petesalty

I've never really understood the desire to "save" on lawyer costs up front. Lawyer money is the cheapest money you'll ever spend, if you use it right. Having a lawyer set up your company correctly from the start is not expensive. Where it does get expensive is when you try to get investment, or bought or some other event and they have to spend months unraveling the gigantic mess you've made by doing all the legal yourself based on some blog posts you read.

To save on costs, don’t go to a big firm, they are expensive. Ask around and find a solid boutique firm that specialises in your area. They will often do some kind of deferment if you are really small, although there’s usually a retainer.

Get it done right, the first time, and you won’t have to spend money on it again. This applies to anything legal; incorporation, contracts, employment agreements, licences, etc.

Honestly, as a collector with 16 years of collecting under my belt, I can tell you this does not happen very often. I do have a few things that I paid hundreds for that are now worth thousands, but I also have works that I paid hundreds (and sometimes thousands) for that are worth nothing (although I really treasure them).

If you happen to catch an artist at the beginning of their careers, and are willing to take a chance on them, then this might happen but more often than not it won't.

Also, as a collector you actually want artists to be successful so you want them to be growing and continuing to get more recognition and keep producing work. In order for them to do that you want them to get better and better value from their work.

The artists mentioned here might not have done so well in that auction but they certainly went on to very lucrative careers.

Well, kind of, except that's not really right. A Gallery usually represents an artist in a specific area. For example, in the US it might be that a gallery represents an artist in San Francisco, while another gallery does so in Los Angeles, another in New York, etc. Generally anywhere with a big enough market is going to have separate representation. That means that a mid career, or later, artist could have many galleries representing them. Generally they will be doing way more than one show per 18 months, generally around 3 to 4 per year in major areas, maybe even more if they have international representation.

Also, $5K to $10K per work is somewhat misleading. I depends a lot on the work, painting tends to be more expensive than photography for example and unique photographic works are generally more expensive than editioned work. A mid career photographic artist doing unique work can expect to start at $10K per work but it certainly goes up from there. A recognized artist with international representation is generally commanding much higher prices.

None of this takes into consideration other work, such as commissions, installations, advertising, books, etc. which can be very lucrative avenues of revenue.

Artists who have good representation in major areas are generally doing much better than $50K per year.

Honestly, if you're doing it in an 1800sqft studio custom built for exactly that process, it's not that hard. I spent a weekend doing it in what was essentially a 50sqft bathroom and it was pretty straight forward, once you get the hang of it. They used to do it in tents in the middle of the desert on giant, heavy plates of glass (16in X 20 in), so this is a piece of cake in comparison.

There are photographic artists doing much more complex work, in much more difficult conditions. Check out the work of Chris McCaw and John Chiara, or the recent daguerreotype work of Binh Danh. Not criticizing anyone, just saying that the way they choose to do things is absolutely crucial to their art, and an essential part of it, not just a process that is currently cool.

Honestly, this seems a tad self-aggrandizing. I've done wet plate before, you can learn it in an afternoon, it's really not that hard. If you can't find someone to teach you there are books like The Keepers of Light that have the formulations and processes all laid out, so learning by yourself isn't that hard either. The tricky part is getting hold of some of the chemistry, but that's not as hard as it used to be either. The issue with wet plate processes is that it's kind of finicky and there's a lot of experimentation that has to happen before you get it down, but getting from 0 to your first one shouldn't take 45 days if you really want to do it. Not hard, it just takes time, and money.

As for there only being 1000 people who practice this, well, that's just not true. I personally know at least 3 photographers in the SF Bay Area who do it, and I know of at least another 6 in the same area (just don't know them personally). It's actually become a quite popular thing to do.

Good for him building a studio and all, and for doing something he really enjoys, but some of these claims are just not right.

Hiring fast is actually really important. It sets a really good tone with candidates and forces you to have a hiring process with good decision points and processes.

At Voxy we had a 1 week turn around goal from receiving a resume to having on offer on the table. Didn't always work out like that because of candidates, and vacations and what not, but that was the goal. The day of last interviews we either said no thanks that night, or got the offer out.

Voxy - Engineers and VP Eng, Manhattan, NY

Voxy is an adaptive learning platform focused on teaching English as a second language. We've just entered a growth phase as our product takes off in Brazil and Mexico.

We have a small tech team that needs to grow rapidly, and whoever we hire next can have a real impact on our engineering culture.

We pair every day, practice real Agile and have a very respect driven, peer based culture. Our team believes in real engineering, not programming.

