kapilkale

I wish the second paragraph was the launch announcement

Is the argument here that "if you know how to code, spreadsheets aren't useful to you?"

If so, that's false. Spreadsheets are a fantastic way to present visual data and analysis in a way that's auditable by anyone, regardless of technical competence. They are visual programming!

This also makes them a better way to do lightweight data processing. One of my most common workflows is to dump production data into a CSV so I can analyze it and build charts off it. This is perfect for business-as-usual questions, like basic segmentation analyses. Pivot tables!

A major issue with Google Sheets is that the DSL is terrible. Like, try to do any sort of string manipulation (extract the first two words)[1], and you'll see how bad it is. Adding native python support helps solve this.

I'm just a random HN-er who saw this, but I'm very excited about this product.

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[1] https://www.spreadsheetclass.com/extract-text-or-numbers-fro...

That makes two of us. We have a Cloudflare worker serve the content from Webflow (which is actually set up with a custom domain at https://webflow2.tremendous.com/. Yes, it's a little convoluted.

We still don't know what broke here - the Cloudflare worker or Webflow, or the combination of the two.

Sorry about that ya'll. We're back up now.

The eng team was extremely confused about what had broken our webflow setup (we do some magic with Cloudflare workers to point our marketing pages at at Webflow with a custom domain)... and then I saw that we were frontpage.

Is the 100x valid? The odds of a founder dying vs. the chances of a company shutting down seem not apples-to-apples

I would guess there are many cases of solo founders shutting down their business other than founder death...

Tremendous | Rails Engineers, Data Engineers | REMOTE [EST +/- 3 hours | Full-time | https://www.tremendous.com

* we help companies pay people for things like user research, signup incentives, take-home projects, bug bounties, etc

* we are highly profitable (almost irresponsibly so), making $XXM revenue with 30 people, and growing fast

* we are bootstrapped, which means building with the long term in mind vs. VC rat race nonsense

email me at kapil@tremendous.com if interested.

we're hiring for literally everything, so even if there isn't a job that's an obvious fit, email anyway, because there's probably another opening up that will be

Kinda- for a $300 reward, for example, we only need an email address. So a recipient could just choose an Amazon.com gift card and apply it to their account, with only an email address provided.

My company, tremendous.com, does this, including the tax form collection process if spend exceeds $600 / person. Our primary use case is user research incentives, but interview incentives is an analogous problem.

Basically no strings attached for both sides. We do complete a compliance review for businesses signing up for our site (given we're a payments company), but it's basically invisible at smaller volumes.

Right on that payments is a challenge in implementing this. Companies need to pay candidates, who may be anywhere in the world, a small amount of money on a one-off basis without the hassle of paperwork.

Tremendous.com (where I work) does this.

Candidates can get payments, gift cards, or donate the money to charity.

(we've been paying candidates to take calls, do tech screens, and complete projects, and it's easily been worth the cost. at some point we'll do a blog post on the conversion rate differences)

book is called "the world until yesterday"

Yo, this is actually really hard

Tremendous | Senior Fullstack Engs (Rails) (FT) | Remote (+/- 3 hours of EST)

Product: tremendous.com/demo, grown 5x over last 15 months, profitable

Team: 19 people, former eng leaders from Plaid + AngelList

Comp: 80th percentile or better (we pay well)

https://muzzleapp.com/

Always ask about the preference stack. You'll rarely discover anything interesting, but if you do, it'll completely change how you value your equity grant.

https://angel.co/blog/liquidation-preference-your-equity-cou...

“Looking for jobs through employer reviews is becoming more popular, so buying Glassdoor not only grabs more users but also strengthens Recruit’s existing HR platform,” said Yushi Kawamoto, analyst at Haitong International Japaninvest KK. “Recruit is paying about seven times sales, which isn’t high. This will boost their competitiveness. So overall this is positive for Recruit.”

Glassdoor was valued at ~7X revenue [1], and was growing ~30% YoY [2].

This means they were doing ~$170M top-line, up from $130M in the year prior.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/japan-s-r...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/jobs-webs...

I doubt this is a choice on Shopify's part; it's almost certainly coming upstream from their payments partners.

https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed

$33 / US driver... I'd say Uber came out on top here.

