Introducing Red Planet Labs with $5M in funding | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Red Planet Labs with $5M in funding

medium.com

39 pointsnathanmarz33 comments

What's the point of this article? It sounds like you've started a company and raised a round but don't have anything to show for it yet. Why should HN readers care? Shouldn't this post be made once you have a product?

They want to hire clojure folks

Founder here. Excited to announce Red Planet Labs today. I'll try my best to answer any questions here.

Also want to emphasize that we're a fully distributed company, and we're hiring! If you're a strong Clojure programmer we would love to hear from you (though we're open to non-Clojure folks as well).

Thanks very much for your post. I'm intrigued, but to be honest, your post set off a lot of warning bells in my head in that it talked about things very much in generalities, but I still don't really know what you intend to do. Perhaps that's just because you want to keep your cards close to your chest for now, but how should I think of your company. Is it like Firebase but instead of "consumer mobile" focused it is enterprise focused? How should I think of it in comparison to the PAAS offerings from AWS, GCP, Hiroku, etc.

We're revealing very little about the technology at the moment. For now, I can say that it's a single tool upon which you can build nearly your entire backend. It will be kind of like Hadoop or Storm in that it's infrastructure that you deploy and then program your applications using a Java API.

Why did you choose Clojure?

Clojure's a fantastic language. Writing our code in an immutable style leads to much more robust code, and we heavily make use of the expressive power of Clojure (e.g. macros, protocols, etc.)

This looks like a recruiting post, but the type of people you're pitching to are the kind of people who are quite passionate about the specifics of functionality and workflow and architectures. Are you planning on providing more information than "software tool" to help developers decide if this is something they want to help build?

We're still keeping the technology mostly under wraps. We're hoping that the strong track records of everyone on our team, as well as our amazing group of investors, will interest people in applying.

Well, a strong track record was enough to get me to toss $10 into the Light Table kickstarter, hopefully it will also be enough for you to find developers willing to dedicate a couple years of their lives.

Congrats on the launch and sorry if my question is not directly related to your announcement.

I’ve known you as creator of Apache Storm and author of the manning Big Data book, and was impressed by what you achieved, so impressed that I was wondering for the past years what was the stealth startup Nathan Marz is working on, and whether it will introduce a new paradigm the way Storm was a paradigm shift towards streaming.

What is your advice to someone who just started his career (~2 years xp) and not sure how to invest his time, to be able to reach your level of mastery in the next few years? Should one focus on the basics, algorithms and data structures? Or should one try to be very proficient in one programming language? Or try to learn a bunch of technologies/frameworks/databases etc and become most productive with them?

Thank you.

The first thing to keep in mind is that it takes a long time – thousands upon thousands of hours. I think the best way to utilize those hours is to spend them building real applications, and to always be pushing your comfort zone in some way. That could be by utilizing a new piece of infrastructure, working in a new language, or working on a new problem space that's very challenging to you. Make sure to seek jobs that enable you to consistently push your comfort zone like that! If you keep doing that, after many years you'll become a very strong programmer.

Any challenges raising the round given the team is distributed?

Congrats for the raise!

I only had one investor who even raised that as a concern, and he still offered to invest. What I was more worried about was raising as a solo founder, but that didn't turn out to be an issue.

I got to know Nathan 10 years ago when he was working at my YC batchmate's startup Backtype. He created Apache Storm previously, and now with Red Planet Labs, he's made something incredibly elegant - when I saw it, it was clear to me this would be the backend to end all backends. There are some very powerful abstractions here that will make developers a lot more powerful.

He's hiring and this is probably the best pure opportunity to write code that will touch a lot of people. Talk to Nathan!

Back in (I think) 2014/5 I worked on http://docs.the-startup-stack.com/.

My goal was to create a toolchain that is battle-tested production-ready and pluggable to help companies deliver code faster and worry less about operations.

I started it in my spare time and worked on it for about 3-4 months.

I still believe there is a HUGE need for this and that many companies are solving the same problem over and over again. It's super expensive to build.

The challenge is catching companies at the right time. It needs to be as easy to start as it is with Heroku and a Rails application BUT you should be able to grow and scale up with batteries includes (unlike AWS).

Another challenge is the fragmentation of development tools/frameworks/configurations and cycles.

Very interesting space.

For clojurists here, Nathan is the creator of the Specter[1] library. Which is a brilliant idea and technical masterpiece, IMO.

Nathan, kudos and good luck!

[1] https://github.com/nathanmarz/specter

My guess it would be an infrastructure platform where you serialize your code, and you would provide all primitives as SDK to manage business logic, storage and scheduling. Could we call it a batteries included FaaS platform? :)

You mentioned the service being accessible as a Java API. Would it be Java only or other SDK (Python, Rust, Go, ...) could follow?

Also, how do you think to distribute the service? Full SaaS or OSS/SaaS?

Congrats for the funding and good luck for coming challenges!

V1 will probably just be JVM only. We'll certainly look at supporting other languages in the future.

The goal is to offer our product both on-prem and as a service.

Interesting, so is the end product itself going to be a Clojure-based developer tool? Would be huge news for the community.

No, it will be a Java API. Unfortunately, making a tool Clojure only limits your potential userbase too much.

I noticed this in the job description - "Three weeks of mandatory paid vacation. Overworking not allowed!". Great idea, I have old colleagues who wouldn't take holidays and had up to 3 months in holidays accrued.

Thanks, I strongly believe this is the only rational vacation policy for a company to have. Overworking destroys productivity, so preventing it is better for the employee and the company!

Interesting policy! I've actually worked at a couple companies where I've felt that management insisting we take vacations worked as a proxy for better management and support. Vacation doesn't matter if the job is hellish. Hopefully you've got that bit down too :)

> ... but multiple orders of magnitude cost reduction for building end-to-end, scalable software applications.

So I would guess it's toolchain and/or debugging/tracing tools for building scalable distributed system?

"better serverless?"

Could very well be.

I wish them the best of luck, but this seems like a difficult market to enter. Lots of existing players and momentum towards containers and K8s. I'm interested to see what their better mousetrap is.

Can't reveal too much about the technology as of yet, but the key thing is our technology is not incremental improvement. It's orders of magnitude improvement to what currently exists. You're right that it's a crowded market, but in our minds the market is currently offering horses while we'll be offering Teslas :)

By "fully distributed company" do they mean worldwide or US-only ?

We're open to candidates from anywhere in the world. The constraint is they'll need to work hours that overlap with the rest of the team – we do daily standups and 1-2 hours of pair programming each day. For candidates in a significantly different timezone, that could mean working in the afternoon and evening instead of a typical 9-5.

* doesn't have anything to do with Mars *

* stops reading * *

Edit: By way of apology I will make an addendum more in line with the HN aesthetic.

Calling your software startup Red Planet Labs is a bit like calling your architecture firm Lunar Industries. We are too late in the age of space travel for such 'whimsical' venture names to not be intrinsically confounding.

Please don't do this here.

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