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mthomasb

164 karma · joined September 15, 2011

Co-Founder of Bonsai (https://www.hellobonsai.com) (YC W16)

https://www.twitter.com/matttbrown

himattbrown at gmail dot com

Verifying my Blockstack ID is secured with the address 13n9UpnZzv3hTdJZe3yKPB1QqPWPievkez https://explorer.blockstack.org/address/13n9UpnZzv3hTdJZe3yKPB1QqPWPievkez

YC Badge: 0xEC517D782cA3714E5210D9E7Ae0F5C67940a5C43

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mthomasb··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2021)
Abstract API | CTO | Remote | Full time

Abstract is a profitable, fast-growing, and fully-remote dev tools company used by Shopify, Airbnb, Google, and thousands more companies. After experiencing a year of rapid growth in revenue and usage, we are looking for a strong engineering leader to help Abstract continue scaling.

Learn more here: https://abstractapi.notion.site/Engineering-Lead-CTO-at-Abst...

Or email jobs at abstractapi dot com

mthomasb··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2021)
Head of Product & Product Manager for Tax | Remote | hellobonsai.com (YC W16)

https://angel.co/company/bonsai/jobs/1264053-lead-product-ma...

https://angel.co/company/bonsai/jobs/1278010-lead-product-ma...

mthomasb··on Ask HN: Consultants and freelancers, how do you handle invoicing?
Founder of Bonsai (YC W16, www.hellobonsai.com) here.

We're built from the ground up to handle invoicing for freelancers and come with lots of little details to help you save time and get paid. E.g., automatically apply late fees, lock files on a invoice until paid, recurring invoices and auto payments, and more.

Happy to answer any questions you have!

mthomasb··on Question for Freelancers
Bonsai (YC W16): www.hellobonsai. It has time tracking, invoicing, reporting, and more. Founder here and happy to answer any questions!
mthomasb··on Show HN: Crowdsourced freelance contract template, written in plain language
We (Bonsai, YC W16) built something like this specifically for freelancers. You enter the parameters of your project and we'll generate a contract using a variety of pre-set clauses. https://www.hellobonsai.com/freelance-contracts
mthomasb··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)
Bonsai (YC W16) | REMOTE | Growth Lead

Come build the future of freelancing

https://angel.co/bonsai/jobs/426887-growth-lead

mthomasb··on Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production
This is a great video on the economics of the hub and spoke vs. direct model embodied by the A380 vs 787: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlIdzF1_b5M

That channel also has alot of very interesting content on the economics of air travel (e.g., seating classes, how tickets are priced, etc).

mthomasb··on Books I've read in the third quarter of 2017
I used to beat myself up about not remembering details of books, even ones I read only a few months ago. I still try to take notes and revisit those often, but PG's take on this help ed reduced my anxiety about it:

> Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.

http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

mthomasb··on Ask HN: How much are you earning as a freelance app developer?
When we first launched we didn't have enough data for Europe, but we do now and will update it soon with rates for most European countries and a few others.
mthomasb··on Ask HN: How much are you earning as a freelance app developer?
Hey all, Matt from Bonsai (YC W16) here. We provide contracts, proposals, invoices, and other tools to freelancers, mostly developers and designers.

We used our anonymized data to break out what freelancers earn with different experience levels, skill sets, locations, etc: https://www.hellobonsai.com/rates

mthomasb··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2017)
Bonsai (YC W16) | Full Stack Product Engineer | SF or REMOTE

Bonsai (hellobonsai.com) helps freelancers simplify their lives with an integrated contract and payments workflow. You’ll join a technical, experienced team that’s backed by some of Silicon Valley’s top investors (YC, Index, Matrix, et al) and building the future of work.

We’re looking for a generalist backend engineer with a hacker mentality, 3+ years of experience building full-featured web applications, and a deep familiarity with Ruby. Experience working with payment API's and processing is a huge plus, as is previous startup and/or freelancing experience.

Offering competitive compensation and willing to sponsor a visa for the right candidate if they'd like to be in SF. Remote is ok too. Email matt at hellobonsai dot com if interested.

mthomasb··on Ask HN: How much do you earn on average through software freelancing?
To clarify, these are rates that freelancers quote via our contract tool and are paid for via our invoicing tool, so it's pretty verified. We also allow users to submit their rates, but we weight those much less than the data verified by client payments.
mthomasb··on Ask HN: How much do you earn on average through software freelancing?
We're a YC company that put together a visualizer for freelance engineering and design rates. It draws on a few thousand data points from our freelance invoice and contract product.

You can filter by location, type of work, and experience: https://www.hellobonsai.com/rates

mthomasb··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2016)
Bonsai (YC W16) | SF or REMOTE | Full Stack Product Engineer

Bonsai (hellobonsai.com) helps freelancers simplify their lives with an integrated contract and payments workflow. You’ll join a technical, experienced team that’s backed by some of Silicon Valley’s top investors (YC, Index, Matrix, et al) and building the future of work.

We’re looking for a generalist backend engineer with a hacker mentality and 3+ years of experience building full-featured web applications. We're using Rails + React. Experience working with payment API's and processing is a plus, as is previous startup and/or freelancing experience.

