Scott_MacGregor

With the recent Texas "Sales Tax" changes regarding Rackspace, etc..., here is the Texas franchise tax. It is a privilege tax imposed on each taxable entity formed or organized in Texas or doing business in Texas.

This may, or may not, apply to you also.

This has a no-tax-due dollar threshold listed in the FAQ.

Texas has no income tax, so this is how they collect revenue.

If this happens, I wonder how long it will take to fold the Adobe contacts and products into BizSpark.

Monty Python is pure classic comedy gold. To me it's funny with or without a few wording changes.

If the company issues physical shares to the employee as they vest monthly, that is 12 physical shares per employee per year. If for instance, there are an average of 10 employees over 4 years that is 480 pieces of paper that will need to be tracked down at some point in time.

When the shares are needed, if even one of those people are missing and cannot be found, it adds a pain factor to the process. The physical shares need to be consolidated and accounted for at some point in time. Not everyone leads a stable life where they can be located at all times.

For the employee to physically hold the actual physical share in his or her hand is of no greater benefit than holding a photocopy of the shares along with the vesting agreement and any canceled checks used to pay for the shares. Physical shares can be forged just as easily as a photocopy if it were to go before a judge. It is like having 1 dozen green apples, vs. 1 dozen red apples in your hand. The difference being it is a lot safer for everyone to keep all of the shares in one place.

It is not suspicious on any level. They are probably doing it on advice of counsel. The actual physical shares will need to be tracked down if they go public, and if any people/shares cannot be found they will have to reissue the shares. Having all of the physical shares in one place protects everyone.

Yes, file the copies with your stock purchase/vesting agreement. Also if you have paid par value or whatever amount for the shares keep your canceled check with the copy of the shares you bought. The company keeps a list of who owns what shares as well as the physical shares. If something should happen to the physical shares they can be reissued.

As far as giving someone access to a server, give him a lower permission than you have. For instance if you are on a MS server and are the Forest Owner, make him an Administrator and only give him the minimum permissions that he needs to do his tasks. Same holds true for Linux, just different terminology.

Look up your operating system online to see how to grant lower level permissions than you have.

The percent split is up to you guys. I think you should choose what the two of you think is fair to both sides. If this were my company and I were bringing someone onboard 1 year later, I would be thinking about the vesting schedule and possibly using cliff vesting.

http://startuplawyer.com/incorporation/why-your-startups-fou...

This is nice, though some formatting would make it easier to read. In IE7x there is almost no whitespace on the right margin. On my big monitor it is close to wall to wall text.

That is correct. No hardware will work with every OS. Certain hardware will support certain versions of Ubuntu though. It makes life a lot easier and saves an enormous amount of time if you research what the hardware will support first, and then use the correct hardware and OS combinations. With an unsupported combination sometimes it will look like everything is ok but you will have intermittent problems such as USB ports not working sometimes, or other issues. With the correct combination of hardware Ubuntu will work fine.

China has a very different culture than Singapore. I do not think that just because they are in close proximity and are both Asian that it means the people are moving in the exact same direction. To me China seems much more blue collar heavy industry than Singapore, and Singapore seems much more western looking in a lot of ways than China.

I'm not sure if this is non-fiction enough for you but, Tony Robbins, "Awaken the Giant Within" is one of my favorites. It is a good self help type book. It comes in Kindle too. http://www.amazon.com/Awaken-Giant-Within-Immediate-Emotiona...

This is an interesting move for IKEA. I wonder if the real reason behind releasing their numbers is they are thinking about selling, and want to generate some quick interest. For a company to be so closed door with their earnings for so long and then suddenly open up when the economy is shaky seems unusual.

Does anyone have any thoughts about this?

I am an adult. I am old enough to know what I am doing. Why do you ask?

These people can keep their socially sensitive group. I will pick high IQ any day of the week. Competing head on head, I'll bet my high IQ group would beat them hands down every time. I respect IQ, and have found people who are smarter make much better decisions overall. I know I do.

All the S means is you file a request with the IRS to be taxed differently from the C, which is the default. The actual entity does not change, it is a tax issue. Also, with the S election you cannot raise investor money, only the C can raise money.

You can base it on anything you want that seems fair to both of you. Sometimes in a company that is a good size but is not public, you might want to require a third party to evaluate the value of the company, and set forth a timeframe for the buyer to come up with the cash or note to buy the shares with. In a smaller company your CPA can probably come up with a value for you.

