charlesdm

Sure, e-mail is in my profile!

All the developers I have talked to tell me it's a waste of time and money, for the most part. It's more of "sure, why not" channel. But if someone has different experiences I would be happy to hear them.

You'll get destroyed in reviews. It's horrible. It's a shitstorm you know will come when you make the change.

I actually agree that plenty of apps don't warrant a subscription. Do you want to end up paying a monthly fee for everything? It's a hard one to balance.

As someone who has made indie Mac apps for a living, it's a tough market.

I've done well and made good money on my own, but launching a new Mac only desktop product these days without a subscription component is hard. Launching one without subscription is even harder, because your revenue is one off.

Apps that are not extremely mainstream are bound to make just a few thousand or a few tens of thousands a year. That is likely not enough to build out a proper app dev team.

There is also a tax benefit in the US. A lump sum payment is taxed as capital gains, vs an annuity which will be normal income.

I'm not US based, but just curious.

What happens to that capital, is it just sitting in a bank account waiting to be dispensed?

Could you invest or loan it to other companies you control at market rate for other purposes?

Same here!

I'm not an expert on AWS, but can't you use all those services without AWS?

Startup investing isn't private equity. Private equity is acquiring a profitable company with limited equity and a pile of debt, paying it down, and selling it at a profit.

This is amazing. I'm writing this down for when I have kids!!

All great, until I got to the end. The easy money drying up? The FED has injected $3tn into the markets in two weeks. Assets are being propped up across the board.

People who are not asset holders are getting screwed here, because salaries are not going up.

I don't agree with it, but the reasoning goes like this:

It makes sense for both parties because for the seller the investment gains from the capital they're getting from this transaction will be similar to what they're making from running the registry. But they no longer have the headaches of running the registry.

For the buyer, well, it's a monopoly so the sky is the limit. Even if current seller is able to raise the prices, they might not want it due to the backlash this would cause. Current buyer is less constrained by this.

Depends on the tax and accounting laws of your country, but generally the taxable event happens when you invoice.

So I'm doing accounting in EUR and invoice 10,000 USD. For accounting purposes my 10,000 USD gets converted to EUR on the invoice date, at the ECB USDEUR exchange rate.

Then you hold that 10,000 USD for 2 months in your USD account, and the USDEUR exchange rate has dropped or increased 10% in that period. When you then exchange the USD into EUR, you'll generally pay tax on the exchange difference (= capital gain)

My Belgian bank accounts are all multi currency. I can hold, receive and send USD/EUR (and others if I wanted to).

Mind, for a VC. A VC needs at least 100x on their investment. You don't realistically get that unless you invest very very early or you exit to a strategic acquirer, and most acquisitions aren't by strategic acquirers.

That stake was likely worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, but to KPCB it wasn't worth the hassle to find someone willing to pay that. They know they make a loss on most of their investments.

But lenders take a different risk. They don't share in the upside. I can borrow $100m against assets for next to nothing. You can't raise the same amount of equity for next to nothing -- equity investors are generally looking for much higher returns, for the risk they are taking.

If anything, depending on the market the risk is that the house actually goes down in value.

At the end of the day it depends on what your risk appetite is.

We've been on quite the bull run so in that regard I would say no, but given rates are super low and mortgage debt is cheap to come by (barely covers inflation), I honestly don't see why you wouldn't investigate it more. If you can make more than the mortgage interest rate, then it was worth it.

Using debt is fine is you can stomach a potential drop in a liquid market. That is more psychological than financial, actually. Would you panic sell if your (leveraged) investment drops 30 or 50%? I've come to realise I wouldn't hence I would consider making that investment, but to each their own.

This is less risky than using pure margin debt on your investments, because this can't be automatically liquidated.

I'm based in Europe but together with a partner I'm a buyer of small tech businesses. We have bought businesses so are credible and are always interested in buying more. We could pay $8m if an interesting business came along.

The issue is that a lot of smaller deals fall through, either because of unrealistic final price expectations by the seller or because some metric that is super important to the business was calculated and supplied in the wrong way (i.e. churn). Or there are issues in structuring the contract because the seller (or his legal advisor) "overengineers" the contract -- lawyers can and sometimes do end up killing deals.

As a buyer, if I pay you a $25k fee, you now have leverage over me. Because if the deal doesn't happen I'm out $25k. If I don't pay you anything you're incentivized to get the deal done and try and draft a balanced sale/purchase agreement that works for seller and buyer. That means both parties making concessions on terms. In my mind, that is healthy, because if we finalise the deal you're getting a bag of money.

Let's say there is a clause we just can't find each other on. No worries, we can jointly decide to walk away. If I paid you and you're not willing to budge, then I'm out $25k if I walk away. It doesn't keep the discussion balanced.

Add to that that some people might (in the end) be unsure whether they even want to sell or not, and you end up in a situation where it's all mostly uncertainty (for both parties) until the deal closes.

This is excellent advice

^ Totally agreed. Key is to see them as a partner, not someone just handling the legal side. You actually want a lawyer who keeps the end goal in mind, and doesn't just want to protect their client at all cost.

On some of the key terms in a contract: explain me the situation, give me the options and the associated risks, and then let me make the call on what I (as the client) find acceptable. I've never seen something blow up when operating in this way.

An alternative is to sell them IP. Whether they're interested in that is another thing, but if your employment contract doesn't contain relevant clauses that automatically transfer IP ownership to your employer, it also doesn't seem like a bad solution to the problem.

If this isn't a situation to consult a lawyer on, then I don't know what is. He needs an IP lawyer with notions of employment law of the jurisdiction he's in.

If a company wants to formally acquire the rights to the IP.. it's safe to say it's worth something.

Agreed, this is a legal issue. Consult a lawyer. DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING! If they insist, let them know you are consulting with a lawyer.

If they pressure you to sign documents then consider that they don't have your best interests at heart. Depending on the company their position could either end up being very friendly, or very unfriendly towards you.

Also remember that, if you feel this is a project with great potential, it might be worth quitting your job over.

The legal position will be different depending on the jurisdiction you are based in. The laws of Belgium are different to those in say, Delaware.

The investors. If you give a loose cannon many billions of dollars, who is at fault?

But yes, normal employees are paying the price here.

Thing is you don't want to sell to a nontechnical owner. I've sold apps in the past where it all just died, because the purchaser did not put in any effort.

You want to sell to a party who will run it as if it was their own product (or who will hire a capable team to expand it further). That is possible for a $400k ARR product, but much harder for a website doing say $50k through one-off sales.

This reads exactly the same as "I want this girl, but she has a boyfriend". And the answer is exactly the same: you likely can't -- maybe you can, or maybe you can't, but you'll end up wasting a whole lot of time and effort on something that is not worthwhile.

There are other fish in the sea. Time to start looking for a new position.

Same opinion here. I've met many nice and many not so nice people over the years, both rich and not so rich. But in my view both are not really correlated.

In all honesty, it only sells well because of the tax benefits. Do the actual math and then figure out how many people would then buy and use it. Likely not a lot.

This is a decision that likely does not matter at all to the success of your company. The number one skill you're likely forgetting about now is sales.

You need to figure out how to talk to people and sell them things.

That's only for the "smucks", though. If you have a proper banking relationship, you'll get great rates.