Startups How do you usually deal with employee's off-boarding? |
- How do you usually deal with employee's off-boarding?
- I built an app that I believe has the potential to grow a user base, but I'm not doing a good job getting signups
- They are trying to take the equity guaranteed in my contract
- Interviewing with startup tomorrow, what % equity should I ask for?
- Bad Timing - New Job and Funding Within Weeks of Each Other
- The Perfect Partner
- Programmers, web developers, tech gurus and businessmen of Reddit, what is the absolute minimum necessary knowledge one needs in order to create a simple forum website, preferably through outsourcing completely with overseas programmers?
- How do you build a community?
- Nonstandard equity split question
- split org or convert to corp?
- Any suggestions for acquiring funding to support a digital educational tool startup?
- Would I be infringing on a trademark?
| How do you usually deal with employee's off-boarding? Posted: 25 Jan 2018 01:43 PM PST This topic is rarely mentioned but I believe it deserves a little bit more attention. In my startup, we were a very small team (<5 people) but at the peak of development, we were 7. After 2 of the guys decided to leave, I started the off-boarding process where, among other steps, I had to remove them from all the services we were using (AWS, Bitbucket, Stripe, Trello, Slack, etc...). Well, unfortunately I left one service behind and one of the guys ended up having access to our AWS account for one more year without my knowledge. Of course the guy was 5* and he also didn't know he still had access to that service. So, one year after, I finally detected it and he was promptly removed from that service. However, that left me thinking "What if that guy wasn't 5* and had left my company angry or annoyed with something? What if he had bad intentions?". He had access to our AWS account for Christ sake! I truly believe this topic deserves more attention because it can open a security breach in your company. Seriously. What do you guys think? How do you guarantee everything is well done after off-boarding an employee? How do you keep track of all the services each team member is using? My startup had only 7 people, but what about companies with 50, 100, 500 people? Imagine an ex-Google employee still having access to all the code because someone forgot to take him off from the Github account! This post is already too long so, thank you for reading to this point. I just want to know your opinions and experiences with such a critical process which surprisingly, is never mentioned. TL;DR - If you forget to revoke employee's access to some service after off-boarding, you may be compromising your company security. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Jan 2018 07:33 PM PST I built this app (dating app) over the last 2 years or so as a side project. It's ready to launch and I'm trying to get pre launch signups, but I'm having a hard time getting the attention of journalists to get some PR. I know it's a saturated market, but I think it's unique enough to have a chance to succeed. To this point I've just been writing emails to PR people (who have previously written about dating apps) telling them about the app and hoping to discuss the potential of writing an article. I've got a few responses, but mostly from smaller blogs that won't do much for traction. I did get a response from a large publication, but one hard lesson I've learned so far is to not reach out until you're close to launch. I lost a pretty good opportunity with long period between initial contact and follow up email. Doing some social media posts as well. Other than that I'm not sure what else to do. I'm willing to sink some money into this just because I've obviously put a lot of time into development, I just don't want it to release -> flop and then be done with it. I have a development background -- with this being my first attempt at marketing an app. Any advice? [link] [comments]  |
| They are trying to take the equity guaranteed in my contract Posted: 25 Jan 2018 03:48 PM PST Apologies for being vauge, the last thing I want is more trouble stemming from them thinking I broke their NDA. Background: I'm a CS student in college and I accepted a pure equity deal (common stock options equal to 2%) just for the experience and my resume. six months ago I was brought on as employee number 1 (technically independent contractor) at a startup. The company provides B2B services and uses optical character recognition to extract data from business documents. I was the sole OCR developer and 90% of the business model is based on the code I was tasked with producing. Contract: my contract stated that my "services" included developing an OCR solution and any other tasks That I did for the business. Equity: stock option plan, 12 month vesting period, with a 3 month cliff for 2% equity total, no dilution. (Currently I'm on month 6) Leading up to today: For the demo that got me hired I developed an OCR solution that extracted all the data from 2 documents. After that the number of documents increased to 20+. The difficulty increased with it as the documents have many formatting inconsistencies. I spent the first month solving the problem for that company's document type (these documents are not produced by our customers simply forwarded to us). (When I refer to type, I mean unique format, size, font, resolution, image noise, etc.) They brought on a potential customer (non paying customer) and he gave us access to hundreds of documents. These were a completely different document format with the same data. I spent 2 months applying my previous processes and developing new ideas on how to solve it. After those 2 months I was able to accurately gather about 80% of the data from that new companies document type. The image resolution was terrible and the discrepancies in what were supposed to be identical documents with different data, were insane. At this point I knew this was not a sustainable business plan. Custom code would be needed for every new document type and each customer could easily have 3 unique types each, with hundreds of documents in each format. The CEO is not a technical person by trade and did not understand the unrealistic expectations. To further explain this, a potential CTO was interviewed and he said if I was able to make my code a universal solution, to scrap the business and sell my code, because anyone would buy something that can do that. The potential CTO then turned down the offer. I then found out that this customer had digital representations of all his documents that wouldn't need image