BobbyH

I run Google Ads professionally and this has also happened to me. I was never unable to fix it directly. One time, I had a Wordpress site that Google Ads claimed was a compromised site. I migrated it to a landing page provider (Unbounce), and Google Ads still insisted the site was compromised even though Google's tools said the said was clean.

What I did to fix this was to migrate my landing pages to a new domain. (I believe migrating my landing pages to a different subdomain on the same domain would also work, but I haven't tested this.)

You don't need to run traffic to your full website. All you need is a marketing website to run traffic to. That marketing website doesn't even need database integration, so you can put that marketing website on a totally different server.

So to fix this issue, I wouldn't try to fix it. I'd just create a marketing website somewhere else and direct traffic to that.

This is actually the plot behind Larry Niven's Ringworld! A gigantic civilization has created a Ringworld (a rotating wheel artificial world), until a superconducting plague (https://news.larryniven.net/concordance/main.asp?alpha=S#sup...) destroys the material that enables room-temperature superconductivity, thus reducing the entire Ringworld to the dark ages...

I work in the bankruptcy niche, and I wanted to tweak your statements...

Chapter 13 bankruptcy is deleted from your credit report seven years from the discharge date, which comes 3 to 5 years after you file (because there's a 3 to 5 year payment plan). So if you measure from the filing date, Chapter 13 takes 7 + 3-to-5 years to come off your credit report, which is 10 to 12 years from the filing date.

Similarly, Chapter 7 bankruptcy is deleted 10 years from the discharge date. In a typical Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the debtor receives a discharge 4 months after filing. So your statement is actually quite close, but to be pedantic, it's 10.33 years from the filing date.

In my experience, most Chapter 7 filers can fully recover after about 2 years, provided they are able to make their payments on-time after the bankruptcy.

Taking a step back, it seems like you want to present a perfect solution to your boss that he can just adopt. I mean this in a friendly way, but that's not your job. Your job is to tell your boss what you want. Your boss's job is to figure out how to meet your needs.

Along those lines, I would just tell him politely that you'd like a plan to get your backpay over time, you'd like a raise although you understand that funding may preclude that, and you'd like your non-compete to be altered so at least it doesn't apply to your consulting work, since the scope of the consulting work is so broad that you wouldn't be able to ever get another job. You can mention that given the natural instability of a startup, this fact is stressing you out and making you lose sleep.

I would also ask to "paper" the backpay, so you have more than a verbal commitment on that.

If you talk nicely and respectfully about these issues, it is very likely that he will agree to the one term that doesn't cost him any money. (He will likely stall on all the other terms.)

It sounds like you and the CEO both want something, which is often the basis for a reasonable compromise. You want to be let out of the strict non-compete clause, and you want your back-pay and ideally a raise. Meanwhile, the CEO doesn't want his company to fall apart in the wake of your departure. You could approach your CEO, and ask him to deliver a plan to pay down your backpay. During that discussion, you can tell him that since you're underpaid and haven't gotten a raise for years, you'd like to amend your employment contract so that the non-compete and invention clauses only apply to your corporate work (and not your consulting work). You can explain that this would let you do projects on the weekend that would help you make some more money to compensate for the undermarket salary.

Not tying the reason to your desire to be able to get another job easily also helps the CEO from freaking out as much. Also, limiting the non-compete edits to the consulting work helps him feel that his corporate work isn't threatened, while getting you what you want.

Amending your non-compete would also give you flexibility if you choose to leave, so that would be my primary goal here. To increase your leverage, you can also ask for a raise. Assuming he says that giving you more money is impossible, that increases pressure on him to concede on the only term that is non-monetary.

I take your point. It's just that if those four loans default, you will be down 16%. If that happens, you will lose your principal and also not earn interest on those defaulted loans. So even though you charged an 8.4% APR, you will only earn interest on 84% of your loan balance. So unless a miracle happens, it doesn't seem likely that you will break even.

Here are some details on those four loans:

* Alex made one late partial payment ($1.17) on his $100 loan and is 108 days late on his second payment: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/Macbul/3583.html

* Margret hasn't "rescheduled" her loan even though she hasn't made a payment for four months: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/margret-muthoni/34...

