Why You Should Join: Inside Edition
Suggestions from Josephine Chen (Sequoia), Chetan Puttagunta (Benchmark), Saam Motamedi (Greylock), Trevor Oelschig and Vedant Suri (General Catalyst), and Kevin Hartz (A*).
Some opportunities to consider:
Meter just raised a sizable round from Sam Altman and Lachy Groom after more than tripling revenue, square footage, and deployed networks. They are actively hiring for several functions, including a number of engineering, product, and GTM roles that aren’t yet publicly listed. Reach out to jobs@meter.com if you’re interested in any roles not on their website.
Etched has built a chip that can run transformers >10x faster than GPUs. They’re currently hiring Machine Learning Researchers, Compilers Engineers, Verification Engineers, Firmware Engineers, RL Design Engineers, interns, and more in Cupertino.
Welcome to “Why You Should Join,” a monthly newsletter highlighting early-stage startups on track to becoming generational companies. On the first Monday of each month, we cut through the noise by recommending one startup based on thorough research and inside information we’ve received from venture firms we work with. We go deeper than any other source to help ambitious new grads, FAANG veterans, and experienced operators find the right company to join. Sound interesting? Join the family and subscribe here:
Why You Should Join: Inside Edition
April 2024
As you know, the goal of this newsletter is to highlight promising early-stage companies to join, and to do so in a way that’s thorough, unbiased, and (occasionally) entertaining.
We do this because startups are risky business, and we think people deserve a quality resource to help figure out which ones are actually worth joining — one that’s less shallow, biased, and hype-driven than most of what’s out there.
Our philosophy in doing this has been to been to offer the opposite of one of those “Top Startups” lists — to us, it’s important to understand why a company might succeed before joining it, and we felt most resources recommending companies didn’t go deep enough to be helpful with that. By picking and deeply analyzing just one company each month (all with inflecting/breakout traction), we hoped to provide a better starting point for people exploring potential career moves. So far, this approach has worked well: over 20,000 of you have subscribed, and most of the companies we’ve covered are growing quickly — The Browser Company, Hadrian, and SmarterDx have all recently raised more money, Hebbia, Traba, and Etched have all doubled headcount in the past year, and Loop is set to more than 10x their payments volume between the start of last year and the end of this one.
But of course, there have also been tradeoffs.
The main one is that we’re unable to cover every company we want. At 6,000 words per piece and one piece per month, we just can’t get to every biotech, climate, aerospace, AI, and software company we’d like to. As a result, finding ways to share more companies while upholding our values is something that’s been top of mind for a while now.
This new series was one result of this.
Last November, we began turning to a few investors we respected to share their perspectives on some companies we were both excited about. The idea was that investors could offer a more direct perspective on the companies they work with, and that we could all benefit as a result.
People liked the first edition, so now we’re back.
This second edition features five companies in total, each backed by a different firm and each operating in a different industry. All are at an early stage, and all are growing quickly. At the bottom of each piece, we’ve added a few of our own thoughts on the company and why we respect the investor who’s recommending it.
This took a good amount of work from everyone involved, and we’d like to thank our contributors for participating.
We hope you enjoy :)
Why You Should Join Orb
The Modern Pricing Platform
In the evolving landscape of B2B SaaS, one truth has emerged with striking clarity: the rigidity of traditional pricing models no longer serves the dynamic needs of modern businesses. This realization isn't just theoretical; it's backed by the substantial shifts in strategies by companies like Cloudflare and AI companies pivoting towards usage-based pricing to more accurately reflect value delivery and manage compute costs.
At the heart of this transformation is the critical role of billing infrastructure. Historically, billing systems were constructed in a bygone era for static, straightforward pricing plans – the evolution being limited to licensed seat increases and decreases. However, as the frontier of SaaS pricing has expanded, these legacy systems have increasingly become a blocker to innovation. They not only stall a company's ability to iterate and innovate on pricing strategies but also compromise transparency and flexibility for customers.
With the adoption of usage-based and more nuanced pricing strategies nearly doubling within B2B SaaS in the past five years, it's clear that agility in billing systems is not just an added advantage; it's an imperative.
Against this backdrop enters Orb, born from a vision shared by Alvaro Morales and Kshitij Grover, who, through their experience with billing systems at Asana, understood the pivotal role a dynamic billing infrastructure plays in a company's growth. Their firsthand experiences echoed an increasingly loud narrative in the tech industry—that the tooling to evolve pricing and packaging can be a significant determinant to a company’s growth trajectory.
