cfield

I am a current customer of Outbox and also a customer of VirtualPostMail (VPM) for both personal and business mail. And I am a former EarthClassMail (ECM) and PayTrust customer.

Since many seem to be asking about alternatives, I have generally positive views about VPM and ECM. They get the job done, though neither of them will blow your socks off from a technology standpoint (e.g., search, image resolution). I used ECM for 2 1/2 years and then switched to VPM, which I've been using for the last 2 1/2 years. VPM is considerably less expensive than ECM (which probably targets pricing for SMBs rather than consumers).

For reasons I can't grasp, I consider dealing with physical mail one of the most undesirable "life maintenance" activities imaginable. In 2000, I started using paymybills.com (became Paytrust/Intuit) -- basically VPM for bills only plus online bill pay. I paid ~$10/month and easily would have paid double that. I emailed them around 2001 and suggested they expand to provide the same service for all mail. When Intuit acquired Mint, I emailed Aaron Patzer a suggestion that they look into doing to mail what Mint did for financial information. He put me in touch with a product manager he said was looking into this, but apparently it never went anywhere.

When I heard about ECM, I signed up for their service in a heartbeat. It wasn't perfect, but I considered their service to be (barely) worth the $800-$1000/year I paid them. When I learned about VPM, I quickly switched to them and remain a generally happy customer and average about $200/year in fees.

Similarly, I signed up for Outbox the instant I heard of it, wanting to test it out on the trickle of mail I still get at home to see if it might be an improvement on VPM. The one thing I never got from Outbox was peace of mind that they would be around for the long haul, so I thankfully never cancelled my VPM service. I sent Outbox an email in March 2013 inviting them to charge more because I knew today's announcement was inevitable if they did not make some fundamental changes. I never understood why they wouldn’t scan bulk mail I wanted open (you had to have it delivered). But I was cheering for them and am sad to see it come to an end.

[Edit: typo]

I can confirm that you and others with this understanding are indeed mistaken.

Based on my extensive experience with all of them, I would shuffle your words around a bit and suggest a more accurate characterization is:

YC's female partners are great and make and participate in important decisions. Though it is not their main role at YC, two of them have chief responsibility for YC's own finance/accounting/legal needs.

In hiring Kirsty and Carolynn, YC did hire other women like Jessica, at least on the "great-ness" scale.

And I wholeheartedly agree that YC would do itself a lot of good to hire other women like all three of them. Just as it would do itself a lot of good to hire other men like pg, pb, Robert, Trevor, Kevin, Aaron, Geoff and Garry.

I contemplated a response to the question from pshin45's friend, but decided it might be a fool's errand because the question itself suggested a deep misunderstanding of YC. I am hard pressed to imagine a more incorrect characterization of the role Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica play in YC than "one is in charge of legal, the second: taxes, and the third (largely) of founder relations". I certainly understand why Jessica's initial reaction to the question would be anger.

I would estimate that, collectively, I have worked with Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica for upwards of 500 hours over the past 2 1/2 years. And I would estimate that 80-90% of that time has been on product development, business development, sales, customer acquisition, fundraising assistance ... I could go on.

Outside of our company, there is nobody who has been more involved with our "business strategy" than Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica. There is not one part of our business that they have not been critically and deeply involved with.

(minor edit for grammar)

You might be surprised to learn how broadly the SEC and courts have interpreted terms like "offer" and "general solicitation".[1] An offer is any "attempt ... to dispose of ... a security ... for value".[2] The SEC "has confirmed that uses of ... unrestricted websites ... constitute general solicitation."[3]

Had you done this last Friday, you would be hard-pressed to find an experienced securities lawyer who would tell you that the letter posted on your web site does not violate US laws. The good news is that due to regulations that went into effect on Monday, you have not yet violated US securities laws. However, because you've engaged in general solicitation, you are now subject to, among other things, additional investor verification requirements before you actually sell securities to any US investor.[4] If compliance with US laws is or will be important to your business, be sure you get help from a very experienced securities lawyer with the rest of your fundraising process. There are many traps for the unwary.

