tjpd

Agree on getting tax advice. But because QSBS is such a gift to VCs I really don’t want to jeopardize it particularly when a bunch of startups are raising $20m on $0 revenue, so the balance sheet is basically just cash. At ~5% that’s $1M/yr of interest, which can easily be the only income the company has. If that cash is sitting in an investment portfolio instead of boring cash equivalents, it feels like you could start getting into weird territory with the 80% active business asset test. The probability is Low but the impact for us is massive.

Isn't the issue of products like this that they present PHC risk, jeopardize QSBS - particularly at the earliest stages where revenue is de minimis?

Surely this is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of German’s agglutinative nature and come up with your own?

Handyschwelle?

Or more formally: Mobiltelefonbremsschwelle?

Glass hearted is a Chinese insult meaning you are weak minded and/or easily offended.

Pinkie is a term used to describe young pro-China online posters.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Pink

Respectfully, I have to disagree. I have a similar setup to the one in the article (Sony A6400 + Simga 30mm f1.4) and the difference in image quality is dramatic _even over Zoom_. It is such an improvement that, in my experience, almost every first meeting that I have with someone over Zoom the other participant will remark on how good my picture is. The perception of "quality" has little to do with resolution issues or compression artifacts and far more to do with good framing/focal length, focus depth and bokeh all of which a good camera setup has in spades and all of which webcams lack.

The article states another benefit of the motor is that it doesn’t require rare earth elements, so presumably they’re trying to solve the ecological and supply problems presented by rare earth mining.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China

As an SF resident for at least as long as the author I can sympathize with a lot of the sentiment but I'm skeptical about the some kind of renaissance when the city's budget is deteriorating badly.

Rather, when you add it all up: the loss of many of the things that made SF fun; increasingly distributed labour, capital & opportunities for start-ups/VC; SF's seemingly unsolvable problems (cost of living, homelessness, spotty public education, irregular transit, weather...) - just what is the bull case for SF anymore?

I honestly wish I had a good answer.

The floor of the wealth tax doesn't really refute the central argument, because it just means that it impacts anyone who owns a business worth over $50 million. This is a LOT of businesses in the US!

We can actually look at the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances and get a reasonable number here. Household's with >$50m are top 0.07% percentile and there are approximately 84k of them out of around 130 million households....

[1] https://cdn.dqydj.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/millionaire...

I'm not a fan of this proposal but I think this line of argument is pretty flimsy and pretty specious.

In the Bay Area you're already subject to a form of wealth tax called property tax. And it's substantial. If you live in San Francisco you'll get charged 1.1801% every year [1] on the value of your wealth (property). If I bought a house in SF and live for another 60 years I would be taxed 60 times on that same asset. Does that mean the government will over the course of my life take 33.6% of my house?

It's not as if property tax has kept a damper on Bay Area house price inflation.

[1] https://sftreasurer.org/property/understanding-property-tax

I can also recommend MagicSandbox (https://www.msb.com/) which provides a lot of learning content alongside a real k8s remote environment.

Isn’t this the developer’s or Go’s security issue first before it’s a GH facepalm? GH doesn’t make any representations about the provenance or the safety of the code on their site. It is the user and toolchain that’s making those potentially dangerous assumption, no? Doesn’t blocking id reuse open them up to a kind of ID squatting and DOS?

"While we were completing legal documentation related to Dave McClure's resignation from 500, funding for certain companies was delayed. Since then, we have resumed fundraising, as well as funding our investment commitments. We have been regularly communicating with our companies regarding the status of their investment and expect to complete all outstanding investments in December."

Here's my outsider's guess: Dave was almost certainly a Key Person in 500's Limited Partnership Agreement. When a Key Person leaves, for whatever reason, that triggers a Suspension Event and the start of the Suspension Period. During the suspension period, the LPs are not required to contribute capital except for certain things (e.g. management fees, follow-ons). The LP's (some threshold or some combination of them like the LP advisory committee) then have 60-90 days to vote whether or not to continue with the fund.

500 would already have called down some capital so that meant they could make a few investments but otherwise, during the suspension period they likely couldn't make any new ones. Since then they got their LPs on board with the idea of continuing without Dave and now can fulfill all their obligations. That would make sense to me because 500 as an institution is much more than just one man.

Disney has a very, very large catalogue of content but is particularly strong on kid's content. It will be very high up on the list for the average household, and a lot of consumers

> The company has about 230 employees, up from around 140 at the beginning of the year. Huffman would like to end 2017 with around 300 full-time staff.

That sounds odd too me as well, maybe I am not versed in startup culture. Having a goal of going from 230 to 300 people seems like a pointless metric (and wasteful). It's like saying "I want to write 1000 lines of code today".

I understand this criticism but I think the intent behind their statement is different from the intent you're reading into it.

It sounds like you think they're using it as some kind of empire building management metric (I might be wrong). ie. 300 people and well be a great company! As you say that'd be pretty stupid and so I doubt that. Here's my guess: the headcount number is by product of a broader growth plan. ie. We need to get to X revenues, or scale to X users, or build Y products in Z months which means we need to hire X engineers, Y marketers, Z salespeople in a certain time frame.. add all that up and that means we need 300 people by the end of 2017.

