Zelos.gg (YC W20) | Los Angeles | Frontend / Fullstack | https://zelos.gg
Zelos is a rewards program where gamers earn points and redeem in-game prizes across multiple games. When you play your favorite game, simply finish a challenge (e.g. get 3 kills) to earn points and trade in your points for a prize (e.g. a new game or a skin).
We built Zelos because games today focus on monetizing off their most dedicated players (whales). For gamers like us who play multiple games, spending money in each game quickly becomes expensive. When we move to a new game, all the money we spent in the old game is effectively lost.
So we built Zelos for the 55% of gamers who play 2 or more games and they LOVE us. Having launched only 2 months ago, we already have 50K+ weekly active users across 30+ countries.
Zelos graduated from YC W20 and just closed a heavily oversubscribed seed round. We are only a team of 3 and you will be our first frontend/fullstack hire. As such, you can expect great responsibilities, huge opportunities to learn & grow, and of course significant equity.
Being a gaming company, we have a very laid-back and open culture where people care about having fun as much as doing great work. You would be a great fit here if you enjoy playing games and building things.
If you are interested, please email us directly at founders@zelos.gg and tell us more about yourself.
Zelos.gg (YC W20) | Los Angeles, and REMOTE USA/CANADA | Frontend / Fullstack | https://zelos.gg
Zelos is a rewards program where gamers earn points and redeem in-game prizes across multiple games. When you play your favorite game, simply finish a challenge (e.g. get 3 kills) to earn points and trade in your points for a prize (e.g. a new game or a skin).
We built Zelos because games today focus on monetizing off their most dedicated players (whales). For gamers like us who play multiple games, spending money in each game quickly becomes expensive. When we move to a new game, all the money we spent in the old game is effectively lost.
So we built Zelos for the 55% of gamers who play 2 or more games and they LOVE us. Having launched only 2 months ago, we already have 50K+ weekly active users across 30+ countries.
Zelos graduated from YC W20 and just closed a heavily oversubscribed seed round. We are only a team of 3 and you will be our first frontend/fullstack hire. As such, you can expect great responsibilities, huge opportunities to learn & grow, and of course significant equity.
Being a gaming company, we have a very laid-back and open culture where people care about having fun as much as doing great work. You would be a great fit here if you enjoy playing games and building things.
If you are interested, please email us directly at founders@zelos.gg and tell us more about yourself.
I had the chance to work with Armon as a contractor at HashiCorp when I was in college. Armon was absolutely one of the most down-to-earth leaders I've ever seen. Even though he was technically brilliant and I was only an undergrad, he never made me feel like I was stupid or inexperienced, but rather patiently guided me towards the best solutions, so I was able to gain a lot of confidence and grow a lot along the way.
If you are an aspiring distributed systems engineer (as I was), I highly recommend applying to HashiCorp. They are solving some of the most fun challenges in distributed systems and they have a great engineering culture, not to mention that they are remote-friendly.
One time quite a while ago, I randomly hung out with the Kiip team one day when there were like 6 of them. Mitchell struck me as a super nice guy, and at some point he randomly dropped the fact at some point that he wrote Vagrant.
I went to college with Armon and highly enjoyed working with him. I've never been associated with Hashicorp and can't speak to his leadership there, but as a human being he's fantastic. And it seems like Hashicorp is doing well.
I think your advice is great for tech leads at big companies, but for tech leads at startups, I have to disagree with the point about "Work for your product - not your company."
At a startup, the business objective has to come first and the engineering team has to keep the bigger picture in mind.
"Long-term stability and robustness" won't matter if your company is dead. Build for the short-term and build fast while you are figuring out product-market fit. Move fast and break things.
As a tech lead at a midsize company (~300 employees) I have to agree with this. There seems to be a strong tendency among tech teams to always push back on everything that business wants. We need to remember that we’re on the same team.
> If you’re at a startup, your product is your business.
Your product is whatever you end up with after the long tenuous period of being startup, which often evolves/pivots drastically over time. Your product is your ability to execute.
Depends if the product is a key profit center. If your startup is making a product and it's not a profit center, it might get binned, it might get pivoted, it might postponed. The advice is great, just don't die on a shortsighted engineering hill when the decision come from emotional attachment to your work rather than what's best for the companies positioning and financial health. You can always put that love and energy into a new/pivoting of the product.
The problem is if you're at a startup you probably don't know what your product is, because you don't know who your customers are.
