Lightcone Infrastructure
Work with us
This is a linkpost from our most recent hiring post. See the original post with more information here.
Lightcone has a core team of 7 generalists who work on anything from design, to backend programming, to running conferences, to managing construction projects, to legal, advertising, portage, fundraising, sales, etc. We tend to operate at a sprint level, with teams and leadership of those teams being reconfigured every few weeks depending on what's current organizational priority. As an illustration, approximately every person on the core generalist team has managed every other person on the team as part of some project or initiative.
For the core team, I try to follow Paul Graham's hiring advice:
What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.
What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.
Almost everyone who worked for us was an animal at what they did.
At least basic programming skill is a requirement for this role, but beyond that, it's about being excited to learn new things and adapting to whatever schemes we have going on, and getting along well with the rest of the team.
Lightcone is a culturally thick organization. Working with us on the core team is unlikely to work out if you aren't bought into a lot of our vision and culture. It's hard to summarize our full culture in this post, but here are some things that I think are good predictors of being a good fit for working here:
We try to pay competitively for this role, but are still somewhat limited by being a nonprofit. Our general salary policy is to pay 70% of whatever you would make in industry (with some cap around $300k-$400k, since we can't really pay 70% of the $5M+ salaries flying around in a bunch of AI land these days).