robfitz

I actually completely agree with you[1].

My [intended but perhaps poorly articulated] point was that playing DnD doesn't feel the same as making tools for DnD.

However, if you accept that premise and are willing to endure potentially dull work, then caring about DnD will allow you to make much better DnD tools.

[1] (updated to remove irrelevant personal information)

I want to buy this, but the checkout fails for me (bad merchant address?) and there's no email address to contact you in either your HN profile or the site. How do I seek help?

We actually moved from the valley to London for that very reason.. all our customers were in London (or NY, but better advisors/investors in London).

On the other hand, you aren't going to be able to reasonably maintain relationships iwth 10,000 people. If you can get 10 or 100 and stay in close contact with them through either events or friendships, then you've probably got 90% of the potential value already.

Quick apology to anyone on /newest who saw this double-posted by me within about 5 minutes -- for some reason I decided to post and then immediately change my blog's URL scheme..

Keynotopia and mockingbird/balsamiq made a huge difference for me. I'd like to see more mockup apps (particularly an easy way to create navigable mockups!), so my vote is firmly on #2.

Well. I love it, at least.

I'll just chime in and say I quite like your reading of it and think it's a great point.

Regarding my intent: that video is the example to zoom in on the uncomfortable feeling of allowing someone to misunderstand you while you get to where you're going (which in the comedian's case is the punchline, the entrepreneur's case is better customer understanding).

Feel free to correct them once they stop talking, but let them get their initial braindump out of the way first. It's auditory gold!

You can certainly benefit from being a good talker (the inverse of #3), but the broader point I was [trying to] make is more about your own ability to listen rather than the customer's.

When you tell someone your idea the first time, chances are high that they will misunderstand you. When that happens, founders' first impulse is to correct them. But you can get a lot of value by allowing that uncomfortable misunderstanding to linger for a bit while you listen.

(edited to clarify some verb ownership and improve sentence pacing)

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Regarding our situation: the company ran for about 4 years. We raised a couple rounds and had customers like MTV and Sony, so it wasn't a total flop or anything.

I'm not actively hurting -- I've had two companies since then, which both quickly failed without funding or the drama of extensive hiring & firing. But I do talk to lots of early-stage founders, so I often reflect on that first failure when I see it happening in others.

I also see the stories in the PR circuit which don't quite ring true, but which are still some of the only guidance new founders receive. Like yours, my experiences suggest that reality is a lot messier and more ambiguous than that.

Steve Blank's Customer Development is basically a repeatable process for discovering IPO-worthy startup ideas in the enterprise space. Sounds like reading 4 Steps to the Epiphany would be worth your time (the summaries and blog posts don't really get at idea creation in the same way the book does).

Another choice is to start with a customer segment that mid-20s guys (e.g. startup founders) tend to ignore and figure out what could be improved about their lives. Middle managers, stay-at-home moms, nurses, prisoners, old people, etc.

Also, pg posted a convenient list: http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html

If you can do that, excellent! But they probably won't commit to anything they can't see.

The better ones I've seen in this category have done something like:

  -Have idea
  -Walk into stores, talk to owners, managers, customers
  -Improve idea
  -Build a simple version of the product
  -Get a store manager you're friends with to trial it
  -Gather lots of data
  -Depending on the data, either iterate or pitch the big chains

The stumbling block is basically that even if you make your product totally free, trying it out still costs the store & manager lots of time. They are paying hourly wages, so employee time is a very real cost. Until you have numbers proving that it does what you hope it does, you'll probably need to count on someone running a free trial as a favour to you (friend, family, alumni network, campus store, etc).

Seedcamp was great once again this year. Vox.io was by far the most impressive company I've ever talked to out of an accelerator or competition. Congrats on all fronts.

Howdy. I'm finishing up a community/portfolio site for small game developers. I think I'm probably too early for it to be useful to you (just about to put up a quiet v1 and it's not terribly startuppy in its current form), but would be more than happy to be reviewed if it's relevant for you.

(email in profile)

Ditto. We went through as a 4 founder team in summer 07.

Sadly not. It sprung to mind because my girlfriend is currently going through the training term at a PE (private equity) firm and I have been lightly flipping through her textbooks and training manuals.

PE is about buying under-performing companies, making them more valuable, and then re-selling them. So she's being trained in how to spot a particular type of under-performing which they're in a good position to improve. They have a couple different strategies they are comfortable with, including basic stuff like switching the management to fancier plays like buying one company in a new industry with the intent to use it as a platform to acquire lots of other companies in the same industry and turn on the economies of scale.

