Today was a fun day, as we finally put a name and public face on our new startup – Wildcard. For the past 5 months we’ve been working without a real name, without a public facing site, and without really announcing to the world what we’ve been up to. While it’s necessary in the early days to spend time thinking internally, figuring out exactly what your mission is and how to communicate it, there comes a time when you need to step out into the world.

So what are we working on? My co-founder, Jordan, describes it really well in his blog post…

We are building the definitive card platform for the mobile web. Every site in the world, every action you want to take, all the things that are hard to do on your phone but easy on the desktop web…they can and will live inside of cards…and we are building that reality.

 

We’re designing the easiest and most intuitive way for users to find mobile cards on their phone. Every brand on earth, actionable in a consistent form. All of the power and breadth of the legacy web, with the simplicity and functionality of concise native apps.

 

I suggest you read his entire post to get the full context of why this is necessary right now. But hopefully, if you’ve ever felt the pain of trying to take action on the mobile web – to buy a pair of sneakers, or look up the amtrak schedule from Philadelphia to New York, or book a flight, or make a dinner reservation – then you realize that there must be a better way. We believe that interactive cards are the better way, and we’ve been working hard on building a platform that will solve this major pain point for consumers.

And we need help. I’m looking for smart, inspiring, entrepreneurial engineers to join us as we work to create this platform and change the way people use the internet on their phones. Here’s a sampling of the problems that we’re working on…

• Data engineering – to improve the mobile internet you have to understand the current state of the mobile internet – all billions of pages worth. We’re processing and analyzing data at a large scale.
• Web emulation and network performance – many of the card based experiences we’re creating are backed by the existing web. This means we’re dealing with web emulation, request proxying, caching, and generally trying to deliver content to users with as little latency as possible.
• Search – we need to show the right cards to the right users when they declare their intent.
• Mobile and web based product development – all the work on the backend would be useless if we didn’t have beautiful mobile clients.

There will be room to focus on all of these areas as we grow over the next year, so whether you are an experienced engineer looking to lead one of these efforts, or a recent college CS grad looking for their first job, I want to talk to you if you’re interested in this problem. I really value the entrepreneurial spirit and drive, and generally hire employees who want to go on to start their own startup in a few years. Wildcard is a great place to learn and observe the ride from the beginning.

Check out our job postings and feel free to reach out to me anytime at doug@trywildcard.com.