USV Blog

Parallel Markets | Sr Frontend Engineer | Remote | Full Time | https://parallelmarkets.com
Parallel Markets provides a re-usable identity for financial institutions in both web2 and web3 contexts. We just raised our Series A from Union Square Ventures (https://www.usv.com/writing/2022/02/parallel-markets/), and we're growing our remote-first team with additional full-time/permanent hires. Our frontend is React/GraphQL/Relay. Our backend is Elixir/Phoenix — with a dash of Go and NodeJS — on PostgreSQL. We deploy on AWS, provisioned through Terraform.

Engineers here at Parallel love building products, emphasizing efficiency and developer happiness. We deploy at-will, many times a day, coordinated via Slack, GitHub, and Shortcut. As a remote-first team, we will always prefer asynchronous processes. As a result, our morning standup is the only recurring meeting and we Write Things Down™. That goes for requirements and documentation, but also our company handbook (https://about.parallelmarkets.com/handbook). Through collaboration, we prioritize the best answer — regardless who comes up with it — and believe "done" is better than "perfect."

We want to work with curious, self-motivated engineers who enjoy learning new technologies. We all learned Elixir on the job, for instance. So, instead of looking for people with "X years doing Y," we're glad to find those with opinions on a variety of languages and approaches. We're excited to know there's always more to learn; if you feel…

Creator / submitter here - Some people have called StreetEYE 'HN for investors', but it's a little different.

You can go to Bloomberg, Reuters, WSJ, FT and hit a page with the most-read stories, but now everyone shares everything on social networks and blogs, so we can try to make one page with the most popular news across all sites and blogs - find the top people who share news, and combine algorithmic, professional, and crowdsourced curation to make the best front page across financial media.

StreetEYE is more like a mashup of HN, Techmeme, Google News, Flipboard, Buzzfeed. Basically the goal is to make the best flippin' front page of the financial Intertubes, by all means necessary.

For now, no comments or submissions to avoid spam, but plan to add them.

A longer manifesto here - http://blog.streeteye.com/blog/2013/10/the-streeteye-manifesto/

Been around for a couple of years in various iterations, has a bit of traction among financial journos/twitterati.

Never submitted before because the typical HN reader is not the target, but did an October relaunch, and there was a lot of interest in this thread where it was mentioned -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844565

Other sites in similar space

http://boredbanker.com

http://filll.com

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/

http://www.businessinsider.com/clusterstock/thehive

http://www.usv.com for VC (of course)

http://www.trejdify.com for broader business news

Would love to hear feedback, suggestions, any…

Web platforms are governments.

"Facebook is a government. Facebook's users are citizens,
and Facebook's applications developers are the private
companies that drive much of the economy. Apple. Twitter,
Myspace, Craigslist, Foursquare, Tumblr and every other
large network of engaged users (including some services of
Google) plays a similar role. We have always tacitly
acknowledged this. We talk about these networks as
communities, communities have governments."

"Once you start thinking about large web platforms as
governments, the logical question is what kind of government
are they. One thing is for sure - none of these platforms
are democracies. They are oligarchies controlled by
founders, investors or shareholders. That may not be at all
bad. As long as citizens (users) can move freely from one
government to another with little switching cost, there is
no reason to burden these polities with the inherent
inefficiencies of popular democracy. But that does put a
special premium on emigration policies and property rights.
Do I own my data, can I export it freely? It also suggests
that large networks that have strong network effects may
someday need other incentives to act in the best interests
of their citizens."

http://www.usv.com/blog/web-services-as-governments

Hi Larry,

I for one thank you for your contribution. Hacker News can be a bunch of jackasses at times.

You are absolutely right: distributed version control led to git, which completely changed programming. And though Satoshi didn't cite it by name it was almost certainly also part of the inspiration for Bitcoin and the blockchain, which has led to another $30B in collective market cap.

If you want a suggestion for what to do next, or what to advise, you can probably have a lot of impact (and make money) by getting involved in some of these new distributed ledger/ICO projects. You have the technical ability and it's now possible to monetize at the protocol level. Here are some links if you're interested:

https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/

https://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crowdfunding/

http://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols

Fred Wilson's specialty is with larger consumer/enterprise investments (http://www.usv.com/investments/) vs Dave McClure's speciality is in smaller investments and also international.

According to Dave, it seems like there's so slowing of momentum for growth with the smaller (base hits) he sees both domestically and internationally. And I appreciate his blog post that champions the consumer web.

But I wonder with Fred's observations if people might need to be a bit more wise with consumer internet plays if raising funds might be more difficult than previously. I also wonder when you combine both Fred and Dave's observations that maybe you see an opportunity for bootstrapped ventures to start out a lot smaller, maybe even w/o outside funds.

I also didn’t understand this.

I had a lot of respect for AH and USV. In particular I know some of the folks at USV. But some of their decisions astound me. When they invested in Crypto Kitties and Fred posted about it, I felt they jumped the shark.

I remember how $31M was poured into a startup called Color a few years back, only for the startup to go belly up a month later. Meanwhile they don’t even take a meeting with something far more promising, sometimes. I feel I will never understand the VC mindset.

For what it’s worth, here are their perfunctory rationales:

https://versionone.vc/announcing-our-investment-in-cryptokitties-the-wildly-popular-blockchain-based-pet/

http://www.usv.com/blog/cryptokitties-1