The answer to the eternal question: "Where do I find a technical cofounder?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.hailpixel.com/articles/technical-cofounders <comment><USER3> You don't. They find you.

Technical co-founders are necessarily naïve.

Why?

Because once they've been one once, they don't want to be one again. The only "serial" technical co-founders I've encountered have usually failed to get to the MVP stage of any of the companies they've founded, and thus don't know the hell their path leads to.

I speak from first-hand experience. I would sooner chew my own legs off than do this again. Not because I dislike my company, or don't like what I do today, but because it's traumatic, and I've no desire to go through it again.

It costs you years of your life, you don't get sleep, or friends, and at the end of it all, nobody will thank you, they'll just resent you, as those that were there from the start never realised just how much the technical co- founder did to make things work in the early days (not so fond memories of not leaving my desk for 9 grim, sticky days), and those that started later don't see the technical co-founder getting as involved in the technology as much, and thus view them as disconnected.

Damned either way.

If you get someone in with experience, they'll tell you to get bent, won't do the death-marches that you often need to get the ball rolling, and will want to be paid their worth, rather than nothing.

So yeah - your only hope is to get to know technical folks while they're still learning, and get them in then - otherwise they'll know better and will refuse your poisoned chalice.

<comment><USER4> I commented below, but personally every time someone comes to me with an idea I ask for 75% equity. Usually people scoff and walk away, but sometimes people are willing to negotiate.

To me it's always amazing how little equity some technical cofounders obtain. Ideas, like talk, is pretty cheap. Coding for years is pretty damn expensive.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm being naive, but there can be something else that the non-technical founder brings that is equally valuable to the tech stuff: paying customers. If they have actual customers that are ready to pay, then the deal may be worth it even for less than equal share of equity. Another is cash investment (not relationships with investors, real cash of their own that they are willing to invest).

I think most of these non-technical founders just have a fantasy about a product idea and it really is worthless. But if they have a good network of contacts and people ringing their phone for whatever they want you to build then that is some value.

If these idea people are so sure of their ideas, they can finance development using freelancers and they don't need a technical cofounder. If technical cofounder is just doublespeak for programmer willing to work for free + equity, only someone very naive will take it.

<comment><USER6> Yes, people with money or people who already sold their (non-existing) product are indeed a good match and as scarce as good co-founders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I met a business guy who explained his attitude to tech guys to me, over a number of meeting about starting a venture.

\- Tech guys can just sit back once the website is built and cash in forever, while the marketing and business guys have to keep on the ball. \- You can rent an army of developers in Eastern Europe for no money at all. He had 30 guys doing his one-pager color split testing for him. \- All the value is in the marketing and supply chain. He's 80% of the value and feels screwed giving the tech people 25%.

Funnily enough we never got that one launched.

<comment><USER8> Flip side is most tech guys think the business guy is an idiot. people suck at realizing other disciplines have worth.

<comment><USER9> Many (most?) of the business guys who you end up talking with in those situations _are_ idiots. The ones that can execute often already are, and aren't wasting their time doing cofounder dating.

Likewise by the time you're scrounging around looking for technical cofounders, you're at meetups and startup weekends, and most capable technical folks never end up going to those - they're either happy in their current situation, or working on something of their own.

<comment><USER10> > _The ones that can execute often already are, and aren 't wasting their time > doing cofounder dating._

The same can be said about programmers, I guess. What a horrible attitude.

FYI: many startups fail because the founders don't have a clue that a business involves far more than writing code. Sometimes you need "people skills", and when you think you're God's gift to a business, you're probably lacking there.

<comment><USER9> I thought I'd addressed that with "Likewise by the time you're scrounging around looking for technical cofounders, you're at meetups and startup weekends, and most capable technical folks never end up going to those".

I'm not at all saying everyone who is at every networking even is a total loser. Far from it. I've met some interesting folks at events over the years (cofounder dating, meetups, startup weekends, etc). But I also tend to meet a disproportionate number of "idea folks" who try to push NDAs before telling you about their next "big idea".

And on the tech side, there's usually a few tech god/wizard folks who can literally do almost anything with a few keystrokes, and other people who are just getting started, have a lynda.com or treehouse account, and want to hack away. It's not necessarily a bad attitude to have, but usually the skills aren't enough to execute enough to get traction.

