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quintharon Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

I think your pessimism is spot on for most companies. But I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with how great companies handle those questions.

quintharon Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#6 is super important. It's absolutely crazy that many companies won't tell you this.

#7 is a good question, but don't expect a tangible answer -- unless they just closed a round yesterday, it's truly impossible to say. That said, it's still a great question to ask to see how they value themselves, and what they feel potential acquirers or the public market would value them at.

#9 - I think that's a good question, though might be more diplomatically phrased. ;) (That said, be aware that "market rate" is extremely hard to pin down: for the same reasons you should expect an ambiguous answer to #7, your own "market rate" is similarly ambiguous.)

#10 - Agreed. I target 50, personally.

quintharon Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

It's only a faux pas if the company you're talking to sucks. Great companies love hard questions.

quintharon Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

Heh, it was a long road:

1) Have a p2p startup get acquired by Akamai 2) Want to do something financial 3) Financial == PCI compliance == super super expensive 4) Use p2p to build inexpensive PCI compliance 5) ... 6) Profit!

quintharon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2014)

In-house is obviously ideal, but we've got a few remote folks and are always open to more -- especially if you're willing to regularly travel to SF (monthly is best, but quarterly works too). Ultimately we recognize that amazing people always come with strings attached. Let us know what your constraints are and I'm sure we can make it work.

quintharon Forget Virality, Selling Enterprise Software Is Still Old School

I'd suggest "enterprise" means "everywhere the classic top-down enterprise sales strategy works", which generally means "companies over 1000 employees". At Expensify, we define the market as:

1 - Individual, prosumer, contractor, solopreneur, etc. 2-10 - "Very small business" 11-100 - "Small business" 101-1000 - "Midsize business" 1001+ - "Enterprise"

But you're very right to ask -- different industries segment the market differently. We focus on employee headcount because we sell seats; companies who sell big contracts not tied to seats typically segment the market by revenue.