The reason it gets boiled down to 300 is two-fold: 1) It's just hard to get a journalist to be interested in that kind of considered detail & much easier for journalists to remember that one number 2) It's actually still a good signal in an ultra-competitive hiring market. ("you bet we're hiring!, we have lot's of jobs openings! didn't you here we're looking for 100's of people, come and help build that site that you already spend half day on")

300 as a management metric = no sense; 300 as by product of growth plan, headline grabbing takeaway, beacon to potential talent = better.

There are plenty of examples of individual companies (or groups of companies) getting too much monopolistic (or oligopolistic) power and doing just that or similar. You could look at at the Phoebus Cartel of lightbulb manufactures [1], the Bell System monopoly [2], or in transportation the GM Streetcar conspiracy [3].

Due to Uber's network effects you could say they'd have even greater power to change prices dramatically. Let's say Uber became the dominant transportation network in a particular geography and then trebled prices. Any new competitor has to both lure riders and drivers from Uber. Riders, sure they can be lured by cheaper travel but drivers want to earn the most money. Uber could simply double how much they paid drivers. All the existing drivers (and any new drivers) would rather work for Uber and get paid more. In fact they would have a vested interest in seeing the competitor fail.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#Nationwide_monopol...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

No it's not, it's really not. In fact I think in a niche market then it's often even more true.

If you're building in a niche then (almost by definition) you're not going to need a lot of infrastructure. There won't be millions of customers and they (usually) won't need tons of infrastructure.

I think the only case is where you're building a business like Pinboard :) Where the CLTV is relatively low but the the bandwidth, storage & compute is relatively high.

Regardless of the market you're in though, if you want to build an independent livelihood or a lifestyle business typically infrastructure costs still shouldn't be a factor.

A good livelihood might be $50k/yr say or $4k/mo roughly. The difference between $5/mo and $500/mo in hosting costs isn't what determines success or failure. It's whether or not you've built, marketed and sold an app to 5 or 500 customers.

I disagree with this wholeheartedly and just posted why above but wanted to reiterate it here. This might just have been a throw-away comment but "bloat", lock-in & cost are red-herrings.

"Bloat" here is a virtue. Heroku removes two levels of drudgery and administration between you and the hardware. Who wants to be racking hardware? Who wants to be patching the OS? Who wants to be dealing with package vulnerabilities? None of this helps actually build the business

Lock-in is minimal, particularly if it's a self contained app and you're not using a lot of services. There are countless examples of companies who've moved off of Heroku when they've gotten big. Plus there's also lock-in using EC2, S3, AWS. There's lock-in of some level regardless where you run your stuff.

Future cost is also really, very very low because P(success) is, sadly, super low.

Reading a lot of these comments make me think that everyone on HN is a cynic of the Oscar Wilde/Lady Windermere variety: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing" [1].

IMHO you should go with Heroku and ignore anyone who's suggesting dedicated servers, VPSes, AWS, Docker or containers. Every moment you spend maintaining a server or doing devops is wasted because it's time not spent building or marketing your _app_.

New startups' biggest expense is founders' time. It seems a lot of people, even on HN, don't realise it because it's a hidden cost. But if you think that a decent developer is worth at least $50/hr and it might take you an 1hr to set up and 1hr/yr to manage a server (e.g. apply patches, update security) then you're better off not spending those 2hrs and paying an extra $100 hosting your app.

Worrying about the future infrastructure cost is also wrong-headed. It's a kind of premature optimisation. To get the real, expected future cost, the projected infrastructure cost has to be multiplied by the probability that you'll actually get big, which for start-ups, is very low.

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/790/790-h/790-h.htm

One of the interesting things from the slide shown in the article is that they're extracting the azimuth and elevation of roof based satellite dishes from aerial imagery presumably to cross correlate with the satellite orbits and whatever comms they're eavesdropping on.

Wow, those are some pretty outrageous allegations if true:

  > Defendant Shervin Pishevar, who was generally uninvolved in 
  > day-to-day matters, began dating the company’s PR vendor, and
  > increased her salary from $15,000 to $40,000 a month ...

  > When their subsequent wedding engagement fell through, he 
  > finally heeded suggestions that her work was worth little, 
  > and terminated the arrangement.

  > Similarly, Defendant Joseph Lonsdale insisted that the 
  > company hire his little brother’s two-person outfit, with
  > no notable experience with companies building hardware and
  > engaged in infrastructure development, and few independent
  > contacts with international and top-tier investor funds, 
  > as the company’s exclusive  investment bank

  > Meanwhile, Shervin installed his brother, a personal injury
  > and criminal defense attorney with his own small firm in
  > Rockville, Maryland, as Hyperloop One’s General Counsel,
  > granting him salary and stock options far greater than even
  > the most talented engineers received.

  > Later that night, Afshin Pishevar, the lawyer and Shervin’s
  > brother as mentioned in the letter, was seen placing a noose
  > on BamBrogan’s chair on the security camera.

