tkiley

Sometimes it takes much longer than six months. This is what it looked like for my company:

http://i.imgur.com/LE2kK.png

Even if 2010 and 2011 are ommitted for scale, the first 3 years of those graphs are essentially flat.

/No career plans or vision/

The best developers I've ever worked with tend to lack career plans. If you're sufficiently happy with your life that you don't need a change strategy, that's pretty cool.

Three years ago, I was the sole employee/founder of my startup. Today, I'm CTO of a 21-person company with a 6-person dev team.

As an individual developer, my default loop is "Find something to do. Do it. Repeat."

As a CTO, my default loop is "First, cycle through all my employees and make sure that I have equipped them to be happy and productive in their jobs. Second, find something to do. If possible, delegate it; if not, do it. Repeat."

Wow. I knew the labels' economic relevance was declining, but I'm amazed that one of the four key "factories" in the commercial music industry just changed hands for $1.9 billion - less than half of Dropbox's recent valuation.

Our 20-person team is split between Nashville, TN and Vancouver Island, BC. Staying out of the major startup hubs has definitely helped us to avoid the assumption that funding is a critical component or yardstick of success. For us, I think this was a lucky break; we still haven't encountered a day in which lack of funding is a significant impediment to our growth.

For three decades, Microsoft carried the torch of backward compatibility and feature preservation. Unfortunately, this means that Microsoft has willfully cultivated a customer base that is downright curmudgeonly when it comes to forced changes.

Meanwhile, many of the people who might actually tolerate and applaud these changes are already running OSX.

This is one of the reasons our development team is located on Vancouver Island. We could have set up shop in the middle of Silicon Valley's startup culture, but instead, we set up shop in the middle of world-class mountain biking, hiking, surfing, rock climbing, and snowboarding. Collectively, our team gets no shortage of exercise!

Incidentally, outdoor activities provide a great environment for generating creative solutions. We do some of our best problem-solving out past the break, or on the uphill side of a downhill ride.

Nashville, TN or Parksville (Vancouver Island), BC

InQuicker seeks a director of marketing. We're looking for a person who can coordinate our online and offline marketing efforts across the United States. We're looking for a person who is effective in online marketing analytics, PPC, SEO, copywriting, and managing agency relationships.

We're 100% bootstrapped, with 15 employees and millions in annual revenue right now.

Check out our website at http://www.inquicker.com/. If you're interested, email me. My address is in my profile.

InQuicker was a bootstrapped, single-founder, YC 07 reject, healthcare-based startup that sold primarily to the enterprise, and somehow we've been ok in spite of getting all those things "wrong". We're blogging about our experience to illustrate some of the unconventional ways startups can succeed; if you'd like to hear more, ask a question here and we'll try to answer or write it up as a post! :)

For context, HN has discussed my startup (at my request) several times:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76077 (November 2007) and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629011 (May 2009)

We are launching a blog to tell some of the more interesting stories of the past few (and next few) years. If there's anything in particular you're curious about, ask here and I'll try to either answer quickly or add it to our list of post ideas :)

Wow. Lightspeed is investing a huge amount of dollars and energy in creating a viable alternative to the YC ecosystem.

Seems like this it the type of act that is characteristic of a firm that is either quite visionary or quite desparate, but I'm not sure which is the case here ;-)

Excellent write-up! I've learned most of these things the hard way :/ I'm filing this away to recommend to any developers who are setting out to use Javascript extensively for the first time.

One quibble: In the "common pitfalls" section regarding the "this" object, they say that locally-defined functions within other functions never have any practical use. I might disagree: with a little coaxing, you can convince locally variables inside the constructor (both functions and other variables) to serve as private properties of an object; this is the only technique I know that allows for private properties.

(I haven't actually done this in code that has been maintained/used anywhere, I just did it as an experiment and filed it away as a "that's cool" for future reference)

Edit: Here is an example of what I'm talking about: https://gist.github.com/866103

InQuickER (YC W08 reject ;-]) is hiring on Vancouver Island, British Columbia (Parksville/Nanaimo area, onsite preferred but not required).

We are bootstrapped, profitable, and proud by 37signals' definition. Today we are an 8-person team, and we're looking to add another senior ruby/rails developer and a user acquisition engineer.

Contact tyler@inquicker.com.

For perspective, take a look at this list of the largest intraday changes in the Dow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_daily_changes_i...

That page shows 40 specific days in stock market history that have seen a 6% or greater change. In that context, a 1% decline by noon EST is no big deal.

I launched my company alone. My partner read about it in a magazine article.

If you have the gumption to go it alone, you may be able to attract a partner more easily down the road; traction has a way of turning heads and opening doors :)

Quick mathematical summary of the problem:

An octave is a 2:1 ratio between frequencies, so 880 hz is one octave above 440 hz. A perfect fifth is a 3:2 ratio between frequencies, so 660 hz is a perfect fifth above 440.

In the modern western system of music, twelve perfect fifths is harmonically equal to seven octaves. In other words,

(2/1)7 == (3/2)12

Unfortunately, we know this is mathematically untrue.

Furthermore, three major thirds is harmonically equal to one octave:

(2/1) == (5/4)3

This also is mathematically untrue.

Hilarity ensues.

Great article -- there's nothing groundbreaking here, but it's a good exploration of a topic that is often non-intuitive to engineers.

High sales complexity isn't necessarily the kiss of death for a startup; it just means that you need strong sales talent early on (preferably in one or more of the founders). Sure, you do everything you can to shift your product as far toward self-service sales as possible, but at the end of the day, if you can't sell it without being out in the field, that means most other companies can't do it, either. Presto, barrier to entry.