I'm sometimes surprised at how far people get with so little, and those are the people I tend to want to work with or help out in some way - regardless of the industry/work/project. I like working with people who can get stuff done. It's just harder to do that at many networking events, because the people who are 'getting stuff done' usually don't have time for those events because they're getting stuff done.

Couldn't tell if you meant "horrible attitude" at me directly because of the comment or what.??

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a supporting anecdote, I'd like to share the story of how my non-technical cofounder found/"grew" me (or rather, grew the relationship), and why I think it worked.

Last year I was in my final year of university. The school I graduated from, BYU, has a strong business program and a culture of entrepreneurship. A number of my friends and acquaintances contacted me with ideas for tech-empowered businesses they wanted to form, but I had the sense to stay away from anything that sounded like "I had this great idea for a business last week, why don't you build it for me and we'll see what happens."

When my now-cofounder Sam approached me, it was a very different experience. It was obvious that he had put months of work into developing his idea on his own time, with mockups and tons of user testing of various ideas, and literally had gone as far as he could without actually building the product. Even after we decided to start working together, we spent several months contracting together for a 3rd party, before we finally decided to strike out on our own. When we eventually did form a startup, we split the equity 50-50 and we've both been working 110% since day 1.

In retrospect, I didn't end up joining with Sam because the idea was much better than the other ones I'd heard about, or because he had access to connections or capital that I couldn't easily find myself. It was because he demonstrated clearly that he didn't consider the idea alone to be 80% of the value, respected what I brought to the table, and worked hard enough to bring his half to the table too.

I guess my best advice to the non-technical looking for a cofounder (beyond learning as much as you can about the tech side of the business on your own) would be to try to find ways to demonstrate, through your actions, that you have what it takes to push a new company forward. The actions Sam took on his own, and when we first started working together, demonstrated that to my satisfaction, which is why I was more than happy to sign on as a cofounder.

<comment><USER12> I'd add that calling Sam "non-technical" stretches the definition a bit. Sure, he wasn't cutting code, but the sort of design work he did to prove and evolve his idea is also the sort of work a lot of us "technical" people do at various times.

Sounds like he had a bucket-full of clues, including the equity distribution, which doesn't sound like it was hard to negotiate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am running multiple eCommerce businesses as a tech guy where I provide a platform that can be plugged straight to another business area with minimal costs - to take care of those areas I usually find a business person and offer a generous 50/50 split in equity and rights as I want everyone to feel useful and in control.

What I noticed from some bad examples of business guys I tried something with is that some of them 1) don't have a clue nor willingness to improve 2) are very frustrated they don't own the additional 1% to be completely in charge 3) try to restrict the flow of business information towards me 4) treat tech as an easy thing that must work 100% on autopilot while they don't do much at all.

Whenever this happens I give those persons an out; we can shut the business down immediately (for me it's just another business test that didn't go well and it needs to be resolved ASAP as I don't like to waste time) or those things must change.

It's difficult to find a business person that doesn't want to become super rich in like one year and that really wants to treat the business as an equal partnership and have fun growing it. If you find one, stick with them, it's pure gold.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here are my observations as an initially non-technical person working on a relatively technical side-project that requires the help of others:

1\. Non-technical people (myself included) often have a bit of a complex about being non-technical. They are well-steeped in the YC/Stanford/Valley zeitgeist and believe their project won't be taken seriously if it doesn't have legitimate engineering talent on the founding team. Depending on the product and the team's growth strategy, this may or may not actually be true.

2\. I would posit that fear of not finding a technical cofounder (FONFATC, I just coined an acronym) is really three related, but distinct fears: a. Fear of not being able to get the MVP / beta / 1.0 versions built. b. Fear of not being able to raise money to grow because VC's won't take your team seriously if you don't have a technical cofounder. c. Fear of not being able to recruit good engineers as you scale from, say, 3 people to 15 people. (The reasoning being, good engineers are going to have doubts about working for an organization that doesn't have a technical cofounder; both in terms of not wanting to be supervised by people who don't understand the technical fundamentals and in terms of working in a non-engineer-centric culture).

3\. Non-technical people in some cases spend more time trying to find/recruit a technical cofounder than they would have to spend to learn the necessary technical skills to build a basic MVP. Not 1.0, ready-to-ship-to-paying- customers product, but MVP. Getting technical people to join your project is a less painful proposition once you have a product, even a crappy one.

