PullRequest (YCombinator S17) is building the first platform for code review as a service.
We combine great backend tooling, a custom IDE, with teams of reviews to deliver first class code review. We’re hiring for engineers of all
flavors to help us build our platform. We write mostly in python and javascript, but we’re running an agnostic stack.
We’re looking for amazing folks that care deeply about code quality. If that’s you, please reach out to lyal@pullrequest.com
The solution is fairly straight forward - create economic and package parity for Canadian entrepreneurs and workers.
It's hard for Canadian employers to pay similar wages to other countries for a variety of reasons. Most of them are completely self-inflicted: things like reliance on SRED to recoup salary costs (a program that's gotten increasingly hard to qualify for, but as a retroactive program, devastating when not won), priority selling into Canada as opposed to going global, etc.
The variability of the Canadian dollar is another huge factor. It shifts around; leading to boon and bust against the US for compensation. When I left Canada, it was at par, making $110k very competitive in the US nationally (if not in the valley). It's obviously not there now!
The funding/exit end of things is the other big challenge. A huge chunk of the "Valley Salaries" are RSUs from pubcos, options from startups, etc. It's a chicken and the egg scenario that would be familiar in any secondary market in the US; valuations are low, leading to low exit multiples, meaning that even founders who exit often don't get life changing returns, before we even get to employees. This means that options are discounted entirely in the compensation structure.. making people more reluctant to give them out. It's a bad circle.
I bet that typo gets them a lot of extra attention from investors. Even if they immediately correct them, at the very least they've got their attention to start a conversation.
We price based on the amount of review being done per month. $49 is the base threshold; individual reviews can vary based on the amount of code being reviewed at once. We're figuring out the exact pricing model for individuals and teams that'll be easily communicable.
We would love to offer one review a month - unfortunately, because there are humans on the other side of the review, it's harder to do this than for a straight SaaS operation.
We'll definitely have free tiers for our static and instrumentation product though.
We're still exploring the landscape on this. At the core, we're hiring reviewers in jurisdictions that we have presence for (currently North America), and they are signing a 3 way agreement with the company under review. This offers the same level of protection as a traditional consultant in terms of protections.
I think that's a natural place where our tooling will evolve to - a lot of things that aren't caught in an automated way, after being trained with real review, will. There's no replacement for the human component of review though, and we believe that by allowing reviewers repeated access to the project, that they will gain the context necessary.
Are you storing/validating tax docs?