wdaher

It's just been one of those "I just haven't gotten around to it yet" aspirational acquisitions. It seems very interesting and maybe I'll eventually get around to it.

It's more the satisfaction of (a) doing a small nice thing for a stranger on the Internet while also (b) freeing up a little shelf space is also worth the ~$5 it would cost me to mail it to someone.

Assuming we’re talking about the Stripe Press book: if you email me and if you have a US address I’d be glad to mail you my totally unread copy which is mostly just gathering dust for me. (Email in profile.)

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a poem by Goethe, or more famously, a sequence from the Disney movie "Fantasia", which you can see here: https://video.disney.com/watch/sorcerer-s-apprentice-fantasi...

The short summary of it is: the sorcerer's apprentice (Mickey) uses magic to get a broom to fetch water for him, and then the situation gets out of control as the broom continues to get water, and he has no idea how to stop it.

(It's a cautionary tale about the danger of playing with forces you don't really understand/"be careful what you wish for".)

This is 100% about Delaware Franchise Tax and is a rite of passage for all first-time founders. (There is no portal you can log into to view your federal taxes owed.)

Here’s a detailed writeup I prepared a while back about exactly how to resolve this if you want to DIY it. (This is one of the very few filings I actually recommend you DIY.)

https://pilot.com/blog/how-to-file-your-delaware-franchise-t...

Scalability is overrated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34656776 - Feb 2023 (232 comments)

This is the correct parsing of it. (I can't take credit for coming up with the title, but I worked on the project.)

A bit reminiscent of Tallis's "London Street Views": https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015051808932&se...

See my example here for where it ends up biting you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533#44204246

Worth noting: the version of the Big Beautiful Bill passed by the House ends this particular change, starting in tax year 2025. We'll have to see if this provision makes it through the Senate, and in what form.

This is what the Sec 174 change said: it says that you do have to capitalize it.

Here's a toy example that hopefully makes this clear:

In 2024, your business has $1m in revenue and has $2m in expenses. 100% of these expenses are R&D salaries (engineers you hire.)

Your company loses $1m/year. (You brought in $1m and spent $2m.)

Under the old rules, you'd owe no tax because you were unprofitable.

After Sec 174, what the IRS now says is:

You had revenues of $1m. But you only had $400k in expenses (because you now have to spread that $2m in R&D expense over 5 years).

So actually you had a profit of $600k! And you owe tax on that $600k profit (~$120k)

So you now have an additional $120k tax expense, making your business even more cash-flow negative.

.

Amusingly, if you're pre-revenue, none of this matters (you have no income at all, so it doesn't matter what your expenses are.) You get hardest hit by this change when you have some revenue and when you do a fair bit of R&D.

You should go with Pilot. We literally do this for 2,500+ startups and are the largest startup-focused accounting firm in the US, by far.

(I am one of its founders, though that doesn’t make the above inaccurate.)

Email me? (Email in profile.)

We will do this for folks (moving from Bench to QBO) for free: https://pilot.com/bench-qbo-migration

(It's a nontrivial problem but there's at least a reasonable check—"Did the balance sheet, P&L, and cashflow statement generated by both systems match")

Honestly, love to hear this :)

For Bench customers that want to look elsewhere, Pilot is doing free migrations from Bench to QBO, even if you don't want to use Pilot. (So you can even take advantage of it if you want to instead DIY or work with some local firm.)

https://pilot.com/bench-qbo-migration

(Disclaimer is that I'm one of Pilot's founders.)

We do, yes.

It's a fairly capital-intensive business.

Here's my best articulation of specifically what makes it hard: https://waseem.substack.com/p/tech-enabled-services

Price should be comparable to a high-quality local provider, but if that's not what you're seeing, I'd love to know that.

We have a number of folks who have switched from Bench, and as you can imagine there's enough volume here that it's worth building some bespoke stuff for this.

And yes, we can do 2024 catch-up work.

