Wild Card @ Ava
Ava
Posted on Tuesday, August 13, 2024
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Wild Card @ Ava
Put your unique talents to the service of humanity
At Ava, we want to build a totally accessible world for deaf & hard-of-hearing people, empowered by great voice recognition technologies.
Imagine if you could help 450 millions of people communicate much better with the rest of the world. Imagine the smiles on their faces when they realize that the world will now be a bit more open for them. We celebrate all the misfits who have unique ideas and deep empathy. The ampersand-shaped pegs not at their place in a hierarchical society.
If you know that you want to use some of your unicorn-level talents (e.g. rare, amazing, almost magical skills) to help our mission, just say hi. We're all eyes & ears!
Why Ava?
Actually change lives at an unprecedented scale: How often do you hear about apps that make people cry of joy? It is really for us a unique opportunity and privilege to be able to meaningfully improve the lives of 100,000s of people - and yet to still be at the very beginning of our mission!
Join us at an incredible time: We're well-funded and hit product-market fit, which gives us a huge green field to work with. You'd join at the perfect time to shape what we build and how we grow, so we can create a more inclusive world.
Work with some of the best people in the world: We have an incredibly talented and passionate team that is a lot of fun to work with. We're still super small and have accomplished more than teams 10x our size. Our interests are wide and deep — and we love to combine them.
Sky is the limit: We like a lot driven folks who are autonomous and pick up the skills they need to go where they want to go. Join us to work on something you're passionate about and we guarantee you'll grow faster than what you think was possible. Sky is truly the limit when the environment and the team is right.
Mission
We want to radically improve how we humans communicate with each other. Our first step is to empower 450M deaf and hard-of-hearing people to a fully accessible world.
Every day, millions of people are excluded from conversations because they cannot hear well what others say. Our CEO Thibault grew up in a Deaf family and saw firsthand how the world was not accessible for them. Together with our CTO Skinner — deaf since age 2 — Thibault co-founded Ava to make live captioning of conversations as easy as turning on captions on TV.
Our small but fast-growing team has reinvented AI-based speech recognition technology to be in service of people who need it the most. We dream of a 24/7 accessible world, without any communication barrier.
In this pursuit, we're seeing how much communication skills are critical, yet very far from ideal, to unleash our collective potential. This is for us the last barrier to be lifted.
Our belief is that well-designed technology can help everyone communicate and connect better — much more effectively and authentically — so humanity can achieve the greatest things together.
We want to make the seemingly impossible equation of communication 1 + 1 = 3, work every time. In other words, make 1 & 1 = 3 a reality.
Life at Ava
We're a small team spread between two cities (San Francisco, where our Product & Growth teams are, and Paris — for our AI team). We care about making the world a much more connected place, and we believe it's best done by a highly creative & driven group of humans working in concert to change the current status quo. We value potential as much as experience and empathy as much as authenticity. Our culture is always evolving though, and we believe new people can and should change how we operate and what we value. A few recurring themes:
Impact first. We care deeply about building AI technologies that make total accessibility possible while being economically sustainable, respectful of privacy, and beneficial to society.
Mountain movers. Our mission is a lofty one. It takes a lot of time, hard work, and perseverance to achieve any kind of meaningful impact. We're ready to persist with bold ideas to the very end.
1 & 1 = 3. No matter where you are from, we know that together we're stronger. We strive to reach authentic and impeccable communication to get where we need to go.
Beyond our bubble. We make Ava for people outside the Silicon Valley bubble. We go beyond our own opinions and biases to listen to our users with deep empathy.
Growth-minded. There’s no model for what we’re building, because we’re trying something that’s never been done before. To stay on our toes, we're happy to commit to learning and growing every day, including when it's about giving each other authentic feedback.
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We firmly believe a small team can make an impact on millions, and we'll stand together to help each other reach this goal.
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We like working together during the week, but we value flexibility - everyone finds ways they work best. Time in the igloo is a favorite!
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Shooting our video in Los Angeles before our viral launch - it was the most shared video ever on ProductHunt, and still is. A pretty amazing day!
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We love going to First Fridays in Oakland. Here we are BBQing on the rooftop of our first office there.
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Founders Thibault, Pieter & Skinner met in UC Berkeley, where we still like to go hike. Roll on you, Bears!
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One of weekly Ava workshop where we get to meet our users. Staying in touch with our community is important for us, it helps us realize the impact of the work we do every day.
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One of our many ampersands, our logo. It reminds us that 1 & 1 = 3, that great teams achieve more than what they believe was individually possible.
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We had an amazing time getting together at our annual retreat. This time we picked Bali!
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We love learning, but also love teaching in all of its forms. Here's Thibault giving a sign language class — his first language — in an evening class.
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Guillaume packed his favorite drone to our retreat, and JB directed this aerial master shot.
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We can be quite competitive in games & sports. The Paris team even made a point to train new hires to acquire new fussball skills!
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Wakeboarding in the summer during our first week-long retreat in Tahoe. One of the perks of being in California where we love to spend time in nature.
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Apply
Thanks for making it here. You probably are really good at what you do, have many choices in front of you. If you are looking to grow your unique talents and leverage them for something truly meaningful, while being in great company, you've come to the right place.
We hope you'll apply here! →