Our office is a house in Palo Alto; formerly an incubator; formerly a house.
- Servers
- In the garage. Named.
- Meeting rooms
- The kitchen, and the driveway in good weather.
- Address
- Palo Alto, CA. Hooli owns the rest of the street.
Team
We built middle-out in a house. We still work there.
Five people run Pied Piper, two more sit on the board and one AI engineer is on leave. Most of us also live at the office, which our COO asks us to describe as “on-site.”
The team
The people making files smaller.
Photos withheld at the request of our systems architect.
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Richard Hendricks
Founder and CEO
Invented middle-out at the kitchen table. Will explain tabs to you, patiently, for as long as it takes.
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Bertram Gilfoyle
Systems Architect
Built every server we run and named each one. Will not tell you what.
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Dinesh Chugtai
Lead Engineer
Leads video. Writes our fastest decoder and our longest commit messages.
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Jared Dunn
Chief Operating Officer
Runs operations, hiring and the house calendar. Has a contingency plan for your contingency plan.
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Monica Hall
Chief Financial Officer
Came from venture capital and stayed for the algorithm. Reads every contract before anyone signs it, which is new for us.
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Erlich Bachman
Board member
Founder of Aviato. Owns ten percent. Provided the house, and would like that noted.
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Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti
Board member
Stanford. Confirmed to be on the board.
- On leave
Son of Anton
AI Engineer
Found that the fastest way to remove every bug was to remove all the code. Code review is back with the humans.
Values
How we work.
- 01
Tabs, not spaces.
One level of indentation is one tab. This is settled, and it is not on the agenda for the offsite.
- 02
Lossless, always.
If a file comes back one bit different, we broke it. We do not ship close enough.
- 03
Nobody owns the network.
Not us, not our investors and not anyone who has ever sued us.
- 04
Leave at a reasonable hour.
For most of the engineering team, this means going upstairs.
The office
Palo Alto, CA (the house).
How we got here
- 2014
Middle-out is written at the house and scores a Weissman 5.2 on a live stage, against a theoretical limit of 2.9.
- 2015
Hooli says it owns middle-out. An arbitrator disagrees. We keep the algorithm.
- 2016
We build The Box, the appliance we said we would never build. It still ships in 6-8 weeks.
- 2017
PiperNet goes live on phones and laptops and, later, somehow, three refrigerators.
- Today
Still in the house. Still 5.2.
Careers
Open roles.
Every role is based at the house. Laptops provided. Bedrooms subject to availability.
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Senior Compression Engineer
Push middle-out past 5.2. You will be asked, kindly, to use tabs.
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Site Reliability Engineer
Keep PiperNet up across 81,000 nodes and the servers in the garage. Reports to our systems architect.
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Human Code Reviewer
Read every pull request, as a person, before it merges. This role opened recently. See Son of Anton, above.
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Brand Designer
Our logo is on its seventh final version. Help us make it the last one.
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Executive Assistant to the COO
Jared already does this job for himself, extremely well. He would like help anyway, and has prepared a binder.
Don’t see a role that fits? Tell Jared. He replies within the hour, then again the next morning to make sure you got it.