Steph Bain Joins Jelly Industries

Jul 28th, 2014

We’ve got lots going on these days at Jelly Industries so our design team really needed to grow. Continuing along on our lucky streak of incredibly nice and talented people who want to join our little group, we’re fortunate to welcome Steph Bain, most recently UI Design Team Lead at Airbnb.

When Steph joined Airbnb almost four years ago, it was a tiny team just getting started. Most recently, she lead the UI team in a complete redesign of the product across both mobile and web platforms.

Steph is a designer with a self-described, “unhealthy passion” for pixel-perfect detail. She also has an egoless, empathetic approach to her work and a kindness that is immediately noticeable. When not designing, Steph can be found playing with her dog and dreaming up her next travel adventure.

Biz Stone,
Co-founder and CEO
Jelly Industries, Inc.

Jelly Industries Welcomes Eugene Ie

Jul 8th, 2014

We’re happy to welcome Eugene Ie to Jelly Industries. Eugene is our first hardcore machine learning computer scientist hire. We’re looking forward to his enthusiasm and expertise in connecting a fun and easy consumer experience with serious machine learning that turns fun into value.

Eugene was born and raised in Hong Kong and moved to New York in his late teens. Eight years later, he found himself living in San Francisco with a PhD in Computer Science. Eugene joins us from Google where he built various machine learning systems—one of which powers Google’s monetization models.

It seems we’ve got a trend here at Jelly for hiring folks who are extremely talented in their area of expertise, passionate about helping people in some way, and have hobbies that are sometimes creatively incongruous with their chosen profession. Eugene builds his own bird feeders in his spare time.

Biz Stone,
Co-founder and CEO
Jelly Industries, Inc.

Aaron Durand Joins Jelly

Jun 24th, 2014

Photo courtesy Niniane Kelley

We’re super happy to welcome Aaron Durand, aka @everydaydude to lead our community initiatives at Jelly Industries. Aaron joins us most recently from Twitter. We’re intent on building a company that helps people in various ways and Aaron is uniquely qualified to do this because he is one of the most helpful people we’ve ever known.

After college at the University of Oregon, Aaron worked as a counselor for at-risk youth in Portland. Four years later, he began working in Customer Service at Adidas where he stayed for two years. In 2008, a job with Birkenstock brought Aaron to the Bay Area. Then it happened. Aaron saved his mom’s independent bookstore with a burrito and a Tweet.

Saving his mom’s indie bookstore lead to Aaron’s eventual employment at Twitter where he worked initially in support and later in Marketing and Communications as a Social Media Manager. I’m a big fan of Aaron’s other passion, photography. He uses actual film in much of his work. You can check out his photography at everydaydude.com.

Biz Stone,
Co-founder and CEO
Jelly Industries, Inc.

Jelly Launches Replies

Jun 16th, 2014

Thorben Primke Joins Jelly

May 30th, 2014

Thorben and his extraordinary talent for Android development joins Jelly most recently from Facebook, where he worked on Search and before that on the Messenger app. Prior to his time at Facebook, Thorben was working at Gowalla where he learned the ropes of Android development.

Thorben Primke moved from Hamburg, Germany to South Carolina where he earned degrees in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from the University of South Carolina. He had the benefit of experiencing startup life while working on a time tracking app with a grad school classmate.

Jelly is a great fit for Thorben because, like us, he is driven by building things that help people and provide value. Software isn’t all Thorben creates—he enjoys building furniture from reclaimed materials as well as other sorts of tinkering including physical things, API’s, and new frameworks.

Biz Stone,
Co-founder and CEO
Jelly

Jelly Adds Topics and More

May 23rd, 2014

Jelly is constantly evolving, and we regularly make changes and updates without announcement. However, today we added a few things worth noting. Now, behind the scenes, every question submitted to Jelly is assigned a topic. There are programmatic things happening in an effort to route more relevant content to and from the right folks but we’re also taking a much more direct approach.

At some point, Jelly will show you a card with a bunch of topics displayed and a title above that says, “You look smart.” You can tap the topics that you’d enjoy answering questions about, and then keep going. It’s way more fun helping people when you actually know something about what they’re asking. This is another way we’re working to make Jelly more relevant to you, on a personal level, beyond location and friends.

Aside from topics, we’ve also cleaned up the Activity section of Jelly—the place where you go to check on the status of the questions you’ve asked or starred, see how many Thanks you’ve received, etc. It’s now much easier to scan your activity because each type is broken out and navigable. We also made it easier to post your well crafted Jelly questions to all your Twitter followers and Facebook friends.