Stack wise we use Python/Django, Backbone, PostrgesSQL and MongoDB and have native iOS and Adroid apps.

We have 4 senior engineering and a VP Eng position open at the moment. The VP Eng position requires real experience building and running top notch engineering teams and extensive experience with Python/Django.

Engineer : https://boards.greenhouse.io/voxy/jobs/36509#.VRwSyZN4r-Y VP Eng : https://boards.greenhouse.io/voxy/jobs/41245#.VRwS6ZN4r-Y

There's a small pop-up style flash, but you are right, no mounting for an external flash.

As I've gotten older, I'm 41 now, this has become a higher and higher priority for me, because I realize once you slip it's harder to come back. I recently changed jobs and one of the deciding factors was how it would impact my workout schedule - was there a gym close by, was it a good gym, how could I work in sessions with my trainer, etc. Don't get me wrong, it's a great job and I'm super excited about it but it was a factor.

The older you get the easier it is to become overweight, out of shape, etc., so don't lose that energy because when you do it just becomes harder and harder to get it back.

Have to disagree about place of incorporation. Investors may not care but you should. Delaware should always be your choice. Delaware is very company friendly with laws and procedures that generally make it much easier and cheaper to get things done there (document filings are a prime example). Always, always, incorporate in Delaware.

Yeah, IANAL but my guess this is pretty illegal in most states. If it wasn't you'd be seeing a lot more companies doing it.

Interviewing is a two way street, or at least it should be. If the interviewers don't want to be interviewed it's a bad company. To that end here are some points I'd like to add (I'm currently hiring some programmers and would love to have any of them ask me for the following. None have so far):

1. Ask questions about how a manager would handle a situation. If you're not being interviewed by your direct manager (why not?), ask what the company would do. Start off simple, "I want to use a new technology that we don't already support but I believe will make a project easier/quicker/more profitable. What's your response?" and work up to harder things "We're pushing to a rapidly approaching hard release date and someone vital quits. The team is already at breaking point. There's no way we'll deliver. What do you do?"

2. Ask to see the working environment and sit down and talk with other employees of all kinds (programmers, designers, secretaries) without management present. Not for long, just 15 minutes. If they say no, it's a problem.

3. If you're expected to maintain and existing code base, ask for code examples. They often do it of you, it's only fair. Nothing in particular, just something so get an idea of the quality.

Just a few of the things I'd be more than willing to do as a manager.

I was in a start-up in the health insurance industry (we just got acquired by a much larger company). While I agree there are some opportunities, mostly in the areas of information, what most people don't realize is that health insurance is highly regulated and hence a very expensive business to be in. It's not like you can just throw up some web site and start selling insurance. It's much more complicated than that.

Great, super easy to use. Liked it a lot. couple of suggestions:

1. White labeling - Let me get rid of the logo at the top and replace it with my own. Similar on the domain, maybe something like my_company.billmebob.com. Maybe these are things you could charge for.

2. Sign in - let me sign up after the first one and have it remember things like my company name, address, and maybe even companies I've billed before (I'm likely to do it again and don't want to repeat entering that all the time). Possibly something else you could charge for.

3. Recurring invoices - email the same invoice every month/week/etc. automatically. Probably need some kind of user account for that.

Freelancing while trying to run a start up can be extremely tricky, I know, I've done it. I often found myself burnt out from client work (the work I didn't really want to do) which impacted the quality and quantity of the work that I did for the start-up (the work I did really want to do).

I'd say, if you must go down this route, really try to limit the work you do for others, take as little work as possible. Next, try and set times that you work on client projects, and times that you work on the start-up. Stick to the schedule you set up (put the start-up work in your most productive time slots). If you can't manage that, work like a demon on the client project exclusively, bang it out, then get back to the start-up asap.

Wouldn't this also have an impact on ad heavy sites, even if the ads load after the content?

I can easily see a use for this. I'm doing a pro bono project for a small non profit, and part of the project requires generating simple PDF reports. They don't have any money so we need to keep it low cost.

One of the ways of doing this is to host it on a simple shared server (it's not a heavily used app).

Downside of this is that it's unlikely we'll be able to use any of the PDF tools I've used in the past (since they need to be installed). This should work fine for our purposes.

Thanks, I was wondering how I'd get around this.

To all those who were dissing this because they couldn't immediately see a use for it, try to have a more open mind.

Find a generator, some beer, and some snacks and finally try to get through all those video games I don't have time for now. Oh, and get a shotgun just in case the rest of you come back as zombies.

