sb8244

Eh, I don't think this is a bad name collision. Nintendo doesn't really talk about stuff like this publicly, and searching for it is pretty much reddit + hacker news threads.

I'm sure there's a lot of internal code name collisions.

I was the VoIP debugger in my last job. Last minute trips to Tokyo, Barcelona, London. Happened about once per year.

I recommend you make yourself known if the situation ever comes up and you are in line to jump in. (Although you need to be able to figure out whatever the problem is.)

My go-to was 5 business days + weekend to where I could get the problem solved. My goal (and I was successful at it) was to solve in 2 and then have 3 days paid vacation.

I mean, once the cat is out of the bag you have to care for it.

It can be discouraged, but people will still use it, so helping is still good.

Plus it helps non AI use cases at same time

How many .ex files in code base?

You can message pass across a cluster. In fact, it's identical code to message a remote vs local process.

Erlang provides "process groups" that allow you to structure groups of processes across a cluster.

It doesn't try to be magic. It's not a workload scheduler or "automatic distributed machine".

You structure things the way you want, on top of it's primitives. It's just that all of the primitives you need are built in and work really well.

Of course not, but there's a big difference between persistent bad raises and a single one.

Bad terms are raised due to bad founders (not knowing better) but more likely bad company health. (That can include trying to raise 50M series A as we saw in past 2 years.)

A healthy company with good founders (or lawyers) should be able to avoid issues.

I asked lots of questions to the founder of the company I was at. He was very nice in always answering me and helping me understand what's good / bad. I try to pass it on but I'm not sure how to proactively get the knowledge other than reading something like "All about VC fundraising" (fake post, I'm sure it exists) and hoping it's there.

Participating preferred = investor invests 50M on 1x participating preferred and company sells for 100M. The investor makes 50M + their % share of the company. Common stock makes % share of 50M.

They participate in the % sales ON TOP OF their preferred stocks liquidation preference (money in = money out before common stock value is considered)

Now here's where it gets nasty. 2x participating preferred = investor invests 50M and company sells for 100M. Investor makes 100M and common stock makes $0. Or if the company sold for 150M, investor makes 100M and participates in the % stock value from 50M.

It's a bit confusing, but the short is participating preferred is the absolute worst terms for common stock holders (founders included.)

I think this is a pessimistic view of the situation and I don't subscribe to it being the norm today.

I run a (still small, 1.5M ARR) tech startup and we treat our employees fairly. Low / clean investment table, early exercise for employees that make early employee risk effectively 0, upfront about how to deal with options, alongside market salaries.

But maybe I am not the norm and it's more common for people to get screwed over. However, I have several friends at startups that have similar recent stories with their options.

That's the name of the game.

1x non participating is a fine way to offset some risk.

Anything more than that is greed.

I think 1x non participating is a fair deal, but watch out for anything other than that. (I wouldn't take a job if there was anything more than that. And it is something I'd ask the founders.)

I think it's worth it still. Depending a lot on the company:

  * Ask questions to founders if they raise on participating preferred (the worst). Don't take a job if they do or if they won't answer
  * Find a place with early exercise of options
  * Find a place with a healthy company culture. (I believe this correlates)

I made a lot off of options, while having a good salary. I know others that did the same.

What if you raised 500B and still got nothing? That can happen with 2x or 3x liquidation preference.

IDK FanDuel structure (not in article), but they only raised ~ 400M. Yet the investors got every dime up to 550+M.

This is an uneducated opinion, but I'd be absolutely shocked if it's not a major investor that is buying effectively privately.

Random people won't be able to get shares.

Agree completely. Going after small deals ruthlessly would've been my biggest change. We were trying to, but so much was wrong with the actual way we were trying to sell.

Btw the price comes from my latest adventure. I think 12k is too low unless you can literally do everything without help (i could have but it would've destroyed my time.) 20k is probably a realistic price floor with pentest included.

Although type 1 doesn't require a pen test or you to actually do anything. Just to say you would do it a certain way. Every prospect that has asked for SOC2 has wanted a separate pentest deliverable.

I agree with this, although the timeline differs a bit between companies. I was at Salesloft from 1M ARR -> 100M ARR, so I saw this roughly play out. However, I will say that the founders did an exceptional job staying close to the product well after 10M ARR.

I think a lot of it is due to the VC playbook. The question of "who am I building my business for?" looks a lot different between VC and bootstrap. Once you start getting into heavy hitter revenue (grain of salt, I've never done this as a founder), the machine starts working largely on its own. It's probably more impactful to spend time on the business systems instead of the product.

But bootstrapped founders seem more likely to stay close to the product for longer. Eventually they may want some sort of out, and you see the playbook execute much much quicker.

