timewarrior

Thanks for sharing your experience.

There is always scope for a botched execution or just pure bad luck. I wish someone shared more candid details of what happened at Friendster.

It's all in good spirit of sharing and learning.

When you are thinking back, also consider the alternative where could you have missed opportunities and product launches because of extra effort spent on scaling upfront.

It's all good learning in the end. It's great to be in your situation. Keep at it and you will see great success in future!

It is great that you got a few which got traction out of 8 tries. This is an incredible success rate.

Most people see much less success. The original suggestion is geared towards first few tries that people make. Once they have made a few attempts, they learn from it and naturally build more scalable products without spending extra effort. You have already read my story about my first try which had a very poor start. My subsequent efforts have scaled in that order without needing a single rewrite.

However, if they spend too long procrastinating, worrying about and investing in scale - they are wasting precious time which would be better spent finding product market fit.

Can you please share some examples. I would love to learn from your experience.

You make a great point. Health should be the topmost priority and I need to get better at it.

However to my original point - you can lose fitness (within reasonable limits) and then gain it back and not notice a difference later on. However time lost is lost forever.

Thanks for putting across your point in such a straight forward way.

I didn't call out directly not the DB tables point. This kind of premature optimization is a huge red flag and I would anyone I am advising to avoid it.

Agreed on this point.

Many a times there is heavy lifting - recommendations, machines learning etc. However that is don't using specialized technologies in a non user facing process and the results are then dumped into a DB available for a CRUD app.

I am hoping that products with such requirements will have some obvious tools for such tasks (Hadoop, Hive etc) and they would find a way to scale such processes with time.

So their stack might be go+*sql+Hadoop.

Can you please suggest some use-cases which don't fit the above pattern and maybe we can brainstorm. Seems like a fun exercise!

I remember reading that Friendster founder was complaining that there were facing a lot of technical issues and investors were not letting him invest effort in fixing them.

IMHO, if your investors need to be involved in seeking approval for handling scaling pains and on top of that if they reject it - there are deeper issues within the company (management issues, politics, technical incompetence, leadership issues).

So to clarify my point - any team could still screw up technical execution. However there is no reason that given a good team and support from within the company, a product can't be scaled.

Agreed that completely blasé is pretty bad.

However in this case being blasé would mean, not working hard to scale when you users are getting a bad experience. A basic stack these days node.js+mongo, go+*sql can easily handle more than 100k users even with one of the worst implementations. Most products don't reach that point!

We were using MySQL like a persistent queue. As soon as a message was spawned, we would send it to downstream SMS gateways and delete them. So essentially that volume didn't use a lot of memory.

At stage 3 we had 50% daily active users who would receive on an average of 8 messages per day. So at step 3, we would send 20M messages per day.

I am guessing you point is that if I had chosen Meteor and MongoDB - we wouldn't have been able to scale.

My initial DB schema was pretty bad. Had to do quite a few DB migrations - which took weeks of work to execute.

I have used MongoDB extensively since, and I am confident that it would have helped us scale to 5M users comfortably. I might have migrated to something else at that point.

There are very few products who reach even 5M users. Which is why developers should focus on launching fast.

Another thing is that best and most successful product have a really simple core product (remember Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc when they had 5M users). It is not that much work to migrate and rewrite. When products are not getting traction - is when they start getting overcomplicated.

Can you please share the details on the tax benefits? I am an immigrant and have started and sold companies and I didn't find any tax benefits.

Say yes if you are Citizen, Green Card holder, any other EAD (H4, pending I-485), a valid H1 or F1 OPT, you can say YES.

I have been working as a coder for almost 12 years now. We have a 3 month old baby.

Life changed a lot after the baby was born. I took time off for almost two months and now am getting into a rhythm where I can spend 7-8 hours in office everyday.

Coming to the original topic - the way I have solved skill up is by having a day job which helps me acquire skills that I want to acquire. I would never do a job where I am not learning what I want to learn. I have left multi million dollars in equity on table at jobs where I was not learning (LinkedIn, Dropbox). Moved to management roles and back to individual contributor a few times, as soon as I had acquired the skills I wanted to acquire.

Based on this strategy I have acquired following skills - Backend, Infrastructure, DevOps, Frontend web, Frontend iOS, Data mining research, Product, UX, BizDev, Sales. Current plan is Analytics and Machine learning.

Given that now I am able to do a full time day job - I am able to skill up as a part of it.

Even with Verizon if you have a phone which supports their LTE bands, you can use them on Verizon. I used my iPhone 6 and iPhone SE from AT&T on Verizon.

I just quit my job and moved to COBRA (which continues my current insurance for 18mo). My out of pocket is 21k per year for spouse, baby and me.

If you are starting a company be ready to pay at least 7k for insurance for yourself.

Previously you didn't have 10 days to find a job when you were fired. Based on USCIS rules previously, you had to be employed the day you file your H1 transfer. So in case you are fired, and if uscis asked for your latest pay stubs covering your employment of date of filing, you would need to leave the country, file it again and come back in.

When I filed an H1 for my startup, they issued a Request for Evidence just because the documentation mentioned our investor pitch "founder previously employed by LinkedIn". They thought I had already quit my job. Luckily I was still employed and was able to send the pay stubs.