* Cynthia missed her first four payments, rescheduled her loan, and is now two months behind: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/cynthia1988/3090.h...

* Soknya missed three months of payments, rescheduled, and is now 67 days late: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/sdndiaye/1908.html

mfheretic, you're counting "active loans" as cash in the bank, but I think you have some active loans that are likely to default and cause losses...

This is the account I looked at: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/profile/Jessica.html That account gave a 20% loan to Hellen Festo, made 40 loans, etc., as you mentioned in your blog post.

I took a look at the first ten active loans listed on that profile. Four loans in particular are way behind on payments. If those loans default, you'd be out $160. On $1,000 in principal, that would represent a loss of 16%, instead of breaking even. That's more in line with Zidisha's write-off rate of 18.65%: https://www.zidisha.org/index.php?p=43

It would be awesome if you could "close the loop" between analytics and SERPs!

For instance, say that you return a SERP with 2 results. Using your analytics and some conversion pixels, Swiftype would know that for that search, the first result has an estimated value of $10 and the second result has an estimated value of $20. From using Swiftype on a Wordpress site, I know that you give admins the power to change the order of results on a SERP page manually. Could you also do that automatically?

So for an e-commerce client, you could automatically re-sort the SERP so the $20 link shows up first (and hence gets more clicks). You could even calculate and display the benefit to the customer of doing this, e.g. "You have generated $1,234 in extra revenue this month by using Search Auto-Rejigger".

I think this behavior comes from the webcam, and not Skype. I have actually seen this exact behavior with the Microsoft LifeCam, which often auto-changes the width of the video stream. The larger width will show "people on the sides," and the more narrow width does not.

I believe that the LifeCam looks for movement in the peripheral area. If there is no movement there, the LifeCam will truncate the sides of the image. I have sometimes been able to force the sides to appear by waving my arms off to the side.

When I first noticed this happening, I was surprised that many "people on the side" don't move or talk at all, thus triggering a truncation. But I started looking for this, and most "people on the side" barely move at all.

In my experience, Skype video quality tends to degrade by simply freezing the screen. I have also noticed this behavior when Skype was off entirely, when recording a video of myself. So I'm pretty sure it's the webcam itself auto-controlling the width, and not Skype.

All the famous entrepreneurs mentioned in this story have very light accents. I found YouTube videos with these entrepreneurs speaking, and none of them have "accents so strong that you have to interrupt the conversation to ask what they just said.":

* Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems co-founder and now a venture capitalis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxYVOMj6F2U&t=1m2s

* Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TShENN3VVX8&t=0m29s

* Tesla’s Elon Musk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io&t=2m33s

* Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vv0NKieCoI&t=5m59s

Good luck! In the spirit of your post, here are four reasons that I think the opportunity you are currently pursuing will fail.

First, you are not making something that people want. The primary customer you have to satisfy here are fashion bloggers (as once you get them, you will get access to end consumers). However, I would speculate that the ability to easily create "outfits" is not the #1 pain for fashion bloggers. In general, customers want to solve their #1 pain. If you solve a problem that is NOT your customers' #1 pain, you will find it very hard to get the attention of those customers.

To address this issue, I would call fashion bloggers and ask them what their problems are. I would speculate that "easily making outfits" is not their #1 problem.

Second, fashion bloggers aren't a very profitable customer to pursue, so a business that targets that market will find it hard to make money. By contrast, if you targeted an industry that makes money, your customers would have more revenue to share with you. On a related note, many fashion bloggers are not making enough to make a full-time living, so they don't think of their fashion blogs as a business. Thus, even if you create a product that makes them money, they may still not adopt your product.

To address this issue, I would find a more profitable customer to pursue that makes at least $50,000 a year. Also, I would make sure that those customers consider what they do to be their main source of income. This would exclude hobbyists.

Third, I would be concerned that it's hard to reach fashion bloggers to market your product to them. Yes, you can pitch them by email or Twitter. However, fashion bloggers are innudated with pitches, and often ignore them.

To address this issue, I would target a market that wants to be reached, so you can easily reach them to pitch your product.

