Disqus - Latest Comments for wheels

Re: Income Taxation of Founders’ Stock: A Really Dumb Idea

Scott Wheeler — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:00:40 -0000

The UK has an exception that goes the other way that I find quite reasonable: for the first lifetime £1 million entrepreneurs pay only 10% on the sale of their businesses; after that it falls back to their normal rate of 18%.

Re: VC's, Stripper Poles and G-Strings - Babbling VC

Scott Wheeler — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 23:20:46 -0000

Wouldn't the other really classical case for raising VC be when there's a demonstrably repeatable sales process where customer acquisition costs x and it takes y months to recover that acquisition cost (combined also with being in a large space)? Or would you say that's the typical case to go for garden variety debt?

As a side note, I feel debt in general isn't talked about much in terms of startup financing (other than convertible notes); it's unclear to me if that's because it's especially hard for startups to secure (this is assuming the above of having a demonstrably repeatable sales model) or if it's just off of the radar of most companies.

Re: Calendaring and Timezone Fails

Scott Wheeler — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:56:24 -0000

Same here -- and much worse is not the one hour adjustment of EST / CST, but when going from Europe to, say, the valley often events aren't on the same day. That's a real curve-ball when glancing at my schedule since I'll usually confirm dates with a secondary source beforehand, but often just assume (despite being burned by this) that the date is correct.

Re: US Elections: Democracy 0 - Structural Change 1

Scott Wheeler — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 10:06:04 -0000

Bill Clinton made the most nuanced commentary that I've heard from any politician yet:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-september-16-2010/exclusive---bill-clinton-extended-interview-pt--1

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-september-16-2010/exclusive---bill-clinton-extended-interview-pt--2

He still took the "grow our way out" line of reasoning, but it was the first I'd actually felt moderately convinced by said argument. The pitfall, perhaps, is in his assumption that producing a certain class of skilled workers is simpler than it in fact is, but nonetheless, it's the most compelling argument I've heard.

Re: Pitching to Angels?

Scott Wheeler — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 05:00:43 -0000

I really appreciate it when investors are super specific on their investment philosophy; I think that's really helpful for entrepreneurs.

There's an irony in that investors typically (and rightly) ride entrepreneurs about how they're differentiated, but 90% of VC websites look like they copied and pasted from The Standard VC Website Manual. You know, they're looking for high growth potential companies, with excellent management teams where they can add value.

One of the sites that I've always though (while ugly and less than wonderfully organized) is Bessemer's, for example, they actually go into some detail here about what they like in the SaaS space:

http://bvp.com/saas/default...

Of course, in reality almost all of the real business happens via personal intros through respective networks, but when a first time entrepreneur is trying to get the lay of the land, I think it's important for them to see first that investors vary fairly widely, and it also provides some guidance when doing network diving to see who's worth getting an intro to and who's not, probably saving time on both ends. (I could imagine it being an effective meeting screening tool as well -- if someone hasn't bothered to read up on specific info that an investor has posted, it's likely that they're doing an inverse spray and pray.)

Re: How to Break the Trust of Your customers in Just One Day: Lessons Learned from a Major Mistake

Scott Wheeler — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:54:36 -0000

Well, here's the part that I think is unclear: What is Chargify for? Is it just a payment frontend? Is it for managing billing plans? Is it an account manager? Is it a billing manager? Is it a revenue dashboard?

We don't really care that our free accounts aren't going over Chargify at the moment because the only problems that Chargify solves for us right now are the first and second of those. Working in freemium support wouldn't radically change that. As long as we have to keep a separate database of customer data, it doesn't matter much to us if we push that over in free to paid conversion or at initial signup.

Now, it seems that Chargify is trying to reposition itself as a premium subscription manager. For us, in practice, since we've mostly got a working system now, we won't rip out those pieces to replace them with Chargify most likely even if they come around. But if we were looking at signing up now, one of the things that would be important would be how many of the pieces of the puzzle Chargify solved for us. If we hadn't needed to build a separate account manager, and hadn't had to build a separate revenue dashboard, and (this one we're about to do) didn't need to build our own invoicing system (Chargify's invoices are so plain that we regularly get requests from customers for a "real receipt that they can use for accounting"), then all of the sudden the value is a lot higher -- it saves us a lot of work.

In light of the things we've had to build on our own, as the product currently stands, and had the pricing been what it is now, it would have changed the dynamics of the build-or-buy decision. Having never done it, this may be naive, but my gut sense is using ActiveMerchant and sending our own dunning mails wouldn't be a lot more complicated than building our account manager, revenue dashboard and invoicing system.

I say all of this because that's my fear for Chargify at the moment -- if it's not solving a big enough chunk of related problems, it's harder to justify the (now comparatively high) prices. In a sense it's not the pricing that's the problem, it's the value proposition -- I barely know what PCI compliance is and never felt the need for phone support, but we've always been willing to throw money at problems that remove things that we have to develop ourselves.

-Scott

Re: How to Break the Trust of Your customers in Just One Day: Lessons Learned from a Major Mistake

Scott Wheeler — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 12:04:52 -0000

I think your assumption that your customers aren't doing freemium may be off. We simply don't pass our free users through Chargify since Chargify isn't full-featured enough to replace our internal account manager and at the time when we integrated, different billing for free and non-free users wasn't yet in place. And actually, interestingly, only 15% of our paying customers go over Chargify, which means that we can't really use it as a revenue dashboard. Support for managing purchase orders / PayPal would help on the high-end / low-end, respectively.

Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

Scott Wheeler — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 06:13:51 -0000

2) is possible, you have to click link first (edit: noted that -- I remembered it being there, but thought it'd been removed) and 3) is possible with Backtype.

Re: Social Networking vs Email

Scott Wheeler — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:52:04 -0000

I realized at one point that the generation under 20 doesn't remember email before webmail. At which point your primary interface to email is a web page, it's relatively immaterial if that's hosted by Google or Facebook. IMAP, POP and SMTP are historical anachronisms.

Re: Touch Typing: a 21st Century Skill

Scott Wheeler — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:26:57 -0000

The problem I think there is that you can learn to type pretty well in about 1-3 months; learning to spell is incremental and takes much longer.

I almost feel like what might be needed is a student-aware instructive word processor that is used throughout elementary school, though if someone had presented me with such as a kid, I'd likely have thumbed my nose at them and gone on using WordPerfect.

Re: Touch Typing: a 21st Century Skill

Scott Wheeler — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:50:38 -0000

My elementary school got 3 PS2s in every room the year I started 4th grade, which was quite impressive for a public school in 1989. They rotated so that everyone got an hour a day on a computer and learning typing using a typing game was one of the activities.

The good: I learned to touch type when I was 9. The bad: I've always been a terrible speller because everything of significance that I've produced has been with a spell checker. The funny: we moved a few miles a couple years later and into another school district where I'd be required to "learn" typing again at 14; however, then, in 1994, they were still using those Selectrics and not having a real computer-style backspace was a shock to me.

Incidentally, Germany still doesn't teach kids touch typing at any level. Most programmers here can't touch type.

Re: Why most VCs don’t sign NDAs

Scott Wheeler — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:17:53 -0000

The irony is that I think in most cases an NDA wouldn't really have teeth; I think it's fair to assume that an entrepreneur asking for such is raising money for the first time, and really, which business that's out raising its first round has time to sue a VC over breach of contract?

But there is a commodity implicitly on the table that's probably more valuable anyway -- reputation. In the relatively close-knit startuper world, if somebody's a jerk, everyone will know pretty quickly. If an investor does nasty things they'll get branded as someone you don't talk to.

That said, there's almost something cute about the "the idea is so important" phase. Yessiree, here in these 20 slides is the key to a billion dollars. I think most entrepreneurs have a phase of that with their first startup. Then somewhere along the line they realize that starting a startup is ... hard.

Re: Programmer-Archeologists Needed

Scott Wheeler — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:19:20 -0000

There are a lot of things that I found valuable in working on a large open source project, but really learning to read code is certainly in the top couple.

Though, thinking about it now, it's almost more like dissecting rather than reading: given a large pile of code (say, at least 10k lines) can the interviewee jump into it cold and pinpoint an issue in a reasonable amount of time?

I think being able to pull together the connection points in the architecture is as important as understanding any particular block of code.

Re: Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters

Scott Wheeler — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:32:02 -0000

Another thing that is easy to miss in the excitement of an elephant showing up at your door is that if you're an early stage startup, they're probably not looking to buy your product; they're looking to buy your company. If you don't know the ropes and what that looks like it's easy to get caught up in thinking you're going to do a big sale only to find out that that's not what you were talking about.

Re: Legacy Technology Dies Hard

Scott Wheeler — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:53:41 -0000

That kind of makes me wonder what chunk of people in older demographics have cell phones and how the decline of the payphone affects them. My grandparents are in their 80s and one still works, but I'm pretty sure none of them have cell phones.

Re: Maximising productivity in venture capital

Scott Wheeler — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:33:45 -0000

I also think 45 minutes is plenty.

One thing that might cut down on the fat in presentations is if investors were a bit more up front about where they fit on the things-I-care-about spectrum. If web pages were a guide, every VC on the planet is looking for "excellent founding teams in global markets with high growth potential". But some investors are more interested in seeing you've done your homework and have reverse engineered some 5 year projections; others would just assume do without the hand-waving. Some are more interested in the individual backgrounds of the founders, others just go on a combination of the vibe they get from them and what they've accomplished so far. Some investors get excited seeing a product; others just want to know you've got customers that will vouch for you.

Re: Fixing Threads in Ruby 1.8: A 2-10x performance boost

Scott Wheeler — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:44:09 -0000

Why couldn't you increase the stack size in the signal handler? It'd be expensive with the massive memcpy that would ensue, but presumably better than a crash. If you pass MAP_FIXED to mmap it either puts thing at the same address or fails...

Re: One Thing You Don't Need To Be An Entrepreneur: A College Degree

Scott Wheeler — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:19:16 -0000

A college helps predict if you might be able to succeed. A track record shows that you already have.

Re: The power of links and the value of global knowledge

Scott Wheeler — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 09:27:14 -0000

Hey Paul - a friend just pointed me to this article, as usually happens, after it'd been sitting for a while. Not sure if you noticed our beta-launch on news.YC last week (Directed Edge), but this is pretty much the problem that we're trying to solve. We started off with Wikipedia just since it was a nice big graph to practice on (see, e.g. http://pedia.directededge.c..., but with the idea of using it on social sites.

We've kind of been backed into calling it a recommender engine, since tool-to-pull-neat-things-out-of-info-graphs didn't have quite the same ring to it, but that normally brings up associations with collaborative filtering, and kind of the raison d'être of what we're doing is a similar belief that you can pull all sorts of interesting information out of the social graph.

I'd be super interested if you have any comments.