4\. Technical friends might not be willing to join your project as a cofounder, for reasons including: you can't pay them the salary they want/need; they're working on their own thing; they don't want to quit their sweet job; they think your idea is dumb. Even in these cases, you can get a lot of help from them if they are in fact your friends. They may not be interested in getting on your cap table, but they'll probably do a monthly code review with you if you ask nicely.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've got a different question: "Where do I find a non-technical cofounder?" It seems people that understand tech but also have sales/management skills are a rare scarcity.

<comment><USER16> what are you going to do with a non-technical cofounder that has "sales/management" skills? That implies that you already have a product built.

A truly valuable non-technical cofounder will be a product developer, not a sales/management guy. The most valuable type of marketing is baked into product development.

<comment><USER17> Funny you say this.

All the non-technical cofounders told me, they didn't build a product but the product idea, business plan and marketing strategy are already done. Now they just need a dev to implement the software and they are good to go.

<comment><USER18> >product idea, business plan and marketing strategy are already done

If they say this, their failure probability is too damn high. What many first time founders don't understand is that startup is a search process in the outlandishly uncertain world. You can't "do" the product idea and strategy before you iterated on your initial hypothesis and verified/discarded/revised it.

This is like startups 101, explained in the basic level entrepreneurship courses on edx/coursera and founder must read books like "lean marketing for startups" and "startup's owner manual".

If a business-side guy or girl doesn't know that, disregard them.

<comment><USER17> Oh, I do :)

> You can't "do" the product idea and strategy

Most of them tell me, they did marked research as a proof for their idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I meet such people in meetups, all I hear is "I am the next Zuckerberg but I have no idea how things work. Where do I find someone to do the work for me?"

<comment><USER20> That would be an easy one to answer - Zuckerberg did all the coding and hired a non-technical founder.

More aggravating are the ones who think they're the next Steve Jobs and just need their Woz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having spoken to 10 - 20 of these people myself (business majors at my University always tried to convince CS majors to do their ideas). Some of the post was decent advice, you have to befriend technical cofounders first (i.e. grow).

Something I would add though, if you are a non-technical cofounder it needs to be either equal equity footing (if you are bringing a fair amount of sales/marketing). Otherwise, forget it, I would want 60 - 70% equity. Without my ability to code, you've got nothing. It seems a lot of technical founders sell themselves short in this regard.

Finally, for me, it's always been hell finding a decent designer. The two I talk with regularly are outrageously busy, but usually they can help out. It took me a year or two to find these guys and now we have some synergy, but finding a designer is hell.

<comment><USER21> Sounds about right for what I would ask for, and I have never found a company. Crunch time is already bad enough at a lot of companies, but an extended one to get the first product even out is probably the worst of them all - <USER2> compensation needs to reflect that value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not a founder, only a developer, but non-technical people asked me if I want to be their cofounder.

Most of the time they are teams of a few business people who do marketing and biz-dev.

When they tell me about their idea, I often think that the only bad thing about their idea is the part, where the company has to supply 4 people, where only one of them can build something.

Also they often see a technical cofounder as a work-horse and not a partner...

<comment><USER9> Almost inevitably, there will be 3-4 people vying for their ideas to be implemented, sometimes conflicting with each other, sometimes conflicting with what's actually possible technically, and the sole dev guy will end up caught in the middle of all this - not unlike corp work, really. And yeah, they'll almost never see you as an actual CO-founder or equal in any way. I've seen that happen (equality) but more often than not, the situation you described.

If you can't "sell" something until every single pixel is perfect and it scales up to instagram levels on day one and everything else is in place because you "only get one shot at impressing person X (or... first customer)"... you're doing something wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't seem to load the page...

That said while we're on this topic, I've always enjoyed Drew Houston's take on it:[http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co- founder...](http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founders)

"Unfortunately this is a classic problem. "How do I find a really hot single girl to go out with?"

* Good technical people will have ideas of their own that they're excited about, and working for a non-technical founder who, by the way, doesn't know or appreciate the difficulty or time it takes to make something well-engineered and undervalues you from an ownership standpoint, gets old quickly.

* People who are not hands-on building the product at the very early stage of the startup are usually not terribly useful until later, because building the product is most of the real work early on.

* Good engineers have a wealth of compelling opportunities at any given time, so it gets even worse if the non-technical founder is inexperienced, or hasn't already brought a lot to the table (funding, etc.) See, for example, [http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-1...](http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-12.html#e2010-12-01T15_45_40.htm) one view of how technical people perceive "idea guys" who "just need a programmer."

