philipDS

Very impressive! Annual Run Rate is different from ARR though. Annual Run Rate is probably just taking one (or a few) months, and extrapolate that to a year.

Still great progress for having raised to little though.

IMHO if your product and company works, you're in it for a long time. That means your co-founder should keep their motivation long-term as well.

If your first sale happens within the next few months, I would keep a 50/50 split just because they will put in a lot of effort in the future. Alternatively, you could start your vesting now and and the other founder could start vesting as soon as he joins full-time. Not sure if this is legally possible.

Another option would be to count the difference in time you spent on it and translate that into equity and ask your co-founder to give you that (like 45% vs 55% equity split). I wouldn't go more than 5%, since I prefer to keep things even. Again, you've got a long road ahead of you, so make sure both of you feel comfortable with the split and with future obligations as well.

Github has been down (or very slow) a lot the last few months. They used to have a good engineering reputation (at least with me), but it's been tough times over there.

We use our own tool internally (https://www.intuo.io/). It works pretty well I'd say. What we do is basically:

* Continuously give each other 360 feedback

* Each manager does a monthly one-on-one with all of their teammembers

* We have quarterly objectives, on a personal, team and company level (using OKRs)

* Apart from that, we do continuous pulse surveys, measuring the happiness and engagement of our people

I have been at meetups all around the world (Belgium, Madrid, SF, Barcelona, London)... and HN London is easily one of the highest quality ones I've been to. If you're in/around London and wanna meet some interesting people (e.g. I've seen pc there once), make sure you go there.

I've been living in Barcelona on/off since 2013. I don't have a problem with the tourists. I do have a problem with drunk tourists who pee and shout in the streets at night. Very disrespectful.

I completely understand the protests.. Tourists are a real pain in Barcelona, especially in El Born/Raval/around La Rambla.

Why is Travis so bad? Ever tried CircleCI?

And a horrible climate in winter. If you're used to California weather, I wouldn't move to Sweden. It's like -20 in winter (celcius), plus it gets dark around 4 if you're lucky.

Move to Spain. Probably the best place on earth life/quality wise. Easy to find a tech job (in e.g. Barcelona). Pay is lower of course.

"And of course, there’s also the question of how Yik Yak will make money — as Crook joked, “don’t worry about the money” is something they say in Silicon Valley, but in New York they say “worry about the money” — a nod to the conference’s New York location.

But that $70+ million in outside funding allows Yik Yak’s co-founders to delay thinking about monetization for some time. Local ads are in the back of their minds, said Buffington, but they are not even looking to test that yet. Instead, the company has the freedom to focus on the user experience and growth, which is what they plan to do."

Cool! If you're willing to share, what is the most popular site people download videos for? I was thinking NSFW sites as well, but you said they only account for 0.65%.

What do you mean income from some casinos? Are casinos downloading videos, or what does that traffic source look like?

Another alternative to Leanpub is Softcover (https://www.softcover.io/)

the total valuation of the YC portfolio is way higher. Dropbox alone raised money at at $10 billion valuation back in January of this year. Then you have some others like AirBnB, Stripe, Teespring etc.. They might be close to $20 billion now.

Having said that, it would indeed be very hard to measure the return because of aforementioned reasons.

Great story! I was in Madrid in 2011/2012 and met the founders at one of the Betabeers events. Very driven and resourceful guys.. one of the very few founders I personally was impressed with in Madrid.

Congrats!

No, this can only be used on the YC app.

I don't know. I just keep them for my own and thought I'd share them cause they might be helpful to other people. Maybe you can add some Markdown to them and keep them in that format.

Some notes I made. Might include minor errors or misinterpretation on my side.

-> how do you identify markets that are growing quickly?

  trust your instincts

  students: watch what you're doing or your friends are doing

  it's real life. you just have to get through it. canonical advice: go on a vacation. almost never works for a founder. you just keep going. you rely on people. you need a support network. address the challenges and things that are going wrong.

A. Co-Founders

-> Co-Founder relationships are among the most important in a company. #1 cause for early death: co-founder blowups.

-> Choosing a co-founder is a very important decision

-> Do not choose a random co-founder or someone who you're not friends with.

