Shoes with a purpose, biotech without a scandal, running a restaurant, & the robot apocalypse
1. Allbirds
Allbirds are the merino wool shoes that have found their way into the sneaker-consciousness of 20-somethings despite being mainly neutral colored and unbranded. You’ve seen them! As a company, their mission is simple — they want to make a shoe that’s comfortable, well-designed, and cleanly-made — but there is appeal to this sort of focus. It’s the kind of place where you could fight for small, meaningful, industry-leading changes. In 2019, for example, they decided to go fully carbon-neutral, and they have a history of committing to design modifications with sustainability impact (water-bottle shoelaces, recycled packaging, etc).
They are hiring interns and full-time associates in more positions than we can list here. Locations include San Francisco and the UK.
2. Careof
CareOf helps people work towards basic but notoriously-beyond-grasp health goals — diet, energy, sleep — through a personalized vitamin/supplement subscription service. It’s self care with a stellar UI/UX. Unlike many consumer biopharma startups, they’re honest about where the science stands, even when it stands against them. Overall, it’s a cool idea with big room for expansion — they’re trying to make it easier for people to take care of themselves, but so far, they’ve only broached the realm of physical health, and only through vitamins/supplements.
They are hiring full-time in operations, product, design, and many other fields— all for their office in the big apple.
3. Bento Box
Think, for a second, about what it would be like to open a restaurant. After you create a menu and find out how to make it, the main work is a fury of operational problems. You need be able to obtain and process orders with some complexity (ex., food substitutions/allergies). You’ll also have orders of different types that need to be treated differently: think carry-out, catering, events. You’ll need to manage your own staff — fire and hire them. And of course, you’ll want to develop a fabulous online presence — a Michelin-quality website, a Yelp page, a Tripadvisor profile, and so forth. The idea behind Bento Box is that this is a lot of stuff to do: their software lets a restaurant do literally all of it in one place. Essentially, they’re thinking deeply about one small problem (restaurant operations) and using technology to tackle it.
They are hiring account managers, events managers, sales associates, and more for their NYC office.
4. Ought
If you’re a computer scientist, a data scientist, or someone STEM, you’re probably excited about machine learning (ML). If you’re a liberal arts major (like us) you’re probably moderately scared of it. Ought is the research nonprofit trying to bridge those worlds: they want to apply the benefits of ML to ordinary tasks and to helping people think better. In describing their purpose, they talk about how ML is going to help us build amazing control systems, self driving cars, drones, etc — but how it might not as readily help us “see more clearly why some cities prosper where others fail,” “reflect on our personal goals,” or explain “how a bicycle works.” They’re trying to find out how to apply ML to the latter group of questions. If this interests you, they have a whole manifesto on their website that you should check out.
They’re hiring researchers and programmers for internships and full-time positions at their San Francisco office.
As always, reply with suggestions, feedback, cool jobs, general thoughts, related articles, alternative medicine advice for Lea who has a bad sunburn, etc.
See you next week.
Love,
Your Caring Parents
(Dana & Lea)