(waseem@pilot.com if folks have any specific questions)

If you’re a tech startup and previously used Bench, I’d strongly encourage you to check out Pilot.com - we work with literally thousands of startups. (Disclaimer: I’m one of the founders.)

A short story that explores some of these questions is "Where Am I" by Daniel Dennett, linked-to here: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/daniel-dennett-where-am-i...

Yes, exactly. I'm most motivated by the first $6,600 that go directly to the Harris campaign, and subsequently by the donations that go directly to battleground states -- but the hope here is that the matching proves successful at getting other folks to donate, which ends up being higher-leverage for everyone.

The Harris Victory Fund (the linked-to thing) is where I'm planning on making my contribution. (I'd do this as "up to $500k from each of me and my wife.")

I spent a ton of time on this for several thousand old photos and ultimately opted to use ScanCafe. It's not perfect, but if you have a little $, you're more likely to actually get the task done if you just ship them off.

Is your accountant actually doing a good job with your books? It’s kinda impossible to know.

But LLM context windows are now large enough that you can feed your entire balance sheet and P&L into the LLM and ask it to point out things that might be errors (or that could be optimized). With the right prompting, it produces results that are… surprisingly good.

So I hacked together a little tool around it, combining some LLM checks with some deterministic checks of a few things that are usually signs of a problem in QuickBooks. I’m pretty happy with it.

My main critique so far is that some of the LLM output feels a little bit like a horoscope: specific enough to feel tailored, but vague enough to be true for anyone. In my testing, it always seems to want you to be more profitable (which, in its defense, is probably a nearly-universally-true statement about businesses.)

On the backend it’s Python and Flask, and it uses a mix of Claude (Anthropic) and OpenAI for different parts of the prompt.

I’ve always been shocked at how manual the job of doing the books is, and I’m very bullish on stuff like this to both (a) improve quality, and (b) actually make the job more enjoyable.

I incidentally happen to be a founder of an accounting firm, but this was a nights-and-weekends hackathon-style project made by me and a person on our marketing team--don’t tell the engineers :)

Trying this out (perhaps obviously) requires a QuickBooks Online account. If you don’t have one, you can watch a short screen recording of it working here: https://youtu.be/Xvqnzr82XVc

Very interested in your feedback. I'll be checking this all day to answer any questions.

"Bonjour, comment êtes-vous?"

The idiomatic translation here would be "Bonjour, comment allez-vous?"

(Post author here.)

In addition to having deep integrations with these tools, we actually do have real partnerships with almost all of them.

"What's a real partnership?" is a great question, but I'd mostly think of it principally as "We know them, they know us, we have a red phone we can pick up to get things solved for each other" (which is good for the customer), and then also "And we occasionally do some comarketing together."

It’s 100% about wanting to work with a great team on a big problem. It’s not that the domain doesn’t matter, it’s that it just matters less than you think (for me, anyway.)

Not to shill my own stuff too much here, but I wrote a bit about this here: https://waseem.substack.com/p/will-your-startup-make-you-hap...

:) My point was intended to be: look, it’s going to be hard work, and I suspect there is not really a way around that.

You're right that that is distinct from “hours worked”, and sure, maybe 35 is the magic number for someone.

0 hours is too few hours, and 70 is too many— so clearly there is a line there somewhere. I suspect that that line varies from person to person and even week to week, hence the point about “either be working or don’t be working”.

I've been on the receiving end of one three times now, but have never "hosted" one myself. As an angel, I'd probably always prefer to invest directly, but if my alternative were "RUV or you can't invest," I wouldn't object to the RUV.

The process itself is slightly easier because I don't have to tediously type in wire instructions into my bank's website :)

The creator of the RUV can decide whether the company pays the fees or whether the investors pay the fees. The ones I've done so far have been "company pays the fee," in part I think to help avoid the perception that you're getting a worse deal via the RUV.

This is definitely anecdata, but sometimes they will. In particular, I've definitely been asked to reduce my own allocation to let someone else in.