far33d

You mean the mob?

Your responsibility to your shareholders is not to maintain the highest profits/employee - it's to deliver the highest total profit per share. If you need people, and can maintain the 3/2 ratio, you should add them.

If you track traffic sources with high granularity and get lots of traffic from ads or viral channels, you can get actionable data from traffic metrics.

Overall I agree - actionable metrics are the most important. I just take issue with the idea that only revenue related metrics are important.

In most early web startups, the biggest challenge (and the most common reason for death) is acquiring and retaining customers. User metrics are completely valid as your primary metrics early on.

I'm going to ignore all the "social" aspects of the supposed pay difference in my analysis. I think they are valid and accurate, but don't paint the full picture. This is coming from the perspective of a programmer turned PM. Note, however, that I haven't actually observed any pay difference - in the current startup/tech climate, good engineers are in high demand and are commanding super-high salaries. The best engineers are often the highest paid (cash-wise) in the company.

The reason good PMs are paid highly is because they use leverage to create more value across the organization than they can provide as a single contributor. A great BA or PM guides the whole project and the whole team, making a group of people more efficient by properly prioritizing their work and getting more value for each hour worked. A great PM measures these results, and shows the difference they make. A great PM tunes the product to the customer.

Great PMs are held accountable for the product and its success in the marketplace. Great PMs can't do their jobs without great engineers and respect that fact.

You only need one great PM for every 5 great engineers, so you can be more discerning about who you hire and how much you pay them. Since great PMs are accountable, they command high equity value, and should accept that instead of higher salaries (like salesmen take commission).

If this isn't true where you work, you should work somewhere else where it is.

>I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased.

7.3m iPads sold so far hardly seems like just early adopters.

When you put it that way, a $20k couch costs you the same amount of equity as you would give a senior engineer in a post-series-A company.

CEO's should all have 2 hour holds on their email that leaves the office. Whe actively fighting fires, it's easy to say something stupid.

What is the story behind the 90/10 split between Clark and Andreesen at Netscape?

I wonder if this kind of "extra fund" will become commonplace for successful micro-vc / super-angels. If you put out 100 $500k investments, and one turns out to be twitter, you are going to want the capital to keep a pro-rata share and follow on.

Raising money for that should be easy, especially if you restrict the fund to existing investments and only charge fees on invested capital.

Slightly disappointed - TripIt is one of the few web products released in the past five years that made me say "WOW. I need to tell everyone about this."

My wife managed bookings and travel for public speakers - TripIt probably saved her and her clients hundreds of hours last year. Given the amount of information they have about people's travel preferences and the high margins of online travel businesses, I'm surprised they were sold for so little.

Actually, Pixar is probably one of the best places on the planet to work.

The no-cold-call policy did not mean that employees were off limits completely. We hired lots of people from ILM, Lucasfilm, Dreamworks, etc, but they came to us.

The "evil" of this particular case is pretty overstated. I was there at the time, and basically understood it was happening, and it didn't bother me in the slightest. All those other VFX houses treated their employees like cattle.

Being lean is about getting maximum leverage, not keeping costs as low as possible. This kind of hire is a great example.

Using the audio port is clearly a "wedge" into the market while smartphone technology catches up to support this kind of thing natively. Would you rather wait to build a market and startup or would you rather already be the market leader when the supporting tech is available?

There is no reason, in a virtual goods model, that larger audience sizes require thinner margins. Players choose games based on how much fun they are having and what they can play socially with their friends - not the pricing on individual items.

Also, the author states "You think they're going to justify a $50 billion market capitalization through banner ads? Are you kidding me?".

This has nothing to do with Zynga and ignores Facebook Credits, which give Facebook a 30% cut of all the revenue on the platform. I'm pretty sure this author has never heard of them.

Reason #3 shows that the author does not understand even the basics of virtual goods and facebook platform monetization. The other points are nearly as non-sensical.

My understanding is that all new hire grants @ facebook are given in restricted stock units (RSU) not options, in part to avoid the 500 shareholder rule.

Ed Catmull always says that his approach to hiring was to find someone smarter than himself and that meant he was the dumbest person left @ Pixar.

No business grows forever - mature businesses should always pay dividends back to their shareholders, public or private.

I thought Facebook credits weren't even available as an option for Connect apps?

If you really want to grow even faster:

1) scrap the standalone website and build it as an iframe app (should be very little work). This will simplify login significantly and will keep people inside FB, which in my experience, makes a world of difference in the viral funnel.

2) replace the "share this link" with a real Stream.publish call. Consider adding like buttons for every single user's page.

3) Allow people to see which of their friends have answers as well.

Then, if you add the 1 credit transaction, you should do pretty well. Beware, however... Facebook has given out a lot of free credits to users and they do not give app devs any payback when free credits are used. These chargebacks can affect actual revenue from small transactions like this significantly.

If they were to payout investors with their cash receipts, they would have LESS cash to actually reinvest and grow the business. For Groupon, given the amount of competition and the local focus of the business, this would hurt their competitive position significantly against any competitor who decided to reinvest all their cash and raise more money.

If the "finder" is an investment banker, this seems very low.

Followup - if your startup is successful, chances are you're going to end up working at a big company. Either you will be acquired, or you will grow.

Experience with this can help you be a better entrepreneur.

Working for a large but still quickly growing company has been, for me, the best of both worlds. There's still a lot of upside in stock options and in career path because of the growth. You get to dabble in politics and you have a large community of people to learn from and keep in contact with in the future.

And usually, these companies are not mired in the large and unwieldy bureaucracy that is common in large and established companies. i.e. companies like Facebook, Zynga, Google 5 years ago, etc.

However, my experience is limited to two big-but-growing companies, one startup, and one small but completely dysfunctional. Too small a sample size for definitive generalization.

It's easy to chalk this up to whining and ignore it since it comes off as a rant. The problem is that United and its employees don't consider service a priority, not that they have a policy about canceling flights when you skip the original leg. I've had this experience multiple times with United and have found them to be the worst offender of all the legacy airlines.

They are a mess and they are outright hostile to their customers much of the time. I realize that travelers get stressed out and yell a lot and it can be frustrating, but laughing at a customer should never be acceptable.

Boston, MA

Zynga Boston is hiring in Game Design, Product Management, and Engineering. We're having a party to meet and greet candidates:

zbostonparty.eventbrite.com

or email me (email in profile)

We were an acquired studio, so we still operate like a startup and have all really talented, smart people. We're also working on new games!

UID

Doing financial or other KPI modeling can be really illuminating. At minimum, it can help you verify your assumptions about market size and opportunity.

For instance, check out this great article from the founders of snaptalent:

http://jamiequint.com/lesson-one-know-your-market

"I think we are going to pass on SnapTalent. I like the guy and the concept, but the model we put together just doesn’t play out the way we would like it to. I’ve attached it here, and you can see that if we assume $5k cost per hire, we get to a very reasonable $2.50 eCPM. But I don’t believe $5K is the right number. I believe it is somewhere between $75 (what Craigslist charges) and, say, $2K. At the high end, that leads to an eCPM of $1 which is not going to get over the bar of most publishers. As the low end, the eCPM and the CPC converge....way bad ;) I’m sure we screwed something up and you are going to make a ton on this deal, and I thank you for giving us time to look at it, but it is not going to work for us right now."

Beat me to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847466

I'm confused - isn't this the wrong graph? Shouldn't we be looking at a histogram showing return multiple on the x axis and # of companies in that group on the Y?

Or, alternatively, return decile on the x, and total return value on the Y - this would probably end up looking somewhat bimodal, right?