Cloudability is a Portland/Bay Area based startup that is changing the way companies measure, monitor and analyze their cloud based infrastructure. With a growing team that works closely together, we move fast and enjoy what we do. Over 7,000 companies across the globe use our platform today. Come join the fun and build something big with us.
JOB DESCRIPTION
As part of Cloudability’s Executive Team, the Vice President of Engineering oversees our growing team of software engineers. This is a hands-on role, where you will be using your experience as a software engineering manager in a rapidly growing environment to lead the engineering function, mentor staff and expand the team. In addition, you will use your experience solving significant and complex technical problems to serve as the strategic technical leader for Cloudability, partnering closely with the rest of our executive team as we continue to build great products our customers will love.
QUALIFICATIONS
What we are Looking for:
• Demonstrated success as a software engineering manager in a rapidly growing environment, with the ability to lead and grow an engineering team in multiple locations.
• Software engineering chops – you value how code is written and enjoy teaching design patterns, OOP, etc.
• Significant experience delivering web applications/services.
• Demonstrated success working with cloud-based infrastructure services.
• Big data and distributed systems domain experience (i.e. Hadoop, map reduce patterns, processing/warehousing/analytics, data replication, distributed system design, etc.)
• Experience utilizing agile methodologies.
• Familiarity with and ability to manage DevOps.
• Fluent in Ruby/RoR or ability to pick it up quickly (other languages a plus).
• Great communicator at all levels of the organization.
• Isn’t allergic to Javascript or the “front end”.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
What we’re offering:
• A competitive full-time salary and stock options. We want you to be excited to be a part of a startup, not starve.
• Fully paid health care, dental and vision insurance for you and your family.• Optional FSA debit card to cover non-standard medical expenses.• Flexible paid leave time.
• Friday Happy Hour and other fun company events.
Contact Mat (at) Cloudability dot com if you are interested.
Our Investment in 3D Robotics
We’ve long felt that machines are taking over the world. Given the rapid cost decreases in sensory components (brought upon, inpart, by the proliferation of smart phones and other mobile devices), it’s easier and cheaper than ever to construct hardware that can interact with the outside world in a fully or partially autonomous way.
Over the past few years, we’ve kept close attention to one particular market of interest: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We believe that the applications are nearly endless, but many have been cautious due to market and regulatory concerns. Early companies produced toys that had some basic ability to do minimal autonomous activities. They were also expensive. Even today, most of them do nothing more than fly around a camera and help a pilot not to crash. Although even then the results aren’t always pretty as evidenced by this wedding photographer drone running into the head of the groom.
On the regulatory front, the FAA has been incredibly slow (even for the government) in adopting new rules to govern UAVs. The FAA has been asked by Congress several times to open up the skies to these technologies, but has been dragging its feet. Despite this,we believe the timing is right for mass adoption of this technology and that the applications are valuable even before the FAA acts on this issue.
3D Robotics (3DR) is producing the hardware and software behind many of UAVs on the market today. Whether they are hobbyists or commercial uses, 3DR is building the core technology behind these vehicles along with developing the largest open source community in the field. The company is also creating its own line of vehicles as well. 3DR is targeting uses that don’t need FAA approval and where people are willing to pay substantial money for the data acquired by UAVs.
The company was founded by Chris Anderson and Jordi Munoz. We are very excited to work with them.
Our Investment in LeadPages
We’re excited to announce today our investment in LeadPages. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota (our first MN investment!), LeadPages is the easiest way to create and split-test landing pages, launch pages, sales pages, webinar registration pages, and other conversion pages.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the web for generating customer leads. With hundreds of thousands of businesses competing for the attention of consumers across the web, the importance of web marketing continues to increase. There are numerous ways that companies drive traffic to their websites, and a large industry has evolved around the best marketing practices to drive that traffic through better content and marketing strategies and effective use of ad spending on things such as Google AdWords. However much less attention has been paid to the pages where those ads drive customers, and what they’re asked to do once they land on those pages.