recognition to interpret the data. I informed the CEO that we should focus on this and I would make something that works 100%. I spent the next two months developing and deploying that solution and it works perfectly. I also redesigned the database and added an analytical feature that was requested by the customer. The CEO told me he loves the digital processing software and it has reduced data entry by ~80%. Today: Since I just finished this solution and knowing they would never get the image recognition working with a reasonable level of accuracy (from me or anyone else), I put in my resignation as to not draw out something that would never come to fruition. Him and I both know the business cannot function without my work. He told me that since I never "completed" a universal OCR solution, I didn't do what I was hired to do and I don't deserve my 1% vested equity. I told him it can be difficult to deal with other people's code so if any new hires came along I would help them get situated, so they can carry on where I left off. My code is well commented. He said if the they hire someone new and that person decides to do something else, my code is useless (what does a new hire's ideas have to do with the progress I made?). I did the guy a favor in steering him away from his unrealistic expectations and he agreed to have me make that solution. The fact of the matter is nothing is ever going to be complete, if you have to write new code for every customer. He is calling his legal advisers about taking away my equity. I believe he's under the impression he gets to keep my code too. The contract never specified any deliverables and stated any work I did for them fell under my services. I know my 1% will probably be worth $0 but I'm not going to be taken advantage of. What do I do? TLDR: I have 6 months vested equity and they are trying to take that away, because I spent a significant amount of time developing something we agreed on that was not the initial goal but provided the same outcome. [link] [comments]  |
| Interviewing with startup tomorrow, what % equity should I ask for? Posted: 25 Jan 2018 04:12 PM PST I have been communicating with a social networking type startup and I have an interview tomorrow for a swift developer position. The company has been around for about 18 months and has 7 employees. The job offer says 1.25-3.75% equity vested in 3 month periods over the first year, and I will be paid a salary as soon as possible. They don't have any investors yet and they plan to release a beta version next month. Obviously this doesn't sound like a great deal for me, but the company sounds interesting and I've always wanted to be part of a startup, so I have two main questions. What percent equity would make this potentially worth it?, and from the other side, as a startup how do you convince people to work for equity only, especially so little? [link] [comments]  |
| Bad Timing - New Job and Funding Within Weeks of Each Other Posted: 25 Jan 2018 07:01 PM PST I'm presently in a situation where I have a new job that I just started, but the startup that my team and I have been working on for a year has recently been selected to receive Venture Capital funding. I've only been at my new job for 2 weeks and I had been out of work for over a year so I really need the paycheck. The industry I work in is very tight-knit community, and I fear that backing out now might potentially burn some bridges considering they just hired me. I've received some advice that I should give them at least a year. It pays well and has good benefits. My spouse is desperate to quit a longtime job due to a toxic work environment and already stuck it out at this job for three years while I was working on a different startup. My spouse feels that it's time I paid back all the sacrifices made. It's not software development, nor is it located in silicon valley - where I know it's common for people to switch jobs quickly. The money we got for the startup is enough for about 12 months. Any advice? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Jan 2018 06:19 PM PST |
| Posted: 25 Jan 2018 04:56 AM PST I have read Daniel Shiffman's Learning Processing. I know a little programming. I know variables, arrays, conditionals, algorithms, looping, objects. But I haven't reached Chapter 18 yet - Chapter 18 and onwards is about Data Input, Data Streams and intro to Java. And I know a little bit about network security because I was curious about Bitcoin. I know SSL and web of trust and I learnt some about Internet Authorities and that we now use SHA256 instead of SHA1 and SHA2 (I might be wrong about SHA if I don't remember it correctly but I can look it up again. I still have the link). And I know that your browser generates Private Keys and Public Keys for secure communication and I also studied a little about PGP encryption. I know the passwords of the users' should be stored as hashes. And I know that domain names should be registered somewhere and hosting should be done somewhere else, preferably, although you can do both at one place. I have the old Wordpress and amazon web services in mind, although amazon web services seems a bit complicated at the moment. I know there are Frameworks and Templates but I have never tried them. I have heard of the CMS but haven't tried it either. (I believe these make things so much easier and are especially important as a tech startup) I have been studying these for like 6 months just because I wanted to create a simple forum website and an app for it for my local hometown, so I prefer not to spend more time unnecessarily studying more and more. I will continue to study and refine while I am running it after knowing the things I must absolutely know. It doesn't even need to be complicated. I want it to be like Reddit because I like Reddit's nested comment system. So, it just need Reddit's comment reply system, there will only be one sub, people may be allowed to post images, there will be Captcha, and that's it. I don't know how to deal with spammers yet, that's an issue but I think I will worry about that later after I first create the site. I checked out Voat. Horrible interface and design with lots of wasted spaces. Horrible font. Bulky and unintuitive. I don't intend to create a Reddit clone. I just want to create a way simpler minimalist site with Reddit's comment system. So, I want to outsource foreign coders to create my website. Where do I get these people? Fiverr? What else? Is the knowledge I have sufficient to start my project? If I absolutely need to know some more so that I won't get screwed, what are those things? I only want to know the absolute minimum necessary. Thank you all you smart coders and startups very much in advance. Edit: wow. I didn't expect I would get this many replies. Thank you everyone. I will read each and every one of the replies. Thanks!! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Jan 2018 04:33 PM PST The other day I was listening something on a video sharing app. They had a founder of a company. I was fascinated by the 'crowdsourcing' methodology. So the story goes like this: she's created a community of designers who would create various home decor designs. And Said company would be a marketplace of those designs. If your design would sell you'd get a royalty. Long story short, I like the idea of putting like-minded people together to build great things. Is anyone here who's done something similar? Or do you have any idea what is the right way of recruiting people for the similar mission? I want to create a knowledge base for building companies. So how do I put experienced people together to share their knowledge and experience?... [link] [comments]  |
| Nonstandard equity split question Posted: 25 Jan 2018 08:02 AM PST I'm looking to bring on a developer to help me finish building out my server backend and need a little help figuring out equity. I don't think it's a typical setup. There are currently two people in the(already formed) company, myself at 98% and my dad/advisor at 2%. I've been working on this for 2 years in my spare time and have a product in production. I have 2 mobile apps and an API on servers I stood up and configured. I built everything myself from zero. I've also built a small network of government contacts with 1 soft lead and one deal for funding/licensing being worked out. The funding is to help speed up development. If the funding falls through the same org will pay for the product once it's done regardless. Due to limitations in the first version and me not originally intending to make a business out of it, I have to rebuild to meet new specs. I decided my existing backend solution was holding me back and decided to write one from scratch. I'd say I'm a quarter through rebuilding the server, then I had to go back and patch the apps to use the new server. I don't NEED a developer but I'd like to get this show on the road and speed things up a bit by bringing someone on. I met with a guy I worked with in the past and we went back and forth on requirements and commitments. He's has no obligations outside his day job and we both will work part time after hours to get it done. His commitment would be a few hours a day, more on weekends, no cash contributed. It would be a straight equity deal until we can pay out salaries. He'd work on the backend, I'd continue development on the apps and business side. He asked for 33%. I was looking more at 20 to 30 depending on the commitments and anything else. I see where he's getting a third. He's viewing this as "equal" partnership and seems he's not valuing or is devaluing the existing work done, contacts made and possible funding and contacts on the table. Of course those are not in writing yet so can't be considered hard but I'm putting some value on them, just not what the full value might be. Is my expectation in line? 33% seems steep for coming in and finishing a build out for something that's partially there, has the infrastructure in place, has the data in place and has contacts and a network in place. We're getting together Sunday to look at the code and see exactly what kind of work would be required. I'm not a professional developer, I'm a sys admin, but I don't think my code is garbage and won't need to be rewritten from zero. That's the only scenario where I see 33+. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Jan 2018 01:48 PM PST I started an LLC a few years back doing consulting work that's driving ~$200k in revenue. I built some software that I also sell that is my primary focus and I'm starting to get some traction. I'm considering taking on some investment and am thinking about how to structure the business. Does it make sense to create a new corp. that owns the software and have a separate LLC for my consulting biz? I want to be sure that any consulting work doesn't impact the other part of the business assuming I take on investors. any help on this would be great! [link] [comments]  |
| Any suggestions for acquiring funding to support a digital educational tool startup? Posted: 25 Jan 2018 01:48 PM PST Hello, I have made the leap into the startup world with an educational tool for the maths and sciences. Currently, the app is rough around the edges but the heart is there. Next month I plan to release a public beta that is free to use so I can validate the idea, improve it's design/functionality, and hopefully get a following going. After the beta, the app will remain free to use for regular users and the plan is to sell a service to institutions like high schools and colleges which extends the app's functionality to better suite a classroom's use case. _ _ The Problem I don't have a ton of money. I can sustain the app and keep it live for months -maybe a year, but with the possible increase in users and contractor payments for building out features, I fear the worst. I have considered crowd sourcing to keep the server afloat but I think that'll only take me so far, if anywhere at all. Outside of asking for more money from friends and relatives, how else can an educational tool acquire supportive funding? Are there any grants available for such a thing? . I am going to seek out an investor this year but I'd like to know my options. [link] [comments]  |
| Would I be infringing on a trademark? Posted: 25 Jan 2018 08:42 AM PST I'm pretty disappointed because I think I'd probably be infringing if I were to use this name for my brand (or possibly get declined as a trademark), although if there's potential for it to still happen, that would be good to know. I know any answers on here aren't legal advice, but I'm just looking to see what some think. It's a real word by the way, not something completely made up like Microsoft, for example. I don't want to say the name, so I'll use a random substitute, but still a real word, and call it "Waves" for the sake of this post. There's a pre-existing brand called Waves who pretty much exclusively makes leather goods such as bags, wallets and belts. I wanted to name my clothing brand Waves, which would revolve around clothing - BUT mainly jeans. That would unfortunately fall under the same "clothing/fashion" category, right? Or is it different enough? [link] [comments]  |
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