Greylock led Orb's Seed round and increased our investment in their Series A. The platform stands out not just for its technical capability but for its foundational philosophy—it's built by developers for developers, emphasizing ease of use, autonomy, and rapid value delivery.
The result is an end-to-end revenue solution that makes pricing and billing more agile for every stakeholder. It empowers enterprises to experiment iteratively with pricing, customizing plans, and gleaning actionable insights from real-time customer usage data. This is not just about providing a billing solution; it's about fostering a culture of innovation and adaptability.
This culture resonates deeply with my perspective on technology's role in addressing contemporary challenges. The ability to innovate, adapt, and respond to market demands is what sets apart the leaders from the laggards. The realms of billing and pricing require an understanding of data that’s at the heart of every modern business. And a team that approaches the problem with a first-principled, developer-first approach.
Orb has already begun to redefine the billing infrastructure for modern companies such as Perplexity, Vercel, Replit, and Pinecone. Their journey signals a transformative shift in how businesses approach billing—a shift from static, opaque systems to transparent, flexible, and growth-enabling data infrastructure.
In championing Orb, we're not just investing in a platform; we're investing in the future of how businesses unlock their revenue potential. It's a testament to what's possible when innovation meets necessity, echoing my belief in the power of technology to fundamentally improve how we operate and grow in the digital age.
For those intrigued by the prospect of shaping the next generation of software businesses focusing on dynamic pricing and billing, Orb's journey represents an exciting frontier. You should consider joining the Orb team—they are hiring.
— Saam Motamedi, General Partner at Greylock
Orb is hiring talented software engineers and product managers - if you’re interested, reach out to their team here. We also recommend checking out the rest of Saam’s portfolio at Greylock. He has a remarkable track record and has previously partnered with Abnormal Security, Snorkel AI, Adept AI, and Cresta.
Why You Should Join MindsDB
Customize AI with Enterprise Data
MindsDB is one of the fastest growing open source projects that is enabling developers to integrate AI and their enterprise data into their applications. MindsDB Cloud, which will be released to the public soon, will allow developers to bring the power of MindsDB open source to the cloud and will allow developers to move into production quickly.
AI will help every company thrive, but off-the-shelf, generic AI usually doesn’t completely meet their needs. The core value proposition of MindsDB is that with MindsDB’s nearly 200 integrations, any developer can create AI customized for their purpose, faster, and more securely. Their AI systems will constantly improve themselves — using companies’ own data, in real-time.
MindsDB empowers organizations to harness the power of AI by abstracting AI models as Generative AI Tables. AI tables, introduced by MindsDB, abstract AI models as virtual tables so you can simply query AI models for predictions. These tables are capable of learning from the input data and generating predictions from the underlying model upon being queried. With MinsdDB, you can join multiple AI tables (that abstract AI models) with multiple data tables (that provide input to the models) to get all predictions at once. This abstraction makes AI highly accessible, enabling development teams to use their existing SQL skills to build applications powered by AI.
Founded by Jorge Torres and Adam Carrigan, MindsDB has been deployed 100,000+ times and is backed by a large community with over 700 contributors. Some of the largest companies in the world to the fastest moving startups use MindsDB to get into production with AI quickly.
— Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner at Benchmark
MindsDB is hiring talented engineers and designers for their product and marketing teams - if you’re interested, reach out here. We also recommend checking out the rest of Chetan’s portfolio at Benchmark. Chetan has a stellar track record and has previously partnered with MongoDB, Elastic, and MuleSoft.
Why You Should Join Privy
Giving All Users Simple Access to the Decentralized Web
Privy is now a key part of the default stack for developers building delightful consumer applications in crypto. Crypto will only realize its potential if we can make it more accessible and useful to mainstream users. What stands out most about this team is the level of ambition they bring to the space. They are a hard-charging, fast-moving team and have been able to create real value in a tough market because they believe (and we do too) that the opportunity to change the web through crypto is unique. Working at Sequoia, we see a lot of ambitious founders, Privy is a world-class team building a leadership position in real-time.
Privy now powers access to on-chain systems and onboarding for OpenSea, Zora, Blackbird, Friendtech and Courtyard among many others. In the past 13 months, their systems have onboarded 2.5M users and handled more than $100M in transactions.
