drives financial markets. The difficulty of assessing risks hidden in long public filings makes earning manipulation, and even fraud, both possible and profitable. Earnings manipulation involves using the flexibility in accounting standards to make financial statements look better than reality. This is easier than most people realize because accounting involves MANY choices and estimates. There is money to be made by accessing and trading on underused predictive signals. Making money by stopping fraud is a win-win situation. There are two main technical challenges thwarting progress in the field: (1) NLP models work best on short (500 character) text, but financial filings are hundreds of pages long, and (2) important and unimportant language sounds very similar in financial text. For instance, this sentence sounds like it could be indicative of terrible things going on behind the scenes but is in fact, just boilerplate disclosure: “We face risks and uncertainties related to litigation, regulatory actions and government investigations and inquiries.” You can see how ML models easily get confused. There’s a big gap in both academia and industry. A lot of effort is being put into forcing results from non-existent linguistic signals. Models that claim to predict specific outcomes often don’t hold up to scrutiny in practice. In order to overcome the technical challenges we used supervised and semi-supervised learning with high quality labels, we focused on tangible facts represented in textual context, and we adapted language models using domain expertise. As far as we know, no other solution is able to identify problematic/risky disclosure algorithmically. Using search terms to do something similar results in overwhelming noise. The disclosure selected by our algorithms is highly predictive of downside risk - validated in deployment and also in backtesting. We launched our core product in April 2021 (see https://bedrock-ai.com ) and it’s used by hedge funds and institutional investors. We’re also doing a pilot to support Canadian securities regulators ( https://bit.ly/3wOwOj6 ). We’ve also just launched a minimalist free site, Ledge ( https://ift.tt/3wRIykE ), to help retail investors stay up to date on material events at companies they follow. Companies are required to disclose material events between their quarterly reports, but these disclosures rarely make the news. Our core/premium product is currently only available to institutions, in part because retail investors generally don’t prioritize risk management and therefore aren’t committed customers. We plan to expand the free site and better support individual investors as we grow. We would love to hear from you. Have you tried to read annual reports and gotten lost in the weeds? What has your experience been in making NLP models work on financial text?

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Webdev with poor/deteriorating vision. What can I pivot into?

July 20, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Webdev with poor/deteriorating vision. What can I pivot into?
Ask HN: Webdev with poor/deteriorating vision. What can I pivot into?
22 by mouzogu | 9 comments on Hacker News.
Long story short, I have a corneal disease that cannot be fixed with glasses or surgery. I'm able to get about 20/35 to 20/40 vision depending on whether it's a good day or not with glasses. I can get 20/20 with rigid lenses but it's not very comfortable after 3-4 hours and I'm not able to look at anything dark or black in colour so it's not perfect (thanks all you apps without a light mode :( I've been working as a web dev for 15 years since graduation but I know my days I numbered in this field as it requires near perfect vision due to the UI nature and dealing with things on a pixel level. What kind of field could I leverage my experience and pivot into that does not require perfect vision? Thanks, for any advice.

New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes+actions+feedback+okrs, one app

July 19, 2021 Add Comment
New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes+actions+feedback+okrs, one app
Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes+actions+feedback+okrs, one app
30 by brennanm | 5 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, we’re Brennan and Graham founders of Hypercontext ( https://ift.tt/3rkdQPX ). We make an app that helps managers run their 1:1 & team meetings with action items, feedback, and OKRs(Goals) in one workflow. Most managers get promoted into their role with no training. “Oh you’re a good engineer? Great! Now manage a team of engineers and stop coding”. They’re largely leading with trial-and-error tactics. The good ones are reflective and learn, and many eventually read books on best practices and frameworks that can help them. Our insight is that it’s possible to build some of these good frameworks into a workflow so every manager can get them by default, similarly to how a good software framework lets you not have to hand-roll all the boilerplate code, so you can focus on the business logic. We think it’s time managers stop winging it (worst case) or hand rolling their management frameworks (best case) in Google Docs and Moleskin notebooks and start importing frameworks that solve the basics for them. Previously, Graham and I have been co-founders for 10 years together. Our last startup grew to ~40 employees. When we became full-time managers we were shocked at the lack of tooling that existed for general management work. This was where the idea for Hypercontext came from. We started building tools and systems to help us fill the gaps(mainly in google sheets/docs/forms). We shared them with friends and they were loved. Personally, I stumbled through management in my first startup. I didn’t talk about goals. I didn’t share candid feedback. I wasn’t clear or consistent. I thought I knew how to do other people’s jobs. I learned the hard way every single time. And so did all of my peers. The only way to save a fellow manager from that pain was by sharing tips 1:1 or recommending books. We thought there must be a better way. Hypercontext starts before the meeting: connecting to your existing meetings and helping you and your team build a collaborative agenda and show up prepared. During the meeting, often overlayed on a google meet: we help you take notes and action items, and email them out automatically for you. After: ML runs over your notes and generates insights about management blindspots. We then suggest questions/conversation starters for your next meeting to help to resolve them. Finally, we’ve built a powerful goaling tool, complete with the largest library of goal/okr examples on the internet (free here, broken up by role: https://ift.tt/36Nmrl0 ), that helps you collaborate, document, and discuss long term goals every meeting before the urgent agenda topic. Founders, CEOs, execs use our app all week to manage their job -- mainly through their 1:1 and team meetings. We’re specifically helpful for folks who are doing a lot of context switching throughout their day and need to offload the “remember to talk to people about this” part of their brain.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)