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A lot to unpack in your post, but some things worth mentioning:

A. Savings rate is everything. How much can you save and get compounding?

If you're high earning early in your career and can keep your costs of living down, you come out way ahead. This is much easier said than done. Also a big deal in college savings—being able to put away $5k / year in a tax advantageous account for your kid(s) makes a huge difference if you can do it when they're infants. If you're not a high earner until they're in high school, it's a different scenario.

2. Have seen a lot of friends (particularly engineers) go freelance and build up consulting work while in a city like NY or SF—and then once they have stable income they move to a cheaper location.

Kingston, NY in the Hudson Valley is a really interesting example of this. A small but steadily growing community of technical talent that works remote, but knows each other—making 90%+ of what they'd made in a major city and only two short hours to NYC by train or bus to meet clients, etc. And very nice housing stock in the $200-300k range. I would expect to see even more of this as we move into an age of autonomous vehicles, etc.

3. Cities. It's not clear that the party line of cities for the past decade is true. The 2008 crash did a number on younger people's ability to buy homes and finance them. They opted to stay in cities and rent instead. That trend seems to be reversing quite quickly.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-18/growing-m...

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-03/millennia...

There are some funds out there that will help employees exercise their stock options (for a %). 137 Ventures is one of them. Generally, these types of funds will only be interested in the stock of truly breakout companies.

Marco and Jonathan are the real deal as entrepreneurs—they always think for themselves.

Fun dialogue between Pete Wells (former Editor of NY Times Dining) and Helen Rosner (features editor for Eater):

https://twitter.com/pete_wells/status/635499327918612481

I think the biggest qualification factor of a cash flow positive business mitigates quite a bit of risk (as long as there's some minimum bar of >= $50k / year).

The part that's tough is: what's the use of raising additional capital?

Is it to go full time on the product? Is it for marketing?

I love that this story is trending on Hacker News. The author, Paul Hoffman, is a close friend.

It's nice when good work gets rediscovered here.

I've thought about executing something similar with friends. I think there's a market for it—but the question is how big you think it can be?

ie: Birch Box works (sort of), because they're not paying for their merch samples. Would be great to try and make that happen for yourself.

Also, I think there are a lot of complications involved in shipping hard liquor across state lines. The alternative is to only be sending mixers and not liquor, which doesn't seem like as big of an idea.

Second on: completely arbitrary.

If someone shows up in early days before a company has product market fit and is one of the people that truly shapes the business, call them whatever you want.

It’s hard to encourage and nurture positivity on the web. Tumblr’s done it by not explicitly building comments into the product—so if you’re going to say something critical, it shows up in your personal space. It's conflicting to build a growing community vs. a good one. One of the only ways to do it is to have some sort of asymmetric follow relationship that allows all users to create their own smaller communities.

Clay Shirky: “The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t supportable at any large scale. Less is different — small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t.”

David Foster Wallace: “TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

David Foster Wallace: “We should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do with lewdness or bad taste. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.”

http://christmasgorilla.com/post/29694673248/its-a-genuine-p...

Two of the best collections of UI / UX patterns I know of:

Chris Messina (factoryjoe on Flickr): http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/collections/72157600...

Zach Klein on Evernote: http://www.evernote.com/pub/zachklein/generaluiux

strong preference for NYC, but will consider remote for exceptionally strong candidates.

Biggest question: how does Fabrice's analysis play out for someone that isn't extremely wealthy?

Yes, if you have $20 M dollars and are talking about simply allocating assets he is probably correct. However, what about for the avg working person who's buying a house with money that isn't his (a mortgage) so that by the time he retires, he isn't burdened with paying for a place to live.

Also, as an aside: I think most people don't have the personal fiscal discipline to take the money they would save by not paying a mortgage and invest it--they spend it. A mortgage is like a forced savings account for many.

@joshu Do you have specific selection criteria for non-US businesses? And when you do them is there usually a business model from the get go?

Some notes on Instagram, aspirational self representation, and homogeneity.

I've also been using Greplin for a few days. For someone that uses multiple computers, accounts, etc--it's amazing.

Standard is a 4 year vesting period. So, for example, if a cofounder had 100,000 shares, they would vest 25k shares each year--possibly with a one year cliff.

If you've already put considerable work into a company prior to any financing event, etc, it's common to keep 50% of your equity upfront and vest into the remaining 50% over a four year period.

Continuous periodic vesting is important. It's usually set at a quarterly or less time interval for the reasons mentioned by markstansbury.

Don't you think it's something like the following: think of a country's economy as a technology stack. You need to have the base levels of the stack in place before you can make more abstract things.

In places like Africa and India, there's a lot of access via mobile phones. But there's also a lot of missing pieces: transporation goods and services, smartphones, etc.

It seems to me like there's a lot of opportunity for media startups in both places, but that actual monetization is difficult because there isn't much in the way of ecommerce (due to logistical issues) and there isn't much in the way of advertising (because there's a lack of a base level of businesses to support it).