One thing to think about is what serves you now may not serve you in 2 years. If that is the case you can change the wording to suit the circumstances better when you need to. Talk to your attorney and ask what seems best based on your situation now.

One reason a buyout clause is smart, is that corporate shares are considered the same as money by a divorce court and can be assigned by the judge to the person's ex spouse. Meaning you could have a hostile, non-contributing person on your board. So be sure to talk to your attorney about that.

Since you may want to raise money, a Delaware Corp, with shares vesting over time for both A and B seems like a good fit. As far as profit splits go, that can be set forth in the bylaws however you want. A buyout option provision seems like a good idea too.

Maybe put the data feeds into frames on the page so the main page loads quickly and the frame data can load as it comes in. Then use a simple progress bar for each frame.

Progress bars are not an optimal solution to this. Many websites shoot for 3 seconds or less load time because a lot of people will not want to wait.

Another tactic might be to prefetch the data somehow as soon as the first page loads into a visitors browser and feed the data to the user before he asks for it. If he does not ask for it you will burn unneeded bandwidth preloading it, but something needs to be done to get load times down from 10 seconds to avoid losing users.

10 seconds is not good at all. What is causing it to load slow? Are you coding in ASP?

It was long, but not too long, because it was thorough. I didn't realize you were doing so much. In a way the article is kind of like a long sales pitch for YC without all of the typical sales language hype. Which is nice.

If you decide to go deeper with the details like in the bulleted points above, I think 2 additional features would be useful:

1. Radio buttons for each item that lets the selecting person set how important that item is to them on a scale of 1 to 10.

2. Something to do with attitude/personality, such as (serious)(humorous)(quiet)(outgoing) etc... where both people can rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10.

I assume there will be some type of financial damage claim from the clients against the law firm and its individual attornies who are involved in this. I wonder if the multi-clients monetary damages will be covered by any kind of insurance or if it will come out of the pockets of those involved?

I wonder what level of standard of care for the documents will be used to decide this. Some of the more security experienced among our ranks may be able to make some good quick money from expert testimony in this matter. On both sides of the issue.

Edit: A lot of law firms use Interwoven to manage their documents and email. Here is link, if anyone is interested in coming up to speed on this

http://www.interwoven.com/index_iManage_legal.jsp

You did a real good job with both videos creative wise, and for video 1 sales wise. It was not what I was expecting, but the first class production definitely caught my attention, enough that number 1 would persuade me to want to find out more about the team and product.

I like video number 1 better. For me, the word choices of number 2 are not nearly as hard hitting as number 1. Also for number 2 the color and music seems less effective than number 1.

I think number 1 presents a definite "Google" feel to the presentation, and I think that is a positive for you guys.

If the presentation were being done only for me personally I would like 2 things to be altered.

1. Insert a quick opening from the company CEO showing the CEO, and saying "Hi I'm X, and we have developed this new product, and here it is, etc...".

2. Just a little slower presentation of each series of written words. Because for a new unknown product the features panned by just a little too quickly for me to get a good overview of exactly what the product does. Although number 1 seemed interesting enough to me to replay it to get the information I wanted from it.

So come up with an idea that will make money and go for it!

Maybe bounce some ideas off of people in here.

It all starts with an idea.

This is very cute! What a nice cat.

Looks good, you did a good job with it. Are you planning to sell it, use it yourself, or open source it?

Good funny post, that was the best laugh I've had all day. Thanks!

Firefox 3.5.1 is A-OK.

Chrome 6.0.472.59 is A-OK.

Both are on Win XP SP2.

Edit: For pre-release you could try something like this: http://browsershots.org/

There is no way to select a city in IE7x. After selecting Craigslist all that displays is: the header, the footer, the menu, and a grey 1px box with

http://spotli.com/index.cfm?activity=0&dept_id=1&sto...

link printing "Craigslist" to screen in blue with an underline.

The rest is blank white page.

Edit 1: Also, I am running ZoneAlarm with mobile code off and popups blocked like a lot of people do.

Edit 2. I can see in your code the "<li><a href" coding with the cities that are supposed to print to the screen. But they are not printing.

Edit 3. I shut down ZoneAlarm and it still does not print to screen. So it looks like it is an issue with IE7.0.5730.11 on Win XP SP2.