It seems difficult to believe the point 1, where she is being chased by VCs. The author has never built a startup before. All her previous roles have been mid/entry level roles in big/mid size companies.

This articles seems like an attempt to create pent up demand.

I do agree with the points mentioned in the article though.

You gotta start somewhere. Right now the situation is an utter clusterf*! And if an Entrepreneur who is moving to US can't pay for food and lodging to himself and his employees - how are they gonna survive.

Indians aren't part of the E-2 treaty.

Based on your last line, I guess number of granted have gone down.

Doing all I can to get EB-1 EA. Let's see how it goes.

thanks @alex_hirner. I have applied for EB-1 EA. Doing whatever I can to get it and will find out the result next year.

However I have significant resources at my disposal right now, which many other entrepreneurs wouldn't have - supporting the point raised by Vivek Wadhwa. If I had a Green Card, I wouldn't have sold to Dropbox and would be doing running a startup right now :)

Didn't quite understand your last line. Did it mean that 50% of YC batch applicants for EB-1 got it?

Thanks once again!

Anyone who can create a startup should be allowed as long as they can pay themselves and their employees. If they employ more than 5 citizens/green card holders who are more than 50% of employees and have more than 0 profit for 3 years give them a green card. These company should build products and not provide services.

That's because most Israeli startups are targeted to US market because of lack of local market. Many get acquired when either they are threat to a US Industry Major or if they have saturated the market. Some get acquired for talent (Engineers from Israel are awesome) and it is easier to move Israelis to US vs trying to move Indians (Green Card waiting line for Indians is 20 years while it is instantaneous for Israelis - smart people don't want to become slaves).

One other thing most people don't realise is that life on an H1 is shit. You have to do a shitload of paperwork. You have to answer stupid questions when entering US. You have to answer stupid questions at Consulate when getting Visa. There is a lot of paperwork and uncertainty when you are changing job. No one should be stuck on h1 for 20 years. I did my 6 and am looking to get out next year if I don't get a Green Card by then.

With Indian companies, most are operating in Indian Market, are nowhere close to saturating Indian Market. I expect quite a few of them to be worth 10B or more.

Did Facebook know that they will be worth 100s of billions when they started. Neither did Google.

Anyone who is net positive on the welfare system should be welcome to US. Even a company which makes a million dollar profit per year in 5 Years should be welcome.

I think you guys are missing the point. I know he normally is in favor of H1 but not this article.

He mentions two mains things in his post: 1. Give a path of Green Card to entrepreneurs.

2. Do not bound h1b employees to current jobs. Right now US is allowing quasi slavery by bounding workers to their jobs and making it really difficult to switch. If employers couldn't enslave h1 workers it wouldn't be economically viable for them and they are get lot less h1 workers.

I have worked at startups all of my career, built the biggest social network to come out of India, built another startup, sold it to Dropbox, currently head the innovation group at a Fortune 15. All I want to do is build startups. But on H1 I can't hold majority stake in my own company, and because of my previous experience I don't want to do a startup again on h1.

It will take me 20 years to get a Green Card on EB-2. I am trying for EB-1 but even with my background it will be difficult. If I don't get a Green Card by next year I will move out of US.

I am also discouraging any Entrepreneurs I know in India against a move to US.

I sincerely hope that the situation improves.

Sorry, didn't go in details of why it didn't add up for me. Agree with your point.

I was reading sometime back that our gut has good bacteria and initially when people didn't understand them there was a phase when some people were using antibiotics to kill their gut bacteria. Today, Most people agree on the benefits of good bacteria in our gut. Around 2010 I was reading an article about other good bacteria which also resides on our skin and then I decided to stop using anti-bacterial. I make sure that I was my hands thoroughly with water and use soap if required.

Agreed!

However it's still probably better to eat organic than something which doesn't even pretend to be safe. It's all relative in the end.

I hope one day I can control the sources and attributes of all the food that I eat. However till then I will try to do my best with my available time and money.

Agreed! But we cannot ignore potential visible risks while worrying about unknown risks.

I use organic/natural exclusively. Try to model my life closed to simple ingredients people used more than 100 years back. I also diversify things I consume. Someone once posted on HN: His grandpa told him everything is poison, so use everything in moderation. I really liked this recommendation.

However it is very difficult to prevent all the radio waves in today's world as much as you try. Maybe it's not harmful but we won't find out for decades.

Completely agreed. I have been avoiding using anti-bacterial soaps for years, because something didn't add up. I am perfectly happy washing my hands with water before meal. Sometimes if I feel that my hands are really greasy/dirty I would use a natural ingredient based soap.

I have friends who would chide me for that. And now FDA bans sale of many anti-bacterial soaps: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/science/fda-bans-sale-of-m...

I just went to gym and someone who used the treadmill just before me doused the treadmill with 10-12 pieces of anti-bacterial wipes. The treadmill was wet when I started and was giving out fumes for almost 10 minutes while I was running. I am wondering what is worse for me: potentially germs from a reasonably healthy and hygienic person vs vast array of chemicals from this cheap anti-bacterial wipe.

Fat based foods are pricier vs sugar based. Given limited household budget for food, margins tend to be lower on Fat based products.

And you can eat a lot more sugar based food vs fat based food on per food weight basis.