dkador

Alan's one of the most thoughtful engineers I know. No surprise to see this post from him. Nice job!

Shouldn't this have a field for the salary you make at the startup?

Makes total sense. This is an important point for many of our customers so I appreciate you calling it out. Thanks!

Thanks, John. Best part of this job is hearing from happy customers. :)

(Disclaimer: founder of Keen IO here.)

That's a bit misleading, I think. The full paragraph:

You are solely responsible for any content and other material that you submit, publish, transmit, or display on, through, or with our Services (“Content”). You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully paid license to use the Content, as necessary, for purposes of providing the Services to you and other users of the Services. All rights in and to the Content not expressly granted to us in this Agreement are reserved by you.

Anyways, legal mumbo jumbo aside (we obviously could make this clearer), we absolutely don't sell or give your data to anybody but you. That's one of the major differences between us and some other analytics companies. Your data is yours and we won't monetize it.

Yeah, I was wondering that too!

CTO of Keen IO here.

The ingest side isn't too crazy. We're doing between 50-100 insert-type requests per second per server (although we run multiple instances of Tornado per server so it's actually fewer per Tornado process). The stats on the read side are more impressive. :)

Thanks for the kind words. :)

I like how they're linking directly to the keen S3 bucket that hosts google prettify's CSS.

Except HyperMac worked VERY closely with their marketing company. AND the vitriolic response was posted by HyperMac's CEO.

That's a fair point. I think the article is assuming that, in these cases, the companies are in the wrong.

This is actually interesting. I think there's probably a huge opportunity to communicate with your customers in this case. There's got to be a way to engage while respectfully disagreeing.

I don't think it does much good to try and differentiate between the industry making a product or service and the advertising industry that supports them. They don't exist without each other.

For example, if Apple put out a sexist ad, you can bet people would talk about sexism in BOTH the tech industry and in the ad industry.

It's not true because men and women are both brought up in the same power structures. There are plenty of women who believe that women's rightful place is in the home, that buy into the notion of modern beauty, and that don't care about women's rights (aka abortion, rape, etc).

That being said, I'd buy an argument that said women are more likely to be aware of these issues. Or even that women are less likely to be sexist. I suppose I took issue with your assertion that women are MUCH less likely to be sexist. I guess it's an argument of degrees.

I think both of those would be better than their actual response, which was accusatory and hostile.

Love this. At the very least, you get a +1 from me.

It's inexcusable from a PR standpoint. It's sad to think how much more love they could have received from the community.

That's definitely not true.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough when I wrote it, but my intention was to show that, while I wrote that version of the post, I realized it was stupid (not just the post, but the idea).

We're working hard to not fall into any of the traps of working with friends. It's not easy. Who knows if we'll succeed. But we're trying.

Thanks, Nat. :)

I had an amazing time doing TechStars Cloud this year. Definitely apply if you're considering it (or even if you're not). Happy to answer any questions about it if people have them.

Every company incentivizes its employees to behave in certain ways, and one of the main ways to incentivize is through monetary reward. We're big believers in keeping our employees happy. And research* shows there's a big correlation between commute time and employee happiness. So we've made the decision to try to encourage, through a bonus, all of us to stay close to the office.

I see it as similar to the way FullContact is trying out a program to encourage its employees to take real vacation time - paid, paid vacation. They believe (and we do too, actually), that people SHOULD take time off work to go cool places. But they often don't. But if you give them money to do it, maybe they will.

Of course, you don't have to agree. And maybe it means we wouldn't be a good culture fit for you. Sounds like you're okay with that?

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-rese... http://www.fullcontact.com/2012/07/10/paid-paid-vacation/

Of course we've thought of this (and a number of other hypotheticals). And of course we've discussed it, openly amongst the entire team as well as behind closed doors with our board and counsel. It does complicate things. In the end we felt like the positives (having Michelle on the team so we can take advantage of her strengths) outweigh the potential negatives. It could absolutely turn out badly. As with almost everything else in startups, we're making a hedged bet. And you're free to think we've made a mistake, of course, as long as you don't leave believing we haven't thought a ton about this. :)

It would be different if we were inserting Michelle into some rigid organization structure, especially if she was reporting to somebody other than our CEO. We don't have that kind of structure, though, and even if we did, we would never tell a frontline manager to hire somebody based on nepotism. That's a sure-fire way to kill a company in my book.

(Couldn't reply directly to you, rdl, sorry.)

I agree that offering an office manager 5% is silly and offering a founder-level person 5% could make sense. I guess I was more curious to see what you think the right ranges are.

I think that's a fair thing to assume. Full disclosure: I'm Dan, one of the other co-founders of Keen. I actually did the negotiation with Michelle - Kyle delivered our original offer. But she's one of my best friends as well. As is Kyle. As is our other co-founder and the two other people on our team.

The negotiation was awkward, but I'm personally convinced that we're a stronger team because of our close personal bonds. It's not for everybody or every team, of course, but I believe it works for us.

Probably because she's a woman and people here can be very sexist?

Disclosure: I'm one of the founders of Keen.

With respect to the housing subsidy, you've got part of it right. We do work out of a big house that some of us live in. But the rent subsidy was put in place for one main reason: one of the main drivers of employee happiness is commute time. They're inversely related, and the rent subsidy is our way of incentivizing employees to live close to the office.

You think because they're engaged that she was more likely to get a favorable offer?

You think that if a company offers a sizable equity percentage as part of their comp it signals something negative about that company?

Like Michelle points out - once you make above a certain amount, money doesn't really move the happiness meter much. At least for certain people! You and I seem like we're among that bunch.

Everybody's different on that front. We all have to figure out how much we're willing to sacrifice something, be it "freedom", interest in work, happiness, time, etc. for our paycheck. I think the interesting thing is that people's view here definitely changes over time.

My corporate job for five and a half years after college offered amazing cash flow and other perks and I didn't feel like I was sacrificing anything. But eventually I felt like the pace at which I was learning slowed down too much and I knew I needed to make a change. With the nest egg I had built up over the years, I knew I could quit without sacrificing a ton.

Starting Keen was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Do you think your opinion will change in the next five years?