Biz Stone,
Co-founder and CEO
Jelly

Shaun Modi Joins Jelly

May 12th, 2014

We are thrilled to announce that Shaun Modi, a celebrated leader at the intersection of technology and design, is joining Jelly as our Chief Creative Officer. Shaun’s experience, seniority, and approach will become instrumental at the broadest company level and tiny product details

With a degree in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design, Modi has set the creative vision for large scale products at Airbnb, Google, NASA, Motorola, Nokia and his own startup, DailyModi. He is known for his highly collaborative approach—a perfect match for the Jelly team.

Shaun joins us most recently from Airbnb where he served as the lead designer inventing the future of travel, discovery, hosting, search, mobile, customer experience, and growth. His influence through design at Airbnb was instrumental in fueling the company’s hyper growth between 2012 and 2014.

Before Airbnb, Modi lead the design of Google+, and contributed to the look and feel of both Maps and Chrome at Google. Early in his career, Modi worked with the Habitability Design Group at NASA for a 2020 moon mission. Prior to NASA, Modi developed early multi-touch wearables for Nokia.

Shaun has actively used Jelly since we launched. He came to a talk I did in San Francisco and something clicked for him—he became convinced that Jelly has the potential to reinvent the way we understand the world around us. We met for a long lunch and I knew he was right for Jelly. We made him an offer.

Shaun accepted saying, “I’m joining Jelly because I respect the team, the product, and the company vision. Building services that empower people to help one another is directly in line with what motivates me as a designer.” He also said the warmth and energy of our team is palpable in our product.

With Shaun aboard, design thinking will be instrumental in how we develop the experiences to accomplish our goals. At Jelly, Shaun’s objective is to build a culture of design. This means more than product design—it means designing the way we design. We’re lucky and excited to welcome Shaun to our team.

Biz Stone,
Co-founder and CEO
Jelly

Chad Etzel Joins Jelly

May 8th, 2014

We are excited to share that Chad Etzel is bringing his amazing iOS skills to Jelly. Four years ago, Chad moved to San Francisco to work with startups. He has honed his iOS development skill shipping fifteen different apps. Chad has a passion for creating apps that are intuitive and fun to use. Prior to joining Jelly, Chad worked as an iOS developer at Twitter.

Chad was forged in the heat of Atlanta and South Florida. After earning a Computer Science degree from Georgia Tech he worked at Cisco on next generation embedded systems. Chad (aka “Jazzy Chad”) is a Y Combinator alum and been through the valuable experience of starting his own company. Fun fact: Chad shares a birthday with the Golden Gate Bridge.

Biz Stone,
Co-founder and CEO
Jelly

Jelly Updates with Maps and More

Mar 31st, 2014

A substantial update to Jelly is now available for download in the Apple App Store. You can ask with your camera, you can ask with a decidedly familiar blank white space, and now, you can ask using an interactive map of the world. We’ve designed a better way to ask questions—simple, visual, and interactive. The better the question, the better the answers.

Watch video

We released Jelly almost three months ago. Since then, we’ve learned so much just by paying attention to how people use the service. The single most exciting thing we learned was simply that Jelly works. Reimagining the way we submit queries and get answers based on the idea that helping people is fundamental to the human condition was a big bet.

Watching the questions flow in, we can see that a significant percentage of queries are best answered by a human. More than that, our hunch was right—people want to answer. I’ve often been asked what motivates folks to help on Jelly. I’m so happy explaining this motivation is genuinely rooted in a natural desire to help others. Thank you.

Biz Stone
Co-founder and CEO
Jelly

• Download on the App Store
• Get it on Google Play

Jelly Goes (RED)

Feb 10th, 2014

In 2010, 986 babies were born daily with HIV. In 2012, that number was 700. By 2015, we hope it’s close to zero. With access to lifesaving antiretrovirals, the transmission of HIV from moms to their babies can be stopped. An AIDS free generation is in sight. The question isn’t, “Can we?” It’s, “Will we?”

The team at (RED) has long held my deep respect for their ability to see the immense power of collective action. The folks at (RED) found a way to harness our everyday choices—from downloading a song, to buying a T-shirt, such that they add up to a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.

Jelly exists because the world is the most connected it has ever been and the true promise of a connected society is people helping each other. When you get help from another person on Jelly, you tap “Thanks!” and that person receives a Thank You Card for taking the time to answer your query.

All this week, today through Friday, Thank You Cards are (RED). For every Thank You Card generated across the Jelly system, $1 will be donated to help continue the fight for an AIDS free generation. We’re fond of saying, “Jelly helps people.” We could not be happier to say it together with (RED).

—Biz Stone, Co-Founder and CEO

p.s. Follow @red on Twitter and visit red.org to learn more about the fight against AIDS.