A Frog in the Valley

Standout Jobs officially launched today, and announced a 2 million funding with great noise all around the blogosphere (Mashable, GigaOM, CenterNetworks, MontrealTech Watch and Startup North are a few notables).

The standout crew is well know in Montreal, the three founders (Austin Hill, Benjamin Yoskovitz and Fred Ngo) are heavily invested in local barcamps, founders and funders, montreal tech entrepreneur’s breakfast and Montreal on Rails… and they have this guy named MAC writing the fastest and lightest ruby server around, too!

I will be taking a closer look to their platform in the next few weeks, my schedule was bursting at the seams for the last few months… when they announced they where looking at companies to beta-test, we had to pass our turn then, we were - ahem - working on our upcoming launch (more on that later)…

I believe they have a good product/market fit, the most telling quote I read today was from Ben Yoskovitz on CenterNetworks :

Convincing people to get out of email isn't one of my biggest concerns, because I’ve experienced using email enough times to manage candidates and the hiring process to know how difficult it is. Basecamp’s done a good job of getting people out of email for project management, hopefully we can do the same in that regard.

I think it’s a great positioning statement : StandoutJobs is to HR what Basecamp is to Project Managment - easier, sexier, just works better for the networked generation (and their social spin could be huge too, but I will let Seb wax prophetic tell you what it means on that one elsewhere)