skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to structure the funding for my company?
I'm starting to organize a round of funding for my company, so I can raise more money to finish up and launch the technology I've been working on for over a year. But since I don't have much professional experience with raising money, I have a question.

It seems to me that the coolest way to structure an investment is like this: come in with an amount of $ that you will need in order to be sure you can take the company to the next level, and then negotiate how much % you are willing to give away. Let's say it's $200,000 for 20% of the company. Then take the deal with the investors you think are the best fit, but structure it as follows:

The $200,000 is set aside for being used if your company needs it. That way everyone ensures the company won't fail for lack of money. But you withdraw the money in $10,000 increments. Each time you withdraw, you sign a note and that is when the investors get the corresponding % in your company. If you wind up using $40,000 and launch something that makes your company way more valuable, you can start shopping around for a much bigger valuation. Let's say by the time you have spent $50,000, you have found investors interested in doing a round at a 10 million dollar valuation. Then your first investors at this point own 5% stake in your company, but that 5% just became 10x more valuable (as did your shares as a founder). Now you do the same thing at the second round of funding, etc.

This way, it's a fair deal for everyone involved and the incentives properly align with what's good for the company. The entrepreneur will not want to just waste the money they are given, and in fact will actively try to grow the company's value. This seems like a good deal for the investors, too. In fact, if I was investing $200,000 into a company, this is exactly how I'd want to structure it -- I'd start to feel uneasy if the company started spending the last of the $200,000 without another deal in place yet at a much higher valuation. Giving the entrepreneur the incentive to constantly grow the value of the company (and as a result, give away less equity) seems to promote runaway hits, which is what VCs try to fund all the time.

Investors in previous rounds would be invited to participate in later rounds. But there won't be any "back-room deals": once someone is willing to invest in your company at a 10mil valuation, someone cant go "just give us another 2% at the old valuation".

What do you think? If there are any seasoned investors reading this, could you please give me a piece of your wisdom? I'm just speaking out of intuition here.
Ok, first of all, I'm not trying to censor you -- I just want that to be clear. So, it's not a question of whether anything you say is "too offensive to be spoken". That was your interpretation -- not mine.

Second, I don't believe that we can or should always avoid offending others -- we don't have a right to never be offended.

What I am specifically focusing on is this attitude that "you shouldn't be offended" is conventionally used to defend the status-quo, by people who are not disadvantaged under the status-quo.

This impedes reasonable discussion and learning. Obviously if I don't have a problem with X, I don't have a problem with X. The people who do have a problem with X seem kind of weird.

The only way we can reasonably start to figure out whether or not X is a problem is by listening honestly to a bunch of people affected by X. As people unaffected by X our opinion simply doesn't count as much -- until we've made a geniune effort to understand, rather than just dismissing.
The real post from Quora: http://www.quora.com/Dennis-Crowley-1/What-are-your-top-5-pi...
Googler here. I can raise this on the internal [eng-misc] mailing list, but I can't replicate his results: I have Chrome installed with no unwanted plugins in Firefox, and when I downloaded Google earth, I get:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/404957/gearth.png

Ditto for iTunes. Or is he talking about Windows?
I find this article misleading, Google certainly does not have problem retaining talents joining early stage startups. Those talents probably joined Google pre-IPO and funding their own startups now. The problem for the late Googlers is that they and their uncles all want to join the multi-billions dollar pre-IPO "company". And yes, their scale is big enough and affect millions, and the up side is, one day they can move on to be entrepreneurs.
It's pretty obvious that your intent was innocent. But the fact that you didn't realize how awful a headline that is sends a different message.

An apt way of putting it. Thank you. I wasn't familiar with the historical quote, and I only saw the headline on Hacker News. My initial reaction was, "Oh, good grief. Do we have to go through GenderFail, SmutOnRails, etc., every 15 minutes? I hate this conversation. It must be even less fun for female hackers, who can't win either way."
I've turned free beta mobile application to paid version just by informing people about the change. Offered 40% discount to old users and it started to sell right away (license is around $20). There was people complaining about price but otherwise I got even positive feedback. However conversion rate was not that good but app had several hundreds of thousands users already so it turned out to be business after all (additionally to consumer markets we also sell enterprise versions).

I think it is important to have viable user base, you are going to lose a lot of your existing "customers". They signed up to free version so it is really unlikely that they start paying for it. Also if your free version hasn't attracted that much people, how it would attract if you ask money for it? Do change when you can lose 99% of your free users and still maintain valid business.

