Why the lady sitting next to me should pay $2,000 for a computer class

April 22 28 Comments latest by FollowSteph.com

I’m sitting at my neighborhood coffee shop listening to two women talk about their careers. Yes, I eavesdrop.

One of them is complaining about her job, but says that she can’t get another one because she’s uncomfortable with her computer skills. Which led me to this post.

If you take a $2,000 computer class and it lets you get a job with a $10,000 salary bump, you should do it. No question.

If you buy one book per week, for $20 each, that’s $1,000 per year. If you get one good idea per week, my friend Paul told me, it’s worth it. If you apply that idea, I can’t even guess how much it would be worth.

If you buy a new car for $8,000 more than a used car, it can sometimes be worth it.

Put the numbers in context and look at value, not just cost. A $2,000 conference sure sounds like a lot. But if you make $80,000 off it, it sure looks like an investment. (Which is exactly what another friend, Erica, just did.)

Of course, the excuses will come. I don’t have that kind of money. (Answer: Save up.) How do I know if the class will get me that better job? I could probably take the same class for $100 somewhere else. All this stuff is free online, anyway.

You don’t know. That’s part of deciding what’s valuable and what’s simply a cost. But remember, buying something is not just about a number. If the value exceeds the cost, do it.

(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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28 Comments latest by FollowSteph.com

2 startup jobs (engineer and product manager) + $2,000 in referral bonuses

April 1 21 Comments latest by Doug

My startup is hiring! If you’re interested in working at a Silicon Valley startup, read on…

Last week, I wrote about life at the startup I co-founded, PBwiki. We’re based in San Mateo, CA (near San Francisco) and offer free lunches, free espresso, 32895123 energy drinks, stock options, and more. See more about life at PBwiki.

We’re hiring two positions, with some special perks:

• $1,000 referral bonus. If you refer us someone that we eventually hire, we’ll pay you $1,000 in cash. Hell, if you’re in the Bay Area, I’ll even deliver it myself. Refer yourself if you want! Or send this post to your friends. (The person has to stick around PBwiki for at least six months.)
• $1,000 for a K-12 classroom. If we hire someone from the iwillteachyoutoberich post, we’ll also donate $1,000 to a US-based classroom for supplies or a special project. And we’ll include your name in the press release/announcement.
• We’ll pay for your moving expenses. We’ll pay relocation expenses for extraordinary candidates (we once shipped 3 cats from the East coast). So if you’re not in the Bay Area, don’t worry.

I wrote earlier about how well things are going at PBwiki.

So, if you’re interested in working at a startup, read on…

Product Manager

Have you ever used a breathtakingly simple and clean web application, and immediately started wondering how it was built? Did you start calculating the tradeoffs in the product and guess at the future product roadmap?

If so, we’d like to talk to you.

The product manager is a senior part of the PBwiki team who works to define what the product should include. In other words, the product manager collects inputs from the executive team, marketing, sales, support, and engineering to define the scope of PBwiki. S/he will also be customer-focused, communicating and collecting user requests and understanding key customer pain points. And the product manager will understand the competitive landscape to build a better product.

The ideal Product Manager will be deeply familiar with SaaS environments and their unique properties, have a technical background, have experience in startup-style environments, understanding how to sketch out storyboards of feature implementations in conjunction with Engineering, and ideally even be able to bang out crude prototypes. Preference will be given to candidates with 3+ years experience in Product Management.

Send us your resume today. Include links to webapps you’ve helped build, including any screenshots and process documents you used.

Web Engineer

What makes us tick? We love building useful tools for the web. We develop new features on Monday, and deploy it to hundreds of thousands of real users by Friday.

What makes you tick? We want you to be energetic, full of ideas, know what a wiki is, and enjoy working with a small team of brilliant people. You should thoroughly understand web technologies. You know how to prototype things and quickly make them real with XHTML, Javascript/AJAX, CSS, and/or PHP.

Send us your resume today! Please use your cover letter to either provide a URL to a web app you’ve built ground-up, or describe a project of yours that would impress us.

