It also depends a lot on the person, I have a pretty high bar for "exceptional": https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-thing...

I challenge anyone to find better founding engineer compensation. Comparisons from YC: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/l/software-engineer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43004276

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

1) It's not a security, so it's not a share of the company. In order to be compliant with US law, we can only offer a utlity token 2) Crypto is a 10x better underlying data structure and architecture for the financial system: https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...

(author/fetchfox ceo)

I usually make a few different offers that have cash / token allocation tradeoffs. Higher token = lower cash, and lower cash makes you more like a founder.

Just to give a concrete example, for a recent very good candidate, the offer on the high token side was ~20% of the expect total allocation and 150k cash. There is also a higher cash option with lower token allocation.

For less exceptional candidates, the offers are a lower token allocation the equivalent cash.

I've seen this also, and I think its lame.

This is why at Fetchfox I explicitly use the phrase "crypto token" in the article and in all offers offers to prospective hires. It's a crypto token, so we call it that.

There are a lot of negative associations with the term, but using euphemisms just confuses people and makes it seem like you're afraid or that you're trying to trick them. I say, call a spade a spade, and call Voldemort "Voldemort".

I thought about setting up Fetchfox this way, and in some ways we are an employee run company. Everyone including me gets the same crypto token as our stake in the company's success. I get a higher stake as the founder/ceo, but some offers give the employee 0.5 for every 1 of my allocations, which I think is pretty fair.

Long term, it would be nice if I had <50% stake in the project, and it self-managed somehow, similar to crypto projects like Ethereum.

That said, the phrase "employee owned" has some bad connotations. It has an implication that you are not trying very hard to grow, or that you are somehow less committed to company, or that you are some sort of co-op. For these reasons I don't like use that phrase.

I have a few pragmatic reasons why I want to use a crypto token, instead of traditional instruments.

The first one is liquidity timing. With a crypto token, you can have 24/7 trading and liquidity from basically day 1. There is no need for second markets with high fees and complicated process. Just a 10 second Uniswap contract.

Second, you don't need to "manage a cap table". The token trades and moves freely on the blockchain, permissionlessly for anyone who wants to use it.

I have a long article at https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for... about why I think crypto rails are fundamentally better than the current banking system, from a computer science perspective.

The best example is how money transfers work in the current banking system. A money transfer is the canonical example of why you need transactions in a database: you want to deduct money from person A only of you successfuly transfer money to person B. But guess what: this is never executed as an actual atomic transaction, because A and B are usually at separate banks, in separate DB's.

Compare this to the blockchain: every single transfer is an atomic, universally auditable transaction. If you ignore all the noise and scams in crypto, this just makes 10x more sense to me as an engineer.

FetchFox as a company has two goals:

(1) Make the best possible AI scraper (2) Prove that crypto tokens are viable and better alternative to traditional company structures

It's lame that so much crypto stuff is caught up in scams that obscure the underlying value.

Draft doc with comments enabled: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VvxEQBRexuFJT5qCr9MCeZRV...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953506

Points: 8

# Comments: 2

FetchFox is looking for an exceptional engineer to join our team.

We’re making an AI powered web scraper. You can type what you want in English and it automagically handles all different site layouts and data schemas. It’s 10x easier than using CSS selectors and code, and it lets non-coders scrape also. Try it out at https://fetchfox.ai. However, if you’re applying for this job, you might like the Javascript library.

To install it, use npm:

    npm install fetchfox

    import { fox } from 'fetchfox';
    const results = await fox
      .init('https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575537')
      .extract({ company: 'Company name', url: 'URL of the company website' })
      .extract({ summary: 'Summarize this website in 10 words' })
      .run(null, (delta) => { console.log(delta.item) });
    console.log('Results:', results);

Our compensation is competitive. Our cash compensation is similar to YC founding engineer roles, but our equity compensation is unique. We offer at around an order of magnitude (10x) more than comparable companies. You can read more about this on our site: https://fetchfox.ai/a/founding-engineer-compensation

To apply or inquire, email jobs@fetchfoxai.com

FetchFox is an AI web scraper. It convert takes a prompt and a URL, and crawls that site to give structured data.

[edited to remove listing, as we are working through existing applicants at this time]

MIT license. It’s just one line of code to get started: ‘fox.run(“get data from example.com”)’

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41575685