Wow, did the Ask HN on "what is the YC W11 social network startup that's hiring called" get deleted? There were at least a dozen comments on it last night, it was high up the front page, and now I can't find it.
If this is what you're talking about https://hackertimes.com/item?id=2020416 it's still on the front page. It never had any comments though. The one thing I really think should be changed on HN is this job posting with no comments nonsense.
I just looked at that site. It looks clever (but it could use some prettying up).
Why didn't they mention their name in the job posting, then? I would totally work for them, were it not for the fact that I already have a job and a skillset completely orthogonal to anything they might want.
They pretty clearly are in some form of stealth mode. My guess, from looking at their site is that they have some competitors. Go through the schools enabled and there are some pretty glaring omissions. Quite a few very large state schools that are not listed while very small schools surrounding them are included (look at California, Missouri, Florida and Georgia).
This is just speculation, but it would be my guess that they are either dealing with a few smaller competitors or one big one.
If they have competitors, their competitors are 100% certain to be aware of them. And the fact that they're hiring might be interesting to a competitor, but not really actionable in any way. So why stealth?
Perhaps, but it's awfully hard to keep your existence secret from your competitors when you apparently have nonzero traction in other universities in the area.
That's the point. You build up traction in the surrounding area to break into the campuses where there is competition.
(again this is just speculation)
They're already in plenty of big and small campuses, though still missing a few big ones.
For instance in California they've got Berkeley, Davis, UCSD and Stanford, although they're missing UCLA, UCSB and all the other (smaller, I think) UCs. I haven't looked at other states. There doesn't seem to be any particular rhyme or reason to which universities they're not in, so I guess it's just that nobody at UCLA has bothered to click the "I want it here" button yet.
