We don’t need better selfies. We need technology to make the world a better place.
Here’s your chance to spend 10 weeks creating that technology by becoming a SolveFor{s} Hacker-In-Residence. You can apply below.
The Challenge
There are millions of people for whom the American Dream is getting more and more elusive, and these people are underserved by technology. Significance Labs brings together tech’s brightest minds to build products for 75 million low income Americans.
150 product leaders and entrepreneurs applied for our inaugural SolveFor{s} Fellowship. Six of them have been selected to lead product teams. Those fellows are not just looking for talented developers but for potential CTOs and co-founders, people who can help them to create a product from scratch, which can truly make someone’s life better.
Between June 9th and August 15, Hackers-In-Residence will work full-time with a fellow to identify and validate an idea, choose a technology stack, prototype and test features and create an MVP which has user-traction. To make that testing easier, we have 200+ users from different backgrounds ready to give feedback. We hope that each project will take on a life of its own after the program ends. It will be up to you and your team to determine a post-program vision.
Who You Are
- An experienced engineer: you’ve built things that really work from the ground up, tools and applications that other people use.
- You write quick, concise clean code that is as much of a pleasure to read as it is to run.
- You are comfortable working across the whole technology stack, front to back and everything in between.
- You know when to write tests and when to write experiments and are regularly the most productive member of your team.
- You know that deleting code can be just as powerful as creating it.
- User focused, you expect to iterate on the product in response to what works and what doesn’t. Maybe the best user interface for the user are text messages instead of mobile web, maybe we need to build a kiosk.
- You are comfortable across a range of platforms and languages, but are an expert in a few. You like to learn new languages in your free time, and have built a project in a new language just to explore.
- Preferred Languages/Frameworks: Linux/Opensource, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Rails, Sinatra, Django, Flask, Node, Express, Angular, Ember
- Preferred Experience: Mobile web a plus, web applications, third party APIs, particularly social and telephony (twilio etc)
Potential Project Ideas
- Could behavioral economics inform the design of credit union savings products that target families living paycheck to paycheck?
- Could wearable technology that counts words heard (a key indicator of cognitive development) be used to improve quality of early childhood education?
- Could innovative service models (on-demand, marketplace-based) help low-income parents respond to unpredictable needs for childcare?
- Could mobile technology be used to make the parole system cheaper, more effective, and more just?
You can see more potential ideas here.
Support
- Co-Working space in downtown Brooklyn.
- Expert engineers, entrepreneurs, UI and UX people as mentors
- Local college interns to help with the details.
- At the end of the cycle, we will do a demo day with VC’s, foundations, government organizations, etc. to help take the product and team to the next level.
- An honorarium to pay your rent and bills.
Honorarium
We think about getting paid in terms of two important ideas: the “equality clause” and the “single working mom clause”.
The equality clause is that everyone at Significance Labs makes about the same amount of money: founders, fellows, hackers, designers. The exception to the equality clause is that we want to pay the people who we ask to share their lives and experiences with us - including many single moms - the most. To find out more about how we think about money, you can read our blog post about it.
Timeline
This is a full time engagement, starting immediately through August 15th.
We hope the project you will be working on will have a life of its own after the end of the program. It will be up to you and your team to determine a post-program vision.
We’ll be starting conversations on a rolling basis and will have an answer for you within a week. We know great people have lots of options and will need some time to wind those down, and we can be flexible and creative in helping you with any timeline related questions.