lfittl

Am I right in the assumption that you meant "SEEKING WORK"?

Author notes "I have lived in the US and have a social security number." (in the comments) - can you open up bank/merchant account without SSN?

No - he's talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berklee_College_of_Music

This comes up again and again, unfortunately. Its Apples and Oranges - and I get the feeling GoCardless don't say this clearly enough:

GoCardless does not process credit card transactions. They process bank debits (= low fees, different system), and are UK only.

Stripe does process credit card transactions, and doesn't do bank debit.

Interesting, my problems back then were actually ZMQ-related.

Though to be fair, we were making it a bit complicated by suspending/resuming the OpenVZ containers. From that we sometimes got dead ZMQ connections that were black holing all traffic (incredibly hard to debug - ended up switching because of it).

I built a very similar PaaS with mongrel2 about a year ago (though all applications were untrusted and running inside an OpenVZ container) - only to change it to be nginx/HTTP-based because of stability.

Great to see this technology is ready nowadays and can be used for production systems :)

He's the co-founder of Gidsy, who just raised from Ashton Kutcher & Index Ventures http://www.crunchbase.com/company/gidsy

The simple fact that GmbH law greatly differs from UK/US corporate law makes it uncommon, and therefore cumbersome for any interested UK/US investors. Though obviously if you've got the traction they'll just bite through.

Also things like stock options, reverse vesting, convertible notes turn into overly complex issues when trying to re-create them in GmbH law.

And besides the additional bookkeeping/accounting burden, I have not encountered any issues with our current setup.

In regard to why Ltd+GmbH: We found the move-the-Ltd-to-Austria process a bit complicated, and also encountered the issue you mention, that people think of Ltds being shady/not trustworthy.

For Europeans: Create a UK Ltd holding company, and a local entity for each country you operate in. Happy to answer specific questions by email (we're UK Ltd holding with local AT GmbH)

You can also save that local entity by moving the UK Ltd into your country and registering it in the local company registry (EU only) - great article on how to do this: http://www.internetszene.at/2009/03/31/checkliste-limited-od... (German, unfortunately)

These systems run "bundle install" on the server anyway - simply make it a full-blown gem and patch it into the Gemfile.

Also highly recommended: Accounting for Computer Scientists

http://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-comput... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2298471

After reading that article it finally all made sense to me.

Thank you for sharing - unfortunate that it doesn't get picked up & voted on more - really enjoyed reading :)

Rob Walling's book is a nice how-to for this kind of entrepreneurship http://www.startupbook.net/

(not affiliated with the author in any way, just enjoyed the book myself)

Would be great if you could share the outline of the survey (or the survey directly) - I've been having a hard time nailing the right type of questions.

Indeed, option pools are usually created before the actual investment (and therefore dilution) happens, but the option pool percentage you negotiate is % of post-money (not pre).

Don't forget the additional $10/hour "region fee" (= $7200/month)

And that dedicated instance is likely still running inside Xen, so you got the normal virtualization overhead, and slow disks.

Is this US-only? (been dying for a good UK based gateway)

Also you should fix the layout of the upgrade screen: http://skitch.com/lfittl/f5rtf

Sean Ellis recently did a good presentation on this, highlighting whats different for network effect businesses:

http://startup-marketing.com/bringing-a-network-effect-busin...

Judging from WHOIS they seem use Softlayer.

Sweet library!

I've also started a more broad collection of articles useful to entrepreneurs at http://founderswiki.com/

If you want to collaborate in some way I'd love to talk more - lukas@fittl.com

It's just a fact about the industry - I can confirm having previously worked for a domain registration company. Low margin business as end users compare on price (e.g. when looking for "domain" on Google) - features (mostly) don't matter.

Vienna, Austria or Remote: Performance Engineer

Vienna, Austria: Linux and C Programming Guru

Full time positions, stock option plan available.

We're building Platform-as-a-Service for hosting providers, enabling them to offer Heroku-style products.

http://efficientcloud.com/jobs.html

Drop me a line at l.fittl@efficientcloud.com - Cheers!

How about Connected: http://connectedhq.com/ - CRM that is mostly based on data you already have on Gmail/LinkedIn/etc.

They are still quite new, but I'm confident they're (mostly) taking the right way.

Would love to have an invite as well, email in profile. Thanks!

Mobclix (SC 2008) http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/30/mobclix-acquired-by-mobile-... (50M+)

And one small acquisition: Talasim http://www.thenational.ae/business/media/jeeran-acquires-tal... (1M)

Uhm you sure about that posture? (didn't read the book though)

As far as I've learned & experienced, meditation is always practiced sitting upright - it's actually a quite important part about it. Like that: http://www.google.at/images?q=mindfulness+meditation+posture...

What I really don't understand - why aren't they using virtualization? (e.g. OpenVZ)

Direct link to the map the article is based on: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=20...

Looks like they want to have only the best candidate, but for maintaining a horrible codebase. Obviously a position that's hard to fill.

The point is that these aggregators are not in everyone's mind today. Groupon can use their current offering to reach everyone's mind, and then use that positioning (and therefore you going to their site) to do price comparison, focus on the user choosing specific topics of interest, etc.