So, what can you do?

* One is look for a technical cofounder, not just an early employee, and give commensurate equity. Again, bear in mind that frankly he or she will be more valuable than you at this phase.

* Two is learn to code enough to bang out a prototype -- this will also make you a better engineering manager if you can appreciate the technical craft and can empathize with engineers. And there are tools like Balsamiq that can help create reasonable mockups that can convey your idea without writing code.

* Three, search the far corners of the earth for talent -- maybe you'll get lucky and find a CS student who hasn't been jaded by bad experiences with arrangements like this. Or, if the technology you need developed isn't rocket science, you can try outsourcing, which is its own Pandora's box. Derek Sivers has a good post on managing that: [http://sivers.org/how2hire](http://sivers.org/how2hire)

Good times, but this is what business cofounders bring to the table, right? They figure shit out, and it's hard work. Hiring the early team is just the beginning."

<comment><USER23> "* Two is learn to code enough to bang out a prototype -- this will also make you a better engineering manager if you can appreciate the technical craft and can empathize with engineers. And there are tools like Balsamiq that can help create reasonable mockups that can convey your idea without writing code."

I've always been confused by how this is meant to help - could you explain further? I've always been a technical founder, but I've never had any idea how to find a technical co-founder - as you correctly say, good technical people will have their idea they're excited about! So I'm always skeptical that "make a prototype" would work to convince anyone, but perhaps it would - is there some hidden pool of good engineers who exist in some weird fugue state of "show me a cool semi-working website and I'm on-board", outside of, like, 1st year CS?

<comment><USER22> I can talk about something completely different– I'm a writer, and I work with visual designers. They much, much prefer it when I can give them a terrible sketch of an idea rather than a lengthy diatribe about what I want. Because it's far easier for them to apply their design sensibilities to a crappy sketch than to a cloud of words.

Similarly- I don't think it's "show me a cool semi-working website and I'm on- board", but more of- "Show me something that I recognize immediately as a really good idea, even though it's kind of crappy in execution."

I'm reminded of what Jong-Moon Kim wrote about Pixar movies: [http://jiggity.com/kitchen.html](http://jiggity.com/kitchen.html)

> Pixar uses a structure known as a braintrust to delicately examine works-in- > progress. The braintrust is composed of some of the best storytellers of our > generation who take a supreme effort in understanding the director's intent > before offering suggestions.

> What's most incredible is that this feedback from the world-class cabal is > merely suggestive and the director has the power to reject changes. The > braintrust is aware of the danger of heavy-handed feedback squashing the > soul of the product.

> New ideas are delicate and brittle. What starts off as a ugly, tangential > feature later grows up to become a fundamental part of the final product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cached version : [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BXa1Cn2...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BXa1Cn2TzMIJ:www.hailpixel.com/articles/technical- cofounders+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

</comment><comment><USER25> > A close friend once said that, in order of seriousness, relationships go > "business partners, spouses, cats & dog."

Prioritizing cofounders over spouses surrenders Silicon Valley's moral authority and undermines its cultural leadership.[1]

I've always found prioritizing cofounder over spouse a sad depressing commentary on priority of money over change by bad actors. Innumerable colleagues and VCs have quoted me unprompted, "You can divorce a wife, but you can't divorce a cofounder," leading me to doubt their integrity; It's only true if you prioritize your business over your vows.

It is far more difficult to succeed when prioritizing family, but such is the burden of leadership. Moral authority, a prerequisite of true leadership, derives from such commitments.

[1] Power derived when a leader embodies the values of their followers.

</comment><comment><USER26> I know this is a bit snarky, but honestly: ask.

It is the startup world, there's risks everywhere. Find someone, and if you kick off well with them, then go ahead and try.

If you spend too much time bothering about details like the perfect technical cofounder or non-technical cofounder... chances are you're not putting your time and effort into your actual startup.

In my experience, it's simply been the potential of something that attracts people who actually have a passionate interest. They're the best people. Technical or not.

</comment><comment><USER27> Two remarks:

First, for non-technical founders, get technical yourself or at least get started: Get a computer, settle on Linux or Windows, get documentation, read, type in code, get it to work, and then build at least something simple.

Second, for technical people considering being a technical co-founder, here are is a threat you should watch for: Basically, the people in the start up, especially the non-technical people, may believe that it is in their interest to block your entering the company or, if you enter, throttle or block your contributions and push you out of the company.