My startup is definitely on the high complexity end of the spectrum; our sales cycle is anywhere from 3 months to 3 years. Right now, we have no direct competitors; this is probably at least partly due to the complexity of the sales process.

I stopped reading when I got to the part where the author expressed an apathetic ignorance about the concept of "goodwill". If the author can't be arsed to research an article, I can't be bothered to read it.

That said, the article did motivate me to do 10 minutes of research into United States GAAP and conclude that the $33 billion is probably a result of the Compaq merger.

Edit:

The Inquirer says HP valued the goodwill from the Compaq acquisition at $14.5 billion: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1019181/when-hp-bou...

That leaves another $18.5 billion that is probably explained by this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlett...

These kinds of UI tweaks can be amazingly frustrating to users if you're not careful. For instance: When I click on an empty input box, I expect the cursor to load on the left-hand side of the box. In the date box in the demo, it populates the mask and places my cursor in the exact part of the mask that I clicked (usually toward the middle). I have to click again (on a much smaller target area) to move the cursor to the beginning of the input box.

I filled out a 3-page form yesterday with this exact problem. It was memorably annoying and had a significant negative impact on my opinion of the company behind the form (ING direct).

True, complements to existing products can avoid typical barriers to entry for non-disruptive products, but they come with their own set of issues. Generally speaking, they are at high risk of being absorbed into the products they complement. Xobni -> outlook, facebook apps -> facebook, etc.

"Disruptive" is popular because it implies the product or service can generate value on a large scale without playing catchup to existing market leaders.

If you're going to make an incrementally improvement, you have to first catch up to the pack, and in an established industry, this can be (or at least seem) cost-prohibitive and risky. "Disruptive" startups, in theory, do an end-run around the barriers to entry.

The article suggests that we replace disruptiveness with usefulness as a criteria for evaluating startups. I think we need both; disruptiveness ensures the startup has a fighting chance against the incumbents, and usefulness ensures the startup has a market.

Incidentally, several of the author's supporting arguments can be applied to the term "useful" as well. "Most technology we now consider 'useful' wasn't conceived that way", "the creators of useful technology often don't make the money".

This is somewhat equivalent to WikiLeaks' release strategy: tell the organization that you have evidence of XYZ problem, but don't describe the exact nature and scope of the evidence, then pressure them to come clean and fix the problem themselves; hopefully this leads to more comprehensive "cleanup" efforts that have a larger positive long-term effect.

How relevant is the WikiLeaks strategy in the field of security?

Hi, Joel. I've learned a lot from your stuff.

I guess I'm just frustrated that the current structure of web has created all sorts of malincentives around the exchange of knowledge. Trollish content attracts more attention, so well-meaning creators of worthwhile content are incentivized to wrap legitimate ideas in trollish presentation in order to reach a larger audience.

I wish this weren't the case. I hope it changes in the future.

My understanding is that China's upper leadership is largely intelligent and engineering-oriented. The fact that the Chinese government thinks this type of policy is a good idea makes me wonder if they know something I don't.

Do they really expect to be able to keep a lid on political speech within their country long-term? (From a practical perspective, won't this just drive .cn domainholders to switch to .com?)

I like 37 Signals. I like Joel Spolsky. I like Paul Graham. I occasionally even read Techcrunch. However, I believe all of these people (and many others) tend to occasionally overstate and undersupport their positions. I can’t blame them for it. After all, shoddy generalization provokes snarky rebuttal, which leads to counter-rebuttal, which leads to increased exposure. It’s a great play for the writers; unfortunately, while the writers are busy racking up traffic, readers are unwittingly pissing away the hours spectating a geekier version of Jerry Springer.

I would pay good money to obtain access to a stream of intrinsically interesting content without any of this overstated, undersupported crap.

Edit: My (overstated? undersupported?) assertion that this article is overstated, undersupported crap is now the top comment. The irony is disturbing. I hope someone builds a product that eliminates these frustrations for me (and others) in the future.

Hire someone who likes sales.

Seriously, hire someone who likes sales.

I hate selling. I like building. I started my company in 2006. In three years, I signed 3 deals. Then I found a partner who lives and breathes sales. In the past three months, I have signed two additional deals and have five more in end stages of negotiation. Thanks to our new head of sales, went from actively talking with 15 concurrent prospects to actively talking with 150 concurrent prospects.

Don't kill yourself doing sales. Kill yourself finding someone who will do it well and love it.

Edit: I should mention that the average value of our contracts is going up too. Well-executed sales strategy can generate more revenue off of the same quantity of goods sold. Don't underestimate it.

Is this permanent?

HN is a good source of google juice for interesting new startups, and it would be a shame to see that go away...

This is the visual equivalent of destructively loud mastering on popular music. It's interesting to see that the same tradeoff applies to both formats: postproduction techniques add generic excitement and "pop" to an entertainment experience, at the cost of making everything look (and sound) alike, which reduces the dynamic range of the experience.

(Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war)

Thanks for the encouragement! I've been meaning to write more about it, just been too busy. I'll try to get it done next week, now that I know there is an audience :)

I build my product in 2006. I didn't get into YC in 2007. My company became ramen profitable a year ago. Then I found a co-founder.

I broke just about every rule of thumb that typically applies to startups, and my company took a while to get off the ground as a result, but we are cash flow positive, 100% founder owned and growing like gangbusters.

YC is not the only way to go, and most of the "rules for startups" can be broken. If you want to start a business and have a decent shot at building a substantial amount of wealth, there are plenty of other less-glamorous, less-publicized, less-competitive ways to do it.