Venmo Hackathon: Winners and Honorable Mentions
A lot of companies do Hackathons, and Venmo is no exception. What is exceptional, however, is the talent and comradery that emerged during the wee hours last Wednesday night. A poker app, picture uploader, social payment infographics, and many other cool projects all built string by string through the exploration and utilization of Venmo’s digital architecture.
The winning project, although we are all winners here at Venmo, was built by engineers Peyton, Staub (Andrew) and Christine. They built a poker app called PotBot that let’s you create and manage a poker pool and cash out with Venmo. Needless to say, the team was stoked to put this app into action.
Honorable mentions include, Venmo Goals, the server infrastructure for a Venmo picture uploader (coming soon to the general public), and the Make It Rain app.
Venmo Goals (pictured above) is an app that helps you hold your friends accountable to their resolutions. A user chooses a goal and then up to four sponsors. When the user acknowledges that s/he has “tripped up” on their goals, the app randomly selects a single support to receive a small Venmo payment.
The Make it Rain app, showers your friends with dollars electronically, via Venmo. Just open the app, pick a friend and, with a swipe of your finger, you can make it rain one Venmo dollar at a time.
Hackathons certainly bring out the creativity in people. What ideas do you have for a hack built using Venmo? Email us at press@venmo.com for a chance to have your app idea featured on our blog or built during one of our next hackathons.
Venmo’s Head of Culture Talks Employee One-on-Ones
At Venmo, we’ve been working hard to find the best people to join our team. Dan Garfinkel, our head of culture and community, is in charge of maintaining the Venmo vibe as the team grows. “We are now 24 people strong… and we’re all responsible for setting the tone for Venmo as we continue to grow,” Dan said in a company-wide meeting on culture and community building initiatives.
To help make sure every person on the team gets to know their co-workers, Dan introduced company one-on-ones. Each week, every Venmo employee is paired with another member of our team to spend a little one-on-one time outside of the office.
Team members agree on an activity for their outing, pay for it and are reimbursed with a simple charge to the Venmo employee expense account. Sometimes we just grab lunch, a beer, or a coffee, but some people in the office like to be a bit more creative. Engineer Alan and designer Christine used their Venmo spending cash to play a friendly game of poker. One engineer, Julian, was considering handing out flowers at the high line park for his next one-on-one. “It’s choose your own destiny, once a week,” said marketing manager, Cora.
In true Venmo fashion, after Dan announced the one-on-ones our engineers started arguing over how the pairs should be selected. To help sort through the different programming solutions our engineers offered, Dan held a company-wide competition to see who could write the most efficient program. We won’t mention any names, but the winner earned serious dough from his congratulations via Venmo.
No matter how many people come onboard in the future, Venmo plans to make sure the company always feels friendly, vibrant and close-knit. As Dan said, “Happy team members work hard for the team.”
Columbia Student Organization Uses Venmo for Dues and Dining
Ron Shapiro, Columbia University student and Venmo intern, talks about how Venmo provides his student organization with an easier way to collect dues.
Ron, long accustomed to using Venmo for coffee runs during exam week and splitting bar tabs with his friends, has found an innovative way of to Venmo to improve his extracurricular activities. He established a Venmo Club account for his Hillel group to collect dues, making it much easier to plan big events.
Ron’s group plans a dinner for 250 people. Collecting money from all of those people was cumbersome and a little socially awkward. “Asking people for cash can be really nerve-wracking and kind of a pain,” he explained. Adding, “when dues can’t be collected, group leaders end up funding events from their project budget.”
With Venmo, Ron just charges group members directly from the app on his phone. “It makes our lives infinitely easier,” Ron added. Now he can even monitor the dues he’s collected and view them on the web.
Fraternities, sororities, acapella groups and countless other student-run organizations all plan group events and rely on dues collected from their members. Ron’s even been encouraging his friend, the treasurer of a Columbia fraternity, to start collecting dues with Venmo next year. He’s hopeful more and more student groups at Columbia will bypass the hassle of collecting cash and start using Venmo: “Everyone agrees it’s the future.”
Thanks, Ron!
Got a story about how you use Venmo on your college campus? Email us at press@venmo.com. Select submissions will be featured on our blog.
We’re Coming Out of Beta: Social Payments for Everyone!
Today, we are finally opening up Venmo to the general public. Thanks so much to all of our beta users for all of your feedback and support— we couldn’t have built Venmo without you!
