anson

San Francisco, Full time. H1Bs welcome.

We are also offering the first 25 people who apply through Hacker News a free $100 Cardpool Gift Card (can be used to buy virtually any other gift card in the US).

Cardpool.com (YC W10) is looking for software engineers to join our talented team of 4 engineers (total team size ~15 + customer service and fulfillment). We are also looking for a Senior/Director-level Account Manager to help develop, launch, and manage new high-profile partnerships. This person will be responsible for implementation, training, reporting, problem solving, growing the business, presenting to executives, and much more.

Cardpool makes it ridiculously easy to buy and sell gift cards. In the last 3.5 years, the company has grown from 2 guys in a living room to a company that helps hundreds of thousands of customers buy and sell over $100,000 in gift cards each day. We have been featured on CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, NPR, and The New York Times.

We pride ourselves on being an engineering-focused group (with experience @ Apple, Google, Amazon.com, Microsoft, MIT, CMU, UIUC, Harvard, and Brown) that moves quickly and builds great customer experiences. Some of the interesting technical and business challenges we're working on include real-time inventory management, dynamic pricing problems, high-performance transaction processing, security, data mining, API design, and ping-pong matchmaking algorithms :)

The ideal candidate would be excited by the prospect of working on a small group of highly technical engineers and enjoy having a ton of responsibility while learning something new almost daily. Experience working with Ruby, Python, or Ruby on Rails is a plus but not a requirement.

Cardpool has an incredible team, above-market compensation, and a generous profit-sharing program. We were acquired in 2011 and will appeal to candidates who are looking to work at a fun small startup-like environment but with the lifestyle (reasonable hours), benefits, and financial strength of a public company.

To learn more, head to http://www.cardpool.com/jobs or email us at [email protected] (this goes straight to the founders).

Hope to hear from you soon! Anson, Founder/CEO/GM

You're right, Blackhawk manages many of the operations related to gift cards.

On the other point, however, I can guarantee that Cardpool is about get a whole lot BIGGER, and won't be shutting down or changing directions anytime soon ;).

We applied last-minute for Cardpool (W2010) and Anywhere.FM (S2007). Applying last-minute is certainly better than not applying, as YC has been great for us both times :).

We were REALLY worried we'd be way behind everyone else, because we started later (or didn't even have an idea yet in the Anywhere.FM case), but turns out that the pressure of being behind helped us launch by month 2 both times.

You're lucky :). Not everyone will have unused gift cards, but you still benefit from being able to buy them at a discount. E.g. you get 30% off at 1-800-Flowers.com, 12% off Gap, 10% off iTunes, etc, stackable with any other coupons or promotions you can find. If supply meets demand, we're happy!

awesome news! like pg said, anyone who has met him knows how smart, determined, and genuinely nice he is. certainly a very valuable and welcome addition to the yc camp and he's already helped our group a ton.

First and foremost, our customers are always protected by this since we take on 100% of the risk associated with any transaction and we guarantee its full value.

Second, to protect ourselves, we've developed several methods of detecting high-risk transactions and ways to mitigate them (such as working with merchants to reissue new gift cards). I'd go into more detail, but we don't want the wrong people to get ahold of this information ;).

In the end though, we'll be fine. The fact that we mail the check to a physical address, make out the check to the seller's name, and the seller has to cash the check at a real bank, is already a big deterrent to bad behavior. These bad people will have an easier time trading their fake gift cards to people on sites like craigslist.

absolutely. we verify every gift card when we buy it and when we sell it, and will refund your purchase for any reason, even if its because the retailer goes bankrupt, leaves town, or you simply change your mind. we are creating this service to solve the problems with gift cards and the last thing we would want to do it contribute to it :).

great question, the techcrunch article needs to be updated. but basically, we strive to have the simplest, most hassle-free solution, at the best prices.

all our gift cards have no fees and never expire and we offer a 100-day return policy, something no one else can claim. and since we are a small and lean startup, we can afford to focus purely on the consumer while offering the best prices. all of these features are unique to our startup and are the result of listening to what they want.

we will be adding this feature very soon!

gotta love guitar hero music :).

http://anywhere.fm/derek/guitar_hero http://anywhere.fm/derek/freezepop!

He'd follow me around and heal me in WoW.

Find a hacker-designer, even if it means expanding from 2 to 3 cofounders. Or become that hacker-designer.

Good design and flow is critical, especially for consumers apps. I'd say that 2 of 3 of our founders consider design as one of our core competencies and I think its made a huge difference.

But even if its not a core competency, make it one of yours! Our 1 non-designer cofounder learned about and talked to other startups about design, and ended up coming up with our biggest design improvement to date - removing the whole "website" from the frontpage. If you go to Anywhere.FM, you'll notice we don't take you to a "website" and this change reduced our bouncerate by 50% (compared to the Alpha release). This certainly trumps most technical feats we've accomplished to date.

Finally, its good to have multiple opinions (but not get locked up in minor details), so that the UI targets a wide audience - not just the audience the designers are most in tune with. Its easy to target only yourself, and we probably still suffer from that today.

:)

Excellent question! The most precise case to follow is the MyPlay case. In fact, the ex-ceo of MP3.com created a startup, similar to ours, that is protected under the results of the MyPlay case, which showed that digital locker services are kosher. In fact a quick google search shows you this space has many competitors :).

broke 150k one day later... this will be interesting... :).

85k and not stopping :). In fact we had to start capping people's upload speeds because we're afraid of affecting our other users.

Sorry to hear about your upload troubles. We've heard that the Linux Flash Player isn't quite prime for handling uploads, and we've gotten a small handful of people who have trouble uploading particular files in any OS. Hope to fix this soon!

Thanks for all your valuable feedback and comments, it is really motivating :). Now some advice I wish I followed... sleep a LONG time the day before you launch ;).