The company’s broader mission is to help empower users on the web: making it easier for devs to build intuitive, user-respecting apps, and for users to control their identity online. Crypto offers core features that help shape this future and easing onboarding into this space is just the start of co-founders Henri Stern and Asta Li’s ambitions—they want to help build a stack that enables the future of user identity.
At the heart of their current product is a simple library that makes it easy to add beautiful authentication flows and powerful embedded wallets to any app. The setup takes only 9 minutes and helps get more users onboarded to web3 products faster. As a member of the Privy team, you get to bring web2 convenience—like sign in with email and social—to web3 products with strong privacy guarantees. This not only increases conversions dramatically, but also increases an app’s potential user base. Privy makes the hard things easy, allowing developers to focus on their product.
The Privy library integrates easily with ethers.js, web3.js and wagmi, to help scale products across all devices, wallets and browsers. Customers use Privy to deliver a world-class experience with highly customizable modals, deep web3 integrations, simple interfaces and easy-to-use out of the box flows.
Security is a top priority at Privy. Threat modeling and defense in depth are built into product requirements. Its robust infrastructure has passed rigorous security reviews and pentests, and is retested on an ongoing basis. Privy’s self-custodial architecture puts users in control of their keys, without sacrificing usability.
The Privy team has diverse experiences across web3, fintech and self-driving and have reshaped user experiences and data infrastructure on the web. They are keenly attuned to the trade-offs between convenience and decentralization online, and strive to build opinionated yet nuanced software that creates a path forward for developers. In that sense, Privy offers a rare blend of deep, technical work building a developer SDK for a highly technical audience, and true real-world impact and UX considerations, since that SDK ultimately delivers user-facing experiences. It’s a unique blend that requires you to flex muscles across technical excellence and product intuition. Privy is a global, distributed company with a core hub in New York City. Their hybrid model is remote-friendly with a culture that believes great work can happen anywhere, but also values creating a vibrant in-person culture.
I have had the privilege of working with Henri and Asta since their Seed round in 2021. Last November, Privy raised an $18M Series A led by Paradigm, with participation from Sequoia Capital, BlueYard Capital, Archetype and others. Privy is using this funding to grow the team and continue to drive the development, security and scalability of their onboarding toolkit and identity platform. If you are passionate about reshaping the crypto stack and the future of the web, Privy is hiring!
— Josephine Chen, Partner at Sequoia
Privy is hiring talented fullstack, backend, and security-focused software engineers - if you’re interested, reach out to their team here. We also recommend checking out the rest of Josephine’s portfolio at Sequoia — she’s one of the sharpest and most thoughtful investors we know.
Why You Should Join General Biological
The Future of Biomanufacturing
The chemicals industry is responsible for nearly everything you touch – from plastics and solvents, to food additives and more. It is also massive: annual sales are roughly $5T worldwide, with north of 50 companies doing $10B+ in annual revenue.
But the business is fraught with structural inefficiencies. Traditional manufacturing processes suffer from low yields – half the input carbon ends up as waste or in the atmosphere – and require extreme temperatures and pressures. The sector is the largest user of industrial electricity, and consumes 1⁄3 of every barrel of crude oil. Toxic factories, plagued by costly explosions and health scandals, are located far from users, driving massive distribution costs (~20% of revenue). Yet the industry has seen virtually no disruption in its 100 year old history.
General Biological — GB — is rewriting this. The team has developed a first-of-kind technology stack that combines engineered microorganisms, novel reactor hardware, and continuous manufacturing to produce chemicals from renewable resources such as sugar, not oil. Their processes run at room temperature, with nearly pound-for-pound yields, and no hazardous waste. The high yields and ultimate process simplicity allows for low CapEx, modular plants that can be built fast and placed close to users. Taken together, GB’s breakthrough manufacturing approach – safe, simple, distributed – nearly triples margins in some of the world’s largest markets, outcompeting fossil incumbents who have been unwilling to innovate. Indeed, GB’s most important products may never be the chemicals they make, but rather the factories themselves.
In short: GB is ushering forward the era of the biorefinery, doing for bioproduction what ExxonMobil did for petroleum a century ago. The team combines experiences in chemistry, biotech, hardware, and software to introduce the world to what biomanufacturing will be. If you’d like to be on the forefront of the biggest shift in the material economy since crude oil and work with a team with world-changing chemistry (!), reach out.
