Startups Is it normal for a startup to begin operations in the offices of another company? |
- Is it normal for a startup to begin operations in the offices of another company?
- startup while employed (IP, legal)
- Any experience with 3rd party card readers?
- Are ICOs the Future of Early Stage Startup Funding?
| Is it normal for a startup to begin operations in the offices of another company? Posted: 10 Dec 2017 08:51 PM PST I'm thinking of a company I used to work for way back, towards the start of my programming career. I was hired by a startup who didn't even have their name listed in the office directory. No joke, the front desk didn't know the company I mentioned, so I had the hiring manager come downstairs to pick me up and take me to his offices. So we went into the offices, they are for a different company, call it Business A, and they are big. Took up most of the floor. After passing by a bunch of cubicles, I then went into the meeting room with a few other people, who I interviewed with. Shortly, I got a job offer from them. Here's where the company started feeling differently. I thought I was going to get a cubicle desk set up and work from there. Nope, we worked in the same meeting room that I interviewed in! Actually they use two meeting rooms- one for most of the work, programming and designing the products for our business clients (the startup is a B2B), and the other room was occasionally occupied for instances where client phone calls need to be made, so as to not bother the other workers. I worked here for a few months and nothing changed. Same office, same meeting room where all the workers (programmers, PM's and designers) huddled on one table. Some of us were perplexed by the arrangement. Well, we found out that one of the founding partners, who was the same guy who called me in for the job interview, works for Business A, and it's that company who owns all the space. When he's working for Business A, he is a marketing lead, and a board member. He's extremely busy and not easy to get a hold of, because he runs back and forth between his day job and the "meeting room office" of his startup. Business A is in an industry that has nothing to do with the startup, and they don't seem to be directly involved with it. The co-founder just asked the CEO of Business A if he could sub-lease two meeting rooms in which to run his own shindig, to which they agreed on. I was still turned off by the fact that he didn't accurately represent our work space and he could accidentally mislead his new workers into thinking they'd be working in the cubicles. We found out that this has its problems. A year later, Business A was hit by a lawsuit. A couple of passengers (customers, not employees) got killed in a bus that the company made event arrangements to. Somehow, they were complicit in the causes of the accident. As a result, they lost about 2 million in revenue and downsized their office space, taking our meeting rooms with it! So the startup moved rooms. Now we were moved to a storage room that stores lots of office supplies. I could have stomached working in a meeting room but now the setup really felt ghetto. It caused turnover with some employees. They got tired of seeing the startup not just break the umbilical cord and drop dependence on Business A. So has anyone done this with their own startup when it was new? Not quit their main job, but still run the startup as a side gig with a bit of help from the company? From my own experience it sounds like only a last-ditch plan that isn't reliable, but what are your thoughts? [link] [comments]  |
| startup while employed (IP, legal) Posted: 11 Dec 2017 12:49 AM PST |
| Any experience with 3rd party card readers? Posted: 10 Dec 2017 05:27 PM PST I have an idea for a quick way for local charities to process donations with a quick credit card tap as opposed to a traditional change jar kind of like DipJar. Obviously, my first instinct is to go with someone like square who has produced this which has the functionality I am looking for but this product requires someone to enter a price every time someone wants to donate and that is just too much friction. After researching online I have found products akin to this and this which from what I can tell would receive the payment information required and require me to program with the provided sdk the standard amount and process the card. Am I totally misunderstanding this tech? Has anyone used these simple chinese nfc card readers? Are there any other one step credit card processing products out there? [link] [comments]  |
| Are ICOs the Future of Early Stage Startup Funding? Posted: 10 Dec 2017 05:35 AM PST Found this great text on Medium by Michael K. Spencer: The Implosion of Early Phase VC Funding The implosion of early phase VC funding might be what was needed for ICO crowdfunding to take off. Think about it, where better could the future of innovation come from then via the trust advocating blockchain? Between unregulated crypto bubbles and a mad race to Bitcoin futures (derivatives), it's make or break time for the Bitcoin madness and we are probably witnessing a new kind of crowdfunding and entrepreneurship. We are witnessing new technologies and blockchain experiments that are creating new jobs and new avenues of how new companies can thrive, and could receive early-phase startup funding in the future. On the other hand, Venture Capital in Silicon Valley is also changing. Since 2014, the amount of VC rounds in technology companies worldwide has nearly shrunk in half from 19,000 that year to 10,000 in 2017. While the amount of money being invested has remained more or less steady, funding has concentrated in later stage companies, away from newly-minted startups. There are a number of possible reasons for this: the popping of a seed funding bubble during the shift to mobile, the movement away from funding apps, Fintech and SaaS startups, and increasingly risk-averse angel investors. Source: LinkedIn. Why we aren't talking about this more is beyond me? Not only does it seem like Venture Capital sexual harassment scandals have hit leadership in VC, Silicon Valley is no longer making it rain so much as it is making it trickle. What's a startup to do? As the level of diligence at the seed stage seems to have increased significantly over the past few years, at the same time, we've witnessed the rise of ICOs and blockchain innovation. Many formative waves of tech verticals, are no longer hot and have either made it, or no longer exist. Regulation of the blockchain must be careful not to curtail the positive impact it can have on democratizing innovation itself. It might be the wild west of ICOs in recent months, but as better regulation occurs, a rating-system is put into place, and more case studies of startups who create win-wins with this new method of crowdfunding occur, yes ICOs could play an increasing role as a proposed solution to the early phase startup funding crisis. This then, means that the crypto hype can fuel not only new kinds of innovation on the blockchain, but the startup community and entrepreneurship itself ushering in a new paradigm of consensus based community and collaboration, in what was once such a cut-throat elitist game of tech. Correct me if I am wrong? [link] [comments]  |
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