philipDS

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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.

philipDS

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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.

philipDS

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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.

philipDS

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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

philipDS

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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.

philipDS

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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.

philipDS

11 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Why is Travis so bad? Ever tried CircleCI?

philipDS

11 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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.

philipDS

11 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

"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."

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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%.

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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.

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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!

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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.

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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

-> how do you deal with burnout as a founder?

  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.

3. Team

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.

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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.

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Yup, I think you're right. Thanks.

philipDS

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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

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