Now, I have other theories on why it doesn't play out well. Going from 10M -> 50M ARR is a huge hurdle. You have to really level up a lot of the business itself to do so. It might be that it's just not possible for a lot of companies to bridge the gap. I think it's easier to go 50M -> 100M than 10M -> 50M.

Sure, I can do that. This isn't an exhaustive list, of course:

  * Don't be afraid to ask for the sale
  * Be comfortable "closed lost"-ing a deal instead of having non-productive conversations (SOGOTP)
  * Recap all meetings with prospects or customers (email sent to them with information such as about your product, your call with them, their painpoints, next steps, etc.)
  * Leave meetings with a tangible next step. Someone not wanting to schedule another meeting is a huge red flag
  * You don't need a sales process or methodology, but you might if you're not able to effectively manage your deals.
  * Be comfortable living in the present and future, as you want early prospects to help shape the future with you.

For sure. Big challenge with those companies—that I found—is that they want a lot of credentials + proof that are simply outside of the reach of small businesses. So even if you're full-time, it may be a "good luck" scenario.

Although SOC2 is fairly easy to get, it's expensive for bootstrapped founders (maybe $30-45k all in.)

It wasn't enterprise, but the 600 person company (that I knew very well) simply wouldn't work with us in the end because we were too small (2 of us.) It sucked, a lot, because the deal cycle took about 18 months to get to a firm no. Since then, everyone involved has left the company

Founders should be doing sales (not leading it, doing it) until at least 1M ARR. That solves a lot of that issue.

Maybe it's a difference between bootstrapped mindset and VC-fueled one.

Nah, that's not the right answer. It puts focus on the product rather than the founders. You do NOT need PMF to get 1-5 sales. If you can't even get there, it's bigger problems. PMF is needed to turn 2k MRR into 50k MRR.

In my case, it heavily stemmed from our inability to do sales (at all). We had feedback early about how this was an $XXXXX product (and we were in sales process for that) and it put blinders on us. We should've been okay with $XXX and grabbed 5-10 customers early.

Why we couldn't do sales is something I'm not going to put on the internet because it affects people other than me. (I have no issue talking about my shortcomings.)

I left that company and started another with a proven sales/marketing type within 2 months. The story is much different than my first. It's because he can sell.

Funny enough, I have a license to use my old product w/o selling it, so we do. We've gotten at least 10 customers asking to buy it. And they're fairly emphatic about it.

There's a dangerous line of thinking around "my business isn't producing revenue because I'm not full-time focused on it." I've fallen into this trap and learned the hard way that full-time focus was not the issue.

You have a team for in-house mobile apps, but you don't have any revenue. Why is that? How will you fix it?

Couldn't you only have the snippet in the layout in dev environment? That's fairly common

This hits the heart of it for me.

I've used Jira (last job) and Linear (now). I don't really see any compelling reason that Linear is "better" than Jira. Jira was always pretty easy to use and navigate for me, and we had team-focused views for ourselves.

Even on this site, several opinions I looked at are about the idea of process or the implementation of a process—not really about Jira. And several of the ones about Jira just came off as whiny nitpicking and not actually meaningful.

Don't worry too much about tools to start. The most important thing is starting, getting consistent, and having a GTM strategy. (Don't overlook the last one.)

  * Be consistent in your outreach
  * Shortcuts like automation are a waste of time unless you're replicating success
  * Always ask for the sale
  * All meetings should have a next step / action. Preferably chain meetings together so you have the next one scheduled by end of current one.
  * "SOGOTP" - you need to respectfully but quickly move conversations to *sales* convos. If someone isn't going to buy, recognize it quickly and move them to nurture instead of taking your time

I'm not an expert here, but I completely failed for 18months w/ 0 customers. Versus current startup where my co-founder is actually good at sales and we're at 1.5M ARR in a year. So I've seen both sides of the coin.

This x 1000.

"No askie, no gettie" is something my co-founder and I say.

I'm the engineering side and struggle with it, but he's really good at it.

This doesn't track with my experience.

We scaled an org with both Ruby and Elixir (later, 1 of the 2 blessed languages) and there was no tangible difference in that way.

You could also scale in other ways like microservice. Elixir plays great in that world, as pretty much every language does.

Regarding one man armies. Usual way I've seen to scale is to find those one man armies and put less expensive Jr + mid engineers on their team and have them work together. I don't think that's an Elixir thing though.

I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows. Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.

Did the parent comment get updated? It doesn't track to what you've put here.

Not to diss, but their landing page is too wide for mobile and the design overflows.

The design kits that tailwind provides have been so useful compared to everything else. The difference in quality (that I've noticed) is significant when compared to free alternatives.

Tailwind full access is such an easy sell for me. Plus it's pay once, so I don't mind it at all.

Pins are pretty heavy and seem like they would be difficult to reliably stand upright from underneath.

Just guess—i don't actually know

Deezer costs more for family than I pay now on Spotify. Why switch?