Fourth, fashion bloggers aren't used to paying for software. Thus, you would have a harder time convincing them to pay you for your software. Compare this to, say, a salesperson, who is used to paying for a CRM and all sorts of software.

To address this issue, you would have to find a way to make money without directly charging your user (the fashion blogger). One way to do this is to require your product be linked with your third-party affiliate codes, and then do a revenue-share on those affiliate earnings. However, this would be hard for fashion bloggers to accept, and would require policing on your part.

In conclusion, I would urge you to switch your focus to (1) solving the #1 pain for (2) a lucrative market that (3) you can reach easily and (4) that is used to buying software.

Good luck!

This email was likely unearthed during pre-trial discovery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law)) when Macy's sued Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO) for breach of contract when MSLO decided to start selling its formerly-exclusive-to-Macy's products to JCPenney. It was probably found by searching for the keyword "Martha" in the emails of certain top JCPenney executives. That trial has already revealed many important emails about the Martha/JCPenney deal.

I also grew up in Northern Virginia. I now live in NYC.

I hadn't considered the broader effects of this sort of migration, until I recently read "The Big Sort", a brilliant book written in 2009 that describes how like-minded people are "sorting" themselves through migration. One way to quantify this effect is to look at the number of "landslide counties", i.e. the number of counties in the US that preferred a presidential candidate by more than 20%.

You can see a map showing how these landslide counties have sharply increased here (the top map is from 1976, and the bottom map is from 2004): http://www.thebigsort.com/maps.php

What's happening is that voters are moving with their feet to be with more like-minded people. This skews many counties towards a particular direction (either Republican or Democrat). Further, as counties tip one way, the minority viewpoint gets suppressed in just the way you described (e.g. if you're a Democrat, why bother voting for Governor in Texas).

One thing that surprised me in the book is that not every state is homogenous. The author lives in Austin, so he spends a lot of time talking about how all the liberals move to Austin (and conservatives move out). So even in the bastion of Republican Texas, there is a liberal enclave.

Looking at Des Moines, it seems that Des Moines is a similar liberal enclave. For instance, in 2008, Des Moines, Iowa voted for Obama over McCain with a 23% margin: http://www.city-data.com/elec08/DES-MOINES-IOWA.html

So it seems like there are a fair number of liberal enclaves in conservative states. To give another example,"The urban core of Kansas City consistently votes Democratic in Presidential elections": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City,_Missouri#National_...

So even if it's true that "Silicon X'es can only happen in liberal pro-intellectual areas", there seem to be enough liberal enclaves in conservative states that Silicon X'es could possibly arise.

Yes, enterprise value (EV) is equity market capitalization (stock price times # of shares) plus the market value of debt (this can be lower than the book value of debt). Financial analysts often prefer to calculate something called "Net Enterprise Value", which is EV minus "excess cash" (total cash minus "required cash", where required cash is usually calculated as a certain % of sales). Net Enterprise Value gives you the present value of all future cash flows to the firm (you are ignoring the value of today's excess cash, which doesn't come from future cash flows). This is particularly useful when looking at companies like AAPL with tons of cash.

I think what georgie is saying is that employers don't care about your skill set and knowledge, per se. They only care about what your skill set and knowledge can do for them.

Also, I second georgie's recommendation of How to Win Friends and Influence People. You can see a relevant section of the book here: http://books.google.com/books?id=yxfJDVXClucC&lpg=PP1...

Click through to the next page too...

Yeah, that's it! I just read Little Bets today. Actually, I was talking to somebody about lean startups this afternoon and I found that "make little bets" is a better way of expressing the lean startup approach than "test your assumptions".

The book itself doesn't break new ground, so much as it synthesizes a lot of lean startup principles and gives some good anecdotes, some of which I hadn't read before (e.g. Gehry's architecture approach). It's a good read, I enjoyed it. Until Eric Ries' book comes out, it's actually the book I'd give people to teach them what a lean startup is.

One clue is that a 404 page (e.g. http://color.com/asdf) says the webserver is "powered by Jetty": http://jetty.codehaus.org/jetty/

Jetty "provides an HTTP server, HTTP client, and javax.servlet container". Here is the wikipedia page for Java Servlet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Servlet So the answer seems to be Java.