My VC Year - Joel Spolsky @ Business of Software | Hacker News Reader

My VC Year - Joel Spolsky @ Business of Software

thebln.com

28 pointspkaler17 comments

This was really hard to read, but I can't wait for the video to be released. Unfortunately for this conference (Business of Software) that tends to be a year later when they start selling tickets for next year's conference.

It's so lame that they don't release videos.

Did you attend the conference? Care to elaborate?

Elaborate on what? I think it's lame that they don't release videos of the presentations.

Sorry, I misread you. I understood "The conference is so lame that they don't release the videos".

They need to secure permission from the presenters and content owners for every presentation, which is hard or impossible.

Wouldn't they normally just write that into the speaker's contract?

I got a checkbox to say "Yes, you can tape this and use it for promotion." It was fairly straightforward. (I presented a lightning talk. It was fairly well received. You'll see on my blog when they post it - it worked better with the crowd than it did in my practice runs, and since it relies on a few reveals I won't spoil you.)

Your lightning talk was ridiculously good. I didn't even attempt to blog the lightning talks - and many of them weren't capable of being annotated.

I cannot wait to see the video of yours. A highlight of the event for many.

Anybody want me to write up my notes for all the presentations? I've got a couple of hours to kill once I get to the airport.

Please do.

That was borderline incoherent. Terribly written.

Looked for a better account of his talk but couldn't find one.

It looks like it was written in near real-time. Going through the main site (http://thebln.com/blog/) there are notes for what looks like every talk.

If you read it in that context it doesn't seem so bad...

I wrote this up as my notes on the talk as I did with all the others. I set my self a target of posting the notes by the time the next talk started otherwise I would not have got round to writing the notes up. Read them in that context and am very happy to get other input if I missed anything which I am sure I did.

Joel's talk was interesting but it was not hugely structured so notes probably represent that, though I take full responsibility if I misrepresent.

The issues around shares and employees however were a mess. Joel's company structure evolved out of Kibbutz where reward is based around time served and seniority of people. He admits happily to making a big mess of this and suggests getting advice from the outset. He had assumed that he could just give employees shares once the investment had been made but of course, if he did, they would have had to pay tax on them at market rate.

When the investment was made, lots of people had shares in the business. They had not done the paperwork on the shares etc and had not realised that just telling people they would be looked after to avoid paperwork would create big headaches.

Wow, I'm pretty shocked that someone who already owns and runs a business would not take care of something so basic when setting up a new business.

Option B: important information has been lost in your skimming of a two sentence summary of a ten minute description of a multiple-month battle about tax treatment and expectation management regarding a generous equity grant.

Good point. The more believable explanation is this transcription misrepresents the situation -- the fact that it was shocking should have made me question it.

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