This is a quick fun read ttp://www.worldwithoutus.com/did_you_know.html

I'd throw luck in there too. A little luck goes a long way.

November 18, 2009 isn't exactly what I'd call inactive. Sure it wasn't super recent, but still, it's less than 3 months ago.

My criteria for this is always can I print it on a t-shirt in one color (i.e. black ink on white t-shirt in this case). If it works on t-shirts it works on business cards, stickers, etc. Keeps it simple and keeps promo items cost down in the early days.

So in short B (that's how I voted).

Not to nit-pick but I believe it's "I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space". "Drug store" is a decidedly American phrase.

Yes, but will that segment shell out that much money for it - $630 is a lot for Mom to shell out for something to surf websites on - especially when they already have a computer in the house that surfs the web just fine.

I don't think you'll see real adoption until the price comes down a lot (say $300 or less) and I doubt Apple will do that, although others might.

In the end I suspect that it'll be a pretty niche market for the people who already buy everything Apple.

Now, I could be wrong and I'm sure Apple did at least some homework on it's marketability, but still, seems this way to me.

Actually it's not that hard, I've done it before - once the account was set up (15 minutes) the SMS was integrated and tested in about an hour. He's certainly not opening his own SMS gateway with $500 so he's probably using a service where you get a 5 digit number that customers include in their texts (everyone has seen this I'm sure). The companies that supply this tech usually have a very easily integrated API so hooking it up is no more complex that hooking up to something like Twitter, in fact usually much simpler. Speaking of which I'd just hook it up to Twitter and let them be the gateway, saves a bunch on SMS fees (which cost you incoming - although this might be different in Australia).

Advertising is a pretty easy hook up as well, depending on the service.

Take a look at glunote.com, it's something that I threw together over a rainy weekend (and it certainly looks like it). It's for taking notes using Twitter and is probably at least as complicated as what he's doing. I'm sure there are a lot more examples around.

Is it just me or does a week seem like a long time to do this? I mean obviously it's not really a business just a little web service, but really, any competent programmer could probably have the functionality up and running over a weekend - figure another day to do design, half a day to put together the "business plan" power-point, and another half to register a domain, incorporate and set up bank accounts (really how long does that take? - maybe it's harder in Australia). So what 4 days? Cool, that's 3 left - you could do another launch in that time.

You can try HTMLDOC (http://htmldoc.rubyforge.org/) which is a wrapper around a C library (I believe) that does exactly this. I've used it before, it's pretty fast and stable and you don't have to worry about JVM.

Without a moon there are no tides, so I suspect there would be no tides with the rings since they're evenly distributed. Is this right? Anyone smarter than me care to chime in on this?

Also, wouldn't this have a drastic effect on the weather? Would higher order life even be viable under such an arrangement?

Actually, I kind of do think it's like the $10 IPod scam - yes, the fees are disclosed, on another page, in small print. It's not like it's right there along with the price "Only $50 each way, and, oh yeah, and on top of this, you'll be paying $25 per checked bag". Yes I know we should probably all be aware of it, but it keeps going up.

I wonder how long it'll be before they start charging "boarding pass handling fees", "seat cleaning fees", "oxygen fees", etc.

I've done this before, even if ticket prices are a little higher but there are no fees other than what I pay for initially. I hate getting to the airport and getting nickled and dimed at the check-in counter. There just seems to be something wrong with that.

I'm not a lawyer but I've seen, and paid for, my share of it, and one thing I know is that if you don't want your lawyers charging you don't fire off emails like; "Hey, if you know X off the top of your head, can you left me know about it?". You either need a legal answer, or you don't, otherwise you're wasting the lawyers time and your money. The law is complicated and convoluted and even things that seem simple can actually require lots of research.

If you're a young start-up, don't hire on WSGR, Orrick or their ilk - I know they're a status symbol, but they'll cost dearly (remember: deferred fees are still fees that need to be paid eventually). Most start-ups need some corporate, a little employment and maybe some patent/ip work. There are lots of small firms that specialize in that, especially in the tech hubs. If you need more specialized work, hire in a firm that specializes in that. Smaller firms usually offer better service, at lower prices - you'll pay a lot less and work with experienced partners rather than 1st year associates.

Finally, your lawyer is not an employee, firing them off an "urgent" email at 4pm on Friday means that you probably won't get a response until Monday, and probably won't get an answer until Tuesday. Just because you work on the weekends doesn't mean that they do. Don't leave important legal questions until the last minute and you'll have a much better experience.