-> YC batch where 9 startups choose a random co-founder and all 9 fell apart

-> A good way to meet a co-founder is in college. Next best thing is to work at an interesting company (e.g. Facebook/Google)

-> It's better to have no co-founder than having a bad co-founder

-> Top 20 most valuable YC companies: all have at least 2 co-founders

-> "Be relentlessly resourceful" - look for this in potential co-founders. You need someone that behaves like James Bond. Smart, tough and calm

-> You really want a technical co-founder

-> Software companies should be started by software people. Not great non-technical managers.

-> 2 or 3 co-founders is ideal

B. Try not to hire

-> Try not to hire. It sucks to have a lot of employees (high burn-rate, complexity, tension, slow decision making, ...)

-> Be proud of what you can do what a small number of employees

-> In the early days, only hire when you desperately need to

C. Get the best people

-> AirBnB spent 5 months hiring before they hired a person. Brian Chesky: "Would you take the job if you had a medical diagnosis that says you only have a year left to live?" - culture of extremely dedicated people

-> Make sure everyone believes in your mission

-> Pick a company that's already working, but that not everyone has noticed yet. Breakout trajectory.

-> Spend about 25% of your time hiring, once in hiring mode

-> "Mediocre engineers do not build great companies". A few bad hires can kill your startup

-> Get person referrals to hire

-> Look outside of the valley

-> For most of the early hires, experience does not matter that much. Go for aptitude

-> Are they smart, do they get things done, do I wanna spend a lot of time around them?

-> Try to work together on a project, instead of doing a formal interview

-> Care about projects and focus on references

-> Look for good communication skills, manic determination, animal test and someone you'd feel comfortable reporting to if the roles were reversed (Mark Zuckerberg)

D. Keep the best people around

-> Aim to give 10% of the company to the first 10 employees. Vested over 4 years. If they're successful, they'll increase the company by way more than that

-> Fight with investors to reduce the amount of equity given. Be generous with employees

-> Don't tell your employees they're fucking up every day, cause they will leave.

-> Give your team all the credit for all the good stuff. Take responsibility for the bad stuff that happens.

-> Daniel Pink: "Autonomy, mastery and purpose"

E. Fire Fast

-> Fire fast. Everyone hopes that an employee will turn around.

-> How do you balance firing people fast and making employees feel secure? Everyone will screw up once, twice or more. You should be very loving, not take it out on them. If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act. It'll be painfully aware to everyone.

-> When should co-founders decide on equity split? Not a discussion that gets easier with time. Set this very soon after you start working together.

-> How do you know if someone is not going to scale up to a role if they're inexperienced? Smart people almost always will find a role within the company.

-> What happens when the relationship with your co-founder falls apart? Every co-founder (including yourself) has to have vesting. You pre-negotiate what happens when someone leaves. Normal is 4 years. Try to prevent dead weight.

-> What about co-founders not working in the same location? Don't do it. Skeptical about remote teams in general. Communication and speed outweigh everything else. Video-conferencing and calls don't work that well.

4. Execution

-> Being a founder means signing up for this years long grind on (good) execution. Everyone gets modeled after the founders. Work hard, be frugal, focus on customers, etc.

-> Only executing well is what adds/creates value

-> 5 jobs for a CEO: Set the vision, Raise money, Evangelize, Hire and manage, Make sure the entire company executes

-> 1. "Can you figure out what to do?" 2. "Can you get it done?"

-> Focus. One of the hard things about being a founder: 100 important things to do every day. A lot of things that look important do not matter. Identify the two or three most important things and do these. Say no a lot (97 out of 100 times).

-> Set overarching goals for the company. Everyone in the company should know these. These are the key goals. Repeat them. Put them up on the walls. Talk about them in meetings.

-> Communicate. You can't be focused without great communication.

-> Meet every week. Focus on growth and momentum. Have to right metrics. Don't let the company get distracted by other things. You can easily get excited by your own PR.

-> Be in the same space with your co-founder.

-> The secret to startup success is extreme focus and extreme dedication. Not the best choice for work/life balance. Outwork your competitors

-> Have a high execution speed. But be obsessed with quality at the same time. Focus on quality for everything you do (e.g. buying computers/gear).

-> Be biased towards action. "I could do this great thing". Every time you talk to the best founders, they have done something new.

-> Do huge things in small incremental pieces. There's almost always a way to break complexity down into smaller projects.

