Hi fellow Fast.ai students,
I just published 
a new version of, Trimmed News, an app that I released a month ago. Trimmed News is a news app where you can read summaries of the news 
. Summaries are produced in seconds still maintaining human-like quality 
.
https://trimmednews.com
Android
Apple
First I started this as a fun project 
where I wanted to learn more about NLP. Then I realized 
how useful this might be and how much bigger 
this can become than just news summarizer. I have always been reading business books 
and watching startup courses 
because I knew that at some point I wanted to start one. A couple of weeks ago someone from London contacted me asking for a call 
. We talked for about 45 minutes and decided to work on this together 
. He got a lot of information about startups, apps, and news space so it was a good combination of different kinds of talents.
Now, two weeks after the call we launched the new version that has much better UI, summaries, and many other things 
. Now we hope to see improvement 
in our retention to see that there is a need for this kind of product. Our plan is to raise seed 
round (first investment round) soon to be available to work in the same place. If everything goes as planned, hopefully in 6-12 months we are ready to raise A 
round (second investment round). That is the point where we hire more people to work. AI 
will play a big part in the app and that is why we need to hire employees to work in this area.
At the beginning, startups need employees that have a little bit wider talents so instead of hiring someone to work with NLP there might need to fix recommendation systems etc. That is why I believe this community is a great place to find employees. People without a PhD can be as good as self-learned but still, many companies don’t understand this:man_facepalming:. Fast.ai students have deep knowledge of different areas 
. I also want to point out that I’m not interested in hiring people who live in the United States but people all around the world 
. It’s expensive to pay 
all paperwork to get someone from other country 
to move to the US 
but I believe it is worth it 
. There are super talented people outside the US and I know how hard it is to get a job in the US even with a proper degree.
I would appreciate if you have time to test Trimmed News and maybe give some feedback. There is dozens of different ways to contact 
me and DM here is one good option. And to highlight 
I’m not interested in hearing that the app is great but hearing what’s wrong. Try to think of questions like: Why do you stop using it after the first day? What makes it worse than your current source of news?
In case you are interested in working on this company in the future, you can already reach out to me 
. There is a lot of things that can and will go wrong but hopefully, in a year we have an office in Silicon Valley and we are ready to hire more people. To improve your chances of being selected keep watching Fastai courses, keep reading papers, and the most important keep coding.
I appreciate any kind of feedback from business strategy to technical details and every contact is obviously answered.
Cheers🍹,
Lankinen