vasco_

Halo, developed by Unbabel, combines a non invasive BCI with an LLM to enable ALS patients to regain the ability to talk with loved ones. The search for a CEO is on.

Hi, this is Vasco, I am Unbabel's CEO. We have a margin, of course, that depends on several factors.

Thanks, it certainly did help beyond YC. The YC network is fantastic and I have to say the in general the YC brand open many doors. Both with customers, investors and recruiting. I don't know if you are also doing a startup, but if so, good luck :)

In our batch there were at least three teams with founders that had kids. I think that what you mean that is that doing a startup in general is biased against people with kids/families. I agree, but that is mostly because living on a smaller budget with kids is harder. The beautiful thing of a startup is that in most cases you work really hard and at the same take breaks in moments where it is important to be there for your kids. YC is structured in a way where during those three months you kind of take a break with your regular life and focus relentlessly on your company, but I believe that doing that is one of the most brilliant things from YC, it makes all the difference in the world for your chances of success.

Doing a startup when you have kids is (almost) always harder. YC actually makes it easier. Since you are more likely to get funding, you can actually pay yourself at least enough that you don't have to worry if you will be able to make rent. There is advantages to it also. When you have kids you are more aware of the consequences of failing, you value your time more and are less likely to "play house" as PG calls it, in my opinion. We didn't move the family to the US because kids where in school and because they have a better support network in Portugal (granparents, aunts, etc). Regarding the financial success, it depends on whether you care about valuations at this stage which are fairly subjective. In terms of valuation it most certainly did, and since I own stock in my startup, it represented measurable success. More importantly though, the access to better funding and better investors allowed me to have better conditions to focus on growing the company and doing what I love, while providing for my family. Even though we don't have luxuries, the ability to work on something I love without my kids having to feel like they are sacrificing is a luxury in itself.

I would actually go so far to say that if you are doing a startup and have kids, YC is by far your best chance of creating a successful startup without having to go through financial distress. In that sense it is the most family friendly incubator. Having done 4 startups always with kids, I speak of experience.

I disagree. I have 4 kids, I have been married for 15 and my co-founder had a 3 months old when we did YC. And we are from Portugal, so we were away from our families when we went through YC. It was hard and it required sacrifice, but it was certainly worth it and YC was super supportive. Our lives, and the lives of our kids are much better for it.

Having lived in Pittsburgh for 10 years, I can say that I miss a lot about that City. I miss the seasons, the people and the landscape, and in Pittsburgh, there are a lot of great technology companies. Nothing compared to SF, of course, but you can definitely have a great life there. The thing that I can't overcome is the lack of an Ocean. It is very to beat a beach sunset after work.

Vasco Pedro, CEO and Co-founder of Unbabel.

I feel that while it is very important to have honest discussions regarding employee expectations, in this particular case Andreas is being particularly disingenuous and stating facts that are plainly false. As the CEO of Unbabel, I find it hard to let wrong factual information be posted about Unbabel. There is a great deal of subjectivity in these matters and we are sensitive to the fact that being fired is not an easy thing, which is why I will try to stick to the facts. Despite the unwarranted distraction all this caused, we wish to put this matter behind us and wish Andreas well in his future endeavors.

The offer letter he received, which was in English, stated clearly the “at will” nature of the contract. The relevant clause is below.

- "While we hope that your employment with the Company will be mutually satisfactory, employment with the Company is for no specific period of time. As a result, either you or the Company is free to terminate your employment relationship at any time for any reason, with or without cause. This is the full and complete agreement between us on this term. Although your job duties, title, compensation and benefits, as well as the Company’s personnel policies and procedures, may change from time-to-time, the “at-will” nature of your employment may not be changed except by an express writing signed and dated by both you and the President of the Company."

This was also explained thoroughly upon signing of the actual contract, which was a standard contract of full time employment within the Portuguese law, which includes 3 months trial period, by default. At the time we did not have our contract translated to English, which is why we took great pains to make sure everything was clear, but shortly after all the contracts were translated to English.

