My first exit | Hacker News Reader

My first exit

yes-no-cancel.co.uk

84 pointsmartinkl24 comments

Congratulations! I really like the "My First Sony" analogy. The start of more good things to come. Another verification of Scala for real products.

If you're at liberty to divulge, how did you connect with Red Gate?

  "Ask HN: Rate my startup, Go Test It (cross-browser testing)"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883049

Red Gate hosts the Springboard program (similar to YC, but Red Gate doesn't take an equity stake). Even before that, they hosted the "accidentals", a group of startups from in & around Cambridge (UK). Martin was part of the accidentals.

More on that here: http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2009/08/the-accidental-in...

Wow, this is very cool of Red Gate guys. Way to be a good community member and make a difference.

Helping to nurture local startups is definitely cool. On the other hand, picking them off to integrate into their product pipeline also prevents greater things from happening. I feel that martinkl could have built a company able to stand on its own. The lure of an early exit is understandable however, particularly after a 2.5 year long slug.

They're all microsofty though :/ puts me off a bit.

I felt that way a bit until I met the people at Red Gate and saw what they're with the local startup community. While Cambridge has a great history of startups (ARM and a lot of other high-tech companies) it's not particularly friendly for small startups. Red Gate is helping a LOT, with desk space and a good vibe. I'm really not a MSFT fan, but I'm a huge fan of Red Gate.

Good to know, I may be moving to the area soon, so I'll certainly check them out some more.

If you are, be sure to sign up with the CamTechMeetup!

http://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Tech-Meetup/ http://www.camtechmeetup.com

Disclaimer: I started it. :)

Cool, thanks :)

What about Microsoft puts you off?

I ask because I've chosen to use the MVC Framework, and its been great so far, I feel like choosing Microsoft products has made development faster.

I just can't imagine a world where you can't ssh into linuxy servers and do things.

Trying to run anything on top of windows doesn't fill me with confidence. Do all windows servers still insist on having a GUI etc? I honestly don't know, but I'd be extremely worried working on a startup running things on windows.

(Note I'm really talking as consumer facing website/webapp). For b2b microsoft is probably a saner choice.

I ssh into my Windows machines all the time. And Windows servers don't insist on having a GUI - look up Server Core, the GUI is limited to a console and everything is (and must be) done with the command line.

The console, hilariously, looks like someone pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del and killed explorer.exe and just left a DOS box running.

They've done a remarkable job trying to remove Windows from Windows Server, but (they admit) they are still not quite there yet - the evidence is in the volume of patches that must still be applied to Windows Server Core.

Genuine question, as I haven't used Windows seriously for years. Does it ship with ssh out of the box yet?

The POSIX subsystem might have a sshd of some form, but I haven't looked at it in ages. But I generally never use Windows without Cygwin, it was that that I was referring to.

Windows Server 2008 Core runs without a UI

I share your dislike for the Windows platform -- for uses other than as a web browser boot loader and media player -- but Red Gate are (smartly) following the money. How many non-MS developers do you know that pay for dev and admin tools?

Seems like an extremely early exit :/

46 days from a "Rate my startup" to a "My first exit" must be a record :)

The article says 2.5 years. Personally I would likely take an early exit simply to build up confidence. And resume :-)

Is it appropriate, or even legal, to disclose your investors' ROI in your company?

If the answer is 15x and it just happened, how upset is the investor really going to get?

Perhaps the culture around this is changing in the US, but I take financial privacy -very- seriously. The kickbacks an investor gets from an investment should be implicitly private.

Presumably if one has permission it's both appropriate and legal.

Both Red Gate and the angel investor were asked for permission before these articles were published.

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