To apply to this position, send your resume to jobs404@pbwiki.com. Be sure to replace the “404″ with the correct HTTP status code for “OK”.

If you have any questions about these positions, leave a comment here and I’ll reply ASAP.

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21 Comments latest by Doug

Life at a Silicon Valley Startup: PBwiki

March 27 41 Comments latest by Joshua M. Andrews

Warning: Jobs at my startup are available below.

I write a lot about entrepreneurship on iwillteachyoutoberich, but I haven’t written much about my day job, a startup in Silicon Valley called PBwiki that I co-founded. Since we’re hiring, it’s a perfect time to write about life at a startup as a thinly veiled excuse to get you to apply to work here. Done and done!

Last time I wrote a job post for PBwiki here, we ended up hiring Paul Singh, who moved to the Bay Area from Virginia with his wife. He’s now our Director of Support and manages a staff of 6. So I’m hoping that there may be a couple of you who’ll be interested in PBwiki and send me your resumes.

What does PBwiki do?
Wikis are collaborative websites that lots of people can edit (Wikipedia is an example of a wiki-as-encyclopedia). You might use a wiki to plan a project or create an online classroom. Instead of sending 50 emails to coordinate something, you put files and pages in one secure place and let your team collaborate online. Try it out: You can create a PBwiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich (yeah, I said it) at PBwiki.com. As for me, I’m the VP of Community Marketing, meaning I manage the messaging and parts of the product that our millions of users see.

Here’s a great demo of how wikis work:

And wikis are getting more popular: In 2007, “wiki” was searched for more than “blog.”

We started PBwiki in 2005 and have become the world’s largest host of business and educational wikis. The United Nations has used PBwiki. So do over 1/3 of the Fortune 500. Collaboration is a huge market where companies and regular people are willing to invest to solve their communication challenges. And we’ve tried to build a drop-dead simple approach to using it. Just like iwillteachyoutoberich, the most important part is getting started.

How are we doing?
Here are some key PBwiki stats:

• 400% annualized revenue growth since inception
• Over 350% growth in the # of wikis hosted since last year
• We’ve doubled our staff (engineering, marketing, sales, admin) in the last 3 months. Between our Bay Area headquarters and New Hampshire sales office, we now have a small team of 18.
• Raised just over $2 million in venture capital

And we’re looking for a few key people to join us. But first, what’s it like working here?

Working at PBwiki

Kristine and I are doing a hot-sauce eating competition:

Things are getting hot — Paul has the defibrillator handy:

Paintballing on our Colorado retreat. I am the one with a lot of paint on me:

A real-time display of millions of PBwiki users and how they’re using our service:

Dress is casual, we have free lunches/espresso, gym memberships, and stock options for each employee.

But more importantly, working here gives you the chance to make changes that millions of users will see that very same week. Whenever people ask me how they can get started doing something entrepreneurial, I always suggest working at a startup. You learn the ropes and get mentored by experienced people, and you get the freedom to experiment and try to make huge changes very quickly.

How we think about hiring
Straight from our official hiring page…

We value intelligence over workplace experience, and clever independent projects over GPA. We’d much rather talk to someone who started a non-profit in college or led a group of a Presidential campaign interns than someone who got a 1600 on their SATs and a 4.0 in college but never ventured off the beaten path. Tell us that crazy thing that kept you up all weekend.

Hmm…sounds suspiciously like an article I wrote a while back: Your college is not a technical school.

What can you learn here?
Here are some of the things I’ve learned…

• How to raise venture capital and what happens in a board meeting
• How to set up systems so that, if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, the company will still go on
• What key-man insurance is
• How to work with marketing and engineering teams to make quick changes to a product and not get bogged down by process
• How to nurture a community of millions of users and grow a web service without spending any money on advertising

If you have any questions about working at a startup, post a comment here and I’ll respond in the comments. And I’ll post a list of our jobs soon!

[Update: Here’s a list of positions we’re hiring for.]

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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41 Comments latest by Joshua M. Andrews

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