At June NJ Tech Meetup, Jet Reveals the Tech Secret Sauce That Helps It Compete with Amazon
Givon Zirkind,
NJTechWeekly.com
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Panel at the NJ Tech Meetup at Jet | Courtesy Jet via Twitter |
The program at the June NJ Tech Meetup included a Q &A discussion with leading technologists from Jet.com, the Hoboken e-commerce startup that is trying to take on Amazon.
The “fireside chat,” moderated by NJ Tech Meetup organizer Aaron Price, included Mike Hanrahan, cofounder and CTO of Jet.com; Lev Gorodinski, vice president of engineering, who is responsible for building and indexing Jet's product catalog; Troy Kershaw, senior engineer, who is responsible for building the order-management system; and Dana Peele, a senior software engineer. Hanrahan, Gorodinski and Kershaw came from overseas to work at Jet: Hanrahan from Ireland, Gorodinski from Latvia and Kershaw from Australia. Peele is a New Jersey native.
Jet was started two years ago by Marc Lore, formerly of Quidsi (Jersey City), who had sold his startup to Amazon. Jet has another e-commerce site, Heyneedle.com (Omaha, Neb.), which is for home and garden products. Jet’s goal is to provide products to consumers at the least expensive price points. It also offers fast delivery — often in one day, two days max.
The startup’s engineers began writing the software behind Jet two years ago. The platform took 16 months to build and was launched in July 2015. The system was designed from the beginning to scale big. Now, in full production mode, the platform handles up to 300,000 searches per second. There are 10 times as many searches after a Jet ad appears on TV, and 20 times as many searches after the Super Bowl, panelists said. In addition, when the system is working to determine the best way to ship an order, it can calculate 100 million permutations.
To accommodate this load, Jet uses 2,800 cores and 600 servers spread over several data centers, provided by Microsoft's cloud.
The technologists said that one of the biggest problems facing e-commerce websites is the consolidation of product sources. Many e-commerce sites either sell their own products or a specific number of fixed brands. The catalog is typically curated in house, including the photography, design and production.
Jet, on the other hand, uses data feeds from vendors to create an online catalog. Jet employees never even see the product, the technologists revealed. This is very different from Amazon, where third-party vendors are constantly uploading items and pictures. The Jet engineers asserted that, while Amazon has hundreds of engineers reviewing products to normalize the catalog, they have just five guys.
Jet's catalog is huge, with 12 million live products, an additional 40 million products that are not currently available (due to they’re being out of stock or other situations) and 300 million products in their knowledge base.
Other software engineering issues discussed by the panel included search relevance and confidence. A search should display the item that the customer wants in the first or second place, they said. To achieve the company’s two-day shipping goal, a product and fulfillment check is initiated within four hours of receipt of an order. And Jet's “smart cart” feature bundled purchases.
Security is a big issue for Jet. Panelists noted that about two percent of the orders are fraudulent. Jet initially raised over $80 million in funding, then sought an additional $600 million in funding and is still seeking more investment. That money has also been a target for hackers, who spear phish Jet employees and try to buy Jet credentials on the Dark Web. Jet recently experienced downtime due to a payment-processing glitch. The company keeps live, evolving run books that document procedures on how to solve such problems.
Hanrahan discussed the reasons why Jet chose to use Microsoft Azure and F#. Azure's ability to scale was at the top of the list. Microsoft's offering of technical support in the form of sending engineers to Jet's physical location if necessary was another factor. Also, the ability of Microsoft’s cloud to provide stateless machines was important. Stateless machines are more accurate, especially in a cloud environment, he said.
The team chose F#, Hanrahan said, because F# is a functional language, immutable and stateless, which is important for a cloud environment. Also, F# is easy to debug and easier to “reason with,” he said. The decision to go with F# did raise the question of where to find F# programmers. However, Jet found a local community of F# enthusiasts to tap.
That Marc Lore is a New Jersey native was not the only reason for situating Jet in the state. Originally in Montclair, and now headquartered in Hoboken, Jet is in close proximity to (and an easy commute for) many talented engineers, programmers and other employees, the panelists said.
Price asked the panel how each one of them came to work for Jet, and how those looking to apply to Jet should go about it.
Kershaw responded with a story. He was a tech evangelist, and when preparing to do a podcast on F#, he asked to interview a Jet employee for the podcast. That was how he connected with Jet, and he was later offered a job. Kershaw added, “The resume alone doesn't do it. You have to stand out. There is no artificial way to stand out.”
Hanrahan said that the cultural mission of Jet is “trust, transparency and fairness. We are a culture that shares our technical knowledge.” In addition, “Everyone is friendly. We are looking for friendly, nice people who are passionate about technology, are smart and get things done. Show us you are passionate about technology.”
Givon Zirkind is a contributor to NJTechWeekly. This article
originally appeared in NJTechWeekly and is republished here with its permission.
ThingWorx headquarters is now Boston
Tom Paine
Follow @phillytechnews
Subscribe in a readerI may have missed the memo on this, but ThingWorx has moved its headquarters from Exton to Boston. I don't know when it happened.
From its website:
"ThingWorx is based in Boston USA - the global hub of IoT innovation. Questions? Business inquiries? Big ideas? Please get in touch!"
It is certainly no surprise. ThingWorx and associated acquired companies have become the visible centerpiece of parent company PTC's strategy. PTC is based in suburban Boston. And ThingWorx' most important partner, GE, has just moved its headquarters from Connecticut to Boston.
And LiveWorx, PTC's huge annual IoT production, was held in Boston a couple of weeks ago. The highlight was PTC's virtual reality acquisition, Vuforia. An "A list' of speakers helped to reinforce PTC's image as the thought leader in industrial IoT.
ThingWorx' LinkedIn page has 243 employees listed, including 65 in the Philly area and 41 in the Boston area.
A request for information to ThingWorx has so far not been responded to.
Vanguard's McNabb: 'We are a technology company " with 3,000 engineers
Tom Paine
Follow @phillytechnews
Subscribe in a reader Whenever Vanguard Group CEO Bill McNabb talks, people listen.
Not only because Valley Forge-based Vanguard is the monster of the mutual funds business, with assets under management of about $3.4 trillion. But also because McNabb himself is seen as a key influencer in the global financial services industry.
And at a Morningstar Investment conference on Wednesday, he made news in several areas. Not the least of which was the technology front. The trade website RIABiz quotes him as saying in a side talk after his main address, "We are a technology company", citing its 3,000 person strong engineering force ( though I don't think he meant it was Vanguard's primary strength). McNabb discusses a recent visit he and some other top Vanguard executives made to Silicon Valley:
“I mentioned I was really intrigued by some of the software development that we saw in Silicon Valley among the robo-advisors,” he says. “So we are working hard on how do we get that kind of capability within the firm to do more cutting edge? We have great technologists, but you know we are running big platform, legacy systems, so how do you develop something for this in three months the way you would see out of the Valley?
Vanguard has a startup product called 'Vanguard Personal Advisor Services' which is considered a hybrid, part algorithm-based robo and part high touch, personal call center assistance, and has had a very successful launch. Of the independent, robo-based startups, of which Wealthfront and Betterment are best known, Vanguard is considered closest to Wealthfront, at least in terms of investment philosophy.
McNabb later added, "We are watching Alibaba in China very closely, and they have entered a space and done so very successfully,”
RIABiz reported.
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