Email matt at hellobonsai dot com if interested.

mthomasb··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2016)
Bonsai (YC W16) | Second Non-Founder Engineer (Full Stack) | SF or REMOTE

Bonsai (hellobonsai.com) helps freelancers simplify their lives with an integrated contract and payments workflow. You’ll join a technical, experienced team that’s backed by some of Silicon Valley’s top investors (YC, Index, Matrix, et al) and building the future of work.

We’re looking for a generalist backend engineer with a hacker mentality, 3+ years of experience building full-featured web applications, and a deep familiarity with Ruby. Experience working with payment API's and processing is a huge plus, as is previous startup and/or freelancing experience.

Offerring competitive compensation and willing to sponsor a visa for the right candidate if they'd like to be in SF. Remote is ok too. Email matt at hellobonsai dot com if interested.

mthomasb··on Ask HN: How do I get a job abroad?
Check out https://jobbatical.com/. They help you find ~12 month contracts with startups abroad, mostly Western Europe.
mthomasb··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2016)
Bonsai (YC W16) | First Non-Founder Engineer (Full Stack) | SF or REMOTE

Bonsai (hellobonsai.com) helps freelancers simplify their work with an integrated contract and payments workflow. You’ll join a technical, experienced team that’s backed by some of Silicon Valley’s top investors and building the future of freelancing.

We’re looking for a generalist backend engineer with a hacker mentality, 5+ years of experience building full-featured web applications, and a deep familiarity with Ruby. Experience working with payment API's and processing is a huge plus, as is previous startup and/or freelancing experience.

# Stack - Ruby on Rails deployed on Heroku - Extensive integrations with payment API’s (Stripe, Coinbase, PayPal, etc) - Lots of jQuery/JS

# Details - Competitive compensation - Please be located in / willing to relocate to San Francisco - We're willing to sponsor a visa for the right candidate

Interested? Email me: matt at hellobonsai dot com

mthomasb··on Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy
It's worth noting that most schools of economics are heavily indebted to physics. This came from a desire to increase economics' perceived rigor, and led to the (mis)appropriation of some core concepts[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_equilibrium_theory, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09672560600708011

mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
We do support US, UK, Canada, and Australia for contracts. About 20% of our users are Brits.

On step 1 of the contract creation process, what happens when you click 'United States'? Also, what browser are you using?

mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
Not yet but it's been very heavily requested. Definitely looking into it.
mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
Yep, sample size of a few thousand signed contracts
mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
As much as freelancers say they hate dealing with clients or invoicing etc, what it all comes down to is the difficulty of managing cash flow.

Contracts and invoices are the first step towards a few other cashflow management tools like invoice factoring, escrow, and others.

But definitely agree, you can't build a business on invoices alone, since those + payment processing are so commoditized.

mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
Yep, we definitely understand the need for more flexibility. In about 1 week there will be many more options to edit.

The big reason we didn't do that sooner is that we didn't want the average user to think they had to really get into the details and tweak it, because the template is made to just work well in most cases. But have definitely seen the need for more flexibility.

mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
We're working on a big release this week to add flexibility, but the contracts definitely aren't for everyone.

If you're a decent sized agency working with larger clients, it probably won't be flexible enough. We try to cover the 80/20 cases and provide some flexibility, but we need to maintain some standardization for the ease of creation, integration with invoices, etc.

mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
Yep, the contracts include confidentiality and IP assignment.

We also see alot of users bringing projects to us from Upwork et al.

mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
One way to think of the contracts piece is as a RocketLawyer or LegalZoom verticalized for freelancers. We provide contracts that are written and maintained specifically for freelancers, and that beats 99.9% of the generic templates you'll find on the internet.

The fact is, nothing beats having a lawyer create and review every one of your contracts. However, that's simply not feasible for most freelancers. Our goal is then to provide something straightforward enough that will cover the majority of issues in the majority of cases.

Re the disclaimer, it's actually completely standard for any site that touches legal issues or content.

Check out the TOS of RocketLawyer (https://www.rocketlawyer.com/ter...) or LegalZoom (https://www.legalzoom.com/legal/...), two huge companies and pioneers in the field, and you'll find the same there.

mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
Thanks :) Lots of our users are new freelancers or are making the transition from part to full time freelance.

We try to put together resources for them specifically, like a tool to visualize what they should charge: https://www.hellobonsai.com/rates

mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
Yep, definitely looking to expand international support for contracts and especially payments. That's one of our largest themes in feature requests right now.

Thanks for mentioning 2checkout, hadn't heard of them before. We've been looking into https://www.adyen.com for international payments.

mthomasb··on Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers
Hey everyone, one of the Bonsai co-founders here.

We're former freelancers who realized there's way more to freelancing than good design, development, photography etc.

Freelancing is a business and many freelancers lack the interest / skills to create effective contracts, manage cash flow properly, etc.

Our first two products are contracts & payments. We had a Stanford lawyer who writes novels on the side draft solid, plain English contract templates. We built a simple, helpful mad-libs style workflow to create the contracts. And finally, we have invoices that can be automatically generated and sent from those contracts.

Our initial users are getting paid about two weeks faster than they were before Bonsai.

Would love to hear what you guys think and answer any questions you have about Bonsai or the freelancing business in general.

Edit: Also, in TC: http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/22/bonsai-wants-to-be-the-free...

mthomasb··on How Scientists Can Thrive in the Startup World
Malformed URL here: <p>Jessica Richman, the co-founder and CEO of human microbiome testing startup <a href="ttps://www.ubiome.com">uBiome</a>
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