Statwing

About Statwing

We love analyzing data. We love the feeling of getting an idea, exploring some hypotheses, and finding a surprising story in the data. And we love enabling others to have that feeling. That’s why we’re creating the modern data analysis tool, so anyone can get as much value out of their data as a trained expert, and experts can get their insight much faster.

Most statistical analyses are conceptually simple, but existing software requires an unnecessarily large amount of statistical knowledge to ask simple questions. And even experts find these tools time-consuming and painful to use. So most people fall back to the much less powerful Excel (and its PivotTables), spending their time shuffling data around an interface that’s barely changed in 15 years. Statwing democratizes data analysis by making statistics easier to use and interpret than even Excel.

We’re two Stanford alums and we work in San Francisco’s Mission District, near the 16th and Mission BART stop. Our investors include Y Combinator, Jeff Hammerbacher (cofounded Cloudera, coined the term "Data Science", built the Facebook data team) and Jason Seats (cofounded Slicehost, runs TechStars Cloud).

Across Statwing we aim to develop strong competency in the following areas:

Design

Radically improving the experience and UI for data analysis is the core challenge of our company.

Engineering

Taking in arbitrary data and returning insights requires great engineering that ties together statistics, algorithms, databases, and more.

Data

Building great tools for data analysis requires an understanding of how people use data in the real world, and how to effectively extract and communicate insights in data.

Front End Engineer

Radically improving the UI for data analysis is the core challenge of our company. As our first hire and only front-end specialist, you'll drive the function and feel of our UI, creating entirely new ways of interacting with data. You’ll meet weekly with the designer of the TiVo UI (an advisor of ours) to sketch out solutions to extremely challenging usability problems, which you'll then implement. You'll code in HTML, CSS/LESS, Ruby, and Coffeescript, using Bootstrap, Backbone, Underscore, jQuery, and d3. And as the first hire, you’ll earn significant equity and help shape our culture.

The ideal candidate:

Excited about taking responsibility and ownership over big pieces of the product
Comfortable with UI and UX challenges. Graphic design skills are a bonus (we currently have none).
Interested in data analysis.
An extremely talented programmer, skilled with front end tools like HTML, CSS, and Javascript/Coffeescript. Familiarity with the other tools listed above is a bonus.
Deeply concerned with system reliability, code quality, and front end architecture.
Open to asking for help, taking feedback, collaborating, and generally being a team player.
Humor. Has a sense of it.

Back End Engineer

Statwing's users demand larger data, more complex analyses, and faster interaction. We'll need to optimize regression, graph, and dozens of other statistical algorithms to efficiently handle wildly diverse datasets. Those analyses will sit on a robust data-handling system that finishes analyses before our users even know they need them. And Statwing's deep interaction and data exploration needs to feel like it's happening locally even when it's not.

The ideal candidate:

Excited about taking responsibility and ownership over big pieces of the product
Comfortable with efficiently handling and processing relatively large amounts of data.
Interested in data analysis.
Very comfortable with Python. Some experience with Clojure is a bonus.
An extremely talented programmer, skilled in dealing with performance tradeoffs and bottlenecks.
Deeply concerned with system reliability, code quality, and back end architecture.
Open to asking for help, taking feedback, collaborating, and generally being a team player.
Humor. Has a sense of it.