
Academia.edu: looking for technical co-founder - RichardPrice

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RichardPrice
<http://www.academia.edu> is a Facebook/MySpace style site for academics. It
launched in alpha version last week.

It's a site where academics can create an academic webpage, and upload their
papers and research interests. You can see a sample webpage here:
<http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardPrice>

We have also built a paper-tracking engine that tracks the latest papers
uploaded to the web in a given field. You can see the results for Computer
Science here: <http://cs.academia.edu/categories/2/papers>

Academia.edu's founder is Richard Price. Richard's previous ventures include
<http://www.liveout.co.uk> and <http://www.peopleradar.com> (the #1 Facebook
API application - recent page views per day have been around 1 million).

Richard is looking for a technical co-founder to join Academia.edu. He's
looking for someone who:

\- Is super smart - awesome at problem-solving.

\- Is super driven - pushes themselves, and everyone else, to meet high
standards.

The site is built in Rails and C#. Knowledge of those is a plus, but not
essential.

The team is based in SF. We're offering a significant equity stake, and a
competitive salary. We want to be surrounded by super smart people, all of
whom are driving each other to create a great product for our users. We'll pay
out whatever equity it takes to hire the most brilliant people. If you are
interested, please contact richard@academia.edu.

~~~
jward
My big question is how did you manage to score a .edu domain?

~~~
RichardPrice
Before 2001, anyone could register a .edu domain; a handful of .edu domains
were registered - academia.edu was one of them.

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npk
This is an interesting idea. I wonder how you will grow it? Most University IT
departments are understaffed and overworked. Even though they _should_ provide
these services, they often can't. Are you planning to charge universities for
providing this service?

It seems to me as if academia.edu has plans to provide library services.
Personally, I don't like the commercialization of libraries, especially when
library scientists are coming up with excellent solutions (like
<http://xxx.lanl.gov/> .)

Either way, there are many directions academia.edu can go, must be an exciting
time for you. Good luck.

~~~
RichardPrice
Thanks for your thoughts - they're extremely interesting and I really
appreciate hearing them.

The site will be completely free for universities and academics. Our business
model is to sell advertising on the site.

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dyu
I go to McGill and our email addresses end with .ca, I think similarly for
some other universities in Canada. Interestingly, mcgill.edu does go to
mcgill.ca (not emails though, I tried).

~~~
chokosabe
I think its a cool idea. A long time in coming but just at right time. If
nothing, the site name is prime real estate.

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edawerd
are you funded? How to plan on paying a salary?

~~~
immad
How do the click through numbers work out nowadays. Peopleradar.com had 1m
pv/day assuming 1% click-through at 50c per click works out to... $5k per day.
That sounds like a lot of money, are my figures way off?

~~~
RichardPrice
PeopleRadar makes about 12 cents CPM with ValueClick - I'm going to try out
TribalFusion, as apparently they offer higher CPMs.