Probably not what you want to spend time reading, but a big chunk of Private Equity literature covers this.

Hey Chris, I've been using a similar structure for some of my projects (all involved track their billable time, which is paid off first in equal proportion, then any remaining upside is split down the middle).

I haven't formalised either, so no contract to give you unfortunately, but wanted to touch base in case we end up thinking about or writing anything which is mutually beneficial.

Some universities have umbrella corporations/trusts set up where students making a mini business can do it under this legal entity and just tell them in plain-english how they want any revenue to be split up. Since the students trust the university, it more or less works out, although someone at the top needs to bear the legal costs/risks.

Anyway, my email is robftz@gmail.com if you want to discuss further.

I've been hounding /newest pretty regularly for the past couple weeks as well, and it seems fairly steady..

I don't understand why people keep bothering, as there's no way it's showing results. I'd assume HN is wrapped into some brilliant-auto marketing package somewhere.

Last I heard, the magic number was 5 flags within an hour, so I think we just need more people actively flagging.

I think you are depressed by what you think you read, not what you actually read.

He explains their motivations quite thoroughly (talent is currently available, so for now, cash is their major bottleneck, not scouting).

They've also been in business for 30 years (founded 1981). Somehow I don't think they are ignorant of how to run a business.

There isn't a moral "right" answer for VC. Taking it isn't a weakness, and funding isn't a sign of giving up. It's a business tool like any other, and it's ridiculous to be sitting spectator to a very healthy business and condemning their choices.

This is actually an interesting site, but the way you're posting here is going to get you flagged off for gratuitous self-promotion.

If you provide some more context on your goals for the site, your experience building it, or what sort of feedback you'd like, I think you'll find the community much more responsive.

Agreed that options can be a bit of a tax chore. Since you're on board before the incorporation, ideally you can just have your shares allocated in the same way as the founders do, for a value of a ten-thousandth of a cent (or whatever) per share.

Exit triggers don't apply to core engineers. They exist for roles which help you get to an exit situation but don't have a role to play within the future owner. Relocation as a trigger might be worth considering though.

And no, don't negotiate for as much as you can get =/.

First off, it strongly benefits both sides to reach the 'correct' agreement here. If you over-negotiate and get too much equity, the CEO is duty-bound to fire you once they realize their blunder, since it's irresponsible to the other stakeholders not to. Similarly, if you are given too little, you'll come to begrudge them and quit, significantly hurting them.

If you started with any salary at all, you don't have a good argument for a founder-sized chunk. An early, key engineer is going to be somewhere in the 2%-10% range.

If you started without salary, and thus took founder-style risk, you might be playing more in the 5-20% space.

For the overall company breakdown, You can assume the structure is something like 10-25% employees/option pool, 75-90% founders.

For example, the founders might choose to give 5% to each of 2 key engineers, leave another 10% to spread among all future employees & advisors, and divide 80% between the founders.

Vesting is a clear "yes", for everyone on the team including the founders. Founders & employees should be on a 4 year vest with a 1 year cliff (if you get fired or leave within the first year you get nothing, at the end of year 1 you get 25% of the equity you are entitled to, and then another 1/48th of the total each month from then on).

The vesting thing is more like... if the founders don't do it, you don't want to work for them because they're clueless. So you should insist on it because otherwise the company isn't being run properly. If the founders don't vest themselves, quit immediately because they are mis-aligning themselves with the future of the company.

You always talk about equity in %, not a # of shares. Companies can be started with an arbitrary number of shares (my last one had 7 million, some go with 10 million, some 100,000). # of shares is totally meaningless -- talk in percent ownership. Founders saying "And you get 20,000 shares!" are trying to trick you.

My advice here is to make yourself a mock cap table, and try to play with how you would set it up to keep everyone properly incentivized, as if you were an outside board member wanting it all to run smoothly.

So assuming there are 3 founders (1 of whom is the engineer), plus you, plus 4 other engineers, you might end up with something like this (where you are the high-value engineer):

Founders: 75% (30/25/20), Current engineers: 15% (8/2/2/2/1), Future Pool: 10%

I was a hacker edged into the biz/sales role (we had 2 other, stronger tech guys on the team). So this is my perspective from watching (and building pieces of) the tech over 3ish years.

Code quality matters. We did enterprise sales across several products, and it got to the point where making minor tweaks to the older products to close a sale was a complete nightmare.

