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Kivo (YC S13) - London

We're building Github for documents and have started by creating the best way to annotate and share presentations. We're a team of three based in Soho, London. You'll be technical hire #2 and have a huge amount of responsibility and ownership of the product.

We're looking for excellent full-stack and front-end developers. Our stack is Scala / Play and we are about to make the move to Angular, but we know brilliance comes in many forms, so we'd like to hear from any exceptional hackers.

Customer feedback is our guiding light and we obsess over product and ux, so working closely with users in shaping Kivo should excite you.

Equity grants will be WELL above market for first hires and salary will be highly competitive. We want new partners, not just employees, so we are looking for people who are as driven to succeed as we are.

We're hiring for people who want to help lead the team as we continue to grow, so you should be excited to shape the development culture of a fast growing start-up.

We also know there's more to life than work. You get gym membership for gyms across London and an extremely sociable team to work with. We love Poker, eating out, tennis, and nights at the pub.

If this sounds exciting, ping us (leo@kivo.com) and we'd love to buy you lunch and have a chat.

We are hiring scala devs at Kivo in London. Ping me leo@kivo.com

God we went down a rabbit hole trying to get omaha working last year. It is seriously complex. It's much-needed though, as Windows Installers are perhaps the most fucked things in existence. I am perhaps more excited for Github's Squirrel (was Shimmer), which has an awesome team behind it and notes simplicity as a priority.

I did EF in 2012 and we are hiring Angular and Scala (Play/Slick/Akka) developers actually ;). Ping me leo@kivo.com

From what I can see there, that is a general windows overlay and not an intergration into Office, which would be much more ugly and afaik would not leak outside the window. So I guess it goes a bit like: DB watch files, find pid of process editing them (PowerPoint w/e) and they overlay a window.

The Guardian has a great approach to tech; they've done some really cool stuff with Scala / Play and released some great code.

Yeah but blackhats ala lod / h0no / el8 routinely released exploits that were leaked or stolen. They just hated full-disclosure with a passion as they saw it as too corporate.

We have been based and fundraised in SV and LDN and my experiences are the following:

Hiring: * Engineers in the UK are amazing, and you can hire from mainland Europe, which is also very good. * Retention rates are higher. * Salaries are lower. * Most decent start-up-orientated talent is at the under-25 level. Finding good PMs with big vision is harder, and if you do, encouraging them to leave for a start-up is less heard of. In a sense, you have to 'grow your own'. * Engineers traditionally have come from more corporate / tech-consulting backgrounds than start-up ones; this has both its pluses and its minuses. * Engineers in mainland Europe, and to a lesser extent London, will have more experience with older technology (C++, java) than newer technologies. That said, there are great developers for clojure/scala/python/ruby, but -- again -- they tend to be at a more junior level.

Fundraising: * The good people in London are really good, but there are a lot less of them. * Seed rounds are not significantly harder (due to SEIS and lots of hnws.) Crunch, I believe, comes at A, B, where there are only a handful of options (Index, Accel, Balderton, Wellington). This is when people look across the pond. Ironically, London is full of PE and massive funds (property, hedge funds, etc.) I assume some of this money will divert to tech in the future. * For seed rounds, you may have some discount price-wise, but, then again, it is a lot cheaper to run a company in the UK. I don't believe this discount is that high or particularly relevant. * Investors are more inclined to want revenue, and focus on minimizing downside instead of maximizing upside; IMO it is harder to fund very big, disruptive ideas vs. smaller, cash-generative ones. There are outliers who are exceptions to this. * Things seem to be changing. Lots of 'US-style' firms are springing up, but mostly at the seed level. * There is a tradition of doing seed as equity rounds instead of convertible debt. This is a massive headache, but people aren't used to debt like in SV. * Most VCs have been bankers / consultants instead of entrepreneurs.

UK has incredible tax regulations for investing in startups. Through SEIS you can write off 105% of losses and pay essentially no tax on profits.

COM hates MTA threading, most of the Office object model actually insists on STA single-threads sitting in the main UI thread to even work (i.e. you cannot use BackgroundWorker() )! Some guy @ MS even released this byzantine code to deal with the situation (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andreww/archive/2008/11/19/implement...) which unfortunately doesn't work. It's completely nuts how bad the object model is.

That's actually what we are doing @ Kivo.com :p

Not to mention the REMOVING of windows installer from VS 2012 and replacing it with a PoS limited InstallShield ;)

Yeah that would totally make sense. There is quite a lot to work with in the OpenXML library (as PP documents are essentially just XML in a zip file). If you could segregate regions of a slide and delegate ownership that could be a reality; I guess the UX problem is having different behavior from similar actions (I.e., how do I know when it's going to merge or if I have to do it myself?). We were thinking the best way would be some document-based version of a 3-way-diff (TortoiseHG have a good one on windows). Regarding the PP COM API, you want to stay away from it as much as possible and stick to proprietary XML serialization..! Cheers for your feedback, and ping me an email whenever: leo@kivo.com

Hey 6thSigma! I'm Leo, CTO @ Kivo:

There are two things you'd merge: changes to the whole presentation (i.e. new slides), and multiple changes to the same slide. In the first instance, we slot together the slides and alert the user. In the latter instance (if you sync a change and I sync a change to a single slide), they will both appear chronologically in the list. It is up to the user to merge these versions together.

Automatic merging works well with code because you can move locations of functions and -- to some extent -- chunks of code (although git usually will require some merge resolution); as we are merging something (a slide) which, unlike code, has to appear a certain way visually, this approach doesn't make much sense. Auto-merging together two slides with different content would not have a desirable result. I'd love to hear your ideas on what you think the best UX for this is.

hey ludoo - cheers for the reply; my name is Leo and I'm CTO @ kivo. Re for a version for writers, would this entail MS Word? We are planning to ship our Word version in the near future and it would be great to get your feedback on what you would like this to look like (leo@kivo.com). All Office files post-2007 actually do have the open format of OpenXML behind them, so we can totally see this being a reality.

hey derek, Leo here -- I'm CTO at kivo. So, although the PowerPoint COM API is super old and buggy, the OpenXML standard which has been around since Office 2007 is actually pretty advanced. This means that you can realistically diff two versions of a file and extract and analyze the changes. The C# wrapper for this is also good (the hard bit is actually serializing the slide from COM -> OpenXML in memory). We would never expect our users to read the XML!

> Office already has features to track and merge different copies of documents together

Only for MS Word I'm afraid.. :( (unless you want to buy a sharepoint deployment for the other products, and that versioning stuff is REALLY clunky!)

Hasan-Dan-Sabah's assassins were crazy: there was instances of them lying undercover for literally decades before their kill.

Interesting the '53 date too for the CIA as they intervened in Persia against Mossaddegh (but preferred to let angry local mobs do the assassinations rather than this James Bond shit...)

Completely and utterly irrelevant, but for some reason I assumed it was this guy: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

Wow that Fravia link brings me back a few years

Might be noted that the hacking community is not a particular fan of Mitnick --> http://static.tor.hu/zero-for-owned/zfo5.txt Ctrl-F "Mitnick"