Here those people may understand that what they are doing is bad for the company but believe that it is, still, good for them in the company. In the B-school subject _organizational behavior_ , such behavior is called _goal subordination_ because the person places the good of the company lower ( _subordinates_ it) to what they see as their own good.

In particular, a non-technical person, might work hard to hire a technical person with the intention that the technical person will fail so that, then, the non-technical person can have an excuse for not being more technical themselves.

Can such wacko things actually happen? Heck yes.

</comment><comment><USER28> How to attract a technical cofounder? Have several of the following... 1\. Previous success at starting a company 2\. A budget 3\. Previous success at raising funds 4\. If it's B2B, have industry connections and sales experience 5\. If it's B2C, some serious expertise in the field 6\. Some sort of evidence that you are a true hustler and not starting a company because you are bored with your day job

</comment><comment><USER29> Seems like good advice.

I'm in the fortunate position of being on the technical side and, I suspect like a lot of technical people, I've turned down plenty of 'opportunities' from ideas people. If you were coming to me hoping to get me on board with your idea, offering anything other than equal footing on the equity side would be a total non-starter. In the majority of cases even that would probably be a crappy deal.

One thing with this:

 _" If you just need someone who can understand your vision and create the software which allows it to function, you are searching for an employee."_

I guess it depends on how technical your product is but I think in the beginning you need to have serious commitment from the technical team. They _really_ need to care about getting the product right or dropping what they're doing on the weekend to deal with a support request. It could mean the difference between life and death for your company.

</comment><comment><USER30> And the answer to the eternal question: "Where do I find a salesperson cofounder?" ? :-/

<comment><USER31> or alternatively, "where do I find a good marketing/bus dev co-founder?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm the technical co-founder. My bizdev/sales co-founder found me when he read an article about my product. He'd considered building a business in the same market space, but lacked the technical resources, so when he discovered my fledgeling but ramen-profitable product, it was a natural fit.

In the two years after we started working together, we grew our customer base about 40x.

I'm not sure if this is a scaleable answer to the "where do I find a technical co-founder" question, but it has worked at least once. :) If you're a non- technical person looking for a startup opportunity, I'd recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER33> May I also ask: how do I get a paycheck, w/o working?

Also, how do I get someone to work for me for free, and I'll mange the cap table?

And last: is it possible in non fantasy world to be gainfully employed, but not even know HTML?

</comment><comment><USER34> Easy, pay me more than the competition (big corporates, public sector etc) Because of the increased risk of default, you have to offer more. So convince seed/angel funders and then seek me

</comment><comment><USER35> On the other side of it, what's the best way for a technical founder to find a sales/business guy? (Has HN discussed that before?)

<comment><USER36> You grow them, just like the article says. I think this applies as much or even more to sales and/or bizdev than to technical co-founders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> You become one yourself.

</comment><comment><USER38> The biggest problem I have with getting an offer to be a technical co-founder is that if this person's main interest is in business, why are the not already rich? A developer's main area of focus is not money so they are less apt to accumulate much, but if your central focus in life is business, then I can't really have a good feeling about your skills if you are not currently rich or have built a successful company. It's like saying you are a great developer but you don't have any software or code to show for it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Tech cofounders might be in a state of frictional shortage. Before people argue with me (it's rare that I'd call engineering talent in a state of "shortage") I think it's important to note that fault lies with the business co-founders. By "frictional shortage", I mean that cultural factors (low social status of technical people, due to a half-century of us selling ourselves poorly) prevent the market (with equity a larger factor in this market than salaries, because tech base salaries are quite reasonable) from clearing.

Right now, business co-founders trade 2-4 points higher on a 10-point scale. I'm a Tech 8, and a Biz 8 wouldn't, realistically speaking, mix with me. A Biz 6 would try to push me down to 5-10% equity, with the cliff and vesting that would make me more of an employee than co-founder anyway, and take the CEO job.

A Biz 6 can deliver Sequoia on an idea, and a Biz 8 is turning away executive- level offers and board positions and 11-to-3, 7-figure jobs at VC funds. A Tech 8 is happy to break $140k and get interesting projects. I've written at length about this skew: [https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/an- insight-o...](https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/an-insight-on- the-damaso-effect/) . Biz 8 have other, very lucrative, options. A Tech 8 who is objectively just as good at his job (and a harder job) doesn't have the same.