-> Be quick, do whatever it takes, show up a lot, don't give up and be courageous.

-> "When I was running my own company, we felt we were about to lose a deal. Critical deal for first customer in the space. We called them saying we had a better project/deal. We drove to the airport and showed up in person. We got to their office at 6am. They told us to go away. Junior guy wanted to meet. Then senior guy wanted to meet. Within a week, we had an agreement."

-> Always keep momentum in growth. It's the lifeblood of startups. You want your company to be winning all the time. A winning team feels good and keeps winning.

-> If you lose momentum, most founders try to get it back in the wrong way (rally troops with speeches). You have to save the vision speeches for when you're winning. Sales fixes everything in a startup. Figure out where you can get small wins.

-> Fights will break out when losing momentum.

-> When Facebook's growth slowed down: Mark created a growth group. Small fixes got the curb pack up. Most prestigious group. One of Facebook's best innovations that turned around the dynamic.

-> Ship product, launch new features, review metrics and milestones

-> Do not care about competitor noise in the press. Don't worry about them at all until they're beating you with a real shipped product.

I've felt the same way for a long time... and the only way to get over it is to practice. Buy a whiteboard and practice at home. Buy some books (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Edition-Thomas... and/or http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming-...). You can also subscribe to http://codingforinterviews.com/.

Not exactly an answer to your question, I know. Most startups I know in SF/Bay Area at least do a technical test (either coding or just regular questions) on the spot. It is stressful, but as anything, you can learn how to do it.

Yup, I think you're right. Thanks.

Feel free to share this! Also feel free to mention my handle/name/website :)

I made some notes while watching/listening. Might include minor errors or misinterpretation on my side

4 critical parts: Idea, Team, Product, Execution

1. Idea

-> Good startups take about 10 years

-> Startup should feel like an important mission

-> Hardest part coming up with great ideas: best look terriblea t the beginning (e.g. search engine, social networks limited to college students without money, a way to stay at stranger's couches)

-> "Today only a small subset of users want to use my product, but I'm going to get all of them"

-> You need to believe and willing to ignore naysayers

-> Most people will think your idea is bad: be happy. they won't compete. it's not dangerous to tell people your idea.

-> it's okay if it doesn't sound big at first. first version should take over a small specific market and expand from there. unpopular but right

-> take the time to think about how the market will evolve. market size in ~10 years. think about growth rate of the market instead of its current size. small, but rapidly growing market! people are desperate for a solution

-> you cannot create a market that does not exist

-> there are many great ideas, pick and find one you really care about.. "SW is eating the world"

-> "Why Now?" - dixit Sequoia - have a great answer to this question

-> Build something that you yourself need. You'll understand it a lot better.

-> Get close to your customers. Work in their office or talk to them multiple times a day

-> If it takes more than a sentence to you know what you're doing, it likely is too complicated

-> "Do more when you're a student." Think about new ideas and meet potential co-founders

-> Think about the market first and you'll have a big leg up

2. Product

-> Great Idea > Great Product > Great Company

-> Until you build a great product, almost nothing else matters

-> Sit in front of the computer working on product, or talk to your customers

-> Biz Dev, Raising Money, Raising Press, Hiring are significantly easier when you have a great product

-> Step 1: build something that users love

-> YC is all about: Exercise, Eat, Sleep, Work on Product and Talk to Customers

-> "It's better to build something that a small number of users love, than a large number of users like"

-> Get growth by word of mouth. This works for consumer as well as enterprise products. You'll see organic growth. If you don't have some early organic growth, then your product isn't good enough. It's the secret sauce to growth hacking.

-> Breakout companies always have a product that's so good that grows on word of mouth

-> Great products win. Make something users love.

-> Keep it simple. Look at first versions of Google, Facebook, iPhone

-> Founders care about small details. They're fanatical

-> One thing that correlates with success is hooking up PagerDuty to their ticketing system. Response time within an hour.

-> Go recruit your first users by hand to get feedback every day.

-> When everyone tought Pinterest was a joke, Ben Silbermann walked around coffee shops in Palo Alto to convince people to use Pinterest. He set Pinterest to the home page in the Palo Alto public library so people would discover the website. Do things that don't scale. Read Paul Graham's essay.

