3 ms·

gut instinct is a wonderful thing, don't ignore it completely :) this sounds like yet another case of a non-technical person trying to strong arm a developer/d

by ammmir 13y ago

gut instinct is a wonderful thing, don't ignore it completely :) this sounds like yet another case of a non-technical person trying to strong arm a developer/designer/the person that does actual product development into signing away their rights. in my very limited experience and from others i know, unequal equity split for co-founders usually always ends up with someone becoming sour over time that they're not getting their fair share. you may not think you might be that person, but if the app takes off or somewhere down the line the company is acquired, would you be okay with not receiving a single penny? don't sign anything without talking to a lawyer. if you don't know what you're signing, you might even be worse off than signing a "standard NDA". you can always say no.

hga 13y ago
A lesson from the early days of microcomputers is relevant (and I knew some of the players): Visicalc was the first spreadsheet and first PC killer app, "I have to buy an Apple II to run Visicalc". (Per Wikipedia, $2,000 of PC for $100 of software.) But they, their company Software Arts (SA), made a distribution agreement with Personal Software (PS) that was grossly unfair to latter, and this became a big issue over time, because SA wasn't willing to budge on the agreement. So PS exercised their only club, that SA would have to port it to any PC model they asked for, and there were a lot of them out there. So while SA was distracted doing a lot of porting, plenty of it silly, and did a generic port to the IBM-PC (forget which OSes of it), Lotus did a much better spreadsheet for the IBM-PC and the rest is history. Except, there's a bit more relevant about that, see my top level comment. 1-2-3 was written in assembly language by 6-8 people as I remember, and the team didn't stay together after the launch. Lotus didn't have what it took to be a successful software company, clueless management that was kept afloat by stunning sales for a long time, etc. etc. Their "mid-life kicker" is the best illustration of that: IBM-PC memory was limited, ultimately 1 MB addressable (640K until you hit adapters, but there were tricks you could play), so someone came up with concept where you could add a card with lots of memory and it would map parts of that into the address space on command. Ah, now I remember, Expanded Memory Specification, EMS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Memory_Specification#EMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Memory_Specification#... Two engineers at Lotus modified 1-2-3 to use it to great effect, but that was against management orders, and they left the company before it realized they had to use their code base to extend the life of 1-2-3, which they did for some time. There's of course lots of details I'm leaving out, like an attempt at a C language version, but it's notable that one of the reasons almost all of Microsoft's competitors failed is that they lost their ability to write software that mostly worked, generally after their first major version, and most especially when it came time to do a Windows 3.x version.

by ammmir 13y ago

hga 13y ago

A lesson from the early days of microcomputers is relevant (and I knew some of the players): Visicalc was the first spreadsheet and first PC killer app, "I have to buy an Apple II to run Visicalc". (Per Wikipedia, $2,000 of PC for $100 of software.) But they, their company Software Arts (SA), made a distribution agreement with Personal Software (PS) that was grossly unfair to latter, and this became a big issue over time, because SA wasn't willing to budge on the agreement. So PS exercised their only club, that SA would have to port it to any PC model they asked for, and there were a lot of them out there. So while SA was distracted doing a lot of porting, plenty of it silly, and did a generic port to the IBM-PC (forget which OSes of it), Lotus did a much better spreadsheet for the IBM-PC and the rest is history. Except, there's a bit more relevant about that, see my top level comment. 1-2-3 was written in assembly language by 6-8 people as I remember, and the team didn't stay together after the launch. Lotus didn't have what it took to be a successful software company, clueless management that was kept afloat by stunning sales for a long time, etc. etc. Their "mid-life kicker" is the best illustration of that: IBM-PC memory was limited, ultimately 1 MB addressable (640K until you hit adapters, but there were tricks you could play), so someone came up with concept where you could add a card with lots of memory and it would map parts of that into the address space on command. Ah, now I remember, Expanded Memory Specification, EMS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Memory_Specification#EMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Memory_Specification#... Two engineers at Lotus modified 1-2-3 to use it to great effect, but that was against management orders, and they left the company before it realized they had to use their code base to extend the life of 1-2-3, which they did for some time. There's of course lots of details I'm leaving out, like an attempt at a C language version, but it's notable that one of the reasons almost all of Microsoft's competitors failed is that they lost their ability to write software that mostly worked, generally after their first major version, and most especially when it came time to do a Windows 3.x version.