skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would've been employee #22 at the company. I also worked at another startup - 0.1% for employee #13. That may have been low-balled a bit because I was straight out of high school.

I've heard that the options pool is usually about 20% of the company, the first hire gets about 2.5%, and then it decreases exponentially from there. So the second hire might get 1.5%, the third 1%, the tenth about 0.2%, the 20th 0.01% (perhaps a bit higher; it seemed low to me too, which is why I didn't take the job), and on down. If you gave 2% to each of the first 10 employees, the options pool would be exhausted right there.

Of course, the company is hopefully growing all this time. But if you're employee #20 or even #10 and the company is profitable, they may be heading for a liquidity event soon, in which case there's not much time for growth.

My current situation - no equity at all - is atypical, because it's a bootstrapped startup and the founder really wants to maintain control. IMHO it's probably a mistake - I know I'd work a whole lot harder if I had equity. But I get a decent salary, and it's really the founder's call...
Choice of programming language may improve performance by a constant factor at best. I can't see how Google-sized scalability depends on that. I'd be happy to grow 1/10 or 1/100 of Google!
Emerging?

Anyways, some additional sources

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006/09/03/webdesign-trends-...

http://www.cre8d-design.com/blog/2006/01/12/web-20-design-tr...

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_2_for_designers/
101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed
And beyond good and bad lawyers, there are good lawyers who are a good or a bad match fora specific company and founders. You need to interview a few and select one who seems like a good match.
Get Yourself A Morning Ritual
I downmodded you by mistake because of my fat fingers on this iPhone. I guess either I need to zoom in next time or Paul needs bigger buttons. :)
The man who saddled Google with a saintly motto (Paul Buchheit)
If you read my replies carefully you will realize that we are likely in agreement on many points and that you are putting words into my mouth.

As for the Sapir-Whorf argument the relevant case is not what the Lisp programmer thinks while programming C++ but what the only-C++ programmer thinks while programming C++. Are there thoughts he is not capable of thinking because he has not been exposed to Lisp (or any other non-C++ language)? I do not believe this is the case. How would Lisp have been invented if only Lisp programmers are capable of thinking at that level of abstraction?
I upmodded to compensate :).

[pg: Anyway, why is it that you can't correct your mistakes/change your mind when voting? I think reddit's way of marking your current vote with colored arrows, which you can click again if you change your mind, is better (you may prefer to use shades of grey, or the YComb orange color for the 'chosen' arrow.)]
Your instincts are good - I'd guess that you'd slowly come to despise your job

So, what're your languages/tools of choice?
Steve Jobs' Greatest Presentation
I'll send that part about the cost. WSGR has been known to charge 2x what other firms charge for the same work.
"champagne has a disgusting taste" <-- He can't be serious!
Does anyone have good ideas for specific lawyers to interview, and what the best interview questions are to find out if the lawyer is compatible? (Thanks for all the comments so far!)
Wow, do they add that much more value than other firms?
I was just going to say thanks, but they are not local until I read that they just opened an office in Palo Alto. Email on the way :)
Author Offers Tips for Entrepreneurs
Michael Gerber, a small business expert who founded consulting firm E-Myth Worldwide, will hold a day-long training course for entrepreneurs next month in Denver, Colo., organizers announced this week.
Sorry if I gave that impression. I realise some of the things I said in my latest reply may come across as trying to refute arguments which you of course didn't make. My intention was to go deeper into what you said about the tradeoffs involved. I admit my arguing for high level languages was a bit out of place in that context; I guess I got carried away by the tone in the rest of the thread. In particular, in my last paragraph I didn't mean to imply that you were proposing C++ as a pragmatic solution, esp. for startups. So please accept my apologies.

With the Lisper-coding-C++ example I was trying to convey that even if you could think such thoughts, it wouldn't help you much for practical purposes unless you can express them in a convenient way. So, even if we discard the Sapir-Whorf argument in the literal sense, for practical purposes you may just as well pretend it's applicable.

That said, I find different languages do shape how you think about programming.

The people that invented Lisp were mathematicians, which of course were used to thinking at a pretty high level of abstraction. It's not strictly impossible to come upon the same ideas on your own, just as it's not strictly impossible to come upon ideas that are not expressible in your natural language, even if you accept Sapir-Whorf. After all, somebody had to invent the words of natural languages too.

But there is a huge leap between learning a concept(+) and inventing it. Natural languages evolved over thousands (millions?) of years; modern mathematics took a couple thousand years to discover. Yet most children learn their native languages effortlessly, and a high school kid learns centuries worth of mathematical advances in a few years.

So yes, you could think of the thoughts that higher level programming languages afford without having ever been exposed to those languages, but that would be an exercise of lucidity comparable to finding a bunch of significant new mathematical theorems, or to inventing new words for concepts that can't be readily expressed in English, without having learned about those concepts in French or Japanese before.

