AI dating assistant + teen hacker confessions + architectural figma = ???
Meet your embodied companion, and statups with 20+ open jobs!
Goooood Morning Sunshine,
Today’s newsletter is packed with sweet treats:
An invite to build embodied AI companions
Plenty of remote jobs
Two startups with 20+ open jobs
Before we get started… my team at a16z speedrun is building a job discovery platform. We need your opinions to get started!
Company spotlight: Tolan
Quinten Farmer sold his fintech company Even to Walmart in 2022 for $300 million. But he and his colleagues were having such a good time, they didn’t want to say goodbye. ❤️
So they created Tolan. What is a Tolan?
A Tolan is an embodied companion that talks to you like a friend
Your Tolan looks different than other Tolans
Over time, your Tolan develops its own personality, an understanding of you, and memories with you
Quinten is currently hiring engineers and product designers. I asked:
Who do you want to hire?
The right person for us is at the intersection of three different circles:
People who are conceptually interested in what it means to form healthy relationships with AI
People who want to work on fun consumer stuff. (Turns out it’s really fun to make things for people that just bring them joy)
People who want to solve fun technical challenges
Your application instructions are so vague! It’s just an email address.
It’s so annoying, right? Our invitation to email is trying to capture people who can send us something interesting: Hey, this is who I am, here’s an interesting thing I’ve done, and here’s why it’s relevant to your company
We’re getting a lot of LLM-generated slop. You really would be better just writing two lines that are clearly from you rather than the pages or paragraphs of LLM generation. That’s what we’re trying to capture: someone who has an interesting point of view, has made something interesting that’s relevant to us, and wants to talk.
Beyond technical skill, anything else you want to see?
Someone who’s really deep on using this incredible new technology in a way that feels authentic and relevant to them. That could be a novelist, that could be a student, that could be an engineer. Many different people can do that, which is what makes this technology so cool.
We hired an intern this summer (and I did not expect to hire an intern) because he had a great cold email. He had made the first AI student body candidate at his high school, a candidate who was 100% LLM generated. He really grappled with a small-scale version of building an LLM system. He wasn’t saying, Hey, I built this thing with millions of users, but he had to think about how to tune a model to express the personality of the candidate.
Open jobs
Goodfire is an AI interpretability research company, which basically means making trustworthy AI systems. They’re hiring for a variety of roles—including biz dev and R&D—in their Telegraph Hill office in SF. They’re also taking general interest applications, so if you’re interested in the mission, it’s worth going for. They announced a $50 million series A earlier this year.
Hybrid AI law firm Crosby is hiring engineers, plus some folks in product, sales, ops, and legal. All jobs are based in their NYC office.
Blacksmith is building a CI cloud from scratch — making GitHub Actions run 2× faster, cheaper, and actually fun. They just pulled in ~$10M (GV backed) and are hiring across Engineering (Product, Systems), GTM (AE, SDR, Ops), and Business Ops. 🚀 Offices in NYC & SF, in-person and hybrid gigs. (their website also has mad drip, respect)
🚨 (REMOTE) - Metalbear 🐻 is making production debugging not just survivable, but actually usable. Their open-source tool, mirrord, lets devs run local processes as if they were inside prod — no redeploys, no breaking teammates. Fortune 500s are already paying up, and now they’re staffing up: Senior Software Engineers, Team Leads, Account Execs (NA + APAC), and Solution Engineers across EMEA, APAC, and beyond. Many of these are remote/global.
Scientific superintelligence platform Lila Sciences has 50 open jobs at their office in Cambridge, MA. They announced a whopping $235 million series A this month and they’re ready to grow, baby, grow.
🚨 (REMOTE) - MagicSchool, the generative-AI platform for schools, has 20 open roles across engineering, product, sales, marketing. And guess what? They’re all ~*~*ReMoTe*~*~
Numeral is taking the dread out of sales tax — think full-stack automation so you never miss a filing or rate change again. They’ve built a platform powering e-commerce & SaaS scale. They’re hiring across engineering, product, growth & ops. Based in SF.
🚨 (REMOTE) - Universal stablecoin platform Mo is hiring remote workers in engineering, product, people ops, and more. A recent $40 million series B brings their total backing to $100 million.
🚨 (HYBRID) - Craft is building a notes/tasks/calendar/docs platform that may someday rival the Schmoogle and Schmicrosoft suites out there. They need new hires in engineering, design, and CX. Most of the Craft team is in Budapest, Hungary, with others scattered around Europe.
🚨 (REMOTE) - Sunrise Robotics, which is building robots for manufacturing, is looking for a slate of engineers, including an AI research engineer and robotics software engineer. They’re also ready for a GTM field project manager. These jobs are remote and work hours are Central European Time +/- 3.
Cardless has built a native credit card infrastructure (think branded credit cards). They need new folks in their SF offices. Cardless already boasts clients like Coinbase, TAP Air Portugal, Qatar Airways, and Alibaba.com. Despite announcing a $60 million series C recently, they run a very lean team.
Paris-based Rayon calls itself the Figma for architectural design. They’re growing their team—currently 15 people—by adding engineers, product leaders, a growth marketer, and a few interns.
Toby talks
I like this outreach tip from James Buckhouse at Outsider Insight:
When cold emailing someone, you only make it to the next step if they give you a “yes” so you need to design your request so that they can say yes to what you are asking. First, let’s look at failure mode:
Don’t ask: Hey you, can you give me a job?
Failure mode: (too much, too soon)
Don’t ask: “Can I pick your brain?”
Failure mode: (ewww gross, waste of time, why? to what end?).
Don’t ask: “Can I be your intern?”
Failure mode: (too much, too soon)
Do ask:
Dear James Buckhouse,
I’m researching product development in the AI era and really enjoyed the articles you wrote on Coding Backwards and MCP. I’m interested in learning more about how product and design leaders are implementing these new approaches for their teams and would like to hear more about how you are putting these ideas to work at Sequoia.
Any chance for a 15 min zoom? Required reading
Dropout’s Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping the internet weird
What the H1-B changes mean for tech workers
Jailhouse confessions of a teen hacker
How bad science is seeping into LLMs
Uhhhh … Facebook is getting an AI dating assistant?
That’s it for this week… Your totally embodied companion,
Jordan