One of the largest, most irritating conundrums of the universe as we’ve built it (so far)
Hi friends,
This week, Lea was on a mad search for a pair of suit-pairable white sneakers, which would be a real savior on the ankle blister front, and Dana biked 8 miles to purchase a summer pass for her nearest Jewish Community Center (they have a delightful pool).
We bring you 1 grocery store revolution-to-be, 2 attempts at productive meritocratic marketplaces, and 1 more way to monetize data.
A lot of the food in our grocery stores today is unhealthy, but when you ask for more quinoa-related snacks and celery and etc, you’re not just asking for better ingredients brought to store. You’re asking for the entire food system to work contrary to inertia. Shelfmint thinks their software can help us all eat better.
In the second half of the twentieth century, a few historical strands — factory mobilization during WWII, induced consumption in the 1950s, and the nature and stage of scientific innovation — crashed together to produce the food system we know today. Conglomeration abounded across industry: a food system once comprised of thousands of independent chicken farmers became 97% managed by big producers who figured out things like how to apply vertical integration to broiler farming. As those big producers took over, they began to shape the transport and logistics processes that take food products to grocery stores (a great read on how Walmart did it). The point is, our current system is the result of years of historical momentum; providing average Americans access to healthy foods in 2019 means flipping the cards on the Walmart-Tyson synergy that gets us a whole hen for $4. For better and for worse. It means getting small producers heard by big grocers; it means making small producer products profitable for big grocers; it means re-thinking logistics and warehousing processes to do so; it means the re-enablement of people with new ideas about food production. Shelfmint is trying to do literally all of that with a b2b logistics-as-a-service software. It’s really cool.
They’re hiring a brand success intern and a general manager of brand success. And if you want more specific information about how they solve problems, their case studies page is well-aligned and very informative.
Native does data collection on demand.
The best way to understand how powerful this can be is through an example. Let’s say that you are Tropicana, the beverage magnate: it is 2008, and you’re about to rebrand your orange juice (this is a real thing that ended up being a big failure). As a logical decision maker, you want to test some of your theories on public opinion before you decide to push new packaging. Instead of forming a costly in-house focus group prone to selection bias, you just log onto the Native platform and make a request. Native then mobilizes data collectors in your requested area who execute whatever survey or question set you’ve compiled for them in the exact fashion that you prefer. But this is just Native’s simplest use case. Say you make the right choice on packaging, end up with a ton of money, and now you want to expand your orange farms: you need some data about a chunk of Chilean farmland. You want to compare it to a lot in Belize. You also need some on-the-ground knowledge about the stability of the local economies. Native can get all of this information for you, nearly anywhere in the world.
They’re currently hiring entry-level and experienced-hire positions in NYC, London, Singapore, and Bogota. Being a data collector is also an interesting opportunity, although you’ll need an Android phone.
Elizabeth Lorns was knee deep in her post-doc studying breast cancer treatments when she hit a wall. No one at her institution could conduct the highly technical gene analysis that she needed, and she had no way of locating other experts that were available and qualified to help.
Lorns then went out and built the platform she could have used; today, Science Exchange is the largest contract research organization (CRO) in the world. The problem space in which they operate is not all that dissimilar from something like Uber or AirBnb: a set of desired resources are present, but they are disjunctive or hard to access. We use the internet or our phones to connect supply and demand in new ways. For Science Exchange, this means allowing organizations, institutions, scientists, and labs to talk and collaborate with one another seamlessly, oftentimes across geographic and linguistic barriers. The platform also streamlines much of the grunt work that can be prohibitive to this sort of teamwork: payment and contract systems that can take months to formalize are already in place and fully secure.
They’re hiring a few software engineers for offices in Palo Alto, California and Belgrade, Serbia.
To start with a small #SoliloquyFromTheEditors: one of the largest, most irritating conundrums of the universe as we’ve built it (so far) is that anybody can have a sensational idea, but only about ~1% of the population has the ability or the confidence to execute on their idea. Pioneer created something simple and obvious to put a dent in this problem. We’re excited about this one.
Pioneer is a website. You can sign in with Facebook. You enter your idea. For three weeks, you share your progress on it. People vote if they like it. After the third week, you’re eligible to win. Win once and you get $1k for your idea. Win three times and you “become a pioneer,” which means you get more money, helpful business gifts (like a $100,000 Google Cloud gift card), a flight out to silicon valley, and killer mentorship. The company is funded by Stripe and Marc Andreessen (very legit beefy venture capital firms), and people participate from all over the globe. The mastery of Pioneer is that it is — at its core — a real, competitive meritocracy, but one that still feels more fairy tale than cold-blooded. Ideas come to grow; the dream-come-true hope-glow is palpable. Some of the latest winners include a 17-year-old Israeli who made palm-sized satellites to democratize space and a South African 20-something who’s building an app that converts natural language to code.
They’re hiring for business operations, software engineering, and game design. You can also browse their live idea leaderboard or submit your own project.
See you next week.
Love,
Your Caring Parents
(Dana & Lea)
4cooljobs@gmail.com