(+) edit: idea->concept
Facebook Polls
We have 15 of these. Is that bad?
All languages suck, they're all Blub. Get over it. It seems kind of silly to be a language snob if the team and opportunity are right.

Who knows, you might be able to embed scripting in their product. Maybe automate a test suite with dynamic bindings to their libraries. Or maybe be the voice of reason when someone on the team discovers design patterns or IoC and gets delusions of grandeur.
Doesn't Viaweb doing it in 1995 kind of disprove that statement? I also know that's not true because I was working on web-based products since then using a totally open source setup.
I'm highly interested in the education of young adults, but why 7th graders? 7th graders and programming just don't seem to fit together. Perhaps you're talking to a gifted bunch, but are they really precocious enough to understand the concept of 9-5, let alone "startup"? If not, then I would cut out points 2-5.

I agree that inspiring youngsters is very important, but do you have particular reasons for focusing on the professional aspect of it, as opposed to, say, being able to do cool things with software?

Many years ago, there was a kid at a programming camp; he was a bit too young, but not far off from 7th grade. And he declared that he wanted to learn programming to make games, the kind that he played everyday, some 3D RTS. Starting from scratch, for 2 months, that was quite plainly an impossibility. He probably would've had a more profitable experience if he had more reasonable, and relevant, expectations.

Rather than PG's essay as a starting point to motivate 12-14 year olds, I would be more inclined to use more "palpable" examples, perhaps like the Mars Rovers or movie special effects or something. It'd be pretty cool if you started with a demo where by changing certain parts of the code you could create interesting changes. (But I know nothing about the interests or attention spans of the kids you are going to speak to.)

Just a thought. Please post after the talk!
Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
A cool little app would let us list "problem signs" and we could vote on their seriousness and then assign a weight to each one. Then you could answer it like a survey and get a "Failure Prediction Score".

I'm busy. Someone send me a link when it's done, please.
I would say that the second sentence in your comment was probably more significant than the first.
"A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss."

I think this sentence and those that follow are very insightful, when it comes to communicating our ideas.
of course not. there's nothing better than building a great product (if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing), there's just excitement around talking to investors -- you're getting them excited and they're getting you excited. do you get really really pumped to sit down and work on a bug?
Why place so much emphasis on the language rather than the outlook of the startup? If the startup looks promising and you believe in it. It shouldn't matter if you need to work in _____(Write language here), I'd certainly go for it.
PG and nivi have two ends of the stick.

Think about the competition when talking to your customers, not when talking to yourselves. Don't anthropomorphize the problem. Focus on the problem space, not the people that populate it.
In my case I would. None of the apps I have in my mind are super complicated (relative to other apps that is - though even simple apps have the devil in the details).

If you're looking for performance, ruby is not the place to look. Ruby/Rails is for faster development with good organization, with much less chance of having sphagetti code (like PHP) which results in easier maintenance and evolution.
Currently using rails and like it a lot. I have done some really small sites in rails, but haven't had to deal with scaling or performance yet really.

So I will be learning more about those issues in about a month or so when we launch.
I am still working on the language of choice- I am learning Haskell and Scheme.
Any war stories? I mean, with due respect to veterans and causalities, of course...

Also, what would you recommend instead?
Michael Tsai: Subversion to Git
That's been my experience as well. I prefer Rails over most Java frameworks as well due to all the sugar that comes with a fully integrated webdev stack.

As far as scaling, no problems so far (but this is a relatively small app). To me, as long as a certain response time is met, it's not nearly as important as being agile and organized.

All the frameworks have trade offs. But to me, Rails seems like a good place to be not only because of its technical merits, but also because its strong and innovative community...which is constantly improving the framework (as well as Ruby itself).
Nobody in their right mind has been coding "memory management" in C++ for the last 10 years. This is not early 90s anymore.

Also, if your ability to "accomplish as much as possible" in your life is so severely limited by the programming language s(i.e. tool) you use, then you should probably rethink your approach to engineering.
The kiss-to-ass ratio on that site is just too, too high.

"Hey, everyone, I've come up with a completely banal and already-been-done idea."

Oh, mmm, mmm, Aaron you're so smart, mmm...SMAAck Kiss!
Another thought. Just very recently someone posted "Ask Reddit: what is the most beautiful code you've ever seen?"...

Knowing how much reddit dudes love LISP, Haskell, Ruby and Python, I was very surprised to see that almost exclusively everyone's favorite piece of code was written... you guessed it - in C.
Yet another thought! :-) Since company is so small, you can actually get them to migrate from C++ to D! That would have been awesome...
Jesus... what's up with reinventing the wheel? Just use a normal HTML, for god's sake: we are people, not printers. I already developed a habit of skipping PDFs while surfing, now I'll need to start avoiding links to scribd.

