jon_dahl

19 ms·

241.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
Grellas, would there have to be evidence that the participants were acting anti-competitively, or is being in the room enough? Arrington says that a few of the folks there were uncomfortable with what was going on, and were maybe there ju
242.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
Maybe. This approach shows some integrity too, though. Not everything has to turn into a scandal (at least if inappropriate behavior stops quickly). Call me soft on crime.
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Without turning this into "37signals vs. Y Combinator", let's just say there are pros and cons to each approach. One of the cons of contracting is can be really hard to divide your attention in a startup. If there is any possible way you ca
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
It's a complimentary project. Most people who need video encoding also need a video player. The headline is a little ambiguous; it is VideoJS that is relaunching (new version, new site), not Zencoder relaunching as VideoJS. :)
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Your questions are focused around money. Startups shouldn't be about money. If you want to be comfortable, work hard and save and focus on promotions. If you want to be rich, go into finance. Startups aren't comfortable, and most of us don'
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
It's via Heroku. They handle customer management and billing, and send revenue to you (after taking a cut).
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
I applied with what was, in retrospect, a weak application. Bootstrapped a different startup for a year and got accepted on that.
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Steve Blank (who you should read if you haven't) has said "No one can kill you in your first 18 months except for yourself". Two easy ways to kill your startup: 1. Give up. No one has a smooth ride at 6 months. Everyone struggles for years,
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Agreed. (Typical advisor compensation is 0.1%-2%, depending on the stage and the value provided.)
250.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
If it was an important case, we'd be hearing it on CNet, slashdot, digg, reddit, MSN... Hmm, I don't think that's true at all. Since when has the tech press taken an interest in open source legalities?
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Not the previous poster, but I'm sure it is Harvard Business Review.
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Haven't used it, but I think the Roku box is a serious competitor as well, and already exists. Netflix and other channels, plus a SDK.
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
There is something similar with hotels, esp. in a place like Vegas: show $20/$50/$100 at check-in, and get an upgraded room. Google "twenty dollar trick". Not that I've had the nerve to try it.
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Your middle paragraph is reasonable and a good idea. What's with the first and third?
255.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
The general rule is that founders should pay themselves as little as possible . For some people, that's $30K, and for others, it's $100K. Just depends on where one is in life.
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
From my perspective (early 30s), I know a ton of people who match all of these criteria. Even 4 and 5. Savings (4) can cover income risks for a time, and as it turns out, just about anyone can benefit from the PR and connections that YC pro
257.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
On the other hand, a majority of YC companies over the last year or two raise significant funding pretty quickly. A modest angel round can support a spouse/kids/mortgage lifestyle.
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Getting a lawyer as a first step is terrible advice With respect, I think it's great advice. He's far enough along that he's interested in the price and already talking logistics. "Should they be able to see the full source code in advan
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
I think they usually know how to scale their fees. Equity funding can easily run $50K+ in legal fees, but we paid $4K (count 'em) for a medium-sized angel round, using one of the top lawyers in the valley. We were able to do this by keeping
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Not that I'm an expert on this sort of thing, but I'll bite. * Get a good lawyer if you don't have one already. If they're a Silicon Valley company, consider getting a lawyer at a top SV firm (Orrick, Gunderson, Wilson-Sonsini, etc.) and as
261.
by jon_dahl 16y ago
If you're running a website (YouTube, Posterous, nytimes.com) that publishes free video, this exempts you from royalties. If you're running a transcoder (Zencoder, Quicktime Pro, ffmpeg) or a player (Flash, native HTML5 video in Firefox), y
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
He's still active - http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg That said, Demo Day is this week at YC, so this is probably one of his busiest times (along with interview season).
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
From my perspective as a service provider, I feel major pain whenever our service hiccups. If something goes down, the fear of unhappy customers (or losing customers) looms much larger than the fear of having to issue a service credit. For
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Fair point. We'll reconsider the wording of that one. The expected use case is something like a critical security patch - we might have to bring a service down for a security update - but that is pretty broad.
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Why SLAs are redundant, but Zencoder offers one anyway.(zencoder.com)
27 points by jon_dahl 16y ago|9 comments
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
We have a pretty wide range of customers. It's mostly websites today - niche video sharing sites ( http://schooltube.com ), blogging engines ( http://posterous.com ), content sites ( http://www.giantbomb.com/ ), online video publishing tool
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As Google Shutters Flix Cloud Encoding Service, Zencoder (YC W10) Gets A Boost(techcrunch.com)
57 points by jon_dahl 16y ago|7 comments
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
Ezra and team helped a client of mine accept HTTP chunked transfers back in 2007, for custom uploads from a mobile Java app. That might be simple today (or more likely, unnecessary), but in 2007, virtually no one had done it. Googling retur
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
I've probably been to a dozen. The best tech conference I've been to was FutureRuby. Single track, two days, great content, well-planned parties. Those guys know how to throw a conference. Too bad it was a two-time event (more of less). Be
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by jon_dahl 16y ago
If you include Javascript, it's very common. Beyond that, I've pretty well stuck with one language in production work for about five years. But that's only because I've mostly done modest-scale web app development, which really only require

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