alexdevkar

I believe your generalizations go too far. The "crazy" founder who succeeds despite all odds is only one archetype. There are others. Many outliers are successful by creating new markets.

This guy (T.A. McCann) has successfully built and sold a startup, so he doesn't lack the will -- he just lacks the will for this business.

Markets can be so tough that the time/cash/energy to succeed in them means the opportunity is not as attractive as others.

You're right. That's true the before the acquisition and after. Your employer can say you have to accept a reduced package or get fired.

The difference is the starting point of the negotiation. If the acquirer wants to keep you, the "right" language in the option plan means the starting point is your original comp package. You have to explicitly agree to a reduced package for it to change. If you have the "wrong" language, there is simply no deal in place to start the negotiation.

The author notes (a) ways Harvard could spend its money that might have more public benefit and (b) that other non-profits are more deserving of donations. Even if all true, that doesn't mean it should be stripped of its non-profit status. Perfect management to optimize public benefit isn't the standard for whether an organization gets non-profit status.

The more interesting argument is about what organizational traits our government should require in order to be blessed with special treatment.

Other Conspire founder here.

We will not spam your contacts, sell your or your contacts' email addresses or personal data, or otherwise sell data about you to third parties.

Down the road, we will offer premium plans with professional search tools. An example use case is if you want to reach CIOs in northern California at companies greater than 100 people, we will identify those people and tell you the best person in your network to ask for an intro. At the moment, we're focused on growing the size of the network and making it valuable for users.

One other subtle point I wanted to mention: We don't expose email addresses via the product. The only people you can email are those for which you already have an email address. The same is true for people trying to contact you. So you won't get a bunch of spam recruiter emails.

I'm a founder.

Re permissions: We use IMAP to access email data, so there is no granularity. It's all or nothing. We never move or delete messages and only send messages with your express permission. (Google offers a Gmail API that has slightly more granular permissions, but it is not peformant for our use case.)

Re deleting an account: Yes! You can delete your account and all of your data from our system with a couple of clicks. You can do that from your account page.

Please ping me with questions. [email protected].

Lots of innovation in this area: https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

Interesting research that seems directionally true, but I wonder if this overstates the case. The sample set is people who are willing to download an Android app and share data with Stanford researchers. Those people likely have more info online than the average person.

If your friend knows of instances where Silicon Valley firms (1) double-billed travel time or (2) billed as you stated in the value billing section, consider reporting those to the CA State Bar. These are ethical violations.

I'd recommend taking introductory meetings with several attorneys. You should be able to quickly get a sense of what kind of person you're dealing with. Then check references. Yokum, for example, has a lot of clients who will say nice things.

This is important advice. Spend time finding someone you trust and that you feel comfortable talking to. You won't run into any of the unethical things mentioned in this post with a good attorney. In fact, some of those things are against the rules of professional conduct.

Another important point: You can always negotiate your bill. It is very common to pay less than the billed amount.

Full disclosure: I'm a former WSGR attorney. Now a WSGR client.

Good point re point of failure. If LinkedIn doesn't put a lot of resources into the proxy servers, mail delivery could be very slow or fail completely.

I"m still impressed with the creativity from a technical standpoint.

This approach seems almost magical. There are a couple areas that I'd like to hear more about.

- How detailed is the strategy coming down from the top? "... [W]hat you work on is up to you, within the bounds of what’s important to the company." What is the process of oversight to determine if each project is "important to the company"? Are there often conflicts in this area?

- How does employee evaluation work? Does each member of a project submit evaluations for the others?

These can be non-trivial to integrate, but consider using third party authentication like https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2Login.

I did not expect to have my spirit crushed on HN this morning. Need to call my parents.

Given that hipchat groups are completely separate from one another—meaning no shared data—it seems that there are natural ways to shard the various datastores. There is no theoretical reason why comments from one group need to be placed in the same search index as comments from another group. Sharding of course brings lots of challenges.

If you are able to sell your product before it's ready, that is a great sign that you've found a customer's pain point. However, selling vapor-ware can be very hard. And you don't want to start your relationship with a customer with delays and buggy software.

Instead of pre-selling, consider talking to customers about what you're working on, having them take a look at the prototype and getting their feedback. You might not get the clear signal of a buy/no buy decision, but you will get help understanding what really matters in your product.

As always, depends on the particular business. Good luck!

This is an excellent term to throw around carelessly with your designer friends.

Investors typically are not going for acquihires. See for a good discussion on many issues: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/05/13/the-corrosive-...

I look forward to encoding other NP-hard problems into bin packing problems and hammering this API. Just kidding.

Conspire - Boulder, CO - Full-Time

Conspire is a TechStars company founded in 2012. We analyze email data to give users detailed analytics on their email network and to understand the strength of connections between people. With this understanding, we maintain an always-up-to-date, weighted network of connections without any work on the part of users. When a user needs to reach a person or company, Conspire finds the strongest path of connections in the user's extended network.

We're located in downtown Boulder, Colorado.

QUALIFICATIONS

We're a small team, and we're looking for people to take on a lot of responsibility. You should be prepared to manage projects independently from start to finish, including gathering and refining requirements, evaluating potential approaches, soliciting feedback from teammates and experts, picking the right course of action given the company's goals and delivering stable, performant software that integrates seamlessly.

Our product is built primarily in Java, Scala, Rails and JavaScript, and we use several database technologies. We heavily leverage AWS infrastructure, manage source and issues on GitHub and continuously deploy code to production. In-depth experience with our technology stack is a plus but not a requirement.

BENEFITS

Along with all the benefits you'd expect (including relocation assistance), we also offer up to one month international travel per year. Work remotely from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. We'll even give you $1,000 to send you on your way.

Contact me at [email protected] (or [email protected]).