The Tech 8+ drop out of the co-founder market around age 30 (and it's rare that someone even gets to Tech 8 before that age) because they get used to Biz 5's offering 2.5% equity to work on someone else's idea (as opposed to a shared idea with hard technical problems at the core).

See, too many business co-founders want to charge so much for the investor- level contacts, like they're Marlo fucking Stanfield charging $10 million for "a connect", that people usually trickle out before they even get to the Tech 6+ (much less Tech 8+) level. Jeff Dean stays in-house at Google for a reason.

Technical co-founders wouldn't be hard to find if the market could clear. They're hard to find because, while early-stage startups can't pay market salaries for understandable reasons, sociological factors keep equity amounts at shortage prices for good tech talent.

</comment><comment><USER40> This depends highly on whether the company is funded or not.

</comment><comment><USER41> Ideas are worthless, its all in the execution. If all you have is cute ideas go scam people on the Kickstarter.

</comment><comment><USER42> Ask them: how much time do you waste endlessly commenting on ridiculous articles on Hacker News?

If it's anything more than zero, they are a poser and fake.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone out there using Developer Anarchy / Micro-services? - <AUTHOR>

I am interested in this "post-agile" methodology.  Well idea rather than methodology.
And I am wondering if anyone here has experience, good or bad, of the idea of, well, putting developers in charge? <comment><AUTHOR> I did not put any links in the text as I think HN Bot blitzed it the last time I asked. But if you google Fred George you should see a couple of good YouTube introductions</comment>


Show HN: Run.travel – Run a marathon. Track your flights, hotels, and rentals - <AUTHOR> https://run.travel <comment><AUTHOR> My wife is 29/50 for US states. We fly a lot, and stay in a lot of hotels, and rent a lot of cars. It would be helpful to have a website to keep track of several trips in various stages of planning.

So we built run.travel to help you find and plan your next marathon. I hope you like it!

This is just the first release. There are several more things I want to get done:

\- Search more places than just Active.com. Active was the easiest to do.

\- Hotel and rental car search. Flights was the more important one to do in the first round.

\- Freeform note-taking to store flight info, hotel info.

\- Email alerts or push notifications on race-weekend.

\- Better platform for sharing post-race reports.

If you're planning an upcoming flight, try out the fight search on run.travel, it'll really help us out.</comment>


Ask HN: Does Squarespace Make You Enter the Sales Tax for All Zip Codes? - <AUTHOR> If so, here is a free startup idea for anyone enterprising. I have too many things I am working on.
https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206540947-Setting-up-taxes-in-Squarespace-Commerce
Squarespace forum posts seem to confirm:
https://forum.squarespace.com/topic/151517-squarespace-sales-tax-issues/?tab=comments#comment-332158
https://forum.squarespace.com/topic/151482-sales-tax/?tab=comments#comment-332046
And elsewhere:
https://www.reddit.com/r/squarespace/comments/8wmulh/how_to_configure_sales_tax_in_the_us_after_the/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body
https://accountingforjewelers.com/sales-tax-ca-squarespace/ https://www.printful.com/faq/taxes-and-billing/sales-tax/374-how-do-i-configure-my-ecommerce-platform-to-charge-the-correct-tax-rate- <comment><USER2> Zip code alone isn't enough to define tax jurisdiction. One zip code can span multiple tax jurisdictions.

Zip codes and even city names in a mailing address are just a layer of obfuscation for the convenience of the post office and do not necessarily respect the actual underlying governmental boundaries.

<comment><USER3> I've never heard of this. I hope it isn't the case with Canadian postal codes. Pretty sure we wouldn't be so obscurely unpredictable that way up here in the Great White North.

<comment><USER2> For example, if you're in an unincorporated pocket of land within a larger city, city taxes won't apply, yet you'll generally have a city mailing address.

I once lived in an apartment complex with a San Jose address but was on unincorporated land, so San Jose rent control ordinances didn't apply.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I'm surprised I've never come across this. I went through a phase where I was looking at tax sale properties, and actually found a number of them that were unincorporated. I didn't really look into those, but now I wish I did for the learning experience at least.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Getting the Most Out of Pre-K, 'The Most Important' Year in School - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/10/02/552868453/getting-the-most-out-of-pre-k-the-most-important-year-in-school <comment><USER2> Trying to feed the anxieties of urbanites, aren't they?</comment>


The MBA Myth and the Cult of the CEO - <AUTHOR> https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1db3jy3201d38/The-MBA-Myth-and-the-Cult-of-the-CEO <comment><USER2> This is great work. It's a real job gathering and analysing all that CEO performance data.

