noodles23
Edit Source: A Chinese government official in charge of a meat-producing SOE boasted about it during a presentation seeking foreign investment
Top notch guy and an evangelist for the mathematics community. Really happy he's getting the recognition he deserves.
In times like this, the importance of civics education is highlighted. The very idea that people in law enforcement think it's acceptable to treat judges and the legal system with such contempt is scary. Even if you disagree with a certain law or system, you still need to respect it as a public servant.
For less cost we use our own US-based vps, running something like the shadowsocks proxy. It's the same rig we found to work the best in China against the great firewall.
With its own dedicated IP, it would likely be cost-inefficient for Netflix to detect without blocking an entire range of legitimate IP addresses.
A little part of me is hoping to have him on our interview panel again to show him how far we've come.
As cool as these cards are, I really hope they become available on AWS soon. The current AWS GPU instances are so weak we're contemplating buying a physical desktop setup.
It's a tradeoff. If I had a lifestyle trading business, the corporate tax rate in HK is 0% (17% for revenue derived in HK, 0% for non-local revenue).
On the other hand, funding in this part of the world is pretty depressing. I have a collection of term sheets we keep to remind ourselves how bad it could've been. Personal liability, right to veto future investments, majority board control... you name it.
So we're trading higher taxes + crazy amounts of compliance, for a more managed and predictable funding process in the long run.
The list of fees is at: https://stripe.com/atlas/faq#Are-there-any-additional-costs-...
We have to file everything ourselves but we do have a few guides available from PWC and Orrickk? via Stripe Atlas that we're following as best as possible.
I have no idea what level of support Stripe Atlas will provide going forward, we have not heard anything in that regards, so we have enlisted friends in these professions to help us out.
If you do end up provided all these services in one place, let us know. It'll make my life a lot easier
April 8th - Received an invite. They gave up a form to fill out online where we had to upload some IDs and other details.
April 10th - The docusign (digital signature) email documents came along with a legal/tax guide. We filled that out on Apr 19th.
We ended up delaying for a while discussing the tax implications since we're moving from a low tax (Hong Kong) to much higher tax (Delaware C-Corp) area. Unlike Hong Kong, taxes in the US appear much much more complicated and intimidating. Ultimately for our startup, we weighed the benefits and decided to go ahead.
May 16th - Decided to go ahead with the incorporation and signed all the forms (via docusign)
May 17th - Get 15k AWS credits emails (super cool)
May 19th - Our Stripe payments account was opened "You can now accept payments via Stripe" Email
May 19th - "Welcome to SVB Bank" email with login details
May 25th - "Your Company is now incorporated" w Certificate of Incorp attached
June 4th - "Your Company now has an EIN", which a number ID to file taxes
June 21st - SVB Bank asked us to print out a few docs to sign. Basically to confirm we received the EIN.
And that's it. In most cases, it only takes a few days once you've signed the forms to be able to start taking payments via Stripe US (so you get the cheaper Stripe US fees rather than the more expensive international fees).
As an international, we ended taking a while to decide if a US incorporation was the way to go. There's 2 reasons we hesitated:
1) Stripe released a beta in Asia where you can accept payments in many Asian countries. No more Braintree/Paypal crap so you don't need to have US bank account to use Stripe and the Stripe API.
2) American taxes are pretty high (compared to HK), and there seems to a lot more rules and paperwork required.
For us, what pushed us to go ahead despite our reservations was that we spent 1 week in SF (for our YC interview). We didn't get in, but we scheduled a lot of meetings while we were there and we realised if we were to raise any sort of significant funding, a Delaware C-corp is a prerequisite.
This entire video series is about inspiring people with a side benefit of illustrating what makes YC special.
Compare this to content by other accelerators (of which there are many). It's not a lecture nor a recital of advice. It's a series of relatable and personable stories with a consistent theme. Start with "Why" you do something, not how or what.
There's a question on the app that asks (I'm paraphrasing) "what do you know about your market that others don't?". Answer: What appears to be a lifestyle sized market to the casual onlooker is actually big business
The reality in cyber security is that people provide the weakest and easiest point of entry to compromise any computer system. Until the business side and process side of things improve, shit like this will remain common.
It's more the frequency and how the requests are delivered that is different
There are certain ways you can disguise the traffic and the VPN companies that specialize in China do that- but the GFW is regularly updated so what works today probably won't work next month.
The other issue is that even if you do get a VPN working, they have a tendency to throttle your connection. VPN traffic is quite different to your regular http/https.
Both are messed up in their own ways. The difference is that in India, things are generally getting better. There are exceptions but the trend is moving towards a better internet ecosystem.
China on the other hand is a case of how to F* things up. They modernized their tech backbone so quicky hundreds of millions of people have access to fast (20 mbps+) internet. From there the government has made it virtually impossible to have a global tech focussed startup in China.
Just an example- npm repos are by default blocked in China. Apparently the automatic version control ended up with a number sequence that corresponds in some bamboozled way with a black date that's censored. Government had a hissy fit and therefore NPM is blocked. You have to reconfigure to use Chinese locally hosted repos which is a security risk (Read: IOS malware in Chinese versions of software)
We also got stung with a government request for data on users. Since the law in China changes with every government official you meet, some of the shit they ask for is beyond rediculous. To be fair, it's also happened in India, but the frequency is decreasing.