chrisgoman

Founder = equity on day 1 or first couple of days/weeks/months

Co-Founder = more than 1 of above

Owner = equity earned after (sweat or money), founders are automatically owners as long as you still have shares

You can be a founder but no longer own the company (sold all shares)

If you have to take money from your own pocket to keep the company going, you are an owner - capital call anybody?

Some people actually don't want to be called founders as they think that the title they give people when they have put out to pasture and no longer actively contributing :)

But titles don't really matter unless that is all you are after

They can't be "too rich" where they are financially retired (they are not going to be in the same motivation level) but at least have some disposable income to engage in such an activity. It's a self-selecting network.

Why do people pay $150k to get an MBA at Harvard if you can pay $20k somewhere else and maybe get the EXACT same education? It's because you know 99% of the people there paid $150k and you have a "better" network.

Unfortunately, founder-dating is the same as normal dating but probably even harder as the stakes are higher. It's very difficult to find same "motivation-level" people (how much do they "want" it, are they as "hungry" as you, etc.) and it is very hard to gauge with talk as you have to see their actions to really know and sometimes it may be too late. At the same time, there is also the "stage in life" (single, married, etc.) and how much can they risk (like a 45-yr old person may not be able to quit their high-paying job so you will carry the load and end up with a lot of resentment)

Since you work at a FAANG as an engineer, I assume you are fairly well compensated so I suggest finding a semi-expensive hobby (definitely not FIRE friendly) like sailing or flying which may cost like $1k/mo to something you remotely enjoy so you get to meet people from all walks of life and domain expertise enjoying a "not cheap" hobby. The fact that they can afford it means they are motivated. The person doing your hobby may not be the person you end up starting a business with but it may be one-step away (degrees of separation).

This may be bad advice ... so take with a grain of salt :)

Whole cottage industry of this following AA/NA model called Social Media Anonymous. You could have camps, meetings, therapy, etc

Containers are the leaky abstractions of the devops world. Same pros and cons apply

Because work and life doesn’t revolve around your schedule?

If you are entrepreneur, it just gets worse unless you are the ~5-10% of the super successful ones

You have to pick your poison -- is doing this better than dealing with Ubuntu drama

Always Debian Stable (currently 10.x)

Mostly in Dropbox

  - Apps                      <= created by Dropbox
  - Cold Storage              <= does not sync to local, large archive stays in cloud)
  - Inbox                     <= Scanbot app, Brother MFC2740 scanner) 
    - 2019-06-13_160921.pdf   <= workflow folder, files get renamed and filed
    - 2019-06-13_160932.pdf
    - 2019-06-13_160988.pdf
    - etc.
  - Personal                  <= random personal stuff
    - 2014 Porsche 911 C4
    - 2017 Maserati Ghibli
    - Business                <= PDF files
    - Fashion                 <= shoe sizes, suit/shirt size, receipts, model #s, so I can buy the same thing the next time
    - Financial 
    - Graphics                <= random graphic stuff for reference
    - Manuals                 <= random manuals of stuff
      - 7" Monitor           
      - Aeotec Z-Stick 
      - Baratza Encore (2018) <= sometimes stick a year to remember when purchased
      - etc.
    - Marketing 
    - Photos                  <= headshot, DL, Passport
    - Recipes    
    - Receipts                <= random receipts (don't really track it, accountant uses credit card statements) 
    - Sailing  
    - Technical 
  - Projects                  <= projects/companies not started yet, temp
    - Example1 
    - HoldingTemp  
  - Shared-Company1
    - Logins.md               <= user/password, EIN #, address, contacts 
    - Corporate               <= TAX letter, CORP paperwork/filing, trademark
    - Financial 
    - Investors
      - Subscriptions
    - Marketing
    - Operations
    - People                  <= folders for people to share files
      - John One             
      - Sally Two
    - Sales
      - Product Images
    - Tech
    - Vendors                 <= anything coming from vendors goes here, invoices, statements, receipts, etc.
      - Chase Bank
      - UPS
      - Stripe
      - etc.
  - Shared-Company1-Private   <= if really need a 2nd tier of access
    - ...
  - Shared-Company2
    - ...
  - Shared-Company3
    - ...
  - Shared-***
    - ...
  - Shared-Accountant         <= share with accountant
    - Personal                <= personal records, IRA,  
      - 2019  
    - Project1
      - 2019
      - 2020
    - Project2
  - Shared-Family             <= shared with immediate family 
    - 123 Main Street         <= home files, manuals, etc
      - Vendors             
        - Electricity         <= bills, solar credits
        - Cable
        - Joes Plumbing
        - etc. 
    - Taxes 
      - 2020
    - Vendors
      - ETrade             <= brokerage statements
      - Bank of America    <= bank statements, tax 
      - Chase              <= credit card statements
      - Samsung TV         <= manuals, receipt, etc.

