CoStart is a newsletter by Where Women Belong bringing to you tech news, trends, jobs, and products to help you break into and succeed in tech.
Blog Post 📚
Intimidated by hackathons? Want some tips on how to get started? Read more about how to successfully tackle the hackathon environment and have a good and fruitful experience.
ALSO, Read this article to identify skills that will make you a good software engineer.
What is a 1x Engineer? Check out this list of qualities that make up a 1x Engineer.
Tech Trends 📈
ClassPass, finally a unicorn, raises $285 million in new funding
ClassPass launched in 2013 to give people an easier way to work out. The company partners with boutique fitness studios, letting users search through that inventory and book a class all from their smartphone. Since launch, ClassPass has implemented several different business models, trying to find the right unit economics.
Founder shoutout
Flying Taxis - the future is NOW.
Uber and Hyundai announced a partnership to develop a flying taxi service. Hyundai said that its concept vehicle would be able to ferry passengers around at speeds of up to 200 mph. Auto incumbents like Hyundai aren’t the only ones going after the space.
Visa is acquiring Plaid for $5.3 billion, 2x its final private valuation
Plaid develops financial services APIs. It is akin to what Stripe does for payments, but instead of facilitating payments, it helps developers share banking and other financial information more easily. Plaid raised $250 million at the end of 2018, with both Mastercard and Visa quietly participating in the round. Plaid has been doing well as a private company; no one pays twice a multi-billion-dollar valuation for a firm unless they want to keep it away from their core business, or a key competitor.
Resources ✨
Y Combinator
World’s premier startup incubator located in silicon valley, California. For those of you who don’t already know Y Combinator created a new model for funding early-stage startups.
Twice a year they invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups. The startups move to Silicon Valley for 3 months, during which we work intensively with them to get the company into the best possible shape. They have funded some of the most successful companies and they include Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Dropbox, Reddit and Twitch among many others.
If you are a college founder make sure to apply for their summer batch. YC LOVES young founders. An experience at an incubator building your own product surpasses traditional big company(Google or Microsoft) in terms of learning and growing any day!
Jobs 💸
YC Work at a Startup
One common application for hundreds of top engineering jobs. Get in early at a top YC-backed company. Let interested founders reach out to you or browse the directory. Hundreds of YC startups are hiring engineers right now.
In case you’re not sure which companies to apply to here is a list of YC Top Companies - 2019.
Tech talks 💻
Whether it’s brunch, business, or the beach, we’re all wondering – is it Instagrammable?
With a billion monthly active users, Instagram is one of the most engaged social networks. Ever wondered about the inner workings behind the most-used social media app right now? This article explains the key features of Instagram like upload/download/view photos, perform searches based on photo/video titles, generate and display a user’s News Feed.
Learn more about all the systems that power Instagram here. If you are interested in UX/UI case study of the app check out this UX case study. Follow Instagram Engineering on Medium for more tech insights.
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Hey there, We’re Debparna, Manasi and Shraddha, three women in tech in Software, Product and Business roles in startups and Fortune 500 companies. We looove helping other women break into tech. Help us spread the word!