jameswilsterman

Volley | Engineering, UX Design, Growth | ONSITE SF (Hayes Valley)

Volley develops voice-controlled games and entertainment apps for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Our voice apps are world-class and attract millions of users every month. We’re a 45-person team based in San Francisco.

We believe voice control will be the main way people access entertainment in their bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, and cars, and our goal is to build a destination for voice-controlled entertainment, as Netflix did for television.

https://www.volleythat.com/

https://www.volleythat.com/careers

Volley (YC W18) | San Francisco | ONSITE

Volley (volleythat.com) makes voice-controlled games and entertainment for Alexa and Google Assistant. We are a 12-person Series A startup based in SF near Union Square.

Open Roles:

* Chief of Staff / Special Projects

* Lead Mobile Engineer

* Senior Backend Engineer - JavaScript/Typescript

Apply Here: https://angel.co/volley/jobs Contact: james at volleythat dot com

I'm the founder of Volley (YC W18). We're working on games like this as well for Alexa, check out https://www.amazon.com/Volley-Inc-Infected/dp/B07JBKRRNP and https://www.amazon.com/Volley-Inc-Angel-of-DOOM/dp/B07Q35LY8...

Volley (YC W18) | San Francisco | Lead Javascript Engineer / Head of Engineering | ONSITE | Full Time | $120-$150K (+ equity)

Apply: https://angel.co/volley/jobs

Website: https://volleythat.com

Volley develops voice-controlled games and entertainment for Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

We are the #1 voice-first game company with 10+ titles and exponential month-over-month growth. We've raised from top institutional investors in the gaming industry and we are starting Y Combinator in early January.

We are seeking a Lead Engineer or Head of Engineering to build out game engines and design the backend infrastructure for our games. You will help us conceptualize and build proprietary voice-controlled game engines, scale our infrastructure from hundreds of thousands to millions of users, and manage other engineers in a collaborative small-team environment. Founders are both technical from Harvard and Stanford.

Our software stack includes:

-- AWS Lambda (Node.js)

-- AWS DynamoDB

-- Alexa Skills Kit

-- Google Cloud Functions

-- Firebase

Stuff you may have done before:

-- Game development

-- iOS / Android development

-- Engineering role at a gaming company

-- Engineering role at a consumer software company

-- Engineering management experience

-- AWS experience

-- Serverless Lambda experience

-- Alexa / Google Home / voice interface experience

Check out our top rated games for Alexa:

-- "Song Quiz" (http://songquiz.com) - A name-that-tune music trivia game in which you must correctly identify the title and artist of popular songs.

-- "Yes Sire" (http://yessire.com) - A choose-your-own adventure story-driven game set in a medieval castle.

How are you calculating the 'risk of any one person being killed by violence' today? To make that claim you need to consider tail risk and black swan events that are possible but have little precedent. What weight are you giving the likelihood of a person dying by nuclear weapon?

Are people realizing this is from 2013?

Yes - there are different ways I could see it work, but right now, effectively, the amount of money you contribute determines the number of votes you have on ANY action of the endowment. Anyone within the DAO or not can submit investment proposals to the DAO to vote on.

Of course, 51% attacks become possible with anything decentralized, so there are provisions to split the endowment itself or pull out your share of the funds whenever you desire (another benefit vs existing charities and endowments).

Check out Stephan Tual on Medium for more info on how his DAO supporting the Ethereum ecosystem awards votes to token-holders and incorporates 51% attack protections (https://medium.com/@stephantual).

I'd be interested in ways to non-linearly scale votes with donations (such as quadratic voting: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531) but that would require some sort of decentralized identity to prevent dupe accounts.

Think of (925) as something like Magic (https://getmagicnow.com/) for job-hunters.

Text our phone number and we'll do whatever we can to make your job-search experience less stressful and more successful including actually searching for jobs on your behalf.

Thanks for checking out clivebot! I appreciate the feedback and agree we need to make the instructions clearer going forward.

@clivebot: follow [team_name] — This is equivalent to 'following' someone in Twitter, except in this case, you are following an entire Slack team. Once you follow that Slack team, you will be automatically notified whenever that team starts a live-blog.

@clivebot: go live — You're right that this starts transmitting everything your team writes in the channel. Other teams have to follow your Slack team first (as described above) in order for them to receive your live-blog.

@clivebot: stop — This is the command to end your live-blog. You can also use this same command to mute other teams if they are currently live-blogging.

Clivebot can be added to any channel but can only "go live" from the #live channel you chose when you installed.

Clivebot does allow for two-way inter-team Slacking. After you "go live", say @clivebot invite [team_name] to let another Slack team join the live-blog with you. It's kind of trippy actually.

Criminal Justice

+ Apply machine learning algorithms to determine and preempt causes of recidivism

+ Develop Minority Report-style "pre-cog" policing algorithms to prevent predict future crimes and help prioritize policing resources

Public Policy & Economics

+ Land use reform (impact of land value taxes / pro-density initiatives)

+ Develop robust electronic voting systems

Science & Medicine

+ Explore possible systems of carbon sequestration

+ Mars habitability

+ Superconductors? Carbon nanotubes?