My last startup died because we committed too hard to the product and the business model, which while innovative and one that I still believe could have succeeded - we utterly failed because we didn't understand our customers and we didn't pivot fast enough, ran out of runway and then everyone but the founders got laid off. Waiting on hearing about the equity.
If I may function as the devil's advocate - One can read the above as a claim that because you didn't have a good business guy engineers should have worked faster? Would a faster product iteration worked if the business acumen would still have been missing?
It might have. Part of it was arrogance and bad advice from VCs, not lack of business acumen. There was a rejection for industry practice because we were different and doing something different, but it wasn't actually different and couldn't monetize because we focused on users that couldn't pay us real money, while working in an industry that doesn't value innovation.
I don't think the argument is that engineers should work faster. It's that they should be willing to skip some of the stuff you would normally say is good practice in order to ship features super agile and make any necessary pivot easier.
It wasn't a lack of features so much as a lack of talking to people that had purchasing discretion. Never focus on users in B2B, focus on people who have the ability to approve a purchase order.
This isn't universally true. It only applies to a segment of "pioneering" startups. It will hurt a startup otherwise.
There are different types of startups. Not all startups are working on novel discoveries and exploring new frontiers. Zoom built a better video conferencing platform by not moving fast and breaking things.
I agree with you that you have to work for the company objectives.
I think at a start-up the correct decision early on is to take on a bunch of tech debt, but then pay it down as the horizon of the company expands.
Early on, you need to iterate fast on a few key flows and make a product that people want, but once you get product market fit, things like scalability and reliability start mattering a lot more and you need to pay down the debt.
The issue comes when the company's objective is actually to build a reliable, stable, long term product, but it is still in startup mindset of "ship this feature by yesterday at all costs", and expects the rest to come for free.
That only works if tech team is evaluated and measured with the same objectives as business teams.
I've heard so many times "think of bigger picture".. but when we did the tech team got kicked down - as we didn't achieve our own objectives because we sacrificed them for "bigger picture".
Here at Binary Mint, we fundamentally believe in the value of blockchains, which enable the creation of “decentralized applications,” or DApps. DApps are trustless, transparent, interoperable, and unstoppable, and thus have the potential to empower users in unprecedented ways.
But just like how web 2.0 did not take off until it started seeing usage outside of the military and academia, blockchains are not going to take off until DApps are being used by the average consumers. And yet, it’s the unfortunate reality today that DApps have very little usage outside of finance. The reason is that it’s currently extremely difficult to create DApps that can handle a large number of users efficiently, due to technical limitations with existing blockchains and the lack of good tooling for building DApps.
Binary Mint is all about creating technologies that will make consumer DApps a reality. Our first product is the Tenfold Protocol (https://www.tenfoldprotocol.io/), a practical and versatile platform on which developers can easily build DApps that scale.
Binary Mint is an early-stage startup. As such, you can expect to be wearing many hats, becoming a leader in the company, and making a large impact. We are looking for people who are responsible, driven, and great at what they do. We are a distributed team with a base in San Francisco; both local and remote hires are very welcome.
As noted in the parent comment, the Open Container Format will supersede appc. It will also adopt a lot of the ideas from appc, as noted in the CoreOS announcement [1].
For a more ambitious reading list, refer to CS6410 from Cornell [0]. The topics of the readings range from operating systems to distributed systems and networking.
Zelos is a rewards program where gamers earn points and redeem in-game prizes across multiple games. When you play your favorite game, simply finish a challenge (e.g. get 3 kills) to earn points and trade in your points for a prize (e.g. a new game or a skin).
We built Zelos because games today focus on monetizing off their most dedicated players (whales). For gamers like us who play multiple games, spending money in each game quickly becomes expensive. When we move to a new game, all the money we spent in the old game is effectively lost.
So we built Zelos for the 55% of gamers who play 2 or more games and they LOVE us. Having launched only 2 months ago, we already have 50K+ weekly active users across 30+ countries.
Zelos graduated from YC W20 and just closed a heavily oversubscribed seed round. We are only a team of 3 and you will be our first frontend/fullstack hire. As such, you can expect great responsibilities, huge opportunities to learn & grow, and of course significant equity.
Being a gaming company, we have a very laid-back and open culture where people care about having fun as much as doing great work. You would be a great fit here if you enjoy playing games and building things.
If you are interested, please email us directly at founders@zelos.gg and tell us more about yourself.