You probably don't need to rewrite it. In most cases I've seen, re-writing (e.g. switching technologies) is some sort of pathological denial about delaying the admission that nobody wants the product.

The importance of scalability depends on your channel. We spent a lot of time building in scalability, which was important for an advertising company (we couldn't close sales w/out scale guarantees), but might not be important for a word-of-mouth app.

Build an admin dashboard. A good one. You're losing countless weeks if the CTO is a bottleneck for deploys and minor database tweaks.

I wish we'd used a modern web framework. I didn't write any of the server side code, but our development felt particularly sluggish there.

Check for plugins and tools before writing it. Some of the stuff we wrote from scratch was 2x commenting systems, 2x moderation systems, 3x analytics & charting systems, and a widget sharing wrapper. Writing some of those in-house was correct, but we did it somewhat compulsively.

Think long-term. We wrote some widgets in Flash, then switched to Flex because development was slow. But for our ultimate vision, we needed <10kb widget sizes, so we had to switch back to Flash a year later. Since the core of our product was in that widget's UI, it was a non-trivial rewrite.

Write a stupid version of the UI first. A major UI overhaul delayed the rest of a key deploy for ~3 months. Starting with a quick v1 UI which copied twitter would have allowed the UI/UX guys to do things properly without the server team screaming at them every day.

Shipping makes people happy. If you have an API, get people writing (& launching) little apps which use it. Have them own those apps personally and keep them on their personal githubs/portfolios. If you are playing in an industry, encourage people to make 1-2 day apps, separate from your product but wthin the same space. You'll stumble across some gold.

I like #2. Infinite runway from freelancing gives you a lot of options.

As someone leaning toward design rather than programming, you might consider plugging into a platform ecosystem rather than building standalone. In particular I'm thinking Salesforce or 37signals, but I'm sure there are others. Both have big groups of happily paying customers doing real business, and a good framework for API or widget plugins.

Reduces the marketing risk and lets you focus on improving usability instead of starting from scratch.

On the one hand, I haven't used a resume since my college internships (5 years founding startups, then freelancing through the network built up during the startups).

On the other, I still think it's worth the time. Being forced to write big, gnarly programs (like a compiler or collaborative text editor or puzzle AI) will give you experience that you'll never get from tutorials online about dealing with big, scary codebases. Or working in teams. Or whatever else.

If you learn as you go, each of those problems will get you fired when you hit it, because they're not exactly intuitive to deal with and you won't notice it until shit has already hit the fan.

There's not a 1:1 mapping between academic and real world problems, but I guess I'm saying it's still going to help. It also puts some extra items in your toolbox in case you want to do something other than vanilla web dev.

That being said, I have no way of evaluating the financial or chronological opportunity costs, as those are unique to you. It also depends how keen you are to get involved w/ your professors and students.

Plus, universities are where co-founders live!

I prefer taking all my notes on index cards. Notebooks failed me BC I ended up w/ short term (meeting notes) & long term (ideas) mixed, which made it hard to sort & hard to review.

Index cards I can throw away my meeting or call notes as soon as they end and easily group everything else.

Resolve #2 by thinking about your desired daily lifestyle (as opposed to the work or ideas). Comparing grand visions is impossible, so how would you be happiest spending tomorrow?

Regarding #1: I was pretty burned out after working on my startups for about 5 years. It paid the bills for those years, but I wasn't ready to commit to anything full-time again and I was still sore from the feeling of letting down all my co-workers & investors.

So I spent about half my time doing freelance work and the other half dicking around on whatever took my fancy. For the first few months, that was going to parks, boozing, trying out new cafes. Gradually I found myself naturally interested in programming projects again, and then I realized I was slacking off on my freelance gigs to pursue one particular idea. I was staying up late with the joy of coding again.

Anyway, now that idea has turned into a fulltime startup again and I couldn't be more excited. It was allowed to grow very naturally and I avoided the mistakes of rushing into something.

Anyway, infinite runway from contract work is a beautiful thing for letting the "right" idea find you, as long as you keep about half your time open for whatever.

Procedural art is fun. If you combine it w/ real world tools like projectors/cameras or even something like a laser cutter, really neat stuff can happen

The processing page has a nice gallery and also happens to be a very pleasant way to program this sort of thing: http://processing.org/exhibition/

The syncing doesn't work for me when I open 2 browsers and share it to myself..? Does it just share the initial state (which worked great) or also updates?