2,912 karma · joined August 19, 2010
Only 10 engineers run all of AngelList, and most are ex-founders. The culture is awesome: http://www.slideshare.net/fcosaez/joshua-slayton
Built on Rails, but most of us didn't know it coming in.
Apply here: https://angel.co/angellist/jobs
Short answer: it's complicated, but probably C Corp. For the reason that if there's any chance you're going to take angel investment or give stock to employees, you almost need a C Corp. In fact, the lack of a standard C Corp just creates complications with investors and employees that puts you at risk. Keep it simple.
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C Corporations are almost necessary if you are planning on taking investment. They are not as tax-efficient as LLCs because they're taxed twice (once at the corporate level, and another time at the personal income level / capital gains level depending on whether $ is paid out via salary or dividend.) However, they come with the benefit of having different classes of stock (usually required for investors / employee stock options).
LLCs are pass-through entities. They reduce taxes for shareholders by basically eliminating payroll / capital gains taxes.
If you have an LLC and want to take investment, it is relatively straightforward to convert to a C Corp if its early enough in the company's lifespan.
On the other hand, converting from a C Corp to an LLC is a pain (you have to create a separate LLC and have it buy the assets of the C Corp, which creates a taxable event).
An s-election is a good option to reduce tax-liability of a corporation. It grants pass-through status. However, to be eligible, you have to file in the first 75 days of the year, you can only have common stock, and all shareholders have to be US Citizens (no LLCs, etc).
I recently lost my apple tv remote and buying a fire stick is more attractive than trying to figure out where to buy a new remote and how to set it up.
But Ms Poitras has one surprise left to spring, and it may turn out to be a big one. Mr Snowden presently lives in Moscow, where he claimed asylum after the American government cancelled his passport while he was travelling to South America. The film finishes with a visit from Mr Greenwald, with he and Mr Snowden discussing the existence of a second leaker inside the NSA—something that has been rumoured for months in the press and on computer-security blogs. When Mr Greenwald shows Mr Snowden what his new source is offering, his eyebrows almost climb off the top of his head. Like an action film setting up a plot hook for a sequel, viewers are told in no uncertain terms to expect more leaks—and soon.
I work with hedge funds that do this in CA, and neither of your points strike me as true.
The team remained 3 founders until Mar 2012 (1 year after launch) when customer support and other operational tasks started significantly distracting us from more critical things like building product and growing the userbase. At that point we hired a community manager to handle support / ops. We were profitable by then.
There were a few major advantages in delaying this long:
- Doing support ourselves helped us achieve product-market fit. It's critical to be in contact with as many users as possible in the early days.
- Saved money. Early on, a community manager would have had 2 hours of real work per day, and would have cost us $50K / year. Didn't make sense unless there were 6+ hours of work to do per day.
- Kept us from building support tools. Since we were all technical, we just ran everything from the command line. And when we hired our first community manager, we hired someone with immense coding aptitude. They handled support from the command line for nearly a year when we finally built out enough tools for a nontechnical person to do the job.
The two pictures are identical! They've photoshopped the original to look shittier, and passed it off as being taken by another smartphone.
link: http://imgur.com/VG8AUg3
What's likely happening is that really smart kids at good state schools end up finding the pockets of talent there anyway.
Pretty scary implications for the value of a Harvard degree.
source: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlar...
Zynga has acquired 20+ companies on crunchbase. Is Zynga biased towards acquiring companies in the bay area, or are companies that Zynga would be inclined to acquire mostly located in the bay area anyway? Or is it that bay area startups tend to perform better / receive more funding than their non-bay counterparts?
http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pag...
There's still a conflict of interest, and it is possible he is giving his interests more leniency.
Like you said, you are in growth mode. To me, growth mode means reinvesting as much of the profits as possible back into the company. Paying yourself a large salary during this time is the same as taking money off the table.
There are some good reasons to take money off the table, like paying back personal debt or supporting family members. But paying yourself more because you're the CEO doesn't seem like a good one, because your equity position is so significant.
If you don't have a good reason to take money off the table, it signals to employees and investors that "Joel thinks the money is better spent going into his personal bank account vs. making the company's equity grow in value." That sort of logic doesn't work in a startup that is targeting high growth, where employees are hoping to receive some sort of payoff from their equity. Moreover, it casts doubt on your judgment in capital allocation, which is one of the most important responsibilities of a founder / CEO. *
Obviously, all of this logic falls apart if you're not working on a startup. Low growth businesses that have achieved much of their potential are a totally different story. But you aren't starting a restaurant. Even Uber, at its $4B valuation, is giving compensation packages that are weighted towards options vs. salary.
* http://www.amazon.com/The-Outsiders-Unconventional-Radically...
The math the company has laid out says that CEOs should be paid more than any employee in a company, even if they are founders and have a controlling equity stake. I'm simply saying that if I were an investor or employee, I would find that concerning.
That person's equity position is probably at least an order of magnitude higher than the other employees. As an investor or employee, I'd find this alarming.
http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/08/peter-thiel-best-predictor-...
Call me old fashioned, but I think co-founders should be paid living expenses + 25%, even in a series-A funded startup.
It may not be a failure from the ecosystem / societal perspective because a new idea was tested and discovered to have some value to the world, but the company ended up being worth $0. The founders are now saddled with a bunch of debt.
It's like you go all-in on a poker hand, and then lose to a better hand. Did you lose? Yes. What if you had fun playing? It's still a loss.
- they may have banned your device, so I'd try using a different hardware to register
- Use an entirely different credit card. The "name" that gets entered in a credit card form is useless, so I wouldn't put in a real name either. I'd consider using another billing address too (same zip same house number, but different street)
- they may have banned your IP, so don't connect your phone to a wifi network when signing up or using your first few cabs.
Square has a totally different cachet than GiftRocket does, so they may actually be in a position to bend the rules. Seemingly, other smaller payments providers have been able to implement APIs around this.
I believe it's done by opening bank accounts at major banks, and then using the interbank transfer system which is instantaneous and only requires an account number and a name. Other services offer pushes to credit cards or debit cards using bill pay systems or blind credits.
It isn't actually that hard to move money from person to person. The real issues with this sort of stuff are: a) payments fraud b) money transmission law and regulatory compliance
I couldn't comprehend much of the Ember docs last time I was faced with a decision point on which front-end framework to use.