As for going global from a place like Africa: totally possible. But most startups follow a plan of succeeding at something small first.

I also think that Africa is going to leapfrog certain stages of technology / development and not others. For example, mobile banking in Africa is more widespread than it is in the US. My guess is that the first huge ecommerce company in Africa will be some weird hybrid of mobile, local, and banking infrastructure that people already trust.

Certainly not the biggest authority on this but couldn't find much other than AppEngine about 6 months ago. Here's what I did find:

Media Temple has Django Grid Containers: http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/features/containers.php...

There is a gentleman named Solomon Hykes (@solomonstre) who was working on something Heroku-like for wsgi apps. Last I heard, they were trying to remove a lot of dependencies from their stack. Doing a quick search, it looks like they've made some progress: http://bitbucket.org/dotcloud

I say this as a former developer who created some of the first video chat rooms ever (CUworld in 2000). Talking to random people online eventually devolves into porn. You can't help it. Chatroulette got around that stigma by eliminating all approach anxiety to a conversation (Parker's words)--sort of like the exact opposite effect of perusing profiles of people on a dating site and messaging someone very attractive (who probably gets inundated with requests).

I think the notion of turning chatroulette into a performance platform is very interesting. Some of the Ben Folds chatroulette performances were pretty fascinating and managed to get at the one-to-many-ness necessary to drive large amounts of traffic on a consumer site (you don't need that to make an interesting product--but Skype seems to have nailed 1 to 1 video pretty well). Being able to have different bands 'battle' on chatroulette or have comics or musicians present new material could be great.

For political reasons, it's usually best to pay yourselves the same amount. Reasons for different amounts: children, loans, trust funds, etc. When you're medium successful, that may change if one of you is still CEO. For now, don't sweat it.

I interpret pg's comment to mean that any dollars that you aren't spending growing your business are doing harm to the value of your equity. Realistically, I think this means that if you achieve some degree of product market fit, it's a bad idea to pay yourselves more than you really 'need' as those dollars could be more valuable to the business.

Three questions:

1) Why do you find it harder to code these days? Does that bother you? It seems like you're still keeping up with a lot of python stuff from your delicious tagging.

2) Why hasn't anyone advanced the ball past delicious with bookmarking? I'm still a delicious nut, but I really want good search tied into it. Is there no business model or no real use to the data?

3) Do you believe in the Ron Conway style of angel investing? IE. invest in many interesting companies for better returns? Do you ever participate in follow-on rounds?

Nitrogen, as a contractor your taxes should end up being much lower. Anyone doing freelance work should absolutely hire an accountant to figure out what's deductable (meals, office space, tech gear). All of those expenses come off the top and in my experience, you end up with ~30% more dollars at the end of the day relative to what you'd end up with if you were taking a standard salary.

Everybody's comments are pretty much on point. If you're contracting, you should be asking for $75-150 / hour. Shops like Pivotal Labs bill out their developers at $175 / hour (the firm obviously keeps a chunk of that).

I think your options are to try and take on some small contract work so you can keep working on your own projects -or- go work for a well known Rails environment (Pivotal, Gilt Groupe, etc) and work with a team to beef up your skills.

Even if you get a very junior development position at a slightly larger company, you'll probably still be looking at a > $75k annual salary.

The biggest issue here is that most VCs are hesitant to invest in hits-based businesses. This means: they don't want to bet on you creating a hit game, hit show, etc before you have any user traction.

If you have interesting proprietary technology involved in the game or you can figure out a cheap way to acquire users and get some traction, you have a much better chance of securing some investment.

similarly, queries in google spreadsheets are pretty amazingly powerful.

I've met with people that use an app called TimeDriver. It's alright, but maybe not ideal (I found the experience both useful and cold at the same time). Perhaps you could warm it up by having goofy confirmation messages. It goes for $30 / year for a subscription.

My main point was more about how nonprofits judge ROI and donor relationship value and I only included Aaron's post as an interesting link that wasn't included in the Post piece.

I can say from my experience working with nonprofits that Aaron's account definitely passes the smell test of what many organizations have experienced (including those that raise a lot of money online through other channels).

Interesting article and I've been wondering how long it would take for someone to write about this.

Here is the post by Taproot ED on the real cost of Facebook Causes ($300 million in nonprofit employee time to raise $30 million): http://www.taprootfoundation.org/blog/2008/07/is-causescom-r...

I think the interesting point is that most nonprofits judge ROI over the life of the donor and use sophisticated CRMs tied in with their other online fundraising efforts to judge their efficacy.

Causes did a typical Silicon Valley move by disintermediating the nonprofits as nodes in the Causes network which robs the nonprofits of valuable data about their constituents.

Even the simplest user language parsing is difficult. It's no wonder that PowerSet never actually launched.

And I guess if I'm just going to post the negative argument without saying much else, I should also link to Walter Isaacson's more substantive argument (longer than the one in Time):

http://www.aspeninstitute.org/site/c.huLWJeMRKpH/b.4959311/k...