If you want to know anything more about this system, we are having a get together at PyCon tonight at 10pm in Room F (thanks warner!) and then presenting at the RSA Conference at the beginning of March (search the agenda for "tahoe").
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40Tb can be handled pretty well by S3 and other storage services and they have pretty good pricing information to model your costs. Note that they don't (yet) provide very specific SLA's for data availability, so keep that in mind when designing your system.
Maintaining your own drives with some sort of redundancy (RAID, automatic copies, etc.) or using something like (bias alert) our open-source project http://allmydata.org which is effectively a software RAID layer both require some IT and systems energy, so this has to be bundled into your operational costs if you choose that route.
Just to emphasize what others have mentioned, it is important to incorporate the new data influx rate into your model. If you are successful, 40Tb this year might turn to 120Tb next year, so make sure that your cashflow model can support the underlying cost of whatever system you choose.
Our target audience is composed of consumers who want a simple product to backup their computers and a more sophisticated audience that wants to design and maintain their own distributed backup service. For the consumers, open-source isn't necessarily a plus or minus (see marketing below) but for the more sophisticated users (enterprise IT folks) open-source is great if they need to make modifications for their special needs.
Similar to above, marketing your project/product/service as open-source may be very attractive to some audiences (enterprise IT, hackers who want their own storage grid), irrelevant to some (consumer PC user), and negative to others (some investors, some potential buyers).
One very strong benefit that we've received is peer review by experts in the field. Because our system must securely and robustly store sensitive information, the more people who read through our design and implementation and comment on it the better. Several design and implementation suggestions have helped us fix or improve our system immensely.
Because our project is open-source the peer pressure placed upon good design, documentation, and code is much higher than in my previous experiences with proprietary software. Though not perfect, it means that our team has worked hard to make the system usable and not pushed off important items that might not be visible to a busy project manager.
Code contribution has not been a major focus of our project, though we have received several very good additions to our project. I believe (but not backed up with data yet) that our particular project does not lend itself to large amounts of people coding on it as it is not (yet) a platform.
Hope this helps, Peter
We looked at Administaff as well and the main reason for going with ADP was a pre-existing relationship via payroll.
For example, because the code is open to all, the developers are motivated to produce much better documentation and testing harnesses, usually before they actually do the code itself - internal costs go down. This pays for itself many times over in time saved during debugging and deployment.
Another example is that we've received a lot of critical peer review of our code which has helped us catch and fix flaws in our security and design - internal costs go down, public perception of security becomes positive.
In my experience and market research, it is nearly always the execution of the business that significantly outweighs any super-secret Python methods I may have thought were cool at 2am :)
For our production servers, we can lose up to 66% of all of our servers simultaneously before any data loss will occur. This parameter is tunable such that you can make it even more robust at the expense of more data being stored and pushed around the network.
Oh, I should add that we are having a HackFest at our office tonight! I know it's short notice, but every month or so we order pizza and beer and have a couple loose presentations, usually about distributed systems. Anybody is free to come, consume, present, or just sit in a corner and program. Logistics are below: http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2008-March/000462.h...
* Salary (should be market for your new skills and position)
* Retention bonus (usually paid out over 1-2 years)
* Conversion of equity (either to cash or to new stock)
The above depend a bit upon the acquiring company. If you are acquired by a large public company, then you should expect a competitive salary, reasonable bonus to keep you around, and some combination of cash-out and new stock to keep you strategically aligned. If you are acquired by another smaller company then your salary may be lower (but fair for that size of company), bonus may be given in stock, and your equity package is probably pretty flexible depending upon how long they want to you to stay.
As a founder, I took $1/yr salary with the expectation that I'd get a market rates when we secured funding. As an acquisition I negotiated what I thought were fair market rates for salary and stock in the new company with a bonus to keep me happy to stay. When acquiring companies we would offer competitive salaries, retention bonuses (stock, cash, or both) for people we wanted/needed to keep around, and stock conversion (we were public by that point).
In your specific case, I believe that your salary should be market rate for your skills and your new position. The acquisition price is independent of your salary and should be treated as such.
* great people, unique culture
* influence a wide range of issues from tech to office location
* great experience for founding a company later
Note that I didn't include "huge potential financial gain" in that list. A non-founder at a startup really has to value the experience because most likely there won't be a huge financial win. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to negotiate a fair compensation package, but really you are using the opportunity to gain skills and experience to use when founding your own company where you will have more ownership and potential financial gain. If you don't believe that the founders take more risk than the employees now, you will once you found your own company :)
If financial gain is your main goal, you may want to take a serious look at getting into the financing side. This will take a different approach, but good analytical skills plus good networking skills are in high demand. Alternatively, you could go down a more corporate path and aim for senior management at a good firm. I'm not necessarily recommending these paths, but it's worth exploring the alternatives so that you can really appreciate the (in my opinion) extraordinary benefits and privileges of working at a startup.
The most important things I gleaned from my graduate work about 10 years later (MBA and some more applied math) were how to present interesting data to people in a way that they too could interpret it and derive value from it, and how to manage social networks effectively.
One key success factor is to find a high quality group to work with. We used recommendations, but I've also seen a few 2-person shops use oDesk find people for prototypes of applications they didn't have time/interest to build. The prices are extremely competitive, and often you can hire 3 people and use the best result.
We also found that it is both more difficult and more valuable to organically grow a user base that finds good utility in your service. These users typically need more word-of-mouth (including via respected blogs) or viral messaging. A good way to get people in the door is to offer a free basic service coupled with a clear path to upgrade later to a premium service when you've ironed out your business model and service offerings.
Last, we've found that a good way to keep people interested in the service itself is to keep the technology open source. This builds a very involved community, ensures that if the service is valuable that it can continue, and provides excellent references later on when you will be asked if can support large numbers of users.
One thing I meant to mention earlier, we are self-funded so far.
(bias alert: I'm deeply involved in the project I'm about to mention)
A few years ago I realized that I'd either lost data due to hard-drive crashes or mistakes and wanted some sort of safe place to put my data. We then started a project (http://allmydata.org) which provides for a decentralized, secure storage fabric. You can create your own grid if you'd like, create one with friends, or use our managed grid (for a service fee).
I think that Amazon S3, Nirvanix, and others are starting to provide nice basic services in this area as well, but I do think there is a lot of room for retaining and saving information that is gently locked into web services (Flickr, blogs, LinkedIn, etc.).
We've had good feedback from our users which has helped shape our usability and also which features were important to them (like having ftp access for example).
Hope this helps, Peter
We are paying $3000/month for a nice old 3bdrm Craftsman in Rockridge that is about 5min walking from the BART station and about 2min from the College Ave strip.
Some other interesting areas in SF are Potrero Hill and Bernal Heights. Our startup is in Potrero Hill and there are lots of good restaurants around, plenty of parking, and nice steep hills. Bernal has a bit more of a parking challenge and isn't really close to public transport, though it does have a pretty cool strip and it's close to the Mission for good food.
Hope this helps - if you want more details, just let me know at secorp at gmail dot com.