Author Archives: Kalvin

Finding Our Happiness Manager: Fostering Community Inside Ridejoy

Posted on by Kalvin
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At this point, every startup knows how important it is to build a community. Ridejoy included: Margot is all over cultivating ours.

But cultivating intention and purpose among our thousands of users isn’t our only community-building effort; we’re also building a strong community within Ridejoy, the company. We think of our growing team as a family (minus the crazy uncle).

And now we’re affirming our intention to build a great company culture by bringing onboard Camille. She emailed us out of the blue a couple months ago at 10PM, explaining her ideas on community and Ridejoy. Margot was so impressed by it she called Camille that night while driving home, just to chat. (We don’t usually work that late, but it happens.)

Check out the awesome email she sent us below. Curious about what’s next? Read the next entry by Camille on her role, and Ridejoy family dinners!

Continue reading →

Psst: We're looking for our first engineering hire!
Refer a hire and you both get Ridejoy's Ultimate Collaborative Consumption Package!
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Ridejoy Fuels Up With Seed Funding From High-Octane Investors

Posted on by Kalvin
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Our goal at Ridejoy is to make it easy and fun to share rides with friendly people. If you’re going on a trip, you can list extra seat space in your car, and if you need to get somewhere, you can find a ride. It’s like carpooling, but fun. And it works.

The three of us started with Burning Man, launched on the West Coast and brought on an amazing community manager to help out. But we’re just getting started.

We’re proud to announce today that we’ve raised seed funding from investors including Freestyle Capital, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Start Fund, Y Combinator, Ben Ling, Owen Van Natta, Joshua Schacter, Seth Goldstein, Reinmkr Capital, Jared Kopf, and Jade Wang. You can read more at Techcrunch, WSJ, AllThingsD, and the SF Chronicle (press release).

We’re happy to have such a great group of people backing us. We’ll let our lead investor’s website speak for itself:

Josh Felser and Dave Samuel are serially successful entrepreneurs with a passion for Internet startups.

…

When they’re not hustling for Freestyle, Josh and Dave revel in skiing, snowboarding, hiking, wakeboarding, playing poker, traveling to all corners of the world, and of course, Burning Man.

Here’s Josh, Dave, and a friend sharing a ride in a mutant art car on the playa:

We’ll use the funding to accelerate improving our product. And we’re hiring a lead designer and engineer. It’ll be a long but joyful journey. Come join us for the ride!

Psst: We're looking for our first engineering hire!
Refer a hire and you both get Ridejoy's Ultimate Collaborative Consumption Package!
$1000 credit for Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Grubwithus, Getaround, RelayRides, Skillshare, or more.

Startup Hiring, The Ridejoy Way

Posted on by Kalvin
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Since we’re hiring a UX/visual designer and an engineer, I thought we’d explain how we think about hiring at Ridejoy.

Every employer says people are their most important asset. For four-person internet startups like Ridejoy, people are our only asset, and everyone knows it.1

But it’s hard enough to figure out how to build a viable business without having to worry about hiring. And if you’re lucky enough to be able to hire people, you’re probably desperate to get someone onboard immediately. Who has time to figure out hiring?

(It’s not like a marriage. Or is it? After all, you’ll spend 2-10x as much time together as you will with your significant other. Though 10x would be sad.)

We all know to “hire slow and fire fast”, but for most startups, it feels more in line with the usual fail fast mentality to “hire fast… fire faster”. It’s only a small exaggeration. One of our favorite advisors had to fire her first several hires when she started out as CEO.

We’re taking a little extra time and effort before getting hitched; we just care too much.2 We haven’t used matchmakers yet, either.3

Here’s some of what we’ve come up with to attract the people we want to work with at Ridejoy:

  • Culture: It’s collaborative, open, and just a bit sentimental. As a company built on the sharing economy, we think (almost) everything’s better together. We think you can tell a lot about us from our jobs page as well.4
  • Compensation: Fortunately, we’re able to offer competitive market salaries and great health coverage. As for equity, because we’d all worked at other startups previously and had many friends at startups, we knew what percentage equity was usually offered to early employees; we wanted to be more generous.5
  • Perks: We went for the kitchen sink, with $1,000 “Ultimate Collaborative Consumption Package“, a $3K equipment budget, all-you-can-eat food at work, and a $500/mo housing subsidy for living near our San Francisco office.6

The last step of our interview process involves working together for a couple days (paid) to give both sides a chance to figure out whether it’s a good fit.

At most places, new hires commit to spending potentially thousands of hours at their new company after only a few hours, mostly spent interviewing. It’s crazy. We believe in living together before the wedding. At least for a weekend.

Anyway, we like to think this care and attention resulted in our new community manager Margot choosing us (out of everyone on the entire Internet!) to send her way intense proposal to. Let us know if you can help us with another happily-ever-after, or two.

Oh, and feel free to take an extra slice of wedding cake on your way home.

  1. People, and our Apple hardware. And for Y Combinator startups, our crazy amounts of Amazon and Heroku credit. But all those free dynos don’t spin up themselves… ↩
  2. It’s our greatest weakness, along with working too hard and kicking too much ass. Oh wait, that’s Jason. ↩
  3. We talked to a few recruiters. A couple we liked. Another one told us a “SPECTACULAR” candidate’s current base salary was well over $100K, then blithely changed it to a much lower number a few emails later when we told him what we were offering. Oops. Anyway, since we’re only hiring for two, crucial positions, we’ve been screening and sourcing applicants ourselves thus far. ↩
  4. We’re even sentimentally efficient instead of brutally efficient. We recently got the following response to a template: ”Thanks for the thoughtful reply. The worst part of the job application experience is the impersonal rejections. You have the honor of giving me the best rejection letter I’ve ever gotten.” Flattering, but. ↩
  5. We also tell everyone the truth when making an offer: getting options in an early-stage startup is like playing the lottery. Skill and effort buys you more tickets, but there’s a lot of luck–something we don’t gloss over. ↩
  6. Apparently a person with an hour-long commute has to earn 40% more to be as happy as someone who walks to the office. See here and here. ↩
Psst: We're looking for our first engineering hire!
Refer a hire and you both get Ridejoy's Ultimate Collaborative Consumption Package!
$1000 credit for Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Grubwithus, Getaround, RelayRides, Skillshare, or more.

Best Resume Ever: How to Woo a Startup

Posted on by Kalvin
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This story, like all incredibly successful hiring stories, includes bad puns, elaborate presentation-proposals and one of the cutest kittens you’ll ever see. No, seriously, you’ve never seen a résumé like this one.

The backstory: After posting our Community Manager position last October, we received a ton of applicants, including the one and only Margot.

Like everyone else, she sent us her résumé and a cover letter with five ideas about developing the Ridejoy community. But then she went the extra mile and wooed us with the pitch above. This was our reaction:

We replied that same night and asked how she was going to top that in person. She mentioned something about a critically acclaimed one-woman pyrotechnics show.

After an interview, followed by a solid weekend of working together, we discovered Margot was the real deal. We made her an offer, so of course, we had to reciprocate with our own explanation of why she should join Ridejoy:

A bit over the top? Maybe a tad. But we get across how much we care. You can read more about how we think about hiring and culture at Ridejoy, or follow Margot on Twitter.

P.S. No, we don’t spend most of our time at Ridejoy making elaborate presentation-proposals. But if this made you feel like you’d want to work here (and only slightly disgusted), talk to us.

Psst: We're looking for our first engineering hire!
Refer a hire and you both get Ridejoy's Ultimate Collaborative Consumption Package!
$1000 credit for Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Grubwithus, Getaround, RelayRides, Skillshare, or more.