About two years ago, two former college roommates built Venmo because they found that paying friends was an inconvenient, awkward and frustrating experience. They wanted to create an service that made paying your friends simple, fast, fun and easy.
At Venmo, we want to make the payment experience so enjoyable that our users tell their friends about it. Even though we’ve been invite-only up to this point, Venmo is growing tremendously and currently processes $10MM in social payments per month. Our users Venmo each other for dinners, rent, concert tickets, birthday drinks, and sometimes just for laughs.
For us, the most exciting part of creating Venmo is seeing other people use the product the way we do — not simply as a payment service but as a way of expressing, capturing and sharing all of the fun things friends do together. We have been thrilled to see that our users love sharing payment notes with friends, leaving comments, and browsing through their payment histories to relive time spent with friends. With Venmo, every payment tells a story of friendship and shared memories.
To help us make Venmo even better, we have assembled a team of amazing people who are obsessed with building a product that people love. And now, with the support of all of our loyal beta users, a dedicated team, and some great partners (Accel, RRE, Greycroft, and Lerer Ventures) that we brought on last year, we are ready to open up Venmo for everyone to use.
Thanks everyone, and keep sharing the payment love!
Let Siri Carry Your Wallet: Payments at the Speed of Conversation
We have released integration with the iPhone’s personal assistant Siri. Simply ask her to pay and charge your friends. Here are some examples of how it works:
“Tell Venmo to charge Alan O’Donnell four dollars and fifty cents for an iced latte from Starbucks”
“Tell Venmo to send Andrew Staub five dollars for a beer. Thanks for building talk to pay. This is sick!”
Here is your payment grammar lesson and how it works:
“Tell Venmo” + {send or charge} + {the full name of the person you are paying} + {the amount of the payment} + {what you are paying for}
Siri will draft a text message for you to review and send to Venmo. We’ll double check your grammar and make sure you are paying or charging one of your Venmo friends. If everything looks good, we’ll pay or charge your friend and send you and Siri a confirmation message.
Requirements
- Make sure you have our number (646-863-9557) saved as “Venmo” in your phone’s address book.
- Make sure to use your friend’s full name.
- Register for Venmo by downloading our iPhone or Android app.
Protips
- You can use “pay” instead of “send” but Siri often has trouble with this word. For some reason Apple decided to optimize for the word “hey” in text messages :).
- If you want to make a payment that includes cents, use the words dollars and cents. For example, say “ten dollars and fifty cents for a burger” and not “ten fifty for a burger”. Siri will interpret “ten fifty” as $1050 and you will be eating some expensive meat.
Venmo’s First Hackathon - Oct 2011
Last Friday we held our first (of many more to come) 36-hour hackathon. We had a blast, learned a lot, and slept a little. Here’s a summary of the hacks we created!
Kortina, Shreyans, and Staub at a team meeting on Thursday morning
It doesn’t hurt to work at Venmo on your birthday!
Woah, I just bought my dad an iPhone
Andrew Staub here, Venmo Growth Engineer, with a story that captures why I think Venmo is awesome.
My father turned 60 in May. Three weeks ago, he gave in to child pressure and switched from AOL to Gmail and ditched his 8 year-old palm pilot and 3 year-old flip phone in favor of the iPhone 3GS. I had repeatedly encouraged him that these new products were designed so well that he would have no problem picking them up.
And then reality hit. He was calling me three times a day with questions and having trouble making a simple phone call. Most likely, no matter your age, you have experienced a similar situation. You encourage your parents to adopt a new technology and their enormous fear of change causes a great deal of stress.
Android Update!
We’ve updated our android app to include some awesome new features:
Foursquare Check-In:
When you make a payment on Venmo and tag it with a location, we’ll also check you in on foursquare. Two birds, one stone. So, next time you want to check-in at a bar or restaurant with your friends, just pay them back on Venmo, and we’ll do the work for you.
iPhone Update Released!
Yesterday, we released an updated version of the Venmo iPhone app with new features & enhancements.
Connect with Foursquare & Twitter
Now, If you ask to share a payment on foursquare or Twitter but are not yet connected,
you’re prompted to connect.
Other Updates
- Updated card.io to 1.1.1. Collect zip & send immediately.
- Fixed “Cancel Friend” issue.
- Login with short usernames now allowed.
- Allow redirect back to third-party apps after payment completion.
Get the updated version of the Venmo iPhone app from the App Store.
