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Hiring Family & Friends

What is everyone's opinion on hiring family and/or friends and why? I've heard both negative and positive reasoning from both ends and wanted to throw it out there for you all to weigh in.

( Read More... | 2 comments | on HN )
this could be technical... getting users to use the product or service/page. my newest venture is a little different... B2B... so we'll see how that goes.

also, my answer is relevant because with more users comes expansion. my social networking site (before the phrase was coined so feverishly) started with 10 people initially signing up. i had launched the day prior to my vacation and didn't return for 2 weeks. word-of-mouth spread it like wildfire and when I returned... 20k people has signed up. with that however, came the server and bandwidth bill (I was using a shared hosting plan). technically, it made me broke for time (fixing everything that broke and eventually broke during my transfer to the dedicated server) and financially it drained me (back when dedicated servers cost and arm, leg, first born and your dog fluffy). =P

Re:Where is your startup? (for me Atlanta) on Monday August 13, 2007 @06:43PM (#42094)
San Francisco, CA - Financial District & North Beach ;)
Re:Got a Weekend? Start a Business on Monday August 06, 2007 @06:24PM (#39917)
i wouldn't say it's impossible... but if you have too many "leaders" and not enough "doers" then ideas and expectations start to bottleneck. ideally, my preferred team would consist of 2 leaders (one w/ more experience in marketing/biz and one w/ more experience in the flow of programming and visual design layout), a hardcore programmer and a UI designer.
Re:How do you get through boring projects? on Monday August 06, 2007 @06:19PM (#39915)
take every project as a learning experience. if you have the ability to select what projects you accept, only take the ones who have an "emotional" connection to you and/or your business... aka, the ones that don't cause you to groan and hate your line of work. :)
Re:Getting Better Employees Than Google on Monday August 06, 2007 @06:17PM (#39913)
why does everyone compare themselves to google? with everything company, something'll happen eventually and it'll turn into the present-day microsoft. the thing that i'm focusing on is to become a leader like google w/o replicating it step-for-step. google found it's wave and surfed it... now it's our turn to do the same in our own niche/product.
Re:Is YouTube Down? on Monday August 06, 2007 @04:22AM (#39727)
it was for a while... http/1.0 error.

YT died...and the world followed.

Re:Who was your Childhood Inspiration? on Sunday August 05, 2007 @04:43AM (#39536)
my mother actually... for saying the internet is "no place to make 'real money'"

(i tend to try my best to prove people wrong w/ they say something i'm doing is impossible)

needless to say, after making money as a PHP hacker for several years now... she still asks if i've looked for a real job. heh...

Re:does yc news filter duplicate urls? on Sunday August 05, 2007 @04:06AM (#39530)
i see... i just tried it and apparently never noticed it before. thanks for the reply!
Re:Google Print (Newspaper) Ads (Launching -- Discussion) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @08:38PM (#38874)
so i'm assuming that papers like the wallstreet journal will have ads based on investing? did i understand you correctly w/ that?

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