skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They absolutely have something to divide, the current equity. You are working against your own interest by helping to add value to the company without setting your option price and share count. If the 100% owner isn't willing to share now, something is wrong. There are a number of ways to address the issue of actual performance: time based vesting, milestone completion vesting, a cliff for a probationary period with no vesting (typically 6-12 months and then the 6-12 months all drop in). This is a very serious red flag if they have incorporated and tell you "they don't have something to divide." It's much better to have the disagreements now (and perhaps let some folks go along the way for poor performance) than effectively make it a competitive free for all on an ongoing basis (can you imagine the discussion in 6-12 months "I did more than you" "No I did a lot more than you, and I spent most of my time fixing your mistakes"). You are right to worry about team dynamics.
That is exactly what I'm doing for my day job. We evaluated a ton of ERP/MRP providers, and they were all A) Extremely expensive, and B) Awful. So I lobbied them to have it be made in-house.

It is currently being done with only one developer. We're 6 months into the implementation, and are piloting in several of the modules. It is going pretty well so far.

If it continues to go well, we're considering spinning it out into its own company. A well-designed and user-friendly ERP system is a killer asset to have, and being able to resell it is an even bigger one.

I've come to pretty much the same conclusion as you, about customizing. I figured we'd have a "standard" set of modules, which would either be completely replaced or slightly modified as necessary to fit the client company. Certain things like maintenance, receiving, purchase orders and sales teams probably don't vary much between companies. Other things like manufacturing routers and change orders probably do. This would allow us to be flexible where it is necessary, and to reuse code where it is not.

As a side note, we're hiring another developer to work on this system. IC to start. Let me know if you're interested.
first off - this is one of the best threads i've seen here in a long time and I'm deeply inspired to hear others stories of bootstrapping success and failures.

We have bootstrapped rephoria from day one and are now nearing the one year mark but alas have yet to ship our product. I lost my day job mid last last year and thought it was going to be a massive blessing as i had been working nights for two months proir and was feeling the constant strain...wrong. We were not ready from a team capability standpoint and with no funding was constantly stressed by money issues.

During that time we experienced so many setbacks and disappointments but have kept pushing as we are continually inspired by the potential of the vision. Basically it was not until I took a day job some 4 months later that things got rolling again.

As of today we are closer than ever to launching and what we are launching is far better than what I would have launched last year, so in reality (hindsight) at that point we were not ready for investment.

As first time entrepreneurs I believe that we will need to get past launch - get real users - and validation of the model - at which point I will make a strong push to secure an angel round.

Bootstrapping is a fundamental entrepreneurial quality - it forces you to believe in yourself, your team, and your idea in the face of all odds. If you can make it through you will be a superior entrepreneur. Bootstrapping is part of the true Hacker spirit. That said the ability to achieve scale and growth is greatly enhanced by having the funds in place to focus and execute on the plan in a timely fashion.

My twitter a few hours earlier read: Wishing i could hit the biz refresh button and have the time i had 3 months ago with the team i have now.
This is actually available here
http://ycombinator.com/tredennick.html

It's a great article that came out in the Sep 2001 Spectrum (on-line edition).
It's a social media player and, as far as money goes, we're trying to pound that out: basically food/shelter/bandwidth/coffee for 3 or so. Our current calculations say around 20k maybe to get from where we're at to series A (that is if we were to do that at the end of the summer)
any questions, brnlligtsmehi (at) gmail
How about in some way using emacs? The tiger team would develop the elisp needed to cater to the company.
Absolutely not as a primary host. EC2 should only be used for handling peak load, so that you don't have to build out more servers just to handle your traffic spikes. That's it. Nothing more.
$$$ earned :-)
Francis Fischbach interviewed Dave Stubenvoll of Wowza Media
http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/01/25/founder-story-dave-s...

Dave offered a number of useful "lessons learned" for bootstrappers. Wowza is bootstrapping a Flash Streaming Server and making headway in the niche of their choosing against Adobe. My three key take-aways were

1. If you are a lone entrepreneur, team up.

2. Figure out how to get it rolling without quitting your day job.

3. Don't "Build to Flip." Dave notes: “if I was dependent upon the sale of this company to some single entity, I probably wouldn’t survive. I would be doing things to sell as opposed to doing things to make sure that the business is around next year and the year after, and the year after.”

There's a lot more there: he has been involved as a founder or the early stages of five startups (two that were intrapreneurial or internal startups at Intuit and Adobe).
I'm just curious, but what makes them "Web 2.0 founders"?
We have bootstrapped Club E Network, a broadband TV & Social Network for entrepreneurs, from the ground up. We started with nothing, took on great partners (including a technology partner to create the BETA version of the social network), and have brought it in a few months since launch to the range of tens of thousands of unique visitors a month to get us off the ground. Now that we are at that level, we will be taking some investment to further develop the next generation of the site (much more advanced) as well as continue developing our original television series.