For me the problem seems to affect both WiFi and LTE (on Verizon).

What's crazy is that my clock seems to be getting worse. It's gone from 5s off to now ~20s off since I've upgraded.

Thanks. I feel like this issue is strangely underreported.

Streak - (https://goo.gl/VvgCnv)

We made a trivia gameshow for mobile devices. Everyone plays simultaneously once-a-day at 11AM PT / 2PM ET. Players see the exact same questions, so it's like a live, multiplayer, interactive version of traditional gameshows on TV.

We have ~300 MAUs and ~50 DAUs and solid retention, but to get that up to 1,000 DAUs should we be more focused on trying to trigger organic sharing within the app or top line from press, blogs, reddit, Facebook ads, etc? Is our user base too small to even know whether our organic sharing is really working?

Before each dinner we send out a thought provoking question to our membership list.

We send the answers we get back from our members to the dinner host who can pick 12 - 15 invitees based solely on their answer quality.

"It baffles me why more entrepreneurs haven't realized that 87% of the energy sources we use are going to be switching to other sources in our lifetimes"

What leads you to think entrepreneurs haven't realized this? What should they be doing once they do realize it?

Thanks! We are certainly excited about the Apple Watch potential.

I don't think these camps are mutually exclusive. For example, I believe that Thiel is right about the past 40 years, but we are starting to get back on track again (thanks in part to Larry Page) and the next 40 years will be much more broadly innovative.

"We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you."

I don't think this precludes Apple from ever building better predictive services. Tim Cook is specifically saying that Apple does not sell or give away your data to third-parties for advertising purposes. He is NOT saying that Apple would never ask permission to read your e-mail if it meant that they could offer a compelling Apple-created product and user experience as a result.

For example, with Apple Pay, Apple is technically using and storing my private information (my credit card data) to offer me a compelling service. They are not going to then figure out which credit card I own and/or how much I spend, and sell that info to banks so that they can target me with specific credit offers.

Wanted 15" and retina

BTW some people have asked how we're doing our article parsing. We're using the Diffbot article API which has been great for us so far. Recommended if you need similar functionality.

We wanted to take a different approach to RSS. We think our app will be more convenient for many people than setting up an RSS reader. It's just a curated selection of great writers. No hassle. It's not for power RSS users but we think it gives you a good, manageable mix of quality content. We also have a read later tool and some powerful social messaging features that we think work great on mobile.

Also - we are adding more authors if you have any suggestions!

Thanks for the feedback. Our app lets you follow lots of well know writers / bloggers from various disciplines. It's like curated RSS without the hassle. Tech is one of our main focuses and I wanted to highlight that aspect for the HN audience and list a few of the dozen tech authors we have currently but you're right that it is not completely tech focused.

Understand it should not be common practice. But that post was 138 days ago and we've made massive improvements to our app in the meantime. No one saw our last post (it has one point). We've changed our entire pitch even. Does that mean we just give up on getting to the front page with one failed posting attempt 5 months ago? Is there a better alternative? I apologize if people still think this is an abuse.

Does this imply that the 1806-20 event occurred ~50,000 years ago and only just reached us ten years ago?

"In December 2004, the magnetar SGR 1806-20 underwent such a starquake." <- Makes it sound like the effect on Earth was instantaneous but I imagine that is impossible.

I think this will be big, specifically the video aspect. Removes the biggest problems with video chat (Skype, hangouts etc.) feeling 'weird'. My immediate thoughts:

A) Don't feel like you're getting roped into a long conversation (you have to hold down on the screen, so of course it will be short!)

B) Doesn't feel like you are bothering people by calling them without knowing if they are free to videochat (they are clearly using snapchat at that moment so they're probably not too busy)

C) No need to have something specific to talk about; can just say hi quickly and see what your friends are up to.

D) As a bonus, if you are messaging with someone in the text interface and get to a point in the conversation where you need to communicate something complex, just use the video chat feature for 20 secs. and then go back to the more async g-chat style text messaging.

So assumedly this will work in a store also? Could I go 'grocery shopping' at Whole Foods and end up having everything shipped to me by Amazon for cheaper?

Can easily see this evolving into an Amazon price comparison tool for mobile use. Maybe I get a flash discount if the GPS has me standing in a Best Buy already.

BTW, if you have a Jambox, you can demo binaural (3D) sound by installing this update:

https://jawbone.com/liveaudio

Happy to answer questions. Our website is volleythat.com.

I was recently at the Exploratorium in SF (Embarcadero). They have a mirror there that tricks your brain into thinking you are seeing an upside-down reflection of yourself hanging in the air about 5ft in front of where the mirror actually is. I actually tried to touch the 'reflection' and my hand just met the air. My first thought was why don't we use these to create 3D images. Would your domed mirror proposal work similarly?

http://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/central-gallery/giant-mir...

I would like to see a new 'startup league' that tried to make this happen.