And what I almost forgot. You didn't mention what kind of segment you are targeting. Strategy heavily depends of that. If it is enterprise go premium like yesterday, if you are free they are not even interested. Consumers and small businesses are much more difficult.
Seth Priebatsch: Love a life. Hey guys--I've had the pleasure of working with Seth. He's a stellar entrepreneur. He is intensely intelligent. He's a humble and thoughtful hacker. He's living a dream--enjoying what he does and working hard. And isn't that the special thing about geeking out today? We get to do the things we love to do. The things we stay home on a Friday night to hack at? It's a choice I make all the time and I love to hear Seth talk about it with a sense of passion. It doesn't have to be your choice--but it's one many of us make--and Seth gets my nod.
Only in te music industry could somebody do enough coke to simultaneously attempt to sue your company out of existence while investing $100m into it. If there's one thing I agree with PG on it's don't do a music start-up.
There is something important that you miss here. He's generating lots of value, sure. But it is value that can only be generated because his employer already has a lot of existing infrastructure to benefit. He couldn't as easily generate that much value on his own. And therefore being an entrepreneur isn't necessarily that attractive to him.

Life is often like that. As an entrepreneur you should seek to understand and respect people who make that choice, not look down on it. Because after all your hope is to eventually hire people who are like him. If you sneer at smart people who are happy to generate excess value, they will notice and won't want to do that for you.
US Gov't Responds to Domain Seizures, Ignores the Big Question
> "You're talking about out-of-school. I agree with that part."

Yeah, and my argument is that is the part that has really changed in the last few generations. In the school, at least in my area, is all but frozen in time since I went through the public schools. Yet the test scores are dropping. I guess it's possible the teachers have all gotten worse, but what sticks out to me is the attitudes of students and parents.

> "Based on your message I don't think you understand the theory behind school choice"

No, I get it. But what I also understand is how little the school and the teacher matter, comparatively.

Put it this way: say we're updating a house to use less energy during the winter months. You're saying we could hang better insulation all around the house and goose up efficiency 8-10%. I don't disagree at all.

I'm saying maybe we should focus on the windows, since they're the biggest problem areas. And with a lot less money, effort and potential for collateral problems, we could boost efficiency around 40+%. You don't say you disagree either.

But where we're not seeing eye to eye, is where you want to start taking down the siding first.

Addressing the cultural problem is lower risk, lower cost and higher return. And if we don't do it, we're still going to have an educational problem when we're done rolling out school choice.
Thanks — I'll follow up with you about this at @hello_world
Love their bookmarklet feature...so easy for saving all the links before "stacking" them
I once again wish to suggest that teaching and grading are two separate jobs and should not be done by the same people. The conflict of interest should be obvious.
But then again, most of the comments here don't have a whole lot to do with the job.
Why kill a 59 day-old account with spam?
Well, except for the fact that government intervention forced Microsoft to keep Office for Mac viable, along with providing operation funds that kept Apple alive.

You're correct with OSS, that's succeeding despite how broken software patents are.
Guh, reading comprehension fail. Thanks for the correction.

IANAL either, but I agree that GPL-with-linkage-exception is functionally equivalent to LGPL, so I still think the rest of my comment's correct.

Of course, given my track record in this thread, I'd recommend folks double-check my work :)
Glad they were able to actually write a short case-study on such a high worth (I'm assuming) case. That's real transparency.
Note that an engineer at a startup doesn't necessarily need to focus on anything other than engineering. If your startup has 2-3 people, then sure, everyone's gotta wear multiple hats; in a startup with 10-20 people, specialization makes sense, and probably wouldn't be that different from a big company.

(One big difference, however, is that even if you're doing only engineering work, a big company will probably give you more time to think long-term; at a (competently-run) startup, you're more likely to be focused on short-term, tactical, quick-and-dirty work.)
Yeah, they're not really making the best use of the opportunity:-/
This is what I would call a "micro-groupon". Essentially you have a shareable service that becomes cheaper the more people use it. The time scales are also different since it's more of a "flash" sale than anything.

The one way that people break out of the chicken and egg situation is by using the "Bowling pin strategy" (more info here http://edgehopper.com/). So you start with one niche and then scale out intelligently from there. Again, this is what Groupon did by starting in SF and then growing from there.

Based on this my advice would be to start in SF - as they seem to be the early adopters of the world. From my experience there finding a cab is a major pain in the ass. However, the times that you'd use this service are when you're taking a pretty expensive cab ride, usually from the airport. With SF how many people take cabs from the airport vs the BART? If it's not a lot, then you have some difficulty.

Is there a city in the world that has a lot of people taking cabs from the airport?

