Nowmov (YC 2010W) - The Oracle

Did you know that people spend more time watching video than they spend on all other media, combined? Yet watching online video accounts for less than a tenth of the total -- why? Because the current online video discovery experience is terrible. Bad as discovery is now, it's only going to get worse; every minute, more than a day's worth of video is uploaded to Youtube alone.

Nowmov is dedicated to solving this problem. Our current product is an endless stream videos, ordered by instantaneous popularity; we have big plans to become an automatic TV guide for online videos -- the only place people will go to find the video they want to watch.

Our founders -- all engineers -- are David, a serial entrepreneur and web expert, and two ex Apple employees: Thomas, who was responsible for Apple's H.264 implementation; and James, who built the video processing systems for the iTunes Store. We are Y-Combinator graduates (Winter 2010) and angel funded. Our seed round was lead by SV Angel.

You would be leading our personalization effort -- finding the needles in the haystack, using MATH, if necessary. Pick your technology; our backend stack is Rails, Postgres and Redis, but we're not dogmatic about it. We have hard problems, and we're more interested in getting things done than anything else.

Here are some of the questions we need your help answering:

- the majority of our users and videos are new; what can we do to minimize the cold start problem?

- is there anything specific about video that would help?

- if we had a user's social graph, how might that help in generating a personalized stream of video?

You are:

- experienced in the creation of machine learning/personalization systems;

- comfortable with teaching your coworkers stuff they don't know;

- familiar with if not expert in modern web frameworks (Django, Rails, &c.);

- unafraid of pushing your code to the live server. On a Friday afternoon.

We are:

- generous with compensation and benefits, including early-employee equity;

- flexible about work hours;

- happy to buy you whatever equipment you need to get your job done;

- working in a great loft-style office in SOMA, a block from CalTrain;

- right upstairs from the best fried chicken and coffee in San Francisco.

It'd help if:

- you've been frustrated by video discovery;

- you want to take over the world;

- we hear from you soon.

Please email us at jobs+hn@nowmov.com with an intro about yourself and a list of cool stuff you have built.