tkiley

I sympathize with the author but I'm not really sure what to make of this.

Founders are told to hustle, to aggressively push themselves and their visions in order to build momentum for their businesses. Founders are encouraged to bend - if not break - the rules in order to get things done.

First-time founders are thrown into the world of finance with a good deal of ignorance about the meanings and conventions of specific financial terms, combined with a culturally ingrained bias towards spinning things as positively as possible. Broadly speaking, this seems like a recipe for disaster.

I doubt there will be a tech startup equivalent of the Backstreet Boys, though.

In the two years after we started working together, we grew our customer base about 40x.

I'm not sure if this is a scaleable answer to the "where do I find a technical co-founder" question, but it has worked at least once. :) If you're a non-technical person looking for a startup opportunity, I'd recommend it.

inquicker.com started as a hobby / learning opportunity (2005) and grew into a side project with about $20k/yr in recurring revenue from corporate customers (2008).

Eventually, it turned into a full-time job (early 2009) and I found a co-founder (late 2009). We hired our first four employees in 2010. In 2011 we signed our 100th customer and hit $1m in recurring revenue. In 2013 we hit $5m in recurring revenue.

Over the years I have come to appreciate pg's essays as an example of the happy medium: he doesn't pull punches, but he doesn't generalize to the point of hyperbole either, and I find his writing style to be more effective because of this balance.

In a sense, a legal agreement seems like a cross-platform piece of software that is "executed" in the minds of the signing parties, their business associates, and occasionally the court system. Given that context, I'm a little surprised that lawyers and engineers tend to communicate and think so differently.

I still get goosebumps when I think about the impact that community had on my life.

MUDs tended to be free to play and were run by unix hippies. The line between playing and coders was thin and easily crossed; playing the game led almost inevitably to understanding the mechanics and becoming a coder. I feel sorry for today's generation of gamers, since there is a much larger wall between playing and creating these days. CodeCombat and others are trying to bring that link between gaming and programming back - good for them.

In February 2009, I quit my job to go full time on my startup in anticipation of closing an angel round. The next week, the financing fell through.

For the next six months, I was teetering on the edge of ramen profitable - with very little ramen and very little revenue growth. I seriously considered quitting, and in retrospect, there was really no compelling evidence indicating that I shouldn't quit.

Today, my company is doing quite well - we are 100% bootstrapped, profitable, high seven figures of revenue, 34 employees, and good continued growth prospects.

Looking back on 2009, I still feel like I should have quit at that point; I got lucky by sticking it out. I got lucky because I found it easier to muster the courage to keep trying than muster the courage to walk away.

I almost quit too soon, and every day I feel incredibly lucky that I didn't.

The one thing I still don't like about /dev/urandom is this: urandom's proponents say that it only fails on first boot, because modern linux distros capture entropy to seed urandom on following boots.

This means that in order for /dev/urandom to be ok, I have to depend on specific functionality of both the kernel and the linux distribution. In contrast, /dev/random is (arguably) harder for the distro to mess up, as it's primarily a function of the kernel.

Given the number of times distros have screwed up crypto, what are the odds that this will someday matter in the real world?

As a relatively ignorant layperson, my guess is that derivatives allow productive businesses to hedge against uncontrollable risks.

A business with less risks requires less capital buffer, which encourages & allows for more capital investment and profit-taking.

In a nutshell, derivatives allow businesses to run and grow on less capital, by reducing the amount of capital-on-hand required to buffer against risk.

Is there some other way in which derivatives serve an ostensibly positive function in society? Am I missing something here?

Is this statement (from the article) true?

I'm under the impression that financial innovations throughout history have generally spurred capital investment. Innovations like fractional-reserve lending have made bankers&investors wealthy, but also spurred spending on infrastructure in a way that could be a win-win for society as a whole.

If today's financial wizards went away, would we feel a surprising amount of ripple impact, or would they really just not matter?

On second thought, I think the more important issue is the one 7Figures2Commas raised: If you have a lawyer who does the worst of this stuff, you have the wrong lawyer.

With that said, my blood pressure would definitely climb if a client challenged a 6-minute incremental bill for a phone call that was only 2 minutes.

If I would find this sort of pushback so irritating as an IT consultant, I presume a legal consultant would find it just as irritating. Why would you want to annoy an important consultant in this way?

Cheeky.

This article cites a net increase of 170,000 housing units from 2000 to 2010. I can't find an exact comparison for SF, but it looks like SF has less than 25k net increase from 2000 to 2012.

My code becomes cleaner and more maintainable when I am forced to name each chunk of 5-10 lines by putting them into separate functions/methods with defined inputs and outputs. This compartmentalization is naturally encouraged by java, C#, ruby, and python, but Javascript actually seems to discourage it.

The ready availability of anonymous callbacks in JS tends to allow for "function creep", where you blink twice and suddenly you have 50 tangled lines of code without obvious control flow or separation of concerns; sticking to named functions seems like it could definitely help.

The internet was fast enough, but we quickly discovered that we couldn't access google analytics (google.com/ANALytics) without a VPN or socks proxy back in the USA.

I suspect text-based web content filters tend to have fairly high false-positive rates in general.

I understand that no one likes to have the price raised on them later, but perhaps the underlying truth of increasing valuations could be restated in a different way so it seems more like a discount to the first-in vs a price-hike to the last in.

;-)

I don't think I would ever naturally consider a luxury sedan a necessity, but if all my friends had them, I would begin to suffer from lifestyle scope creep.

My wife and I surround ourselves with people who do not spend large amounts of money in traditional ways. We don't budget, but according to mint, we live on just over half of our income.

That book helped me stay sane during an extremely hectic time of life, I highly recommend it. Nice to see it getting a plug here :)

Since then, I've noticed that naively optimistic views are relatively common among people who accomplish interesting things. It's almost as if naive optimism is a semi-necessary precursor to remarkable achievement.

"You can do anything" is nonsense. It's a crutch. But many people use this crutch to get to really cool places, and I can't help but respect their accomplishments in the end.

Also, I find it very interesting that the "high" of this roller coaster is the funding.

On the other hand, I think the underlying vetting mechanism endorsed by this post is good. In many situations, the technical co-founder has more "hard skills" and is expected to do more work in the first few weeks (or months) of a startup's existence, and even if that isn't true, most technical co-founders probably perceive it to be true. Any "business guy" who proactively hustles before the product is ready will stand out from the crowd.

In spite of the massive hype differential vs. appcelerator and phonegap, Adobe's AIR is one of the best ways to build & deploy cross-platform mobile apps right now. That's flash, that's mobile, and it's a far cry from "admitting defeat".

Flash on the desktop browser is increasingly limited to a small set of niche uses. Flash inside a mobile browser was never a good idea, and it's dying. The decline of those two specific use cases should not be construed as a general death of the flash platform.

The process was ridiculously stressful and daunting. My company is not exactly a huge economic driver in Canada (right now I'm bringing about $500k per year in local economic investment to BC), but it's amazingly time-consuming to get all the paperwork right and get a work permit.

After going through this process to enter Canada, I am considerably more sympathetic and tuned-in to the discussion of immigration reform in the USA. Zak may have technically been in the wrong here (and the border officers may have been correct in turning him away according to the law) but I think the law is profoundly sub-optimal, and it saddens me to see that my native country is this economically backward.

Right now, my company is a tiny star in the oligopolistic slow-moving galaxy of the US healthcare system. We grew 10x in 2008-2009, and grew 10x again in 2010-2011. We're still gathering steam, but we (and healthcare companies like us) are crafting the building blocks that will one day grow into the solution to this big hairy problem.