-> Create a tight feedback loop. What do users like? What do they pay for? What would make them recommend it?

-> Try to keep your feedback loop going for all of your companies' life

-> Do sales and customer support yourself in the early days. This is critical. Do not hire these people right away.

-> Keep track of metrics. Look at active users, activity levels, cohort retention, revenue, etc. Be brutally honest if they don't go in the right direction

-> If you don't get your product right, nothing else in this class will matter.

Why start a startup?

-> "It's glamorous", "You'll be the boss", "Flexibility", ...

-> Entrepreneurship gets romanticized

-> The reality is not so glamorous. It is a lot of hard work. You're sitting at your desk, focused, figuring out hard engineering projects. It is quite stressful.

-> Founder depression is a real thing. If you start a company, it's gonna be extremely hard

-> You have loads of responsilibity

-> You're responsible for the opportunity cost of the people who decide to follow and help you out

-> You're more committed. A founder cannot leave a company. For 10 years if it's going well. Probably for 5 years if it's not going well.

-> "Number one role of a CEO is managing your own psychology"

-> You're always on call, you're a role model. You'll always be working anyway

-> If you joined Dropbox or Facebook early on, your financial reward might be a lot better than when starting a startup

-> If you join a later stage startup, you have more impact - massive userbase, existing infrastructure, work with an established team. E.g. Brett Taylor was employee #1500 at Google and he invented Google Maps. He got a big financial reward for this.

-> What's the best reason? You can't NOT do it. You have to make it happen

-> Do it out of passion

-> The world needs it (if not, go do something else) and/or the world needs you (you're well-suited to do it). The world needs you somewhere, find where.

SEEKING WORK - Remote or on-site (full-time or part-time), based in SF and Belgium.

I'm available for full-stack software development projects in Rails, ElasticSearch, iOS and JavaScript (Angular, jQuery). Experience with Linux devops, Java and Android, but prefer projects focusing on the former.

I can help if you need a web application, a REST API over an existing application or database, a mobile app, upgrades and migrations from rails 3x to rails 4x, and/or leading a small team (have experience leading teams of 4-5 developers).

  - Author of Upgrade to Rails 4: https://leanpub.com/upgradetorails4

  - Speak at conferences (latest was http://www.apistrategyconference.com/2014Amsterdam/schedule.php)

  - Ruby on Rails developer with 4 years of experience

  - Experience scaling websites to tens of thousands of users

  - Co-founded 2 companies (one of which was awarded most promising startup in Europe by Seedcamp)

  - Blog at http://rubysnippets.com/

  - Also have a trusted UI/UX guy who I work a lot with (pretty much full-time the last 8 months)

Thanks! Gonna have a look at it now - seems like an interesting authentication scheme :)

Very interesting. I always thought of Ripple as semi-scam, but I can see Stellar become a thing (be huge, actually), backed by Stripe and hopefully others soon enough.

Question.. how is the password used to decrypt the secret key? Which encryption algorithm is used? Can anyone technically explain?

I would rather pay for this if you give me some more context on the journalist and the niches/types of startups they usually write about. $9 for just an email is pretty weak if I already have their name and company. :)

Fried air or not. It's being used by a lot of people on Reddit now to give and receive tips. Every day new merchants start accepting Dogecoin. It's excellent to accept micropayments!

Ghost is one of these things that you didn't know you needed until you have used it. I also have an Octopress blog running, which is great, but with the addition of static pages, I'll be switching to Ghost.

I can also see Ghost becoming a decent competitor for Wordpress. For the purpose of blogging that is, because I remember reading somewhere Ghost didn't have any intentions competing with Wordpress.

Yup. Some are pretty good and also have a presence in the Bay Area.

Teambox - http://www.teambox.com/company/jobs/ 3scale - http://3scale.net/jobs/ Tyba - http://tyba.com/jobs/

More random jobs: http://www.jobfluent.com/

Yup - I wrote a similar book (Google is your friend if you want to find it - don't wanna steal publicity here). I haven't sold that many but the process of writing it and giving support has been really cool. I learned a ton in just writing the book and currently I'm working on my next one (on AngularJS + Rails). Funnily enough, I've also been thinking about giving away Upgrade to Rails 4 for free through Leanpub. Might do that sooner or later.

AngularJS, Redis, Rails, ElasticSearch :)