Why work so hard to make your product worse?
Sure I will - Ruby is a wonderful language that I simply adore. I suspect that over time I will slowly migrate to my own replacements for various Rails parts.

Furthermore, there isn't much of "Rails" you have to deal with. What is Rails? Templates? They're more or less the same everywhere. DB access? Databases are dying anyway... What's left? URL mapper? Rails, ASP.NET, Django.. they are all the same to me.
...so, to answer the initial question: yes, I'd use Rails again for a webapp as long as I wasn't planning on building something like Second Life.
So what is the typical % for employee # < 10 ? I know that there will be variance depending on the employee and the employer so I am asking about the average range.
Databases are dying? What will they be replaced with?
"Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon." -Alan Perlis
Git looks really cool, but there just isnt enough support yet to make it a viable alternative to SVN, IMHO. Once there is a good Eclipse plug in, Apache extension, etc we may switch over but until then Git looks to be only really be useful to the most hardcore (think Linux kernel developers).
I've been using White & Lee LLP over in Menlo Park - The folks that are working with me have been a pleasure to work with so far - Only negative thing I can say is that they are not always as prompt as I would like
Yeah, I think that is precisely the problem with C++. The language lets you do some amazing things, but it is just way too complicated. Unless you've spent a long time becoming an expert at the language, it is all too easy to write C++ code that looks correct, but it is actually wrong (either poorly performant, or non-portable, or subtly buggy).

Whereas C doesn't give you all the wizzbang C++ features, but it has the important property that wrong code looks wrong; the language is simple, and there's often "one logical way" to implement a given algorithm. That translates into simpler code (albeit often less expressive), and fewer bugs.
There are some programmers who were just born to code. They can put in monster hours everyday as long as they believe that what they are doing is cool. I was lucky to work with one such individual at a previous job. He was just phenomenally productive and he was working way more than 80 hrs a week. He could write device drivers in days and entire file systems in weeks. If you are lucky you might get to observe someone like that. In some ways writing code to people who are good at it is almost an exhilarating and enjoyable experience. It is easy to get into the Flow and then you just loose track of time. Programming is not really a bursty activity. If you are unable to find the flow and immerse yourself in your code for hours at a stretch find another career.
Aaron Swartz, Supertaster.
It doesn't sound TOO unusual. Facebook apparently is the next Google, and there is no shortage of news about projects being started by ex-facebook engineers. Why would they leave, unless their equity package was pathetic?

The 20% set aside is usually reserved for "key hires" which is assumed to mean a flotilla of VP level people. If you follow the standard Silicon Valley VC-backed startup script, this means the VP of Product, the VP of Product management, the VP of Operations, and so forth. After the A round, engineers are usually looking at an equity maximum of 0.25-0.5%.

"be aware that founders get rich, late-stage employees get paid, and early-stage employees get screwed" is a great maxim. Unless your company is truly on track for a $1B acquisition or IPO, you are not going to be able to buy a house with an early-stage engineer's equity.
While wishing Aaron all the best, seriously, what the heck? Infogami 2.0 with Scribd's mission statement, yeah, great, super. This was on Daring Fireball, even.
Oh, and... eventually you need to know C++, anyway. How it works these days is: employee #9 makes the site in Rails, or Python, or PHP. She makes $70K a year and 0.25% of the company. Eventually, she burns out and goes backpacking in Thailand for a year. Everything tips over, and you need to hire employees 30 and 31. They get paid $170K a year with no equity, cuz they are the only ones who know how to make it all work fast in C++.

Of course, employees #1 and #2 wrote the cool algorithm in Python, hired some other people to do the boring stuff, then let those people argue about Java on message forums while they argue about who gets the "California King" sized bed in the jumbo-jet. ;-)
I completely agree about learning rather than reinventing.

And I think learning different languages in particular is valuable because it helps to intimately introduce one to various useful concepts.

But in general the most valuable of those concepts are both simple and language independent. Typically you can map such concepts used in one domain onto another domain and leverage them there as well.

I don't see the "languages" as being as important or as absolutely dominant over thought as the Sapir-Whorf style arguments imply. Plus I don't believe the arguments in an absolute, philosophical sense. And I've seen the argument made too many times in a way that tends to insult some of our fellow programmers for no good reason.

Anyway, I think we're probably in agreement about a lot of things but perhaps the Internet is getting in the way of our communication. Interesting talk, take care and good luck!
Just because it has been done before doesn't make it not worth doing. Look at the iPod.
Key Provisions of Stock Purchase Agreements
When you buy the stock of a business, the definitive purchase agreement is generally known as a Stock Purchase Agreement. Below are the key points to keep in mind when drafting or negotiating a Stock Purchase Agreement:
Peter Norvig: The Future of Search
True enough. My problem is the oh-you're-such-a-genius vibe I get from the comments there. It's just something I've noticed time and time again throughout my life--people judge based almost entirely on perceived authority, reputation, and past performance. Oddly, it's something that seems to get worse as IQ levels rise.