Furthermore, as I stated before, when he was let go we gave him more severance than was required, we paid him one extra month of salary and added another $1000 on top of it to compensate for unforeseen expenses. We have tried to the best of our ability to not make sure that Andreas had enough to get back to Sweden, if that was what he wished.

As Andreas admits, the company loaned him money to pay rent, helped him find a house, and treated him with respect, courtesy and welcomed him to the team. Andreas worked with 4 different co-workers and got negative feedback from all of them. There was a fundamental problem of communication with Andreas and there appeared to be a systematic misunderstanding of goals, as well as constant exacerbation of minor problems.

Communication is two-way channel, so obviously this was not necessarily the fault of the individual, and a high growth startup is certainly an environment that is suitable for misunderstandings, since we rely on a lot of assumptions, which is why over communication is extremely important. In any case it felt to us that there wasn’t a good fit between Andreas and the team. We hired 8 employees around the same period, and 7 of them continue to be productive, happy and valuable members of the team. Of the 8 employees, 5 are not Portuguese, creating a very diverse group.

Andreas himself was very happy until the day he was fired, which shows that he was unaware of the consequences of his behaviour, or even of the issues that existed already, which is both potentially a core reason for the problems of communication and why the decision was unexpected.

This particular situation will certainly make us improve our hiring and screening processes in order to improve the fit and I thank the HN community for pointing out ideas we can try, like remote working and better defined trial periods. It is also important that we improve employee communication and give more concise feedback to employees.

Unbabel is committed to being an international company, with employees from many countries. We pay well above Portuguese average and our goal is to hire the best individuals from anywhere in the world to be part of something meaningful.

We are working hard to solve a hard problem in human communication and take very seriously the fact that we need exceptional people in our team in order to to achieve our vision. We are fortunate to have an amazing team and will continue to strive for maintaining high standards and good culture fit.

Andreas acquired an unfortunate view of Portugal while he was here. We tried hard to make his experience a wonderful one and Portugal is without a doubt an amazing place to live. We have a great climate, it is very safe, most people speak English, it is a modern place and it is very easy to get 100MB internet speed in your home. It is close to the US and Portugal has always had a hacker mentally, since the days of the discoveries and Vasco da Gama, much due to the need to find solutions to being surrounded by Spain, which at the time was a problem. These and many other things is why Algarve (south of Portugal) was rated the best place in the world to retire by Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-peddicord/best-places...).

If you are curious about Unbabel’s hiring practices and what is like to work at Unbabel, I would be happy to answer personally.

The claims are most certainly not true. Regarding the code and team we have an mazing team and our code is pretty good, especially since going through YCombinator we have grown at a tremendous rate which sometimes forces us to cut some corners. Of course our code could be better, and it was precisely for this that we hired someone that we thought could be a valuable contributor to the code. Unfortunately we were wrong, as it is ow publicly obvious, but fortunately the rest of the team is truly excellent.

For the record

I am a co-founder and CEO of Unbabel. I feel that I should respond to these allegations.

1 - The contract we had with Andreas was full time employee contract. The first three months were "at will" which means that either one was free to terminate the relation at any time. We have a signed contract to prove it and I am happy to share a sample of the contract to anyone that wants. When we fired him, we not only paid him what we owed, but we paid him an extra 15 days of work in addition to $1000 dollars to offset any unexpected costs. Which we didn't have to. We also have receipts of all the transactions, If need be.

2 - We fired him because he was a terrible fit to Unbabel. It became clear very quickly that it would not work. In the end the responsibility of hiring him was ours, and we are really sorry it did not make the right choice. This made it clear that we have room for improvement in our hiring processes.

3 - He did really well on interviews and we went to considerable lengths to bring him to Portugal. We paid his airplane ticket, we lent him money for rent, we helped him search for a house, amongst other things. I am personally really proud that Unbabel is an example of how we can capitalize on excellent talent in Europe and Andreas was the first person from Sweden. We have people from 5 nationalities at Unbabel and we pride ourselves in having a great environment to work with.

