Job searching is hard enough on it’s own. When you have to worry about not being able to feed yourself because you don’t have any income and your parents don’t want to support you anymore, the job search can become overwhelming. Obviously the best remedy is to get a job, but that’s easier said than done. No matter what, you can’t land a job in a single day unless you’re exceptionally lucky and good. What you can do to ease your financial fears is to start paying attention to personal finance (that’s a link to Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich, because he’s the go to guy for that kind of stuff). You can also start using Thrive, a website that “brings all your credit card, checking, savings, retirement, and investment accounts into one place so you can easily see what you have, what you owe, and where you can grow.” They’re based out of New York City, and as far as I can tell they’re offering a product that is extremely similar to Mint, which has been on my radar for well over a year now. Still, Thrive appears to have developed a great tool for monitoring your personal finances, and since they’re hiring, we thought we should take a look at them.

Thrive in Your First Job

Thrive is a start-up, but they’ve already secured funding and launched a product. Their team is small, but they seem keen on adding fresh talent to help them change the way 20 and 30-somethings manage their money. I’m already on board with the concept, but I have to admit that I’m using Mint (I love the iPhone app!). There’s a lot of competition in this space with Wesabe and Rudder also offering similar services. That means that differentiation and great features are going to be key to winning over users. Since Thrive’s Jobs page says that they’re looking for Junior and Senior Software Engineers, there’s a huge opportunity for you to help them build that point of differentiation. If you have a Software Development background and you’re fascinated by personal finance, this is a dream job for you. Right now all of the jobs at Thrive are on the software side, but you can check out their Team Bios to get a sense of what other types of jobs might be created as they grow. They do seem open to hearing from candidates who are interested in jobs that aren’t listed. Thrive lists two e-mail addresses on their site for people to apply to – jobs@justthrive.com and people@justthrive.com. We’ll guess that they both go to the same place, but you might want to send your resume and cover letter to both – just to be safe.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• JustThrive.com
• Jobs at Thrive
• About Thrive
• Thrive’s Blog
• Thrive’s Team
• Thrive in the News
• What Thrive Does

Are you using any online personal financial management tools like Thrive or Mint?

We've identified Thrive as having career opportunities in the following categories:

• all employers
• engineering
• New York
• personal finance
• software development
• web development

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Jobs Near You

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2 responses to “Thrive”

1. matt @ Thrive says:

   January 23, 2009 at 3:17 pm

   Thanks for the great post, Willy (even if you do use Mint =]). I’m the Lead Scientist here at Thrive, and I can testify about what a great place it is to work: we’re in the rare position of having assembled one of those teams with a strong ninja fu, with strong skills and a sense of togetherness. They lured me out of academia with the promise of the opportunity to help end predatory and negative finance, and they have delivered, every day.

   Not only are we looking for junior and senior engineers, we also have a spot open for a UI designer and a design intern, to compliment Katie and Lynn. We post what we have at http://www.startuply.com as soon as it becomes available, and we’re aggressively hiring right now.

   As for differentiation, we are in the enviable position of knowing what we need to do: new engineers will be coming into a team with a strong sense of direction and commitment, and an openness to new voices in the product process. We are fundamentally different from Mint and others in the space, in that we are focused on young people and building a long-term relationship with our users. Some competitors have created simply expense tracking as a way to lure people into taking sponsored product offers, and we simply have a different vision: Thrive is a comprehensive set of tools and advice specifically designed to help people build better lives.

   So we are absolutely looking for smart folks. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail at matt@justthrive.com if you have questions before applying: I’m happy to talk plainly about why I started and why I stay.

   Reply
2. Willy Franzen says:

   January 23, 2009 at 5:36 pm

   Great comment, Matt! Thanks for stopping by to let us know a little bit more about Thrive. Hopefully readers will take you up on your offer to answer questions.

   Reply