[1] Some illustrations: SEC v. Arvida Corp., 169 F.Supp. 211 Chris-Craft industries, inc. v. Bangor Punta Corp. 426 F.2d 569 (1970) SEC v. Commercial Inv. & Dev. Corp. of Florida, 373 F.Supp. 1153 (1974) SEC v. Thomas D. Kienlen Corp. 755 F.Supp. 936 Diskin v. Lomasney & Co., 452 F.2d 871 Hocking v. Dubois, 885 F.2d 1449

[2] 15 USC § 77b

[3] SEC Release No. 33-9415

[4] Good summary written by Naval Ravikant and Kevin Laws at http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/21/why-you-need-to-pay-attenti...

The $99 annual fee is to pay for the services of someone who acts as the company's registered agent in Delaware, as required by Delaware law.

Delaware and nearly every other state require that a company designate a person or company resident in that state to receive certain correspondence from the state and to receive service of process if the company is sued. This person is usually called a "registered agent", "statutory agent" or "agent for service of process".

I think this is correct.

The Judicial Conference of the United States determines the PACER fees and appears to draw a distinction between the quarterly "fee waiver" available to all accounts and a "fee exemption" granted by a court after making the requisite findings (e.g., exemption is necessary to avoid unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information, research is for academic/non-commercial use, etc.).

Sources:

Reports of the Proceedings of the Judicial Conference of the United States at http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/JudicialConference/Pro...

March 14, 2001: "no fee … [will] be owed until an individual … accrue[s] charges of more than $10 in a calendar year. … providing a basic level of public access consistent with the services historically provided by the courts."

March 16, 2010: "In order to encourage use of … PACER … by the public, … users [will] not be billed until their accounts total[] at least $10 in a one-year period. To increase the amount of data available without charge … users [will] be allowed to accrue $10 in free usage quarterly, instead of yearly, before they would be charged."

September 13, 2011: "… the current waiver of fees of $10 or less in a quarterly billing cycle be changed to $15 or less per quarter so that 75 to 80 percent of all users would still receive fee waivers"

September 23, 2003: "exemptions to the fee are only to be given upon a showing of cause, are limited to specific categories of users, may be granted for a specific period of time, may be revoked at the discretion of the court, and are only for access related to the purpose for which the exemption was given."

March 15, 2011: The Electronic Public Access (EPA) Fee Schedule provides for exemptions … upon a showing that an exemption is necessary to avoid unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information. … [T]he Conference approved, a modification of the EPA fee schedule to include the following sentence: “For individual researchers, courts must also find that the defined research project is intended for academic research purposes, and not for commercial purposes or internet redistribution.”

These days I use Hellofax when I get something that would typically require printing, filling out, scanning and emailing. You can skip the printing part and do the rest through their site...works great! I've used it for leases, bank account applications, state mandated registration forms, address change forms, etc.

"[W]e are ready to cooperate fully [and are] ready to shutdown any form they request and provide any information we have about the user."

Does anyone else see the irony in Jotform making this statement to the Secret Service? Isn't this exactly what GoDaddy did to Jotform that is prompting the outrage?

Due process has its place in a commercial context, and it seems that both Go Daddy and Jotform might be well served to think about how to handle alleged misbehavior by their users when they receive a request from a government official.

indiegogo.com started off focused on independent film making though they're now a more generalized crowdfunding platform (like kickstarter). I don't know much about their platform these days, but I know they had a lot of similar ideas when they started out.

There are definitely a lot of state and federal securities laws implicated with items 6-12 (and international laws if you allow shares to be issued internationally). These laws are what prevent kickstarter and indigogo from adopting a similar model in their current platform. US Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts has proposed some legislation that may make these kinds of structures more possible. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/scott-brown-next-stev...

It looks like a number of folks who use lawyers said they tried to cut costs by preparing the first draft and then having their lawyer look at it. Curiously, this can actually take a lawyer more time to review (and, hence, cost more money). I'd at least consider asking the lawyer for their base form that is the closest starting point for your business and working from that to prepare your first draft for their review.

Virtually any lawyer that does the same type of work repeatedly will have a set of base forms they usually start from. The cost benefit is that they don't have to review things in as much detail because they are already familiar with it (they essentially draft and review documents as diffs from their base form). If you give them a form they've never seen, they literally have to read (and understand) every word.