This is really wrong thinking and a good example of misunderstanding unit economics. You're calculating the unit economics of a delivery assuming there's only one "unit". You have to look at the aggregate. That driver isn't just delivering to you. Not every customer is ordering 1x week.

This is probably wrong. IMHO what looks like has happened is there are a handful of HN-relevant companies had weak earning announcements yesterday[1] after market close, and that is coupled with a weaker US jobs report [2], [3] today. The overall market is off and there are a handful of major drops for the companies mentioned but this is not some public tech market panic event (yet).

That's not to say we're not due a correction.

[1] http://biz.yahoo.com/research/earncal/20160204.html

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/business/economy/jobs-repo...

[3] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets-idUSKCN0VE0...

"Tableau Software tumbled 36% after management warned it was unlikely to realize benefits of certain tax assets. The news sent shares spiralling despite the software company's better-than-expected quarter. The company earned 33 cents a share, more than double estimates."

Also their growth is down.

Likewise, Lenny & Scott Raney @ Redpoint have been making a ton of investments in this space. Looking forward to seeing more.

It's always hard to convey tone of voice well online. Sorry.

"And if I can't pay myself and several more founders? Would that make it a "Yes, topic" ?"

No, it's still a non-topic. If you can't pay your founders minimum wage you still have the same two choices: do a start-up or don't do a start-up. If you chose to do a start-up, know that you are taking on the additional risk that you might be breaking minimum wage laws and/or one of your founders can take you to court over it.

"What sense does it make for all Founders depositing...?"

The sense of it, is that it removes the risk of you breaking minimum wage law. That's ignoring all the positive social good of all those things. As NeutronBoy mentions you're literally describing how business works.

"that prevents almost all tech startups to legally exist"

No, it doesn't. I think your confusions stems from misunderstanding how law works & how law is enforced. Law is not proactive & the law is not binary. Minimum wage law cannot prevent "a start-up to legally exist". As Kirsty & Carolynn point out several times in that video your startup is a separate legal entity, one that exists from the point of incorporation. Assuming you've incorporated your start-up exists. Minimum wage law can't make it un-exist. A law or statute can't prevent it from existing. The clearest evidence for this is that thousands of start-ups do exist & that >0 them probably haven't paid minimum wage.

You really need professional employment counsel to respond to this properly & IANAL but here goes...

"Not paying Founders is illegal, is it?" Most likely, yes.

"Which exact part of any law demands paying active Founders?" There is no "exact part of a law" that demands it. You don't just look it up. That's not how the law works. There is a whole host of federal and state minimum wage legislation as well as precedent case law that would come into play. You cannot point to an "exact part" that requires "active Founders" (a term that the law doesn't recognise) to be paid minimum wage. Dig through [1], [2] and do a precedent search on LexisNexis or Findlaw if you're really interested.

Look, paying minimum wage is a legal requirement in the US. There is a small set of exemptions that allow companies to pay below minimum wage. The executive exemption [3] is one such exemption. These exemptions usually come with tests that you have to satisfy in order to qualify for the exemption. For example, according to the DOL [3] there are 4 tests, ALL of which must be satisfied to qualify for the executive exemption:

1) salary based comp > $455/week 2) primary duty is management 3) directing work of >2 FTEs 4) hiring/firing authority

An "active founder" in your situation who is not responsible >2 FTE would fail this test & therefore fail this exemption. There are probably other exemptions you could look to use instead. Your founders might or might not qualify for those as well, depending on your exact situation. Not paying her/him might or might not therefore be illegal.

The main problem is that you're completely missing the point.

Firstly Carolynn's advice is largely talking to startups that are YC-funded (& beyond). Secondly her advice is a reflection of the consequences & the risks involved, not some legal sub-clause. Do you want to risk falling foul of state & federal minimum wage law? Do you want to fall foul of payroll taxes? The answer is no. You do not. In the event you and your founder fall out (as Carolynn goes on to discuss) your life will be so much worse. Delinquent employers, minimum wage abusers do not fare well in a judge & jury court let alone the court of public opinion.

This is a complete non-topic. You are focused on a technicality & some overblown/imagined idealogical conflict, when instead you should just take Carolynn's very good advice and pay yourselves minimum wage if you can.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Stat... [2]: http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/flsa1938.htm [3]: http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/fairpay/fs17b_executi...

Again IANAL.

After a very cursory look, isn't the answer to download and use one of Citus' free, open source extensions to the free, open source postgres? (Depending on your use-case either pg-shard or cstore-fdw)

http://citusdata.com/citus-products/pg-shard http://citusdata.com/citus-products/cstore-fdw

This is great - having a fullly fledged, containerized device ready to go is awesome. How do you keep the underlying OS & container mgmt layers up to date?

Would you mind clarifying why? I'm not sure I understand the concern. https://www.acompli.com/security/

19-40% is pretty usurious. Alongside the requirement for operational control over payments makes this a bad idea. For small amounts (under $250k) you're better off even taking a personal unsecured term loan (8-15%) or remortgaging (4-6%). But there are still better business options provided by venture-aware banks and lenders like SVB, CNB, Square 1, WTI etc.