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)

 Loading ...

41 Comments latest by Joshua M. Andrews

Mission accomplished

February 21 8 Comments latest by K

Probably one of my favorite emails ever.

Ramit,

Hello. My name is Kayla and my brother actually sent me your recent entry about college financial aid at Stanford University. I was definitely interested because I know that college is going to be very difficult for me to pay for and, quite honestly, I’m really not looking forward to years of student debt. Anyway, I actually just wanted to thank you. I really never thought about how much scholarship money is probably never even given away. It’s really encouraging to hear that, with just a little effort, I could potentially come out of college with little to no debt at all.

Now, I’m not saying my grades are necessarily perfect, but I have goals. I’m actually planning on going to the University of Iowa as a pre-business major and then going to the Tippie College of Business so your advice, in all senses, is going to really help me out. So, like I said, I’d really like to thank you for opening up my eyes about everything.

Sincerely,
Kayla

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...

8 Comments latest by K

College at Stanford is now effectively free. So what’s your excuse?

February 20 52 Comments latest by Ron

Last night at 1:30am, I received an email from Stanford, which read:

Tomorrow, Stanford will announce significant changes in its financial aid program that will make undergraduate education more affordable for families receiving aid. We want you, our alumni, to be among the first to hear this news.

[…]

Stanford University today announced the largest increase in its history for its financial aid program for undergraduates.

Under the new program, parents with incomes of less than $100,000 will no longer pay tuition. Parents with incomes of less than $60,000 will not be expected to pay tuition or contribute to the costs of room, board and other expenses.

The program also eliminates the need for student loans.

What a breathtaking move. By following in other top universities’ recent moves, Stanford and all of America’s top universities have effectively made themselves free for families without high incomes.

But what’s even more interesting is the fact that it removes yet another barrier for high-school students who wouldn’t apply to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, etc. When I was in high school, the single-best deterrent to applying to a top university was not my friends’ actual financial situations. It was not their GPA or list of activities or their access to a computer.

It was just their conviction that they couldn’t get in.

Oh yes, they had dozens of reasons why they wouldn’t bother applying. “I couldn’t get in if I tried,” many of them said. Or the limited-resources fallacy: “They’d never take me because the other students applying are way more qualified than I am.” (It’s true that Stanford rejects enough valedictorians to fill its freshman class each year.) Perhaps most sadly, “I couldn’t afford it even if I got in,” they say, despite Stanford’s own website explaining that , “Financial aid was provided to about 77 percent of undergraduate students…in 2005-2006.” (I’m so fanatical about scholarships that I wrote up a guide to get over $100,000 in scholarships.)

And so the students who don’t apply select themselves out and, by definition, never have a chance.

Guess what?

This is about more than college admission.

The world is making it easier for people to excel. Blogs make it possible to get larger readerships than most national columnists. You can reach anyone with a single email. And the best education at the best universities is now nearly free.

I guess the question is, when all the barriers you’ve been holding on begin dwindling away, what do you do? Grasp around for another excuse? Or change and do something?

PS–I know many of you have younger brothers and sisters in high school. Please do me a favor and send them this post. The links in this post alone have enough information to get them thousands of dollars in scholarships.

[Update, 2/21: See an amazing response to this post here]

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...

52 Comments latest by Ron

Previous Page

Next Page