I think not having money gives entrepreneurs a real advantage in some ways, because you are forced to REALLY think hard and discover innovative ways to market and improve your site, without cash. It's been a very interesting experience, and I definitely believe something that is beneficial for entrepreneurs to go through, as opposed to taking money right from the start.

Corey Kossack
President
Club E Network
http://www.ClubENetwork.com
In the past I watched TV a lot, but now only watch sparingly at night as a way to relax and get myself off the computer. :)

Beyond that, I do watch a lot of TV/videos online.

Corey Kossack
President
Club E Network
http://www.ClubENetwork.com
The problem that people have hinted at, but nobody's come out and said: Fair changes when money's involved.
The people who are presently not voting, by and large, don't vote because they don't care enough about who's in office to bother voting. I don't think we can expect these people, if forced to vote, to put any significant effort into deciding who to vote for.

So who benefits by forcing them to vote? Would it just be random? Or would certain viewpoints/candidates be propelled by ignorant, disinterested voters?
Arc 1 - new version
1) I don't think so. The real win is for an ERP is not processes, it is reporting. Being able to examine every aspect of the business in ONE place in a real-time fashion is an amazingly huge boon for businesses. Businesses succeed not because of good processes, but because of constant improvement. You can't improve if you don't know what to improve. A good ERP implementation will solve this with good reports.

2) For a startup, small businesses might actually be better. They might still be able to spend a decent chunk of change (.25-1M) on an ERP system, but have much lower requirements making an easier implementation that is less likely to fail.

3) ERPs aren't really modular, that is true. I'm not sure there is a win to a real "modular" ERP system. The who idea behind an ERP is that everything in a business is connected, so the systems should be connected too. Sales people are connected to orders are connected to finished goods are connected to build processes are connected to inventory are connected to purchase orders. Removing one "module" in that chain defeats the purpose of the ERP.
that(google TOS)'s is against google mission:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
they were already making millions a year for many years. it's not like they were broke before this.
Wait, are you saying that medicine and counseling don't have pathological bureaucracy? Have you asked your doctor to describe exactly how much time and effort it takes to get money from dozens of separate insurance companies, all of which are using every trick in the book to avoid paying? Or are you lucky enough to live in a civilized country?

And, please, don't even ask about postdoctoral research and the attendent interactions with university bureaucracy, departmental politics, and Federal grant review processes. Or I might need counseling. And my insurance doesn't cover that. :)
There are a few perspectives on this. The first one, which everyone else has voiced, is that verbal promises are worth nothing. Things can always change and you could be left behind...

However, in some ventures I have been involved in, equity distributions are not decided in the very beginning because you don't know enough yet. If you give equity too early, you can mess up big time in many ways. In my opinion, the best thing you can do is sit down and talk through the terms. Figure out what is going to impact the decision about how much equity you do receive, and at what point in time that is expected to happen. Lay out some terms in advance, even if the actual equity percentage is not laid out from the get-go.

The last thing to say is that contracts are only as good as the people who sign them. Trust should be the #1 factor in your decision to deal with business partners. That said, you have to protect yourself, so do what you are comfortable with and roll with the punches. If you are not getting paid and don't have a 100% promise of stock in the company, the time you are putting in right now is "volunteer" time, and that is something that only you can decide if it is worth to you. I wouldn't let the lack of set deal terms scare you off just yet, if you think this is something you could really benefit from. But of course, it's all your call!

Corey Kossack
President
Club E Network
http://www.ClubENetwork.com
Huge warning flag.
Run away.
I know Paul is of the opinion that tables are simpler than divs, but even tables don't have to be set to a fixed width in pixels!
Here's the biggest challenge I think you face. Because ERP is so entwined in a how a company does business, it's really hard to create a "bottom-up" solution. Executives have to be involved, you'll need sales people to explain things, and - most important - you won't really know how it goes until after the implementation. This means there is little incentive to create good software. Once the customer has spent a ton of time customizing it and retraining employees, they're not going to switch away just because the product kind of sucks. The highest quality software is found in consumer apps like GMail that are really easy to switch away from.

Is there any way you can make your solution have minimal up front cost and to be rolled in gradually, similar to the way that Salesforce and now Google Apps spread? That way you can compete just based on quality - not on sales ability. That will in turn force you to make the solution great, and you'll end up kicking everyone's ass.
I'll be the contrarian here.

Unless you control the company, or the founders (or whatever the "board"-equivalent is at this nascent stage) are dumb, no matter what the paper stock agreement is, you can get screwed.

