finsrud

We'll see how it all shakes out, but yes, I would bet there are some sticky conflict of interest issues at play.

The ends often justify the means (i.e. if the company does well, it's easier to retroactively overlook the conflicts; if the company flounders, the scrutiny will be intense).

A startup lawyer's honest take on founder mental health during company distress — with real science and real tools.

Most startups on the venture track aren't profitable or reinvest any profits into growing the business. No profits = no tax. So double taxation usually isn't a problem.

True. But the 5 year holding period doesn't start until conversion to a c-corp. So, plan accordingly.

I love Stripe. And I agree that Atlas makes incorporation process quite easy.

But when I hear about a SaaS startup being organized as an LLC, I wonder if the founders considered the potential benefits of "qualified small business stock" or QSBS, which is only available in a c-corp.

With QSBS, each founder and investor can supersize their exit proceeds by wiping out at least $10 million in U.S. taxes. (See https://www.businessinsider.com/qsbs-qualified-small-busines...).

I know these situations can be painful, (and there may be concerns re: confidentiality), but I really wish more founders would share a bit more detail describing what went wrong.

This kind of candor would be hugely valuable to other founders who are still in the trenches.

> It seems that Ad business is eating up all the talent over there...

Yes, and trying to catch up with Amazon on cloud services.

Yes!

We've held off on adopting Slack because Hangouts Chat seemed promising. But here we are almost 3 years since it was introduced and there's still no integration with Gmail. Argh!

To add insult to injury, while we're stuck using crusty old Google Chat, (due to its integration with Gmail), Microsoft Teams is adding features regularly and has blown by Slack in terms of DAU.

Google Sites is even worse. "New" Google Sites was introduced in June of 2016. Since then, it's received very little attention in terms of ongoing development.

Meanwhile, companies like https://www.notion.so/ are completely eating their lunch (Notion has only 27 employees last time I checked). It's hard for me to believe that Google employees use Google Sites internally in its current state when there are so many better options out there.

I've lost all hope on Sites. I'm still hopeful that Google will make Hangouts Chat competitive with Slack and M$ Teams.

All that said, Gmail, Gcal, and Google Drive are still really really good. Even Hangouts Meet has improved significantly over the past year.

Here's a plain English explanation from Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...

I've used https://simplenote.com/ for ~5 years because it's clean, fast, cross-platform, supports Markdown, has decent search and tagging features, and it's free & open source.

Every day I open a new note named #[YYMMDD] Scratch, and use it as my daily scratchpad. That makes it easy to search for notes by year, month, and day.

In my experience, simpler is better.

If you happen to be in California...

Section 2872 of the California Labor Code prohibits your employer from taking ownership of anything that you develop entirely on your own time without using your employer's equipment, supplies, facilities or trade secret information, EXCEPT for those things that either:

(a) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice to your employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development; or

(b) Result from any work performed by you for your employer.

The audiobook is excellent as several members of the cast make appearances.

Two  menu bar apps:

- Shush: Quickly mute and unmute your microphone using a hotkey (e.g. fn).

- Clocker: Easy way to keep track of your friends and colleagues in different time zones.

We recently went down this rabbit hole. We extensively tested each of the following:

- http://notion.so/

- https://slab.com/

- https://getoutline.com/

- https://gitbook.com/

Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Notion is the most flexible and fun to use. Outline and Gitbook are open source, which is nice. Slab is probably the furthest along in development and in terms of being purpose-built for knowledge management.

Unfortunately, Google Sites seems to be super low priority at Google.

This.

See if your employer would be open to using GitHub's open source employee IP agreement: https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement.

It's a bit more balanced than the standard IP Agreements most tech companies are using.

Read your company's stock option plan.

Most stock option plans have language that auto-adjusts all outstanding option awards in the same proportion as the stock split.

For example, if the company did a 1:5 stock split, your option award would also split 1:5.

So... if your company's stock option plan has this standard auto-adjust language, a stock split is likely a non-issue.