— Kevin Hartz, General Partner at A*
General Biological is hiring talented molecular biologists, chemists, and chemical engineers - if you’re interested, reach out to abhi@generalbiological.com. We also recommend checking out the rest of Kevin’s portfolio at A. Besides being a seed investor in Airbnb and Pinterest, Kevin is himself an experienced operator - he was previously Co-Founder and CEO of both Eventbrite and Xoom (acq. Paypal).
Why You Should Join Tractian
Empowering Industry Workers with AI-Assisted Maintenance Solutions
Manufacturing is the heart of the global economy. While technology provides huge, compounding advantages to those with access to software, hardware and data, manufacturing professionals have been largely left behind. Once overlooked, innovation in this space is accelerating as more and more attention is paid to the ‘real economy’ and for good reason, as manufacturing alone constitutes 12% of US GDP.
The question – “when should I take my machine offline to conduct maintenance on it?” seems simple, but in reality involves several complex trade-offs. Manufacturing downtime includes both planned downtime due to scheduled asset maintenance as well as unplanned downtime due to human error, equipment failure etc. The impact of unplanned downtime is massive – for Fortune 500 firms alone, the cost is ~$1.5T or 11% of their annual revenues. Today, the majority of plants rely on reactive maintenance meaning they only perform repairs after equipment fails which further exacerbates the issue of unplanned downtime.
The unique combination of an inspired team with domain expertise, deep customer empathy, and world-class engineering talent led the Tractian team to set out to eliminate unplanned downtime and provide technicians with comprehensive oversight of their operations. Always a step ahead, Tractian’s founders were immersed in the world of maintenance far before the founding of the company in 2019. As the son of a factory worker and maintenance technician, Igor Marinelli set out with co-founders Gabriel Lameirinhas and Leonardo Vieira to revolutionize the role of the maintenance professional by equipping them with technology.
Through intelligent sensors affixed to industrial assets, Tractian can collect real-time data such as vibration, temperature and current that is used to identify operating issues and predict mechanical and electrical failures. Rather than simply alerting operators when values deviate from the norm, the company leverages AI to understand exactly why values have deviated and articulates prescriptive actions operators can take to fix issues and prevent downtime.
Tractian counts Kraft Heinz, Procter & Gamble, Caterpillar, American Wood Fibers and several others as happy customers. The company has seen incredible growth over the past year and has no signs of slowing down anytime soon. In fact, they’re just getting started. With nearly 300 employees spanning offices in three countries, Tractian’s streamlined hardware-software solutions are no doubt making a global impact. By harnessing the power of data and AI, Tractian is not only revolutionizing the role of the maintenance professional but also reshaping the future of manufacturing, ensuring a more efficient, productive, and resilient global economy.
— Trevor Oelschig, Managing Director at General Catalyst and Vedant Suri, Investor at General Catalyst
Tractian is hiring talented software engineers, hardware engineers, and GTM professionals for their teams in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil - if you’re interested, reach out to to their team here. We also recommend checking out the rest of Trevor and Vedant’s portfolios at General Catalyst. Trevor has a great track record and has previously partnered with Aura, Fivetran, and Contentful.
Conclusion
If you’re open to new roles or just curious about their products, MindsDB, Orb, Privy, General Biological, and Tractian are all worth checking out.
In case you missed it, last quarter’s edition featuring suggestions from Sequoia’s Bogomil Balkansky, Index’s Shardul Shah, 8VC’s Alex Kolicich, Neo’s Ali Partovi and Suzanne Xie, and Pear’s Arash Afrakhteh is worth reading through as well.
We hope you’re enjoying the start of spring. See you next month!
Thanks to Josephine, Chetan, Saam, Trevor, Vedant, and Kevin for their help with this piece.
In case you missed our previous releases, check them out here:
And to make sure you don’t miss any future ones, be sure to subscribe here:
Finally, if you’re a founder, employee, or investor with a company you think we should cover please reach out to us at ericzhou27@gmail.com and uhanif@stanford.edu - we’d love to hear about it :)
Hey Eric and Usman! I could've sworn that somewhere I saw a link to join a talent pool you guys maintain if we're interested in joining any startups you cover. I can't find that link any more though. Do you know what I'm talking about, or maybe I'm hallucinating? 😵💫