nwenzel

Whoa! Definitely give the commenting engine a try. It is insanely fast. I'm curious how it would work on my old SaaS app that had a ton of data and displayed attached PDFs (that were often scanned images of text, not the actual text) that are huge. Nice work.

HN is a place that appreciates craftsmanship over mass production. That can apply to apps or canoes!

Maybe. But user is like a consumer. So HN is multiuser, but seems weird to call HN multi-player. Live concurrent interactions feels like something more than multiuser. Just my 2-cents, but multiplayer as in multiple users acting and interacting is a good use of the term multiplayer.

Solo, part-time developer adds a feature Evernote announced, AI-enabled search, faster than they could launch it.

Anytime I read about why someone likes some new low-cost locale better than SF, NY, or pick-your-US-city, I just can’t help but read it as “I like being rich.”

Supporting offline users is harder but super important. Will check this out.

General Motors. Several airlines. You’re describing bankruptcy protection. It means the debt holders will agree to pennies on the dollar or possibly even to forgive the debt but take over the equity wiping out the common shareholders. Companies can file for bankruptcy protection or debt holders can effectively force companies into bankruptcy if they default on their debt payments.

If you have the opportunity to get help from lpolovets, you should jump at the chance at any minimum. What does $10k or $25k get you in the Valley... not a lot. But if you keep expenses low and have support from great people like lpolovets, suddenly you have a lot more than when you stated.

No price cap or a high cap means the discount is your max return during the period between when you wire your money and the priced round. Compare that to what an Seed VC or A Round VC would look for between their round and the next.

As an angel in that scenario, you’re investing with the risk profile of a very, very early company but the return profile of a later investor.

Founder here. Cool to see the story posted on HN. Happy to answer questions until I hop on my flight. (I'm a "WiFi off and focus on one thing" kind of flier).

Link to the referenced cases:

Alice v CLS: https://casetext.com/case/alice-corp-v-cls-bank-intl

Inventor Holdings v Bed Bath Beyond (multiple): https://casetext.com/search?q=Inventor%20holdings%20v.%20Bed...

(and let's be clear: money)

First, we all have bills to pay. Don’t knock someone for their chosen profession.

Second, I was lucky enough to be invited to a small group event to hear him speak. Either all or the vast majority of his fee was sent directly to a charity. Never hit his bank account.

Good rule of thumb is to remember not to make assumptions about people you know nothing about.

Currently live in Mountain View. Red Rock is the epicenter. Lesser known (but pointing it out here so it gets more business and stays in business) is Olympus Caffe & Bakery. It’s not really suited towards long coding sessions. But it’s easier to talk without being overheard by 18 other startups.

Agree with other posters. The challenge is escaping tech. I have two kids and every parent at their school works for Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Apple, HP, some startup unicorn, or some new startup. Me? Oh, uh yeah. I’m a founder of a 50-person startup.

You’re right to think that 35 is pretty young. But it’s not too young to get into Product Management. Or any other career change for that matter.

There are many different types of PMs. Some companies want a more technical PM. Maybe a company selling a technical product to a technical audience would find your engineering experience extremely valuable.

My default career advice to everyone is to figure out where your experience is rare. If other PMs have 5-10 years of experience as a PM, you’re the rare gal or guy with years of actual coding and experience. That group will have a ton of depth to help on your PM gaps. But you’ll be the only one who can do what you do.

Getting older, getting married, having kids, living in different parts of the country in different types of cities. Basically anything new gives you a broader perspective.

When people talk about startups and equity, they often talk about the “risk” of joining a startup. For me, as a founder, the equity portion of a comp package isn’t about the risk. I’m curious to know what HNers (often with very passionate thoughts on the topic) think of my theory.

There is risk at companies of all sizes. Also, the idea of a single career in your lifetime isn’t a reality, so the “risk” of a losing a job is really the risk of losing it without notice. Compensation for that risk would be something like one month of pay, not illiquid certificates that might or might not become cash someday.

Employees can also change jobs voluntarily. But the idea that their employer should get a percent of their future earnings as compensation for that risk would be ridiculous.

I believe equity comp is because employees have two jobs: 1) execute on their day job, 2) build the systems, processes, culture, and institutional norms of the company. Basically, the equity component is added to the cash component because building a company takes long-term thinking and because it’s a ton of work.

I’m curious to know if others think about equity comp having a purpose other than to offset risk. Thanks!

Hi there. That quote was from me. Thanks for finding it interesting. Thanks for asking lpolovets to weigh in. He is incredibly smart and thoughtful. Turns out... he’s one of the investors that responded well to our “pragmatic” pitch. A few angels did. It’s not that it doesn’t appeal to anyone or that it’s the wrong choice. But, if you’re pitching to a VC where success is measured in # of homeruns—not win rate or even IRR—you should talk about being a homerun, not a sure thing.

First, huge respect for bootstrapping. My co-founder and I ran a bootstrapped company together for over a decade. Skipped our own paychecks three times to ensure we made payroll for our team. But I’m sure you have your own stories just like that. Again, HUGE respect to you and everyone that operates without a backstop.

We went just over two years in our venture-backed company before hiring anyone. Built the business to nearly $200k ARR. Everyone we told was amazed. But if 2 people can’t operate a business with only $200k top line, you don’t need a complex financial model to know that your economics aren’t where they need to be.

So, yes, you need to have revenues and cash before you can hire and pay salaries. 401k is only a little further out than that.

The 401k isn’t expensive. Especially with newer startups offering payroll and 401k. Matching. That’s expensive.

I do. So do my cofounder and many of our employees. We made the 401k available around 15 employees (I think). The tax savings of the 401k offsets the cost of providing the 401k, so its basically free-ish to offer... without matching.

