frederickcook

I had the same question. Can someone explain?

Their stock is the same class as the founders. Everyone who had options in Slide also made money proportionate to Levchin, which is better than the investors did, who made nothing. (This assumes early, cheap options. Later ones may have lost money and be worthless.)

The situation the OP is referring to is when the founder decides not to sell the company or IPO, or makes a poor decision about when. With the former, there is no liquidity and stock in a private company with no liquidity or profit sharing is pretty useless.

If a company takes VC investment, it is basically committing to sell or IPO at some point (VC wants control to ensure this), ensuring the options will at some point be liquid. So, technically, having a VC with board control could be a good thing in some situations to ensure that the founder doesn't get any ideas about building a "lifestyle" company and that everyone gets a payday at some point.

Might not be the best idea to comment on your personal feelings regarding an employee's religious affiliation. It'd suck to have a HN post submitted as evidence in a discrimination lawsuit.

Edit: Why the down-vote? The parent has his company and website in his info. No idea what it's like in AUS, but in the states, if someone was fired and there was any ambiguity regarding the reason, this comment could be be admissible in court to demonstrate a prior discriminatory attitude toward people based on their religion.

Wha? We are talking about internet freelancing here, aren't we?

I worked at an open-pit copper mine in New Mexico one summer, part of which included a pretty intense 3-day safety course. One of the best take-aways was their definition of four levels of competence:

Unconscious Incompetence: you don't know what you don't know Conscious Incompetence: you begin to learn what you don't know Conscious Competence: you learn your task, but need to concentrate on it Unconscious Competence: you can perform your task without that level of concentration

The obvious most dangerous one is unconscious incompetence, but the other dangerous one is conscious competence. As you learn your task, you may become overconfident at this point, which may lead to lose of concentration on the task if you know your task better than you do.

Applies not only to working with heavy machinery at a mine, but server administration, coding, etc.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

Related? Haven't seen it this bad in a while.

This article has a lot of great points about private vs. open, but one I disagree with is "First, it's hard, if not impossible, to monetize private communication."

The obvious example that comes to mind here is Gmail. People still click on the targeted keyword ads next to their email, and I haven't seen that Gmail has started making anyone's email public yet.

That billion dollars Facebook made last year was mostly from those personalized display ads, which can easily target a person based on the ad profile of them facebook builds without anyone (read: the outside world) ever seeing their name/employer/statuses/etc. I can't imagine that the revenue from selling the status stream to Google for some multiple of $15 million comes close to the billion they're making from display ads, or the PR mess they've gotten themselves in.

The size of the opportunity you choose to go after has a significant role in the maximum success you may have, and that choice should not be discounted. Founders of billion-dollar companies such as PayPal and YouTube foresaw that the world was changing, and given many industries to choose from, they picked a couple of the largest possible markets where they could have an impact.

If you decide to spend the next four years of your life making, say, appointment scheduling software (first thing that came to mind), that is a conscious choice not to go after a billion-dollar market, and right off the bat, the potential magnitude of your success is constrained.

The term patent trolls gets thrown around too much.

Did Blackboard put together a patent portfolio, and use it dissuade potential competitors? Or do they have a separate business unit that writes patents without actually producing any valuable product and seeking to make money from lawsuits?

The latter is a patent troll; the former is a business best-practice.

(I feel compelled to say that I don't agree with software patents in any form, but until the system is reformed, it's stupid not to play by the rules.

I noticed the same thing regarding how rigorous the tests are. But, just like real life, you can write a program that passes every single fringe case every time, or that meets the specific use cases. (In this case, the specific use cases are the robots from the factory, which you don't necessarily know ahead of time.)

Agreed re: the UAV comment. Imagine a world where big brother is watching everything you do, and can kill you from the other side of the world with the press of a button, with absolutely no warning, with no way for you to defend yourself, and no way to attempt to explain your actions to someone.

A walking robot is much less terrifying.

The first thing I thought was that countries such as Cambodia could one day exist without landmines.

Build an API should be down at the bottom somewhere.

In the PC market, Apple competes on quality, Microsoft (with hardware manufacturers) competes on price. This is the world Ballmer imagined for the smartphone market, but when Google knocked the floor out by giving away the OS (or even paying the carrier a cut of the search revenue), there is no place left for Microsoft to position itself.

Unless Windows Mobile is a vastly superior product to Android (and how likely is that?), it'll be left out of the smartphone market unless they can give it away and try to make it up in Bing search revenue.

For an individual with a mortgage and family, when the going get's tough, they drop the startup and go get jobs. For someone who can live on a grad student budget (YC funding level), there are many months of productivity left after money starts to get thin.

In addition, it'd be quite irresponsible to start scaling your hiring without that concrete product (proven, repeatable, scalable sales process).

Any plans for an API?