All you people with private company options plans are pretty much deluding yourselves about your recourse in the event of an unfavorable (to you) liquidation. The pecking order is, latest VC, VC, founders, every executive, and then you. No matter what your paper says, everyone above you in that chain can screw you over.

I've seen this go both ways. Companies with 20-30MM+ in revenue have been acquired by $5Bn gorillas, and the VCs and m-team walked with everything but a few thousand dollars. And companies have gone public and larded everyone with windfall options.

If you want to have some idea of how much your "equity" might be worth, you need to know not only how many shares you're getting, but how many shares are outstanding, how that pool is going to change after multiple rounds of funding, and, finally, how much the company will liquidate for. A bunch of those questions are basically unknowable.

So, you can work for people with this sketchy answer, or you can work for the people who make shit up about their equity to make your questions go away, but in neither case is the answer to this question really helping you. Do you trust the team or not? Is the project worth it even if you don't trust them?
Sounds like you have a track record, you've hit upon a legitimate pain that people would pay to make go away, and you're starting to think about how to fix this by doing it, which is probably the only way to do it.

This puts you way ahead of a lot of other entrepreneurs.
Because why? The team hasn't wasted their time dividing up their fictitious millions?
1) While that's nice in theory, the dashboard data has to come from somewhere. And it comes from the processes people go through. Combining the multiple application interfaces into one isn't merely a process of collecting data: it's also collecting processes. If all you had to do was collect data, ERPs would just sit at the junctions of your current data interconnects and feed all the data upwards. But that's not what happens.

2) I agree that smaller is better. But smaller isn't better when it comes to being able to set up requirements.

3) And it shouldn't. I should be able to say, "We're now doing A B C 4 E instead of A B C D E" and not have that change (assuming it's low enough) initiate a 4 week process of review before it ever has a chance of "going live". That -keeps- people from making the suggestions that evolve an organization.

Thanks for the comments.
I do not have enough willpower not to watch TV if there is a TV in my apartment. But there is no TV in my apartment, and I have enough willpower not to buy one and bring it home.
You have a BA in economics and have worked for some fairly large companies, and, like me, you're a company founder. Tell me, is this ever a discussion that is "easy"? And, is this discussion ever "settled"? Seems to me, it's settled exactly until they (a) get funding or (b) hire a CEO, at which point all bets are off anyhow.
If you're developing an in-house system you should try to stay away from thinking about spinning out into a separate company. If/when you are successful you can asses what is needed to make the software into a viable product. I would focus on building something that works for in-house use only and not try to make it any more modular or extensible than absolutely necessary.
The company has a strong team, a strong product, and market traction. The equity argument is as much about risk as it is about effort, and it looks like everyone else on the team has borne far more of that than our friend here. He's an employee, not a founder; his code contribution likely does not entitle him to demand equity reallocation.
No, because each of the team already secretly imagines that the better part of those millions belong to them for doing "all of the work" and is just sure that when the time comes the others will agree.
You just have a high "Schedule Fantasy Factor"
Say for the sake of argument the company has been in business for a year before our friend arrived. Say there's another employee who has been there since day 1, but is skills-wise pin compatible with our friend.

You think he should get 90% of what the day 1 guy gets?
hexstream and jward,

i was suggesting you can learn about the target audience, by watching TV. this works even if the content is bad. like our culture or not, i'm interested in what it's like (which is important to know, if you hope to improve it).

for me at least, tv is not dangerous. i don't drool, i don't buy stuff b/c it says to, i don't like stuff b/c it says to, etc
He's using the word "employee". They're paying him.
I made a quick Firefox extension for this. It automatically replaces PDFs with links to PdfMeNot.

While the service is passworded:
http://why.gd/downloads/pdfmenot_extension_passworded.xpi

For when they unpassword the service, install this one:
http://why.gd/downloads/pdfmenot_extension.xpi

Releasing these into the public domain, free to use/release, do whatever. Enjoy!
Yes, but the number of students in my program is higher than the other two (wealthier) schools in my district, and a lot higher than schools with comparable demographics.

Even if Joe Blub teaches nearly as well as I do (and I'm willing to accept that he may), I recruit a whole lot better than he.

But if I teach my students Java (as the AP exam requires), does that make me Joe Blub?!? :)
The best part of that article is the bit where he feels obliged to write another article apologizing to the Ruby community for offending them: he never once mentioned Ruby in the original article! Talk about sensitive.
That still doesn't account for Gore winning the popular vote in 2000 in the general election.
Top 50 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Google Maps
Coding Horror: The Dramatic Password Reveal
what's your stack look like?
Ughh... where can I sign up for FlashMeNot, a service where annoying flash "black boxes" (scribd in particular) get replaced with proper HTML/CSS?
Ditto - I'm surprised you haven't talked to every elementary school, church group, public library, etc. "Save the children" is the story that writes itself. Pikluk is great and if more people knew about it, they'd eat it up.
How to the Scribd guys feel about this? It's something I would expect Scribd to do (and maybe it does, just needs to advertise it more).