Now, he's smart enough to pay attention to--I won't fault anyone for that--but when he comes up with an idea that was started by PG (project gutenberg) in 1971 (!) it just ain't a work of genius.
The hard part of a project like this is dedicating years to building it into something large. The programming challenges are relatively trivial next to the total work involved. I'll believe he's serious about this project if he sticks with it after most of the fun technical challenges are solved.
NerdLife  How to Fail Gracefully
I'm using both on different projects. I've run into some subversion bugs and never had any problems with git so far. I'm a fairly boring user who uses the command line interface and doesn't do anything very tricky. I'm enthusiastically using git for all my new stuff.

I definitely think all open source projects should move to distributed revision control, like git, so the commit access problem is eliminated.
My public speaking teacher always drilled into our heads: Know your audience. Thinking back on when I was a 7th grader, I can say for certain that I was never interested in finding a cheap way to innovate, or that I lived in the center of the startup world. Maybe it was just me, but when I was in 7th grade, I was primarily interested in making millions of dollars. Why not mention that you can make tons of money being a hacker (visual: Pictures of successful young founders from Google, Yahoo, YouTube, etc)? There's nothing wrong with that. =)

Of course, now that I'm older money is not the reason I enjoy hacking. But it definitely helped me get into it when I was younger.
We had $16,000 in the bank when we accepted YC funding and were already selling product.

Nonetheless, it was 5% of equity well-spent. I couldn't hire pg, tlb, or Jessica for any amount of money. But when I let them give me $15k, they became part-time employees for three months. Pretty cool deal, I think. But, hey, if you already know where you're going and how to get there...and you just need a few thousand dollars to do it, skip YC. It's not right for you.
> If you are unable to find the flow and immerse yourself in your code for hours at a stretch find another career.

That's like suggesting a writer should find another career because they have writers block. Why not just find a new project and/or working conditions? You even said qualified your report on monster coders with "...as long as they believe that what they are doing is cool".

My experience is that great programmers are especially sensitive to what they're doing. If they can't get genuinely and deeply excited about a project you will never see them shine. I've seen some decent programmers who can churn out decent code like clockwork. As if they work in a factory pressing sheet metal. They can be pushed to work 80 hours easily, although a great programmer could probably achieve the same results in 8 minutes most of the time.
Getting back to the core
"Kozmo started out as a business dedicated to getting consumers what they needed every day," he said. "It morphed form that into being superstore for everything you might possibly want, from books to CDs, and having deliveries as a tack-on. We're going back to the core." ~ http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/14/technology/kozmo_redux/index...

Some of the failed dot-com crash-outs from the late 90's had some interesting ideas that might have worked had they stuck with the core of the original idea? Can you think of any others? My case in point is a re-born kozmo as maxdelivery. The difference? (aside from taking $USD230M from VC's) ...

* charges for delivery reflect reality ($10 minimum order, and there's a $4.95 delivery charge for orders under $50)
* simplifying inventory (focus stays on DVDs, groceries and other daily needs)
* no VC's (company isn't beholden to investors who are more focused on growth than profitability)
* sticking to favourable geography with high living density of

Manhattan NYC (instead of having physical presence in 15 states)

Chris Siragusa has obviously learned his lessons the hard way. Do you know of other failed sites that could have been successful getting back to the core?
Another good point..

Thanks everyone. Your comments are definitely helping. I think I'll retarget a bit. Instead of saying "cheap way to innovate" I'll focus on how it's easy to build fun stuff that people will use and enjoy.

I'll still mention how everything will be software in the future, but will probably skip the center of the startup universe stuff.
How do you think the internet will be in 5 to 10 years?
How do you think the internet, the web, will be in 5 to 10 years?<p>I've been thinking about it for some weeks now, and I bet for the ubiquitous internet with devices with a certain degree of awareness of their environment. I.e. GPS with traffic reports/weather forecast/any-service, bus stops that broadcast the wait time for the next bus, helper systems for disabled people...<p>
1. Silicon Valley bigwig gives you millions of dollars and his connections to help you grow.

2. You build a great successful company worth a lot of money.

3. You're personally rich and successful.

You can see why being on step 1 of a process that is proven to make people rich and successful might be exciting.
Wot, 0 points? I'm being serious. It's like the one thing I remember from having read his weblog before:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/eatandcode
"I don't like the various execution models or scaling issues." Can you be a bit more specific?
I'm pretty much hooked on rails but if you know python already, checking out django couldn't hurt.