So, as I understand it, all this money is to work on an open source project, which is quite different than a startup. Now a well-done open source project inevitably leads to a company (Wordpress, MySQL, etc.) but that isn't what they said they were going to do with the money. (Somebody has to host all these nodes for joe-everybody.)

Are there contractual obligations of raising money with Kickstarter, or can they use this for legal fees?

If they can't use the money for a startup, I doubt they'd have trouble raising money for a company separately, though investors know that any software product developed will be open source.

If there's a market that you don't want to serve because of your principles, you take your principles, and I'll take your market share.

As Mark Suster says, "there is a time to learn, and a time to earn."

Is there a case where it does makes sense to put write off salary as loans to the founders? As the OP indicated, any sophisticated investor would insist all the money goes "forward." But even if the company bootstrapped it to profitability, there would be no difference in tax due using this accounting practice, is there?

Is there any advantage at all to doing it this way?

If you bought an iPad (or pretty much any other item online) it is unlikely you would spend any taxes on it. If you did, many states require the purchaser to report and pay the taxes themselves, not the retailer.

Additionally, sales taxes vary widely state-to-state, so for an that has the same MSRP everywhere in the US, it seems to make sense not to advertise actual tax amount.

990 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243

105 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060176

I think it's worth pointing out that on Twitter, there is only one privacy setting, when you set up an account, and you have complete access to who sees your tweets. Unless I missed a major news story about this, I don't think Twitter has yet violated anyone's trust there.

Facebook, on the other hand, by either incompetence or some skewed sense of openness, at some point has made a choice that it wants to put all your information out there while giving you the illusion that you have some control over it.

The point is that privacy isn't impossible. It's simple. You have an element in a database that is flagged as important to someone, so you make sure that before you ever pull that element out and put it on the web, the proper controls are in place. It is just a choice a company makes of how high of a priority to make something, and Facebook has demonstrated that privacy means more to them as a PR issue than a real concern about user data.

>> If your image is a photo or something photo-like, you should use JPG.

Keep in mind that many, many things produced by computers these days are photo-like, as the OP demonstrated with the icons, so this might not be the best rule of thumb. No argument that simple images should be PNG, but toss in a couple of gradients (which your HN screenshot does not have) and your PNG can start to blow up.

If one can buy 1000 ID's for $25-$45, actual password strength is probably much less important than using different passwords for different sites. Why bother running a password library or brute force program when you can just purchase the ids/passwords for so cheap?

It's interesting how animated and expressive both pg and Jessica are. I remember noticing in multiple pg interviews how much facial expressions are used, and Jessica is the same way. They move their eye-brows, modulate their voices, their smile, lean into the camera, use manual gestures, etc.

It definitely comes off as friendly and engaging, but could probably be intimidating in something like the YC interview setting.

I also wonder if one didn't rub off on the other (we unconsciously pick up the mannerisms of our peers), or if it's one reason they get along so well.

Reminds me of the "first-to-market advantage" that entrepreneurs talk about all the time. Apple took a huge, huge chunk of market and has had it since the iPhone came out. I think we'll see over the next year or two how well that works for them, and if developer sentiment is an early indicator, there could be some big changes in market share.

I absolutely disagree that the topic has been rehashed more than necessary. In fact, I think for it to remain relevant and more than just a PR slogan, the topic should be discussed and challenged continuously.

"Visiting Google felt similar to being approached by kids from the Hillsong church, who ask you to come along to just “an event” with other young people . . . until you turn up with them and realise that, not only is it church, but a bloody well organised and extremely rich church."

This is a great quote, and brings up the issue of groupthink. I saw a talk by Ed Catmull of Pixar a couple weeks ago where he talked about how once an idea can be reduced to a slogan, you don't need the idea anymore, just the slogan. His example was architects saying they are designing buildings "from the inside-out," and how it was a good idea for a few years, until he was working with an architect who designed a shitty building and used the phrase "designed from the inside-out" to dismiss criticism.

For Google, if employees get to the point where "do no evil" is a just a slogan that helps them get to sleep at night and they stop constantly questioning their actions, it doesn't mean anything anymore. In fact, it's worse than had it never existed at all, because it's used as a justification for things of questionable evil-ness. "Google stores everything they can about what you do online without asking your permission, but it doesn't matter, because they would never do anything evil with all that information." They can tell themselves that, but it doesn't mean it isn't evil.

>>Sounds like a pyramid scheme where earlier investors continue to dupe later investors.

Funny way to put it, but it kind of is, except that it isn't previous investors duping new investors, it's just an investor mentality. People are still buying into Facebook at a $15B valuation with no real precedent for a company like them being worth that much. It will be really interesting 5-10 years from now after they've IPO'd/been-acquired/fallen-out-of-favor where their revenue and market cap really settle.