I understand the point here; it can be useful to understand the abstractions on top of which you are working.

But given most engineering projects are crud apps without scaling problems, and PaaS companies like Heroku totally abstract away the system adminstration piece for those projects... I certainly wouldn't recommend a new engineer spend any time learning system administration.

Oh man, I'd take this bet!

Loser donates money to the winner's charity of choice. Pick an amount up to $200, and tweet @kapil so it's in the public record.

No issues with that on our end. Plenty of investors using funds or LLCs with multiple members to invest.

You'll want to work with a lawyer to structure the vehicle, and have a full understanding of legal, compliance and tax considerations associated with it.

Edit: the entity investing must be accredited. Here's an overview of the criteria:

https://angel.co/help/accreditation/what-is-an-accredited-in...

Agreed; we do this for regulatory reasons. We've got a limit on how many investors we can have per fund, and we can't sidestep that requirement by spinning up duplicate funds.

The high minimum investment is our equivalent of surge pricing.

We're working on it, though!

Pretty sure this is not a Webvan scenario. The question at hand should be "if Uber ran out of funding, would they die"

For Webvan, it was yes.

The answer for Uber is no, at least in the short term.

a) Uber would stop subsidizing drivers, and then would overnight be cash flow positive

b) The driver subsidies probably wouldn't matter anymore, because if Uber's funding ran out, so would that of their competitors. Lyft is already on the brink (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/technology/lyft-is-said-to...)

c) they'd exit markets where they were burning cash (e.g. China, which already happened)

Long term, no idea.

(disclosure: I work for AngelList)

Much-needed article. Worth adding some color on AngelList syndicate incentives:

Syndicate leads are compensated by earning carried interest on the additional capital that follows them. [1] [2] [3]

Carry creates leverage for syndicate leads. Which is cool because syndicate leads have a bigger stake in a company's success, and often want to help the company more.

This also means a lead may want to invite as many investors as possible in order to get more $ into their syndicate and create more leverage. If left unchecked, this would create conflicts with a founder's interest in privacy.

Part of AngelList's job is to ensure lead behavior doesn't conflict with a founder's interests. Here's some of what we do:

* 80% of syndicate deals in the last 4 months were private (invite-only).

* AngelList has tools to block specific users / competitors from seeing information about a deal.

* Probably the most interesting tidbit: AngelList is undergoing a professionalization of capital. Most syndicate deals have fewer than 20 investors participating, and much of the capital is institutional. These investors are vetted by AngelList and act more like LPs in in a VC fund (for example, most institutional investors on AngelList have signed confidentiality agreements)

If you've got ideas or questions about syndicates, feel free to ask below or email me at kapil@angel.co

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[1] Some syndicates (both on and off AngelList) do charge 0% carry, but they're uncommon.

[2] Leads earn carry deal-by-deal vs. on a portfolio basis, where gains net out losses. This creates a different set of incentives, but IMO doesn't impact founders much. (http://avc.com/2016/02/fund-level-vs-deal-by-deal-carry/)

[3] Currently no management fees on AngelList.

Market cap isn't $161M - they're issuing 11.5M shares, but there will be over 80M outstanding after the IPO. Market cap will be just under $1B.

Former Bain consultant. We used comps from public companies to sense-check things.

The interest rate for an energy conglomerate would not be something you would also use for a non-diversified tech company like Dropbox. As long as we could sell the number (both internally and to the client).

But within like OP said, the range of defensible numbers is still quite wide.

especially now that it's so easy to get that initial traction

It's gotten much cheaper to get traction. In some consumer markets, it is basically cost-free; all it takes is a motivated technical entrepreneur with a couple months of savings.

There are so many faulty premises here

* silicon valley doesn't produce much hardware (evidence for this being true? obviously we hear a ton about software, but what about tesla, intel, nest, apple, google, etc?)

* businesses such as social networking, personal assistance services, short-term house rental services, and other saas have questionable customer value (why?)

* there will be an implosion of these saas businesses (why?)

AngelList - SF, NYC, REMOTE

Eng team is 14. We look for generalists who can do product too. Email me directly - kapil at angel.co

https://angel.co/angellist/jobs

Usually recommended:

http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitalis...