jon_dahl

60 ms·

271.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
Glad to hear it - I'm a co-founder over there. Let me know if you need anything. :)
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Congratulations! Love the design and the simplicity. What do you use for video encoding?
273.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
First, PiCloud looks really interesting and extremely useful. It's solving a different problem than Zencoder - we operate on different levels. (We've actually talked to the PiCloud folks in the past about working together.) Just to give a l
274.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
Agreed. When real business is starting, or a contractor/employee is being hired, some form of confidentiality should be in place.
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Agreed. I've hired a dozen programmers in my day, and I'd rather hire a music or philosophy or math(s) major than a IS or business major. To me, a CS major is neutral; I've seen too many people with CS degrees who couldn't code themselves o
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Generally, two groups of people push for NDAs: 1. Inexperienced entrepreneurs 2. Big companies If you have to sign one, make sure it's (1) mutual, (2) doesn't include non-compete language, and (3) expires. If you want to cheat, add (4) conf
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
For scripting, that's definitely a problem. But it's not a big deal for long-running processes (e.g. a web application server). But Ruby definitely benefits from both: a fast Ruby with ~zero startup time, and a fast Ruby on the JVM. 3 years
278.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
If you've sold at full price to 5 customers at arms-length (people who aren't positively predisposed to you already), then sure, I wouldn't be surprised if you land 200 customers at $30/month. Dial up the marketing and repeat the process as
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Maintenance contracts can be really hard to manage if you're solo, because they can make it hard for you to throw yourself 100% into a project. Since maintenance contracts are a mixed bag at best, write them in your favor - full price, fixe
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
One more item: in a work environment, it's really useful to have single cups of coffee on demand. A pot is usually too much, and is only really good for a short time (even in a thermal carafe). So my office sprung for a super-automatic espr
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
IANAL/IANAA/etc. This sounds a little messy. Draws/dividends aren't mandatory or an entitlement. As the majority holder and presumably the CEO, draws, reinvestment, and fat bonuses (to him) would be at his discretion. If you really want to
282.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
I find people who flock to these investors (YC included) ridiculous. This is pretty overstated. There are legitimate reasons for "flocking" to investors. Some (not all) businesses will have a better chance of succeeding with a large influ
283.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
The first few hires often happen before VC funding is raised, right? And 2-3% for the first few employees isn't unusual amongst companies that later raise VC funding and make it big.
284.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
I always found this counterpoint article fatuous. To which I'd add, what hackers and painters don't have in common is everything else. The fatuousness of the parallel becomes obvious if you think for five seconds about what computer progra
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Minnesota is polarized - there are a lot of independent developers and a lot of Fortune 500 programming jobs. Not a lot in between. I've hired a dozen programmers here in my day, and so it is definitely possible to find good developers. But
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
I don't think this is entirely correct. Good investors understand that different founders have different situations. If you're 19 years old and your personal expenses are negligible, and you pay yourself $90K, investors will wonder if you'r
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
My co-founders and I are in this situation, and we did YC this winter (Zencoder), so it definitely can be done. We basically ran on savings for four months, and were able to raise money quickly, so none of us lost our homes or wives/girlfri
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Definitely. Vorbis is a good codec, too, so this is a win for everyone.
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Definitely. This is not "just another video codec" - it is significantly better than any other open source video codec. That's a big deal. And codecs are really really hard to create, for technical and legal reasons. It's not like 5 new pro
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Not to sound glib, but: it is a hard problem. Extremely Hard Isn't that exactly what an ambitious entrepreneur should look for? Especially someone who's had some startup success in the past?
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
The biggest goal, at least a few years ago, was to have a Ruby that is substantially implemented in Ruby, as opposed to being a hundred thousand lines of C under the hood. Paradoxically, this can result in speedups, since it's easier to opt
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Look at it from the other direction. In 5-10 years, there will be a lot of really successful businesses made as the line between TV and internet blurs. Who knows what those businesses will look like, but I'd bet that a few smart hackers who
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Keep a few things in mind. First, a lot of companies release their long-term vision in stages. Think of Bump: their first release was a way to share contacts on mobile devices. Which is kind of cool, but maybe not IPO-worthy. Now they're do
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
The API is just http + json, so it works with any language. But we also hope to have an open source Python integration library very soon. (Anyone want to help us with that?) :)
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Our pricing decreases as volume increases, so at a higher level, an hour of video is currently $1.68, not $3.60. At scale, we have other options we can offer (like dedicated servers at a fixed monthly price). We feel pretty strongly that ev
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Oh, and then a harder one: Could you take a bunch of images & soundtrack file, and render it to a movie? Not at the moment. It's something we're considering at some point, though.
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Soon! It's in the works. In the meantime, we can of course do non-streaming video for iPad/iPhone/etc. (Email us if you're interested in early access to iPhone streaming.)
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Yep, we're AWS at the moment. We're ultimately cloud agnostic, though, and can support other cloud environments (Rackspace Cloud, etc.) as well as our own servers. EC2 is pretty compelling for transcoding, though, because (1) so many people
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Hi ripb. Yep, our sales site needs a page that covers this. If you sign up and play around with the API, you'll see this info. At the moment, we do: Input: just about everything Output: H.264 video, AAC audio, and MP3 audio, in a MP4 or Fla
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
This is a strange article. H.264 is clearly the leader, and clearly the best video codec available today. But everyone already knows that, and so it isn't news. The news is VP8, which will finally give H.264 some competition. "Microsoft won

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