San Francisco, CA
Academia.edu is a platform for sharing research. Fundamentally we are trying to massively speed up the rate at which research whizzes around the world. For people who have just published a paper, we want that paper instantly to get into the hands of people who are interested in it. It often takes 12-24 months for a paper to get through the journal publication cycle, and to get distributed to the relevant research community. We believe that this is a large inefficiency in the research process, and we believe that there is an opportunity to make a huge impact here. We want to bring the time it takes for a paper to be distributed around a given research community down from 12-24 months down to a matter of hours.
Right now we have over 600,000 academics signed up, with about 2,000 joining each day. Our monthly uniques are over 2 million. We have about 700,000 papers, with about 80,000 new papers being added per month.
Amongst other technologies, we work with Rails, Redis, MongoDB, Beanstalkd, Varnish, Solr, PostgreSQL, Node.js and Memcached.
We're a small team of 7 people in San Francisco, backed by venture capital (Spark Ventures) and angel investors (Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, and Rupert Pennant-Rea, Chairman of the Economist, amongst others). We have a very engineering-focused culture. You can read more about our culture here <a href="http://academia.edu/hiring/culture" >http://academia.edu/hiring/culture</a> and here <a href="http://academia.edu/hiring" >http://academia.edu/hiring</a>.
We have a very collaborative culture, where everyone discusses everything going on with the company: engineering, product, revenue, user growth, recruiting. We think that building a successful startup is hard enough that we need to leverage everyone's brain power.
We're very happy to handle the H1B application process for foreign applicants. Interns are also welcome to apply; we have an intern program detailed at <a href="http://academia.edu/hiring" >http://academia.edu/hiring</a>. For anyone interested to learn more, feel free to email me directly at richard [at] academia.edu
Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (October 2011)