jtfairbank

9 ms·

31.
by jtfairbank 10y ago
You don't. Founding a company will be one of the hardest things either of you ever does. It's almost impossible to know beforehand how people will react to extreme stress, sleep deprivation, large amounts of money, etc... You ca
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
Great points all around! The reason I think small businesses are relevant is that the founders/owners own the entire business. They either lose money, break even, or make money. In the sucessful small business cases where they make m
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
Bro, send me some too. :D Email is in my profile.
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
My team uses ReadMe for non-technical documentation. We tried wikis and Google Drive before that and they all felt so... unoptimized. Searching was difficult, organizing was time consuming, and worst of all the documentation kept getting
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
This seems to be a trend among many highly paid fields: - Many doctors earn 100k or 3-400k depending on their field. - Many small business owners earn <100k or make a killing, depending on their field, goals, and success/luck. - 9 o
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
Anisa @ Giveffect is super kickass. Same thing for Iba @ Tara AI. They're definitely on the earlier side (for now), but I wouldn't be surprised if they make your list in a few years. :)
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
Agreed! We're almost at that point (5 employees, 1 of which has a kid), and need dev help on a broad array of problems.
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/08/product-development...
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
You want to keep your corporate structure as standard as possible. Anything out of the ordinary will scare off future investors, since it results in more risk. This one investor is probably not worth losing a seed or A round in the future
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
Very interesting! I founded ReSchedule Med ( https://reschedulemed.com ) to solve scheduling problems that residency programs have. Our solution is quite different but it's so cool that you've worked on a medical sched
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
Awesome dude! I lived in Nairobi as a kid in the early 90s. Kenya is a wonderful country. What's your startup? I've always dreamed of moving back there and opening up a small shop of my own. Are the VCs experienced, and are the
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
How would GitLab help with this, besides just being the code repository of choice? In other words, what features does it offer for early stage projects that Github, Atlassian, etc don't?
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
They already are my landlords... :( Actually my landlords are pretty dope. They're techies (me too) but they live upstairs so they're ok by me. But yeah, the absentee landlord for profit thing kinda sucks. I get a bit of schade
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
“Oakland,” one of them says. “That’s where we want to invest.” “Too dangerous,” says another. “My wife would never go for it.” “Of course not,” says the first, “but you don’t buy to live there.” I live in Oakland. So glad these people aren
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
Agreed. It really depends on what you are going for. You can learn domain knowledge on the fly (a lot of ours is how the organization functions), but you can't gain a deep understanding of the science side like that.
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
We're working with the head of the University of Illinois operations research lab. Would they be interested in the contracting with academic research in mind?
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
I'm looking for a contractor who knows rules based linear integer programming systems like Gurobi or CPLEX (or open source variants). Can you shoot me an email with recommendations? It's in my profile.
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by jtfairbank 10y ago
I dropped out of college to found a med-tech company that went on to be funded by YC. Every other company in my space is founded by a doctor. I haven't noticed a difference in how we are treated yet. If you're good, you're
49.
by jtfairbank 11y ago
Absolutely. Especially since this is a service. Sure, employees could copy the chat locally, but by using this service they end up sending the data offsite. Certainly sounds like a security breach to me.
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by jtfairbank 11y ago
You can certainly experiment and innovate. Nothing about agile stops you from adding an issue to spend half a day investigating the right tool to solve a problem, or implementing something two different ways to determine the best one. But
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by jtfairbank 11y ago
That goes one step beyond the standard cliff period for vesting. Honestly it doesn't seem like the incentives are aligned: if you make it past a one year cliff, your shares / options are vested and they are yours to keep / e
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by jtfairbank 11y ago
YC founder here. From what I've been told, employees of YC companies get a slight bump in the application process because the partners expect those companies to have a similarly high bar as YC.
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by jtfairbank 11y ago
Yup, always make sure the incentives are aligned. Unfortunately this is a pretty unique situation. For startups the usual is to angle for an IPO, or failing that go for an acquisition. This shared goal and payoff event naturally aligns t
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by jtfairbank 11y ago
Every company will try to get you for as low as they can. Don't think of it as wasted time, this is a really valuable learning experience regarding contracting, and even a chance to practice your negotiation skills. :)
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by jtfairbank 11y ago
So you're a full time contractor instead of a full time employee. This is a very gray zone in the US, which is probably why they require you to setup a company that you are working through. That's because hiring an individual fu
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by jtfairbank 11y ago
I'll commit for small, incremental changes. Each commit is a semantic change to me- could be a small change applied in the same way across multiple files, or a larger change in a single file that does one thing. I tend to push at the
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by jtfairbank 11y ago
jacksondeane has a great answer if you're at a traditional startup who's goal is acquisition or IPO. Not all small businesses are startups though. If you are working for a lifestyle business, or even a larger company that has rel
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by jtfairbank 11y ago
@harj - How do you feel about granting cash bonuses to employees at pre-determined intervals to cover the tax cost of exercising their options? It seems like that would solve a lot of these issues, but also give the employee the flexibilit
59.
by jtfairbank 11y ago
The main tax benefit of options is that you don't have to pay taxes until you exercise them (convert them into real stock). So even if you get the options at a discount then you don't have to pay until you want to convert them &#
60.
by jtfairbank 11y ago
Agreed. We setup our bank account to require two signers to approve any wires, and they gave us a Key Fob for two factor authentication for wires. As the company scales, we may add other people like a CFO to the bank account, but we will a

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