LeadPages was developed to address this problem by enabling publishers to quickly and easily create effective landing pages that better capture customer information and convert website visitors into potential customers. To accomplish this, LeadPages has a library of customizable landing pages designed for a variety of customer interaction types – from signing up for a webinar, downloading a free whitepaper, to simply capturing names and contact information. Like anything related to online advertising, there is a massive amount of expertise involved in creating an effective landing page. Best practices not only change by industry but also by geography, target demographic, and a host of other factors. And because preferences change over time as people become exposed (and over-exposed) to today’s designs, these best practices are constantly changing. Because LeadPages captures data on every interaction across their network of pages (LeadPages generally hosts customer pages on their own network), they are in a unique position to help their customers make data-driven decisions on the best landing page for their specific purpose and to allow them to continue to optimize for traffic conversion over time.
In addition to the easy creation of landing pages, LeadPages also allows their customers the ability to push customer information generated through LeadPages to a number of different platforms – for example CRM systems and email marketing platforms. This functionality is quite powerful to marketers, who generally have to manually enter information into various systems, or deploy engineering resources to automate the data integration between systems.
Ultimately, LeadPages’ aspiration is to power better marketing across the web. We’re excited to have Clay, Tracy, Simon and the entire LeadPages team join the Foundry family in pursuit of this goal.
Foundry Group Contributes $100,000 To EFCO For Boulder Flood Relief
When we started Foundry Group in 2007, part of our strategy was to build a national venture capital firm based in Boulder, Colorado. Brad and Seth already lived here; Ryan and Jason made the move from San Francisco to Boulder. Since then we’ve all called Boulder home.
While only about 30% of our investments are in Colorado, we love this place. Living here bring us both personal and professional joy every day. We believe Boulder is one of the best places on the planet to live and to build startup companies.
Along with many others, the last week has been devastating. We are lucky – none of us were displaced from our homes. We’ve got lots of property damage and plenty of leaks and water puddles but all of us are under roofs and dry today.
Many of our friends and neighbors have been less fortunate. Some lost their homes. Others are stranded – either isolated in the mountains at their homes or stuck downtown unable to get to their homes. Basements and first floors are destroyed. Roads are impassable. Backyards are now ponds. Some homes are completely gone.
When we co-founded Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado in 2007, our goal was to help build a significant non-profit for the Boulder area funded by the success of the new companies coming out of our startup community. The goal was to create a way to give back, continually, and over a long period of time, to a community that enables us to exist.
We are incredibly proud of our community. And we are very saddened by the stresses so many of our friends and neighbors are under. We hope our gift will motivate others like us – who are in a position to contribute directly – to financially support the flood relief efforts going on right now.
If you’d like to join EFCO, or contribute a check directly to the flood relief efforts, just email brad@foundrygroup.com or seth@foundrygroup.com and we’ll get you connected to the right folks.
Our Investment in Kato
We recently led an investment in Kato. We are excited to be an investor in another great company that has gone through the TechStars Boulder program. Brad will be joining the board.
Kato has a straightforward goal – solve the world’s enterprise messaging problem. In the last decade, there has been a proliferation of efforts to address real-time communications in the enterprise. The current state of play is a total mess, especially when you try to go across organizations. The default remains our trusty friend email, which ends up being a soul-crushing way to try to deal with real-time communications.
Imagine a single unified messaging system that was browser-based, mobile-based, and native on each platform. This unified messaging system allows you to create public or private rooms, and invite anyone to them – whether they are part of your organization or outside your organization. Each room has text search across the entire corpus of data in the room going back to the beginning of time. Every user in the system has a unique id, so it doesn’t matter which rooms they are in, or which organization they are in – they all appear in one list that is immediately accessible to you. Now, include integration with virtually any system that has an API, or communicates real-time data, such as Asana, Github, WordPress, Zendesk, and many others and integrate that into the messaging system. Add in file sharing, audio calls, SMS, and video conferencing – both real-time and asynchronous.
This is what Kato has set out to create. We are having a blast working with them. Come check out Kato and help us define the future of real-time communication.
Welcome Andrei, Peter, and team to the Foundry family!
