Assembled | Software Engineer, Product Manager | San Francisco or New York | Full-time
Assembled helps customer support teams resolve issues with the right agent, providing the right answer, at the right time. Over 300 industry leaders, including Etsy, Stripe, and Georgia's Department of Human Services, use Assembled’s workforce management and GenAI-powered automation products to make optimal staffing decisions, improve productivity, and reduce wait times.
Assembled | Software Engineer, Product Manager | San Francisco or New York | Full-time
Assembled helps customer support teams resolve issues with the right agent, providing the right answer, at the right time. Over 300 industry leaders, including Etsy, Stripe, and Georgia's Department of Human Services, use Assembled’s workforce management and GenAI-powered automation products to make optimal staffing decisions, improve productivity, and reduce wait times.
really interesting direction! my company, assembled, builds software for customer support teams. i could imagine being on either end of this. on the one hand, we've built applications to run in the curated zendesk/salesforce sandbox. on the other hand, we get tons of requests to incorporate custom workflows or metrics natively in our application.
I think super highly of the Airplane team and what they've built. Startups are a tough journey, especially so over the last year. There's never a good way to shut down so the criticism isn't surprising and perhaps fair. But I doubt anyone's walking to the bank with glee. The best they can do is to try and do right by their team, their customers, and their investors. I hope they take another crack at it again in the future.
Assembled | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | Software Engineer / ML Engineer — New Products
Assembled is building software to transform and elevate customer support teams. We help industry leaders like Brooks Running, Stripe, and Zoom get the right person, at the right time, with the right answers in front of their end customers. More specifically, our workforce and BPO management products enable efficient staffing of support agents and BPOs (outsourcing partners), while our AI-powered agent assist speeds up responses and facilitates deeper coaching. Founded in 2018, we’ve raised $70m in funding from the likes of NEA, Emergence Capital, and Stripe itself.
Our New Products team - a 4-person group led by our co-founder & CTO - is focused on bringing Cal, our bot, to more of our customers and into public launch. Cal's currently in private beta with ~10 existing Assembled customers. This startup-within-a-startup operating cadence is described more deeply in this post: https://johnjianwang.medium.com/how-we-built-assembleds-new-...
This is compellingly well-written but wrong, in my opinion. There's been a steady trickle of articles on the top of Hacker News that make essentially the same argument: your odds of choosing a successful startup are miniscule (2% in this one). I think this does people considering startups a disservice.
The conditional chance of picking a successful company to join is way higher than 2%, or whatever the median success rate of all startups is. In particular, I think really intellectually curious, ambitious, hard-working people can, for the most part, identify each other. This is really different from reading about valuations or what other people think in the news, which leads to a lot more noise. If you meet a bunch of people at the company, you can assess the their caliber for yourself.
While it's not a perfect predictor of success, it's at least the case that such people are usually working on cool, worthy projects. Based on this, it's possible to get conviction on a group before their likely success becomes common knowledge—granted it's getting harder to do this because of how much money is floating around.
To put it another way, there are a handful of companies out there right now at Series A/Series B with a dense accumulation of talent. It's probably a reasonable bet to try and join them before they hit unicorn valuations, when room for growth is smaller. And in these cases, you could be #10-#40 at a relatively de-risked company and have a really great outcome.
On the flip side, if you even remotely enjoy learning and autonomy, working at Google/Apple/Amazon/etc is probably a great way to set yourself up for existential frustration. It's not even a great financial proposition. Even at $500k/yr, it's 20 years—a whole working life—to make it to $10m, the hypothetical number from the article. Even if your first startup doesn't make it after 2-3 years, you can try again a few times and still come out ahead. This is a classic pg argument—I can't remember which essay—but the point of a startup is to compress decades of working life.
Caveat: I happened to join a startup whose success changed my life both financially and in terms of career trajectory. I'm very biased. But this is also why I feel passionately that this article's advice is bad.
> Even at $500k/yr, it's 20 years—a whole working life—to make it to $10m
Just one nitpick here, FAANG companies have 2-5x’d in the last five years so with $250k of equity in this example would have had an actual comp of $750k-1.5m/year which would leave you set-for-life rich in just 5-10 years no matter which one you chose.
If you have access to a FAANG job and are optimizing for expected return you have to ask yourself - is it more likely this billion dollar company doubles in value or a seed stage startup that you have 0.5% of becomes a billion dollar company?
Perhaps, but it's possible to invest in Google via the stock market. I'm not sure it makes sense to bake in the stock market performance of a public company when considering value of their "equity." It seems like you should be using whatever your standard discount rate (S&P 500 or NASDAQ)?
FANG equity packages are an implicit buy option that lasts 4 years. $1 million dollars of options that lasts 4 years is very expensive and very lucrative.
Plus in startup land, your missing that equity half, so you can't take that money and go invest it in google like you could working at FANG.
Assembled | San Francisco, CA (Distributed until at least September 2021) | Full-time
Assembled (https://www.assembled.com/) builds tools to transform and elevate customer support. Our workforce management platform helps modern support teams save time and staff more efficiently. Our customers include companies like Stripe, Harry's, and GoFundMe. We're backed by top Silicon Valley investors, including Stripe itself.
Filling out questionnaires is such a time suck. It's extra painful because different companies use different standards (CAIQ, SigLite, VSAQ). Hopefully they solve the near-term questionnaire problem, but I'm also excited to see them eventually tackle the underlying problem—we want to prove to potential customers and users that we take security seriously, but right now it's prohibitively tedious and time-consuming to do so.
This was a great read. Allison Pickens is the former COO of Gainsight, so she definitely knows what she's talking about when it comes to Customer Success/Customer Support.
Think this topic doesn't get covered enough in the startup world, even though this is a direct quote from Sam Altman's Startup Playbook: "have great customer support."
Our co-founder & CTO wrote a post recently on how we're using RAG with Reciprocal Rank Fusion to automate support responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40524759
Our open roles include:
- Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/4957681004
- Product Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/assembled/jobs/5175807004
- And more: https://www.assembled.com/careers-at-assembled#openings