HA! The most ironic thing is that this tool has Facebook like buttons all over it. Give the state of Facebook privacy and not actually being able to log out. The Facebook buttons are the biggest privacy and security concern, not your browser.
PG. I was at the NYCYC meetup last night and I don't understand all the attention of the valley vs. New York. The startup economy is not zero sum game. It doesn't matter which location is #1, There are plenty of dollars to go around and other then competing for dev and other resources (which while difficult is not the biggest hurdle a start up is going to face) what's the point of the discussion? Cities aren't threats to each other, it's not like the port of Philly competing with the port of NY/NJ. Shipping is a zero sum game, startups aren't.
Great post. I face this everyday in my job at an "old media" company. There are policies, rules and constraints in place which served some purpose at some point in time, and haven't been challenged for years. Unlearning the rules of established games is almost as important as evolving them. Everything should be questioned and challenged to find the root of the point of the rule/law/restriction and if it doesn't make sense any longer, throw it out.
First of all, there is no such thing as a contract CTO. If you are contract then you don't have a title or any stake in the company, ask for market wages for your skill set and experience. For 80-120 an hour you are a Sr programmer with expert level experience in your specific field as an independant contractor. Note, this doesn't mean you've built 2 websites with Rails and don't know shit about scale or performance. If they have no other technical people on staff and are BS'ing you with a title, run away, this isn't going to work out for you.
I would support that assumption. Been there done that, banks are not excited about touching any of their back end systems. They are mostly still written in COBOL and haven't been touched since the '70s.