4 – We believe that the culture of the company is extremely important and we devote a lot of energy to it. Everyone in Unbabel is expected to participate actively in the company Meaning that they are part of the planning, and encouraged to be autonomous in creating the best products possible. We truly enjoy working with each other and spending time together. For example, every week we go surfing on Wednesday morning in the beautiful beaches of Lisbon. It is not mandatory, but every one has loved it so far. It is an amazing way make sure that every week we hang out together outside the company.

We try really hard to make sure that working at Unbabel is an amazing experience. We pay well above average for Portugal, which means that you get a really good life here. We offer health insurance, surf lessons, catered lunches once a week and beers on Friday afternoon. We give you autonomy and agency, we are transparent about the company every employee has a chance to make a difference. Come and see for yourself what it is like to work at the best Translation Startup in the world. A position just opened up :)

Yes, there are companies in the batch that decide to remain in stealth a bit longer. Until they are ready to shine.

hmm.. interesting, what do you mean?

Gengo is catering to the professional translator. Each job is done by one person, with the possibility of review (costs extra). Unbabel is crowd translation, this means that multiple people work on the translation. Regarding QA, only the top unbabelers have access to paid tasks and to get there they need to have really good feedback from the community.

Depending on your content, Unbabel quality is quite good. Our hope is that it will be as good as Gengo.

Thanks! We hope so too :)

Certainly. Right now you can use the order form and get your blog translated, but soon we will have more seamless integrations. Ideas welcomed.

That is good point. We are in the process of refining the user experience and especially making that much more transparent. Initially we thought that having a stream of tasks would be more efficient. If we have paid tasks we always put that upfront.

Thanks! :)

USP? But yeah, first we do machine and then the crowd edits the output to fix any mistakes.

We are combining a lot of technology with human work and we think we can make this so efficient that even if we charge this kind of prices we will be able to pay editors a decent amount per hour. We might need to raises prices, but right now it is your gain, take advantage of the prices while you can, if we raise the prices, we will grandfather current clients.

Really interesting use case. To be honest I don't know if it would work well, I don't think anyone has used for that purpose, but I would certainly love to try. If you are not satisfied, we can always return your money :)

Also, please check your spam / trash, etc. We have had cases of emails going to the wrong bin. In any case, if you shoot me an email @ vasco [at] unbabel [dot] com I would be happy to make sure that everything is running smoothly for you.

right now we do facebook ads, post on job boards, try the usual things. We have some interesting ideas on how to tap to the bilingual community, which hopefully will do soon. So far our clients have been really happy with the results. I would love to know more about it. Shoot me an email @ vasco [at] unbabel [dot] com, I would love to discuss.

You almost nailed it. It is pretty much like that but there is more than one person editing. It is a chain of editors that work in sequence.

Thank you, more languages should be coming soon.

Thanks, sorry about the mistakes. One good thing is that we can actually handle mistakes for the translation :)

Awesome product.

Thank you, we are working hard to keep improving. Keep in mind that the news is done by the whole community, while paid tasks are only done by the best editors.

Thank you for your comment. There is a lot of variation depending on the language. In Turkish, that tends to happen, a lot of times the translation needs to be redone, but in EN-SP it is surprisingly good. The crowd aspect of it tends to help with the quality problem. Still a lot of work to do though, but we are off to a promising start.

Thank you. We are planning to add Bitcoin at some, paying our translators across the world is sometimes hard.

Thank for your comments, really insightful ideas. A lot of what you say we are already seeing. For example in Turkish, where the quality of the MT output is not as good as let's say Spanish, we are already seeing our translators replacing entire chunks of text. Interestingly, in other language pairs, the output is close enough that there is usually minimal changes in the output.

We have been thinking about having the editor position, we are experimenting with the concept and how it fits with out current workflow.

Anyway, thank you for your ideas, really cool.

Certainly, we started posting it there, haven't had a chance to finish it, but will certainly do so. Mashape is a great website.