Actually, now that I think about it. Any "route" where a sufficiently large number of people would regularly be paying a substantial cab fare would almost certainly have an alternative means of transportation. Whether this be public transportation, shuttle services, etc. More often than not I think you'd find that society at large has already implemented your taxi sharing.

In which case you need to identify those very specific places where the market is lagging behind and therefore your app has real utility there. At which point you'd have to aggressively market your app in those markets to gain real penetration and hope for critical mass.

To be honest, the use case is so limited I have a difficult time seeing how you'd get that critical mass.

Though your idea has given me another idea. An app that lets taxi drivers schedule with individuals directly. How many times do you take a taxi where the driver will give you their card and say "Give me a call if you want a ride?" Well, if you have an app that connects drivers with riders in an easy fashion, then you can get into a situation where everybody's incentives are aligned. You can get the driver to give the rider a discount, the driver does this for guaranteed income, the rider does it for the discount, and you do it because you get a small cut. You can then expand into a "group ride" policy because your already having a person plan out their route.
I like it. Inspired by Hugh MacLeod?
Organs Made from Scratch
I did a similar site a while back, but not for ios : http://flockdraw.com

Looked into a ios app, but users didnt seem to like it after the first few trys do to the inability to do complex drawings. (Drawing with your fingers isnt easy)
http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ is willing to host anything that U.S. law allows them to, and makes more of an effort than most hosting companies to keep anything up that they can, and requiring that proper legal procedures be followed before they'll take things down (policy: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse). That would cover your "brand X sucks" example most likely, though perhaps not others.
One advantage that email has over the mediums you're already using is its asynchronous nature. We choose when we want to be interrupted by email.

Realtime is great for creating a good work environment when you're all working at the same time, but doesn't necessarily bode well for questions you may need to think on for a bit.

I like using email as a precursor for voice meetings (in person, phone or skype) to get folks thinking about a particular topic to focus the conversation.
And it's only garbage collected if you want it to be. (My friends are making an exokernel in D)
This and js2-mode make Emacs a ridiculously good JS editor.
Tower - New Git client for Mac (beta)
Not available outside the US :(
Radiation Rings Hint Universe Was Recycled Over and Over
That's assuming they're doing the tree counting with imagery. The newer Google Street View cars I've seen have LIDAR rigs on top, so they could be mapping trees that way.
Are there perl bindings? I've been tweaking git-svn to not be so painfully slow, and since it's currently spending over 99% of its time forking to very simple git commands, that should help.
Comcast demands Level 3 pay fee to deliver online movies to their subscribers
well they are successful. they make close to $1Mil a year. If you arent a developer, I prefer the strategy of getting something out there as fast as you can, getting market validation and then bringing someone on board/improving wuality...isnt this what MVP teaches us?
http://www.designing-obama.com/ => I snagged the PDF when it was still free. EDIT: Still free. See responses.

VSA Partners on the Logo:

Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etEP1Bhgui0

Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukIMW833EPE

There's a ton of info out there on Obama's campaign, it's really one of the best branding and marketing success stories.
Big Five personality traits
Are you going to make the fashion world more welcoming of straight males as well?
Supreme Court Won’t Hear RIAA File Sharing Case
> It's hard wiring. Women = nurturing, communication. Men = hunt, build.

Let's ignore all the mountains of evidence to the contrary and say that, on average, you are absolutely correct.

Have you read Harrison Bergeron? Go on, it's easy to find on google. I'll wait.

Okay, done? Good. Now think about this:

No matter how correct you may be about genetic predestination, your sexist attitudes, and the actions you take based upon those assumptions and beliefs, create a deep moral wrong against any woman who dares to be exceptional.

Get it now, you fucking jackass?
Only if a teacher's pay or reward depends on the grade they give their students. Otherwise, it is treating teachers like professionals who worked hard to get where they are.
> look for users who tweeted in last X days?

Requires you to check aka scrape every user to see which ones tweeted in last X days.
"don't really need statistics, do they?"

I know plenty of women who would have no problem with any of the above. These things happen at some startups, don't happen at others, some women wouldn't want a workplace like this, others would enjoy it. And this is just one of many, many factors. Again, without more information you can't really say anything intelligent.
Former President George W. Bush, Live At Facebook HQ [video]
U.S. law doesn't exactly conform with my interpretation of freedom and it doesn't help with the anonymity issue.
WITN: Wikileaks – Enemy of Democracy, Fact of Life… or Both? (TCTV)
This is why we made http://updateflash.org

I need to put something up at updatejava.org one of these days too.
"That would have been a huge mistake since it turns out that all of the videos did worse than all of the images."