Anything with Shared-* signals to me that anything I file into those folders are visible to others

Sometimes there are levels of access for the company (all employees get the main `Shared-` folder and then the key personnel or owners get `Shared--Private`

---

Then for working

  ~/Projects        <= git clone ... (checkout folders)
    - MainWork     
    - SuperProject
    - AnotherOne
    - etc.
  ~/Servers         <= vagrant boxes
    - www1          
    - mdb1
    - etc
  ~/Tools           <= things that do not go into Applications
    - eclipse       
    - geektook
    - rdm
    - flutter
    - etc.
  ~/VirtualBox VMs  <= support for vagrant boxes (created by VirtualBox)
    - www1
    - mdb1
    - etc.
  ~/X-Projects      <= projects that are ready for archiving 
    - OldTest1    
    - MainWork_2020-01-01
    - etc.

* All downloads from browsers go directly to Desktop and they get filed

* Photos go to Google Photos https://photos.google.com

* No real music library to speak of so can't help you there, mostly Pandora and Overcast

* The Brother MFC2740 scanner uses an upgraded firmware (so you can send an email directly from this scanner without the need for a computer attached to it via SMTP which is the most awesome thing), then it goes to a Zapier email-to-dropbox, then goes to the Inbox folder above

* I also create a "list" in amazon of everything I have bought (even not from amazon) so I can find product manuals easily

that getting the degree is one thing but learning how to ship a project (aka "make it live") is another

Should be how every company works ... you will be surprised at what you will learn just walking around. It does take some initiative from the person -- do you just want a job or do you want to be the BEST in your job

Go work at the warehouse after your day job? So you can see what the problems are from your perspective as an engineer ...

If you want a company that has more chances of "surviving", apply/work for a company that can generate positive cashflow from operations. Life will be more stable, your salary will reflect the company's ability to make a profit (aka "lower") but you won't get the possible upside of a "hot" startup - you can't have it both ways. Anecdotally, unless you are the first 10 in the startup, it is probably not going to be a lot of windfall for you. For pre-IPO companies, sometimes it even goes the other way (you pay taxes on earnings that may never happen)

DigitalOcean (or any of the $5 VPS) with Debian 10, you will need to know "basics" like SSH and typing some commands (a bunch of sudo apt-get _____) and then you are done. The only thing you don't have with DigitalOcean is domain name registration but everything else is there. Use them for DNS! They have some pre-built stuff for your list here but I would just spin up a blank Debian 10 box.

You can also get a free tier at Amazon AWS but you have to learn all the EC2 stuff and almost piece yourself a server one piece at a time (like the good old days where you build your own PC but clicking buttons) -- IMHO this takes much longer than just doing a $5 VPS and typing things. So if you want to learn Amazon AWS stuff, this may be a good path but it is going to take a lot longer

We have non-developers so they can handle markdown but not much beyond that ... having a website where they can type stuff (this is just like wikipedia) helps us get them onboarded .. then they also can help with the issues, etc.

