It's true that UK banking system is totally wrong (which is interesting, considering that they invented modern banking). There are multiple regulations that make bankers life hard, most prominent being the anti-money-laundering regulation. Generally a completely useless regulation that doesn't protect the financial system in any way (but that's a different story). This system can be hacked though. Normally it will take a foreigner a couple weeks (if not months) to set up a business bank account. But if you will set up a personal account with that bank first, and follow up with setting up the business account later - no problems and instant service. Lesson learned - you need to know your way around, and there's plenty of people that will help you (other startups). You have to consider that London is the financial capital of the world (or used to be), hence the number of fraud and cheating is enormous. They need some ways to structure it, otherwise it would all collapse.
Also, if opening a bank account is something that can kill the startup, please - what will you do when US competitors actually take notice of you?
Front-end developer (HTML+CSS on Python). LinkFindr helps people use their social networks to drive business much like Facebook helped Ivy League students leverage their friendships to get laid. We integrate 4 networks, index thousands of contacts and evaluate connections based on real interaction - then we help people find the right introductions to desired contacts.
One more proof that startups are for people that are into the experience. Not the money, not the credit, just the fun of doing it. If you're about calculating your percentage, figuring out if your're getting paid the largest sum of money around or have the best title - talk to the recruiters of big cos.
Totally agree with you. While you need to fairly sure you are on a path that is capable of providing you with a decent return at some point, the fact remains that you have to absolutely love the journey, otherwise there are a lot easier ways to earn a living... I'm involved in my third startup experience (one decent-ish consulting biz (not really a startup but a new biz nonetheless), one ecommerce biz that went fairly big (in UK terms) and then blew up, and now a social commerce play), and I still get the same feeling of being a kid in a candy shop that is just not present when you are doing (much better paid) work for other people.
Nice polarising title, but:
1. You're not getting screwed, you are making a choice, which is driven by market factors like your alternatives, expected utility from the job etc.
2. The numbers given are quite extreme - if the guy is really worth 100k I find it hard to believe that he would be offered 50k and only 1%. Also his option stake could raise with more responsibility given, this is just the initial negotiation point as I see it.
3. It only makes sense in the Valley or US.
Good point. Also worth comparing startups to regular SMBs, who don't do national TV advertising but rather focus on local listings, niche magazines and outdoor. There is a tool for every marketing job, which for a startup might mean sponsoring a meetup of early adopters, then releasing some shwag, doing PR or advertorials, and ending in harvesting demand via search. Otherwise, when you perceive advertising as a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
A lot of small businesses do seem to do the brand-awareness thing as well, but on a smaller scale, e.g. local TV affiliates. One classic is the annoying/insane mattress salesman with a ridiculous ad that replays constantly, not really to get you to go buy a mattress now, but to build name recognition so that the next time you do need one, you remember that Crazy Uncle Bob's Mattress Emporium exists.
I actually believe the ubiquitous "crazy local salesman" is less about brand awareness, and more about demonstrating a unique selling proposition - even if you know about the crazy mattress salesman down the street, you can still order a mattress online just as well. But you can only interact with a completely hilarious insane person if you stop by the store.
Yes, but as you said yourself it is local (targeted). Also, those ads usually have very precise call to action and very often are connected with current offer/sale/etc. They're also specific to US - very hard to find anywhere else in the world.
As much as I'd always rather have a designer that does HTML on the team (for the sake of quick and agile adaptation), vs someone doing just photoshop, I believe that a good analogy would be architecture. Architects have fairly good understanding of specifics of various materials, their performance as well as associated costs. Still all projects are always reviewed by a 'construction engineer' who converts the architectural vision to workable implementation (that is then on passed to production teams). Taking that example to the online world - designers should understand all of the mechanisms that they will use in the design, and communicate their vision to someone that will implement it. They do not need to actually code it, because following that logic - being a product manager for LinkFindr (and CEO, and business person etc..) I should never allow any designer to spoil my vision with her artistic view, and just storify, mockup, PSD and then code it myself. It takes trust and good communication to split up work in the team, but as Ford proved a couple years ago - when you're running at scale, there is no other way.
Gmail is clearly more of a beta than a functional product (namely attachements don't seem to work), but the biggest question/implication of this change I see is evaporation of any business model (as in 'the ads are gone').
Besides that - I like the UI a lot, but for any offline access to make sens it has to be rock solid (which this obviously isn't).
Attachments should work, with a few caveats. Due to some annoying quirks of the HTML5 FileSystem API, there's a whitelist of supported file extensions. This includes everything useful we could think of, but it's not exhaustive.
The specific requirement for being whitelisted is that it shouldn't have a MIME type that Chrome wants to open inline. Give me a list of extensions that you'd like to see supported and I'll see what I can do.
Screensavers are just special exes on Windows and are commonly used as viruses. Might be better not to whitelist that one and instead convince people to zip them up if they really want to send them.
I think that there are a fair number of mail filters that block .scr entirely, anyhow. In that respect, they're similar to .bat, .vbs, .wsh and the like.
Alternatively, you can just offer to automatically zip those for the user. Actually, that might be a good idea for all unrecognized files because it avoids a lot of weird problems with funny extensions that are automatically blocked.
As a developer who sometimes have to send a zipped project with a compiled build inside, I find this "feature" extremely annoying. I usually end up renaming the file from .zip to .lol or similar.
My experience was the opposite, unfortunately. Why can't the offline gmail application use the same UI as the online one? To me, that would be the obvious way of doing it.
Adblock? Please. POP / IMAP - valid points. But this is slightly different - it's a product they designed from scratch, control the UX etc. Still - no business model.
Perhaps they figure it is better for users who need to reach their email while offline to use Google's offline web app occasionally instead of moving to POP/IMAP altogether.
in an offline mode how would you monetise offline ad clicks? google's business model is based on ctr not cpm. are you thinking of caching ads/pages too?
I don't imagine they need to monetise this part. The offline app simply makes Gmail even better and gives those who use desktop clients one less reason to stick with them. As a result of this more people will end up using the normal online app and therefore clicking more ads.
The thing is - with the new interface, that is perfectly accessible through the browser AND makes sure your offline is in-sync why would people carry on using the regular version?
Deck is doing that somehow (caching ad impressions at least) - so it is an addressable issue. However - this app works both in online and offline mode, so my point was not really touching the offline ad problem - thanks for pointing it out.
