tkiley

11 ms·

61.
by tkiley 15y ago
I'm a US Citizen. I recently went through the process of setting up a Canadian subsidiary of my US company, and obtaining a work permit to oversee Canadian operations temporarily. The process was ridiculously stressful and daunting. My comp
62.
by tkiley 15y ago
Every company that has ever tackled a big problem was once a startup. Startups can't solve big problems right away , but some (mine included) intend to get there some day. Right now, my company is a tiny star in the oligopolistic slow-movi
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by tkiley 15y ago
Sometimes it takes much longer than six months. This is what it looked like for my company: http://i.imgur.com/LE2kK.png Even if 2010 and 2011 are ommitted for scale, the first 3 years of those graphs are essentially flat.
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by tkiley 15y ago
/No career plans or vision/ The best developers I've ever worked with tend to lack career plans. If you're sufficiently happy with your life that you don't need a change strategy, that's pretty cool.
65.
by tkiley 15y ago
Three years ago, I was the sole employee/founder of my startup. Today, I'm CTO of a 21-person company with a 6-person dev team. As an individual developer, my default loop is "Find something to do. Do it. Repeat." As a CTO, my default loop
66.
by tkiley 15y ago
Wow. I knew the labels' economic relevance was declining, but I'm amazed that one of the four key "factories" in the commercial music industry just changed hands for $1.9 billion - less than half of Dropbox's recent valuation.
67.
by tkiley 15y ago
Our 20-person team is split between Nashville, TN and Vancouver Island, BC. Staying out of the major startup hubs has definitely helped us to avoid the assumption that funding is a critical component or yardstick of success. For us, I think
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by tkiley 15y ago
For three decades, Microsoft carried the torch of backward compatibility and feature preservation. Unfortunately, this means that Microsoft has willfully cultivated a customer base that is downright curmudgeonly when it comes to forced chan
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by tkiley 15y ago
This is one of the reasons our development team is located on Vancouver Island. We could have set up shop in the middle of Silicon Valley's startup culture, but instead, we set up shop in the middle of world-class mountain biking, hiking, s
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by tkiley 15y ago
Nashville, TN or Parksville (Vancouver Island), BC InQuicker seeks a director of marketing. We're looking for a person who can coordinate our online and offline marketing efforts across the United States. We're looking for a person who is e
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by tkiley 15y ago
InQuicker was a bootstrapped, single-founder, YC 07 reject, healthcare-based startup that sold primarily to the enterprise, and somehow we've been ok in spite of getting all those things "wrong". We're blogging about our experience to illus
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by tkiley 15y ago
For context, HN has discussed my startup (at my request) several times: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76077 (November 2007) and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629011 (May 2009) We are launching a blog to tell some of the more
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InQuicker: Bootstrapped to 100 ERs/UCCs and millions in revenue. Thank you HN.(stories.inquicker.com)
14 points by tkiley 15y ago|3 comments
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by tkiley 16y ago
Wow. Lightspeed is investing a huge amount of dollars and energy in creating a viable alternative to the YC ecosystem. Seems like this it the type of act that is characteristic of a firm that is either quite visionary or quite desparate, bu
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by tkiley 16y ago
Excellent write-up! I've learned most of these things the hard way :/ I'm filing this away to recommend to any developers who are setting out to use Javascript extensively for the first time. One quibble: In the "common pitfalls" section r
76.
by tkiley 16y ago
InQuickER (YC W08 reject ;-]) is hiring on Vancouver Island, British Columbia (Parksville/Nanaimo area, onsite preferred but not required). We are bootstrapped, profitable, and proud by 37signals' definition. Today we are an 8-person team,
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by tkiley 16y ago
For perspective, take a look at this list of the largest intraday changes in the Dow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_daily_changes_i... That page shows 40 specific days in stock market history that have seen a 6% or greater
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by tkiley 16y ago
I launched my company alone. My partner read about it in a magazine article. If you have the gumption to go it alone, you may be able to attract a partner more easily down the road; traction has a way of turning heads and opening doors :)
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by tkiley 16y ago
Quick mathematical summary of the problem: An octave is a 2:1 ratio between frequencies, so 880 hz is one octave above 440 hz. A perfect fifth is a 3:2 ratio between frequencies, so 660 hz is a perfect fifth above 440. In the modern western
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The centuries-old struggle to play in tune(slate.com)
26 points by tkiley 16y ago|17 comments
81.
by tkiley 16y ago
Great article -- there's nothing groundbreaking here, but it's a good exploration of a topic that is often non-intuitive to engineers. High sales complexity isn't necessarily the kiss of death for a startup; it just means that you need stro
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by tkiley 16y ago
I stopped reading when I got to the part where the author expressed an apathetic ignorance about the concept of "goodwill". If the author can't be arsed to research an article, I can't be bothered to read it. That said, the article did moti
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by tkiley 16y ago
These kinds of UI tweaks can be amazingly frustrating to users if you're not careful. For instance: When I click on an empty input box, I expect the cursor to load on the left-hand side of the box. In the date box in the demo, it populates
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by tkiley 16y ago
True, complements to existing products can avoid typical barriers to entry for non-disruptive products, but they come with their own set of issues. Generally speaking, they are at high risk of being absorbed into the products they complemen
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by tkiley 16y ago
"Disruptive" is popular because it implies the product or service can generate value on a large scale without playing catchup to existing market leaders. If you're going to make an incrementally improvement, you have to first catch up to th
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by tkiley 17y ago
This is somewhat equivalent to WikiLeaks' release strategy: tell the organization that you have evidence of XYZ problem, but don't describe the exact nature and scope of the evidence, then pressure them to come clean and fix the problem the
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by tkiley 17y ago
Hi, Joel. I've learned a lot from your stuff. I guess I'm just frustrated that the current structure of web has created all sorts of malincentives around the exchange of knowledge. Trollish content attracts more attention, so well-meaning c
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by tkiley 17y ago
My understanding is that China's upper leadership is largely intelligent and engineering-oriented. The fact that the Chinese government thinks this type of policy is a good idea makes me wonder if they know something I don't. Do they really
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by tkiley 17y ago
I like 37 Signals. I like Joel Spolsky. I like Paul Graham. I occasionally even read Techcrunch. However, I believe all of these people (and many others) tend to occasionally overstate and undersupport their positions. I can’t blame them fo
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by tkiley 17y ago
Hire someone who likes sales. Seriously, hire someone who likes sales. I hate selling. I like building. I started my company in 2006. In three years, I signed 3 deals. Then I found a partner who lives and breathes sales. In the past three m

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