We’re hiring again. Here is the req: http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=561784&trk=

DriverSide (www.driverside.com) is a new service that 2 good friends and former business partners, Jad Dunning and Trevor Traina, and I came up with a little over a year ago. Over the last 9 months or so we’ve raised some money, built an excellent team and created the first version of what we think is a very innovative new service in the online automotive space.

DriverSide’s aim is to not only help consumers find a new (or used) car and sell their old car online more efficiently, but to help during the ownership process as well. Car owners get nervous about how much to pay for routine or unplanned service or repairs to their car. People need to know what their used car is really worth on the open market and how quickly it is depreciating so they know better about when to sell. People need a place to turn when it comes time to make modifications or upgrades to their car. We’ve built DriverSide to solve those issues and many others that everyday car owners experience. We like to say, love it or hate it, everyone has a relationship with their car. We’re here to make that relationship go more smoothly.

So, our public beta starts today. We’ll be working out a few bugs and vigorously improving/adding new features throughout the summer.

I also want to thank my family and friends being so supportive through this busy time … and our wonderfully talented employees for bringing it all to fruition.

For the better part of the last 10 years one of my hobbies has been sampling the best the Internet has had to offer in investment research tools. I’ve dabbled in developing my own technical analysis algorithms, have done a fair amount of day trading and have taken some more traditional long positions in companies I believed in. Online investment tools have come quite a long way over the years, but one of the recent fads that the “Web 2.0″ wave of innovation has brought us is the concept of social investing.

Social investing sites such as Covestor.com, Cake Financial and several others have done a great job of bringing all types of (typically) non-professional investors together. Their sophisticated platforms allow members to enter their brokerage account login credentials (a little scary, but most of us swallow hard and do it anyway out of curiosity) in order for the site to “verify” your trades. Your trading activity is downloaded into the database and the site assigns a percentage of your portfolio each equity occupies. The number of shares (amount of cash you’re playing with) is not published in order to protect your privacy. The idea here is that, because the equities are verified by the site to exist in the member’s brokerage account, full-disclosure is satisfied and anything that member writes can be judged fairly by the readers. Many of the more active members on these sites keep blogs and write publicly-viewable messages about their rationale behind trades. In fact, when Covestor detects that you’ve made a trade in your brokerage account, they will email you asking for your rationale in the form of a mini blog post on covestor.com.

So, the first thing I did was pick the top 3 or 5 members on Covestor as ranked by their portfolios’ performance. The site has very nice graphs that show members’ performance against other indices like the S&P 500. After following a few of these members I noticed that a lot of their trades were solid (and common) like BUY APPL @ 110 or other fairly safe bets. This made their track records look decent and they typically edged out the market. Other equities they had would typically take up < 10-15% of their portfolio and would be very small-cap companies. These stocks would have a lot of blog posts associated with them and you could see the record of the member buying the stock all the way down a hill, often with comments to the effect of “time to load up, this one is on sale”, etc. Any time there was a pop in the price, you might see something to the affect of “you like that 200% gain today? More where that came from!”. But, the overall performance of the stock since the member initially bought in would typically be abysmal. Often you’ll see other members posing (publicly viewable) questions to the trader to the effect of, “I see you’re taking a bath on XYZ but you keep buying it up … you must have some inside info”, etc. That is often enough to get the degenerate-gambler-day-trader to jump in on the action and wait for that next 200% pop.

The first few of these I encountered made me think, “Well, the guy obviously believes in this stock because Covestor verified his ownership of it”. But, Covestor and others don’t publish how many shares the member owns! This trader could own literally 1 share to begin with and then keep buying 5 or 10 more as the price drops just to back up his public enthusiasm about the “sale”. Then, in another brokerage account not connected to Covestor (and therefore not publicly viewable), he may be making very different trades.

Call it pump-and-dump 2.0. It’s analogous to how the spam kings of yesteryear would pump penny stocks for a week then dump them after enough suckers bought in. I think Covestor and others are great sites with impressive platforms and very innovative features. The first one who figures out how to solve this problem, though, will certainly have the advantage. The only way I can think of off the top of my head would be if the site were to award different “badges” to positions in a trader’s portfolio. One badge could signify that the position is in excess of a certain dollar amount (proportionate to the share price). This would give users that track the trader a little more comfort in knowing that this is less likely to be a pump-and-dump trader.

We’re looking for a sharp and experienced MySQL DBA to work in our San Francisco office full-time.  The team is growing quickly and this will be our first DBA hire.

MySQL Database Administrator

Here is a new business for you - I’ve even given you the tagline. Please, someone start this. With the pool of talented programmers running dry these days in San Francisco, I’ve resorted to working with recruiters to help find qualified and skilled candidates. The fees are hefty - 20-30% of the employee’s first year base salary plus many of them even want stock in the startup - sometimes as much as the employee they place gets! Recruiters are very easy to find these days. In fact, they seem to find you even when you’re explicitly not looking for one. For instance, Craigslist has a box you can check that says “please, no recruiters”, yet the majority of responses I get from the ad are from recruiters. I’ve decided to allow about some of these recruiters to send me resumes. After all, they all work on contingency so I only pay if they place someone.

Some recruiters will want to come out to your office and soak up hours of time chatting about your “culture” and what you are looking for in a developer (as if “LAMP” skills needed more explanation).   Although the face-to-face does add some value to the process, I think this is mostly a networking play on their part to forge a relationship and make sure their future unsolicited email to you will at least be opened. Many of the recruiters we’ve had come by the office wrote vigorously on their notepads as we described the very basic skills we were looking for (I got the distinct feeling they hadn’t heard of PHP or MySQL before). Others (mainly the ones from Craigslist) will just start showering you with resumes once you’ve given them permission.

Both groups send plenty of unqualified candidates - obviously more from the ones that don’t stop by in person. I have some great and rather embarrassing stories about many of these recruiters already just after a few weeks of working with them. I have yet to see any “hireable” candidates through this channel.

I wish there were some sort of a directory I could reference each time a recruiter contacted me to see what the community thinks of his or her performance. I’d like to know:

• What kind of luck other employers have had with the recruiter.
  • What is the ratio of good resumes to bad ones?
  • Do they do ridiculous things like send candidates who aren’t willing to commute to your office after you’d been clear about the fact that you need someone in-office?
  • How many actual hires have come from the recruiter?
• What the candidates think of the recruiter.
  • Does the recruiter thoroughly test and get to know the candidate to ensure more efficient placement?
  • Is the recruiter responsive to calls and emails?
  • Does the recruiter provide feedback when an opportunity is not right so the candidate may learn and improve their skill set?

It’d be nice to have all of this information in a publicly viewable, yelp-style site. If the site got enough audience it could probably get into the job listings business itself! But remember (see previous post about job boards) - keep the listings free!

RecruiterWatch.com (taken w/ no site)
RecruiterWatch.net (available)