I guess this would be really useful on a Mac where PDF plugins only work for Safari (and one for Firefox but only on PowerPC).
I guess it depends on the size of the customer. Above a certain size, sales staff becomes more valuable than technical expertise. In that case, you're playing a game you can't win. But if you could bootstrap a reputation and sales force by selling smaller ERP systems, then you could position yourself well.
Mandatory voting sounds like a bad idea. Personally I would be in favor of requiring a minimum degree of political knowledge to vote.
Google Docs is simply a web storage. The actual "office" part, specifically the text editing, is done by a rich text control embedded into your browser, which is written in C++ or plain C i.e. it is as much "web" as Office itself, only many times less powerful. Closest Windows desktop equivalent? The mighty WordPad circa 1994!

You could have completed your Linux switch without Google Docs. AbiWord kicks GDocs' butt, as well as KWord, I am not even talking about Sun's junk.

We tried to use Google docs and for anything more complex than 2-3 paragraphs of simple text it was inadequate. You can't even control line spacing for god's sake.
It's hard to measure the productivity of any given day. You can of course take a look at your todo list but that ignores the benefit of doing things that are not on your todo list (like hanging out here). I think you should look back at the last 6 months and see if you are satisfied with what you have accomplished.

Often it takes a while to realize the benefit of some otherwise unrelated activity (like reading the news or exploring with various libraries). But usually after a few months you'll run across something and be glad you "wasted" some time earlier on that topic.

For example I spent a decent amount of time at work (several years ago) researching and playing around with rootkits. This wasn't at all related to my job function at the time. Then one day we had a major breach of security and I wasn't the only person around that knew anything about rootkits, especially how to remove them. I was able to help out and as a result I got a "promotion" (transferred to do security work which was always my passion).

Only time will tell if something you learned (or did) was useful or a "waste of time".
What Is Greatness?
Ubuntu - Apache - AllegroServe - MySQL - SBCL (Lisp)
Not necessarily. Some folks don't seem to react well to caffeine. Others thrive on it. If you like a quiet calm atmosphere when working caffeine will probably not help. But if you're like me and like working under stress (and late at night while listening to energizing music) then it can work wonders.
Bebo: $1 billion Acquisition “Definitely Happened” Says Source
Thanks, that would be great. I know it's not the Tokyo Toy Store on St. Marks Place. They have a lot of action figures (mostly Asian) but no anime.

I don't travel to NYC often, so I'm not worried about being there constantly, and I definitely don't have the kind of money to splurge on a lot of anime. I know I'll be OK.
Comment of the Day: OpenSocial is a "Social Cloud" For Developers, Not Users
Clearly the proper answer. Depends what you're doing.
Some of the things to be learned from this:

the security features you need to use while in a public place are different from what you need when you're at home.

password obfuscation in dialog boxes is great when random people are around. not so great when you're at home and don't realize that the number 1 is broken on your keyboard for the first 10 failed login attempts.

I like choices like "reveal my password" so that the user can show the password if desired (instead of copying and pasting from a text editor). And I like options like "keep me logged in for a ridiculous amount of time". Nothing more frustrating that being timed out from my bank after every 10 minutes of inactivity.
Then they have something to divide. What exactly are they waiting for?

I would not accept a job until this is worked out. They're either evil or naive, and neither are good traits in a boss.
Maybe it didn't work for you. I use it to manage my resume for example without a single problem. I can access it from anywhere, share it with people, track changes and email word or PDF copies. I haven't used a desktop word processor in the last year (unless I'm opening some file from a backup disk that I haven't had a chance to upload).

And wordpad was a pretty decent editor. The problem is it couldn't open word files sent by others (so I always had to install Office or convert files to RTF). Turns out most word documents render just fine in RTF.
I'm pretty certain the rich text control in Google Docs is not written in C/C++ and is not built into the browser. It's implemented in Javascript.

Or are you saying the web browser is written in C/C++?
Your complaints are not limited to ERP systems; I can certainly vouch for this viewpoint.

I think you biggest problems is going to find the first few clients. Nobody is going to believe you when you say that you can do more with less. Elephants in the room are impossible to see before you tear down the wall and lead it out into the sunshine.

Any ideas? I'm in a similar situation regarding group benefits administration, and I think I could even pull a sale or two based on past encounters, but you're talking about changing entire industries (and shifting a lot of profits in the process) here.
By what I get done, and how much time it takes.