Yup, nobody in all the announcements or any other articles mentioning this new "github" has mentioned the WIKI (which is part of Gitlab) is not included in the free part of Github ... this is kind of critical IMHO

.. the grass is not always greener

Works for smaller teams and smaller # of hosts. I would say that it would start getting harder with 5-6 people and > 100 hosts. But for small stuff, it is the most awesome thing in the world. I had a structure I used a long time ago (https://github.com/chrisgo/fabric-example) but have broken it up now differently in the last 2 years (looks more like Ansible)

... and peer pressure (which is probably not a good reason)

Fabric https://www.fabfile.org/ (just one step above shell scripts using python), using 1.x as the 2.x stuff is still missing things. The key is having is structure to almost be like Ansible where you kind of have "playbooks" and "roles" (had this structure going before Ansible) ... probably have to move out of this soon though

Flutter

On your employment records, you should have 2 hire dates which means that they HAVE TO KNOW that you were hired at separate times by 2 separate companies. Think of it this way: if you have vesting stock, the 2nd company will NOT count the time you were with the 1st company (that would be excellent but it obviously doesn't work this way)

No, this is not right. The PEO is paying you "on behalf of" a specific employer (even if your check is coming out of the PEO's account). So you should get 2 W2s with separate amounts from each employer.

TriNet (a large PEO) stores employees as SSN so if you have ever worked for a company that used TriNet as their PEO, you are in their system. As an employee, you should see a dropdown at the top and you can only see ONE employer at a time and you have to use the dropdown to switch around.

The only reason you can get ONE W-2 is if you work at a temp agency. The employer technically pays the temp agency and the temp agency pays you. So even if you got billed out to 10 different "employers", you are still an employee of the temp agency and you get ONE W-2 but technically, this is NOT a PEO situation

Maybe a better idea for them would be to say charge you $10 upfront for 12.5k email credits which should last you a while. Seems like a better deal for "hobbyists" vs a bill at the end of a couple of months. For MG, they can collect payment upfront. I guess maybe for some people, going from free to $10 might be too much of a leap? We were on the "free" Mandrill plan which became PAID (which we were fine paying) but you have to pay for Mailchimp before you get the privilege to pay for Mandrill (we don't use Mailchimp at all), all our stuff is transactional. Hard to get out of it as we are using both inbound and outbound

the guys at teller.io seems to be doing it the OAuth way so technically not storing it like the scraping guys. However, it may be limited to the banks that they can connect to due to the requirement for a "real API"

We use Cliq.com for ACH for about 3 years now moving lots of transactions. Amounts are from hundred to low single-digit thousands (<$10k) about 200/wk. API is not as mature as Stripe but you can't beat the cost at $0.20 per transaction.

We mostly do outbound so no verifications are done

I would say that if you see a possibility of recognition 2-3 levels up then you should be the leader that they need. You mentioned "large" so this may be the unlikely option.

However, if you see a chance of leveling up your career faster than in a job you love (but slower advancement), then you should "take over" and put the "owner hat" on -- what decision would the owner (or the board or the shareholders) of this company do and do that. Even if you are 10% better than the next person, that should be evident to the people around you and if this will be visible to people that matter.

You are getting PAID to do a job so you can complain about the job not being right for YOU but a "professional" makes sure that you are doing the job to benefit the company first. Even if it is not with your current position, this attitude and outlook will reward you eventually.

Good luck!

Microsoft "tax". Even if you are willing to pay for a license, all the terms & how much are very confusing and not worth dealing with. Developers would rather solve technical problems than deal with even 5 minutes of potential licensing issues. If you start working on .NET, you almost immediately think "license debt" (similar to technical debt)

So maybe Plaid will be what Venmo was to Zelle. I have been following this space for a while now. When Plaid came into the picture, it made Yodlee be more open. So maybe in 10 more years we will have open bank APIs.

They have been trying to get banks to have APIs for years with no luck -- ofx/ofc. Mint went their own way for scraping and Watsi died because they did NOT want to do scraping. I was actually surprised when 2 years ago Xero got a "direct integration with Wells Fargo. Synapse got some funding a couple of days ago one can certainly hope

Yes

These are the timeless books and should be required reading

Pragmatic Programmer: http://amzn.com/020161622X

Code Complete 2: http://amzn.com/0735619670