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brendan

254 karma · joined March 28, 2007

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brendan··on How an offer to sell our business inspired us to take on $17M in debt
Thanks for reading! We can't disclose the exact terms of the debt, but it's fairly traditional. The interest rate is higher than if we had years of profitability to show -- makes sense as that's the risk the lender is taking. Also, the team that did this is separate from their PE side. Slightly more details are here in this WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ditch-the-venture-model-say-fou...
brendan··on What do you think of our new team page? (type "dance" for party mode)
I made hi-res cutouts of each person. The plan is just to shrink everyone slightly and add the new people to the left and right. I'm not sure how it will look, but that's the idea at least.

Also, at first I was worried about matching the lighting in the new photos, but these cutouts are all from different photos and the lighting was quite a bit different between each shot already. I'm no expert, but I just played with the levels in PhotoShop until things looked right. I think it came out looking pretty good.

brendan··on What do you think of our new team page? (type "dance" for party mode)
Mz, thanks again for spotting that and taking the time to let us know. Just fixed it on the website. You rock!
brendan··on What do you think of our new team page? (type "dance" for party mode)
I'm not single, my girlfriend just dresses me.
brendan··on What do you think of our new team page? (type "dance" for party mode)
Thanks for the details. I didn't test dance mode in IE. I thought I'd cut myself some slack since it's just an easter egg. I'll see what I can do though!
brendan··on What do you think of our new team page? (type "dance" for party mode)
The benefits of being a big company ;)
brendan··on What do you think of our new team page? (type "dance" for party mode)
It's the last track on Girl Talk's All Day: http://www.illegal-art.net/allday/
brendan··on The face behind your website
+1, Chris did a great job and was a pleasure to work with!
brendan··on All Hands Support
If it comes down to that, yes. Though I'd first try to track down their requests in the logs and see if it's something we can fix on our end.

Obviously, some companies make a conscious decision not to support all browsers, so there might be no way around it in that case.

brendan··on All Hands Support
Right on. I'm an engineer (and one of the founders of Wistia), and I really enjoy talking to customers and doing support. I can understand that this type of behavior might not be typical, but it's such a huge advantage to have the people building the product interacting directly with the people who are using/buying it. I love it.
brendan··on All Hands Support
In my experience, the best response is one in which you make it clear that you personally care about the customer's problem and will do your best to get it resolved quickly. This trumps everything else, so long as it's the truth. If your engineers don't actually care about your customers' problems, then having them do support will only hurt your business.
brendan··on All Hands Support
The vast majority of our customers are far from tech savvy. In fact, on the rare occasion where we suggest getting a customer's IT department involved (say, for an email deliverability issue), they often beg us not to -- "IT is too slow, never solves our problems, will want to build their own version of Wistia, etc." I'm always surprised when I hear this, but I guess it means we're doing a good job with the product and support!
brendan··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring?
Boston, MA

http://wistia.com

We're an early stage company entering growth mode. We're looking for a developer who's excited to solve both technical and business challenges. If this sounds interesting, email me at brendan at wistia.