It annoys me no end when websites have videos explaining their product and no equivalent text. I hate watching videos about products. Always make the video optional and secondary.
My Philosophy and the Tale of 100 Rogues
.to domains seem to be a good bet. Tongas domain authorities don't provide anyone with information about domain owners.
Cyber Attack Against WikiLeaks Was Weak
This is explicitly addressed in the original article he links to,

> I could add a nasty banner to my README file telling people the project is abandoned and you shouldn’t use it or you should fix any bugs you find yourself, but that’s not what I think a README is for. I could even remove the issues page so people can’t report issues anymore, but I don’t want that either. There’s some helpful information in there.
Obviously Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touch libraries are a moving target and GNUstep is tracking those as best it can.

There are already people releasing software for both:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep#Ported_from_NeXTSTEP.2C...

Regardless of whether or not they are exactly compatible (some tweaking is necessary) I wonder where you get the idea that Apple would attack the GNUstep folks. Sounds like standard-grade FUD to me.
Subversion on Debian Linux
Some companies created at SW have gone on to be real companies, but SW is really better for getting the feel for working with other people and then working with them on other projects. I can think of five funded (not that that's a metric for success) companies that grew out of Seattle Startup Weekend relationships. While I'm not seeking a co-founder at the moment, everyone on my co-founder shortlist is someone I met at Startup Weekend 3 years ago or I met directly through someone I met at SW.
If I were in the fashion world and felt that was an issue, why not?

I'm not a fucking wallflower.
Is there a problem around lines 87 or 88? Or is it just with the syntax highlighting?

ETA: Thanks!
The self hosted Rust compiler is probably the largest piece of Rust code right now:

https://github.com/graydon/rust/tree/master/src/comp/
Duly noted (and upvoted). I should have made it more clear--my belief is that their actions reflect poorly on the RN who supervises them.
I think you missed the point.

It's not that the fashion world is not welcoming of straight men, it's that most straight men don't care about being in the fashion world.
http://www.livestream.com/facebookguests/video?clipId=pla_0d...
Randomness, Secrets and Security - Part 1
With a name like johngalt I would think you'd be supporting his argument ;)
Greenspun: Software Engineering for Internet Applications
He seems to assume that the contribution and volunteer rate of the added marginal people (those who signed up after seeing the best performing media / button, but would not have signed up with the default media / button) is as good as the rest of the people (those who would have signed up regardless).
Barcelona win El Clasico
Why I started reading more once I got rid of my books
Hobbystrapped - "because running a small startup is my hobby."
"Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?"

Well it depends on what school is for. To be perfectly honest, I'd say that organization and scheduling my time properly and working hard are far more important in college and in the workplace than mastery of subject matter that's ultimately outside my career field. I don't use what I learned in Physics or Calculus or German at my job or in my life, but I need to be organized and schedule my time (work time and personal time) effectively on a daily basis.

"The percentage of students who attend college is rising; 67 percent of high school graduates now enroll in some sort of post-secondary school after graduation (up from 43 percent in 1973). But the reality is that many don’t succeed, in large part because they are not academically prepared."

I don't know if it's because they don't know the material or because they aren't able to adjust to working as hard or managing their time as effectively. From my perspective (entering college in 2005) it was generally the case that students had gotten used to skating by because they could get A-'s without trying and then ran into trouble in college, not that students who had worked hard but weren't as smart were getting too overwhelmed to get good grades. Personally, if I had gone into college with less material knowledge and better organizational/management skills, I'd wager my GPA would have been like a point higher or something.

Disclaimer: I was absolutely one of those "knew the material, scrambling to finish homework as the teacher was collecting it" types in HS, so my grades suffered relative to a purely "material mastery" metric.
Yeah. Because womens brains are exactly identical to mens brains.

Same with their bodies. In fact I can't tell men apart from women. They're biologically identical!

Have you actually had any interactions with real women?
WikiLeaks Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets
I know plenty of women that look at porn, one female friend continually makes jokes about raping me, and if you don't think that women talk about men when they're not around...

Not that I totally disagree with you, and most of my peer group is under 30. Just saying.
You realize that the average man doesn't enjoy programming either, right?

Why shit on the exceptional women who do?

Also regarding kids -- my experience is that while there are differences in wiring, parents and friends do subtle things from even before birth that tend to skew things differently for different genders. Whoa anecdote deadlock.

Why are you so angry? People rarely make sense when they're angry -- perhaps this is true here, too?
Domain Name Seizure and the 'Limits' of Civil Forfeiture