accountoftheday

The article does not support this claim. My reading is that GOOG's HR department kept/keeps the salary curve artificially flat (over-rewarding low performers) to manage pay within a narrow band and thereby prevent having to negotiate with top performers.

Buried beneath a stack of preferences it makes little sense for founders to make any sacrifices to save the company (i.e. not take a salary for a while) since all money will go to investors first.

$25/hour flat rate? Why? That's not even half the market rate for an average developer.

If over half the developers are worthless and you are buying an unknown quantity this seems equitable.

Ex post facto, such as the retroactive changes in CA tax law?

One perspective is that a friend got screwed out of shares. Another view is the real drivers behind the company were smart to not give a dispensable person a third of the company, and are seeking a discount on mistakenly made legal commitments by drawing out the litigation. As an investor I would take the second view. The deposition video also shows Spiegel is clearly CEO material.

Receiver pays in the US.

The simple answer is that this perceived benevolence is forced upon Facebook anyhow, having a substantial presence in the EU and being subject to data privacy laws there. On the pg side of things I can only assume the chilling effect on conversation works as intended.

uninformed prediction: "pg called us to correct their mistake, we got an interview and we're in" by the end of next week, though you might be asked not to talk about it in public. meanwhile, nothing will come of the "acquisition" talks.

No claim is made under the DMCA, it is merely made to look similarly scary.

"pivot" as commonly used now is code for "we did not pull an @ev (i.e. undo existing investment on change of direction such as odeo->twitter) and chose to continue using the $incubator brand licensing arrangement"

That, or we buy a car to commute.

What I dislike about Euro VC is not so much this focus, it is their insistence on risk reduction in the above way coupled with low valuations not properly accounting for said derisking.

This is a javascript based demo which teaches you something. Think about it.

Some of the attackers previously lived as engineering students in Germany.

A key difference: the problems at LHR with the UK Border Agency stem from public employees effectively holding travelers hostage to extort higher pay whereas the the terrible way DHS treats foreigners is so by design.

peers may offer to process bitcoin transactions for free, and the original paper posits there are always going to be participants who will.

google the symbol names and you will see the javascript is copypasta.

The fake achievement racket is reason enough for my future children to grow up in Europe.

How do other founders deal with non-committal VC nonsense? I feel like only taking targeted meetings where social capital gets spent on introductions to avoid this takes too much serendipity out of the equation.

I am only speculating here but the server may be verifying a client's simulation to prevent IAP/multiplayer cheating. (Who hasn't played the old SimCity games with infinite cash?)

10% may seem fair when the company is small but it will cause trouble later. What if the company becomes Facebook? Will future hires be angry that a short-time contributor gets 50x their equity upside? Will investors not balk at paying $500k for 10%, when someone else gets 10% common for having done a logo?

Imho, the correct way to compensate not-really-founders is with a convertible note for the market value of their services times an appropriate risk multiple, or, if you can afford it, cash. (I have actually done this.)

With regards to founder vesting, it is worth pointing out that if the fallout happens before the one-year cliff he gets nothing (if the usual terms apply).

If you are charming like me you can get a SIM card at a T-Mobile store for free (did so last week in SF). Everything is negotiable.

It is quite possible that Apple is, technically, breaking EU law but the Commission are letting them get away with it because they have more important things to deal with. With no consumer outrage and no real local competitor to protect from a foreign predator there is no political gain from action.

However competition law applies uniformly across the EU so it is easy to comply with, if you choose so. A more complex situation exists with Facebook. To follow a variety of applicable national and state law they would have to an extraordinarily large amount of legal resources familiar with the respective intricacies and probably create national variations of their product. This is the kind of thing that holds back European companies but in this case it protects FB, because the Commission (the only institution with enough political clout and resources to take action) is only going to address EU-wide issues, not a bag of a dozen different issues. So it is rational for FB to mostly ignore the law, which in reality they chose to do.

UK taxes are low but that is because public infrastructure and healthcare there are comparatively cheap and shoddy. It is not really a European country in that sense.

So what if it does?

My guess: when zero board seats go to investors. Please correct me if I am wrong.

In that sense VAT is also a voluntary charge. You can avoid it by eating nothing.

Watching any live TV in the UK, even when avoiding all BBC channels, is subject to this mandatory payment. Hence it is, by any reasonable definition, a tax.

The emotional drain came as a bit of a surprise to me, and I am not even invested much in this forum or the idea of making a career via YC. I too have built and exited startups previously (without the warm embrace of an incubator) and some rejections from dealing with investors do happen due to the nature of the game but I cannot remember it ever having felt hostile in the way submitting to a black hole and receiving an automated form letter response from it does.