For reference, we started offering the 401k before our A round. At that point, we had raised $2M and were still under $1M ARR run rate. Based in the Bay Area.

I don’t get the narrative that startups pay very little or don’t offer any benefits. We pay competitive comp and offer good benefits to get great people. We’re an enterprise SaaS company, so maybe pre-revenue or consumer or hit-based companies are different. But even our first employee was well compensated. Though at that point, my cofounder and I were paying ourselves well below market and were living off savings.

Is that true? Or is that just what people want to see?

Avg age at my company (Series A funded, 50-ish people) is >30. Founders started at 35 & 36. Now they’re not-quite-40 and 40. Your sample size may vary.

Step 1 is usually, reduce your expenses. When people say they can’t do something like that, it’s usually an economic decision. But, plenty of people live on the lesser salary. We all get used to the higher salary and rachet up spending accordingly. Otherwise, living paycheck to paycheck would only happen for a narrow slice of the country.

I’m not a minimalist, but it seems to me that the solution for many problems starts with “spend less”. We just don’t want to hear it. I know I don’t.

middleout: your hypothesis is that YC is elitist. Or you have to have PMF (evidence that what you’re doing is working), 2nd time founder (evidence that you have succeeded in the past), or deep subject matter expertise.

Traction, Prior Success, or evidence of subject matter expertise. Those sound like pretty good criteria to me. But, YC is actually looking for people who are “sufficiently determined”. Those three things are just evidence of determination.

As for the elitist case. I have no idea other than to say it seems false using a sample size of one (me) and a sample size of one batch (summer 2013).

I’ll disagree with one point that I have direct personal knowledge of.

Criticism: yc is elitist. with a few exceptions (you have PMF), you have to know someone

Not true for me. I knew no one and certainly did not have PMF (revenue equaled $0 when we were accepted). I learned about YC because I saw someone on a plane reading TechCrunch which led to PG’s essays which led me to YC which led me to apply.

What I did have was deep industry knowledge and an awesome cofounder with whom I had built a progressional services business.

Pro Tip: if you want an edge on the YC application, keep your application short but dense enough that you teach the reader something. Straight from PG: VCs know a little about a lot, so if you can teach them something new, they’re intrigued.

I was 35 and had two kids when I went through YC in 2013. My cofounder was roughly the same age and also had two kids. We weren’t the oldest and we didn’t have the most kids. The idea that YC is just for 20-somethings and consumer/tech apps is a myth that may have been true early on, but is no longer based in reality.

It does help to have a low personal burn rate. If you have high expenses, it’s difficult to quit a decently well paying job to start a startup. But that doesn’t have anything to do with YC. If anything, it’s marginally easier with YC backing because at least you can slow down the personal burn.

IMO python and its popularity is somewhat split between a scripting language, maybe a R alternative, with a data science focus on one hand. On the other hand is python as a web dev language with Django and flask as the popular frameworks.

We're looking to hire on the web Dev side [0]. We do get a number of people who have more of a scripting focus, but limited web Dev experience. I think some of that comes because of the online MOOC phenomenon and the proliferation of python courses that are really python scripting (not python web dev) courses.

I'm curious what the HN community thinks of my hypothesis of that split and if the "incredible growth" is one-sided as a scripting language.

[0] https://www.simplelegal.com/careers?gh_jid=678936

Don't ask. Don't tell.

It wasn't a great policy before. It's not great now. Hiding who you are to avoid ridicule doesn't solve the problem. If the majority opinion is safe to express, but your opinion isn't, then being forced to hide doesn't actually solve the problem. Even if you hide your views, you may get asked why you don't support the majority's viewpoints.

That would assume that the other customer location is currently underserved or not served at all.

Outsourcing is about reducing costs. It's not good or evil. But it depersonalizes decisions on which service to choose and narrows the decision making criteria down to cost. Costs for service jobs are driven by people. So, when a company is choosing their janitorial service and they choose the lowest cost service, that means the service that pays the lowest wages or that cuts the most corners will typically win the contact.

Depersonalizing the buying decision and commoditizing human labor aren't good or evil by themselves. But, turning people's welfare into a math problem certainly leaves us open to making decisions we wouldn't have made if we saw the consequences through a human lense instead of only an economic lense. At best, it causes suboptimal outcomes for an individual while maximizing the aggregate benefit.

We can fight against it all we want, but everytime we buy a t-shirt, an apple, or an iPhone, there's a supply chain behind it built on the lowest cost provider. We are all part of that process. I hope I'm not evil for buying a cheap t-shirt. But I know I enabled some shady behavior that made it $1 cheaper.

SimpleLegal | Python/Django | Mountain View

https://www.simplelegal.com/careers?gh_jid=678936

We're 35-person team building software to run corporate legal departments. We like to say that Sales has Salesforce. Marketing has Hubspot. Legal has SimpleLegal.

We're post Series A with real revenues and a real business run by second time founders. We're backed by Y Combinator and Emergence Capital.

We're looking for Senior Python/Django engineers to join our team to make people's jobs better. Our core customers use our software everyday to do their jobs. We're taking customers from legacy incumbent vendors with clunky software. We're pulling legal departments into the world of modern, user-friendly software.

https://www.simplelegal.com/careers

I'm a founder at a high-growth startup in Mountain View. I always tell potential hires, "options are worth nothing until they're worth something. And, they may never be worth anything."

I think that's the opposite of the unrealistic optimism job candidates get. But I think it also helps set the stage for a culture of transparency and honesty very early. Even before that person becomes an employee.

I'm curios to know what HN'ers think of that explanation vs hearing only the optimistic case. Does it make you second guess the company prospects?