andreshb

Medellin, Colombia. Keep the same U.S. time zone. Affordable living, can get fiber direct to your apartment/house.

Great work John. I have about 500 students learning programming remotely and have been looking for better remote presence alternatives. So far the issue is that other products reinventing the wheel are more resource intensive than Zoom (machine, internet). Working on top of Zoom is much smarter.

I know it's early, but my only other obstacle is that those students are mostly Windows or Ubuntu :/ Although I totally understand focusing on MacOS

This looks great! How would you compare with Tandem?

Google would be smart to acquire Glide (https://www.glideapps.com/)

Been a Mac user for 17 years, never knew that. Thank you.

Try building an app around it with glideapps.com for easier consumption by journalists, activists, etc., I tried to add it to my drive so I could build it but your settings will not allow me to do it

Teach english, cambly

If you hire in the Americas, you keep the same time zone. There's a whole world of English speaking programmers, core contributors to node, to ruby, ML engineers, data engineers south of the border. All the same time zone.

No way I could have written so many papers in so little time in my undergrad Poli Sci major. (2005-2009)College without this would have been a bigger nightmare.

Just to confirm, it can count when it’s a new person but if they enter again it will know it’s the same person and not count them again as new ?

And still have money left over. If you work in tech there is a strong developer community and you can get away with not speaking the language as 5-bedroom penthouse suites are located in neighborhoods where almost everyone is bilingual, from waiters to C-level execs.

Offering Restricted Common Stock (Same as founders) as a solution is more pragmatic than granting preferred stock (Same as investors)

Launch where you can get the most number of customers, that also have the most money, and will hand you that money the fastest. This will yield less time to get to more money, the cheapest.

I wish that was the case for me

For the first 3 months

Buy

“Happiest baby on the block” book

And buy

“Sleepea”

It’s like magic to get your baby to fall asleep and stop crying in less than 60 seconds

If you leave after 12 months and one day, you keep a quarter of your initial stock grant.

Assume the stock grant was 48,000 if you have after the day after you completed 12 months, you get to keep 12,000 shares not 24,000.

In terms of taxes, you have to file an “83b election” with the IRS to prevent being liable for “paper wealth” that’s not really cash

Technically you are granted all 48,000 shares at a nominal value like .00001 and the company has the automatic right to buy back the shares you do not vest at that same nominal value

You should launch it and find out, could be as simple as the wizard behind the curtain where you take their data and pass it through existing tools out there

YC is a minority stake investor, not their boss or board member.

It seems that what you are looking at is a breach of contract where the company did not deliver what they agreed to deliver.

If the company ran out of money, they are probably a dead company/ bankrupt and have or will shut down. They are unlikely to be able to return the money or deliver, and you could end up either trying to sue a company that is dead and/or pierce the corporate veil alleging fraud.

Check with your lawyers.

First, Read "venture deals" by Brad Feld

Then understand that what both of you should have done is 4 years vesting with 12-month cliff.

With that come to an agreement that since you did two years, you should keep only half of your equity (20%), freeing up the remaining 20% so Jim can acquire better talent.

Long version (Excerpt from a post I wrote):

"These are the legal concepts you can use to protect founders from each other, the company from the founders and founders from a hostile board.

Let's run an Example assuming I'll be your co-founder and the company will grant me 48,000 shares for each of the legal concepts (The number 48,000 was chosen to simply math but does not reflect typical number of shares per founder):

1. Cliff

• If founder stays less than 12 months, no equity.

Example: In this case I receive 0 of my 48,000 shares.

• After 12 months 25% of stock is instantly vested.

Example: In this case I receive 12,000 shares of my 48,000 shares.

2.Vesting

• After the cliff, founder vests 1/36th of granted stock each month.

Example: In this case I receive 1,000 shares a month, on top of my previously earned 12,000 shares after the cliff for a total of 48,000 shares over a total of four years. If I leave in month 24 my total number of shares is 24,000.

3. Acceleration Triggers

• Single trigger: all stock is vested upon change of control or sale of the company.

Example: Let's say Google buys our company in my month 24 of vesting, in order to prevent google from firing me right after the acquisition in order to stop my remaining 24,000 shares from vesting, all my shares accelerate are granted immediately, thus accelerating the vesting

• Double trigger: some stock is vested upon termination without just cause.

Example: This provides a dis-incentive from investors, the board, or a co-founder from firing me if I am not done vesting, in order to free up equity to hire a lot more other people, if I am fired and it's not due to committing a crime like fraud then I will earn some stock, normally 12 months, without having to remain at the company for 12 months."

Even longer version: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/startup-survival-guide-recrui...

Medellin has a very strong developer community with a give first mentality of helping, they also have meetups that feel like every single day, also a lot of U.S. companies have engineering teams in Medellin. KiwiBot, Splice, Envoy, Snappr, AI Fund, Landing.AI just to name a few. Then there's the large global software agencies like Accenture, Huge, Globant, Yuxi Pacific. They all speak english.

I think you might just be in the wrong silo. I've reached out to directly via DM on twitter.

Also, relevant https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/21/andrew-ngs-ai-companies-ex...

You just mentioned US allies, by the same logic the US should place sanctions on its own states and government due to their severe human rights abuses.

Sanctions are placed on enemies not allies

You should really update your stereotypes.

If you are in the U.S., wait until you become accredited and have enough excess cash that you can do this part time.

Otherwise, make this your full time job and make sure you have enough income to wait 8-10 years before you start seeing return.

You can also invest in a first time fund, where the manager will charge 2% management fee and 20% carry (success fee).

Getting access to entrepreneurs depends on your geography but generally if you make yourself useful to entrepreneurs, with or without investing, you can start generating dealflow.

Start with small checks, you will mess up in the beginning, so make these mistakes less painful.

Read venture deals and watch all the videos from YC investor school.

"It was none of the US business." When China and Russia are propping up a hostile regime, it's a threat to US interests in the region. The US has made it its business to fight refugees and drugs, what happens in Venezuela impacts its Business.

"For debatable values of "doing fine"." It's doing better politically, and economically than most countries in Latin America. Almost any value that you evaluate it by, its doing fine compared to most countries in the Americas.

That’s like saying “I’ve never been to Manhattan, but I’ve been to Baltimore, Detroit, and St Louis and I wouldn’t feel safe in Manhattan”

I feel safer in Medellin than in San Francisco. In Medellin harassment and crime is not random. I’ve lived in both cities and currently live in Medellin while frequently traveling to SF for business

You have to deliberately go into the wrong neighborhood and mess with the wrong people.

Every time I’m in SF I’m on edge when I walk in the street.

In Medellin I feel safe walking around with AirPods and iphone out, plus I’m not on defensive mode ready to dodge feces or harassment.

Reaction to a child falling across cultures is so interesting in its differences. In a lot of countries in Latin America, when a toddler falls, all adults look away, to pretend as if we did not notice the child fell. The logic goes that if the child has an audience, they will cry, otherwise, they will just dust it off and keep playing.

You don't need to be a U.S. citizen to have a U.S. Bank Account, you can open a U.S. bank account with a foreign passport and a second form of ID.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/060415/can-foreign-...

Culture means something specific: Shared beliefs and behaviors within a social group, but hiring managers or entrepreneurs use "culture" to make up something vague about not liking the candidate. When in fact, saying a candidate is not a culture fit, it should mean the candidate "does not share our social group's beliefs and behaviors"

If the investors were fully aware this is at risk and they backed you because of the team and not the product/market then I'd use the remaining cash to build something else where you are the first customer and start over. Reduce the team to just the co-founders, 100k is still a lot of money for a team of two or three and you can probably afford one or two more experiments.