
Introducing Red Planet Labs with $5M in funding - nathanmarz
https://medium.com/red-planet-labs/introducing-red-planet-labs-2a0304a67312
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driverdan
What's the point of this article? It sounds like you've started a company and
raised a round but don't have anything to show for it yet. Why should HN
readers care? Shouldn't this post be made once you have a product?

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platz
They want to hire clojure folks

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nathanmarz
Founder here. Excited to announce Red Planet Labs today. I'll try my best to
answer any questions here.

Also want to emphasize that we're a fully distributed company, and we're
hiring! If you're a strong Clojure programmer we would love to hear from you
(though we're open to non-Clojure folks as well).

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Thanks very much for your post. I'm intrigued, but to be honest, your post set
off a lot of warning bells in my head in that it talked about things very much
in generalities, but I still don't really know what you intend to do. Perhaps
that's just because you want to keep your cards close to your chest for now,
but how should I think of your company. Is it like Firebase but instead of
"consumer mobile" focused it is enterprise focused? How should I think of it
in comparison to the PAAS offerings from AWS, GCP, Hiroku, etc.

~~~
nathanmarz
We're revealing very little about the technology at the moment. For now, I can
say that it's a single tool upon which you can build nearly your entire
backend. It will be kind of like Hadoop or Storm in that it's infrastructure
that you deploy and then program your applications using a Java API.

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garry
I got to know Nathan 10 years ago when he was working at my YC batchmate's
startup Backtype. He created Apache Storm previously, and now with Red Planet
Labs, he's made something incredibly elegant - when I saw it, it was clear to
me this would be the backend to end all backends. There are some very powerful
abstractions here that will make developers a lot more powerful.

He's hiring and this is probably the best pure opportunity to write code that
will touch a lot of people. Talk to Nathan!

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avitzurel
Back in (I think) 2014/5 I worked on [http://docs.the-startup-
stack.com/](http://docs.the-startup-stack.com/).

My goal was to create a toolchain that is battle-tested production-ready and
pluggable to help companies deliver code faster and worry less about
operations.

I started it in my spare time and worked on it for about 3-4 months.

I still believe there is a HUGE need for this and that many companies are
solving the same problem over and over again. It's super expensive to build.

The challenge is catching companies at the right time. It needs to be as easy
to start as it is with Heroku and a Rails application BUT you should be able
to grow and scale up with batteries includes (unlike AWS).

Another challenge is the fragmentation of development
tools/frameworks/configurations and cycles.

Very interesting space.

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dr_win
For clojurists here, Nathan is the creator of the Specter[1] library. Which is
a brilliant idea and technical masterpiece, IMO.

Nathan, kudos and good luck!

[1]
[https://github.com/nathanmarz/specter](https://github.com/nathanmarz/specter)

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StevenLeRoux
My guess it would be an infrastructure platform where you serialize your code,
and you would provide all primitives as SDK to manage business logic, storage
and scheduling. Could we call it a batteries included FaaS platform? :)

You mentioned the service being accessible as a Java API. Would it be Java
only or other SDK (Python, Rust, Go, ...) could follow?

Also, how do you think to distribute the service? Full SaaS or OSS/SaaS?

Congrats for the funding and good luck for coming challenges!

~~~
nathanmarz
V1 will probably just be JVM only. We'll certainly look at supporting other
languages in the future.

The goal is to offer our product both on-prem and as a service.

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qarly
Interesting, so is the end product itself going to be a Clojure-based
developer tool? Would be huge news for the community.

~~~
nathanmarz
No, it will be a Java API. Unfortunately, making a tool Clojure only limits
your potential userbase too much.

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fuddle
I noticed this in the job description - "Three weeks of mandatory paid
vacation. Overworking not allowed!". Great idea, I have old colleagues who
wouldn't take holidays and had up to 3 months in holidays accrued.

~~~
nathanmarz
Thanks, I strongly believe this is the only rational vacation policy for a
company to have. Overworking destroys productivity, so preventing it is better
for the employee and the company!

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allworknoplay
Interesting policy! I've actually worked at a couple companies where I've felt
that management insisting we take vacations worked as a proxy for better
management and support. Vacation doesn't matter if the job is hellish.
Hopefully you've got that bit down too :)

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oldgun
> ... but multiple orders of magnitude cost reduction for building end-to-end,
> scalable software applications.

So I would guess it's toolchain and/or debugging/tracing tools for building
scalable distributed system?

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pisipisipisi
"better serverless?"

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oldgun
Could very well be.

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treis
I wish them the best of luck, but this seems like a difficult market to enter.
Lots of existing players and momentum towards containers and K8s. I'm
interested to see what their better mousetrap is.

~~~
nathanmarz
Can't reveal too much about the technology as of yet, but the key thing is our
technology is not incremental improvement. It's orders of magnitude
improvement to what currently exists. You're right that it's a crowded market,
but in our minds the market is currently offering horses while we'll be
offering Teslas :)

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cljcljclj
By "fully distributed company" do they mean worldwide or US-only ?

~~~
nathanmarz
We're open to candidates from anywhere in the world. The constraint is they'll
need to work hours that overlap with the rest of the team – we do daily
standups and 1-2 hours of pair programming each day. For candidates in a
significantly different timezone, that could mean working in the afternoon and
evening instead of a typical 9-5.

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nategri
* doesn't have anything to do with Mars *

* stops reading * *

Edit: By way of apology I will make an addendum more in line with the HN
aesthetic.

Calling your software startup Red Planet Labs is a bit like calling your
architecture firm Lunar Industries. We are too late in the age of space travel
for such 'whimsical' venture names to not be intrinsically confounding.

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here.