My guess is that most people were suspecting this anyway. The fact is the CEO is there for a few years making a few key decisions, a large company is like an oil tanker, and markets are quite hard to predict.

Taleb has cooked a fair bit of soup on the fooled by randomness idea, but in this case his observations are correct. It is very very hard to show that CEO performance is something other than random.

That's not to say that everyone's performance is pure chance. Sports generates a lot of reproducible data about its performers, and we can tell from the numbers which players are better.

This is why it's not such a big deal for most people that Ronaldo or Messi get paid a lot more than their teammates, and the rest of society.

What does bother people, including myself, is that people are given far more credit for outcomes than is credible. Why should there be a many-multiples reward for being slightly up the senior management ladder at each step? Is it not most plausible that the leaders just under CEO also understand the firm's situation, and can make sensible decisions? And the step under them? Is it really so hard to find a CEO that you have to pay hundreds of grunt salaries to get one?

The other issue is MBAs. I don't think anyone is surprised that it doesn't help at all. I went to a well known business school too, and it's not like they tell you how to run a company. It's really just a kind of brainstorming exercise where you have bit of a think about what a company might do to be successful. What it does seem to be is a kind of stamp of ambition. People who go to business schools are keen to work hard to reach the top of the business world.

This might seem fine, but you have to wonder whether the best managers are ambitious people who want to be managers, or people in the line of business who want to compete for the same jobs.

I know who I'd pick.

<comment><USER3> To play devil's advocate: The primary function of a manager is to say "No". As one goes higher and higher up the hierarchy, one has to say "No" to pushier and pushier subordinates, and the cost of every misplaced "Yes" is higher and higher. While leaders just under the CEO may understand the firm situation just fine, they may also be unable to say "No" to enough bad ideas for a myriad reasons, including lack of political clout with other leaders, with investors or with peer CEOs.

<comment><USER2> > The primary function of a manager is to say "No".

I'm a manager, and I can't really see this being the key job description.

But if it was, why would that have gotten harder in the last few decades?

<comment><USER4> Lots of people come to my team asking for work on X. If I said yes to everything my team would collapse from being spread too thinly. Being able to say that X is lower priority than what I am currently working on and leave the door open for re-evaluating priorities if needed is a key part of my job.

My team also frequently comes to me with ideas for interesting work that also isn't contributing to our vision. If we just did everything that came to mind we'd also fall apart.

<comment><USER5> My experience after 35 years is nothing scares me more than when a team of out of control developers are adding more and more features to the spec. Most baffling is it's obvious they think they are accomplishing something and you're a meanie for trying to rein them in. It always ends the same way. A lot of things can go wrong in a project. But that's that one 100% guaranteed to sink it.

<comment><USER6> On the flip side, a team of developers who aren't even interested in adding anything of their own volition is also a bad sign.

There has to be a balance.

<comment><USER7> Can't say no to everything, or soon you won't have anything to say no to any more.

<comment><USER8> You can't say "no" to everything, otherwise you'd be taking security's job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the best things to come out of so-called "big data" is the slow destruction of the human ego.

I read an interesting joke few months back (not sure where, might have been in Capital Minded), the gist of it was basically:

If 99% of people who buy corporations for a living can't beat a monkey throwing darts over time...why do we believe people who _run_ corporations for a living are any smarter? They're both looking at the same corporate balance sheets and industry trends!

I mean, it makes intuitive sense. For a fully scaled company in a legacy industry, what would really change if we removed the CEO and replaced him with the Janitor? The business will still be subject to the greater trends of the market and its industry. It doesn't take a Harvard MBA to take a data input like: electric cars are the fastest growing automotive segment therefore...my auto company should probably invest in electric cars?

Edit: where I think this could fall apart is in frontier industries like tech. The decisions require much more specialized expertise and the industries are much less mature (ie. Say ridesharing).

<comment><USER10> Warren Buffet famously says he likes to invest in businesses that could be run by a ham sandwich.

<comment><USER11> "I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them.

Because sooner or later, one will." \--Warren Buffett

<comment><USER12> I think the quote is by Peter Lynch from the book - One Up on Wall Street.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps, though Googling the quote has SERPs more than 25:1 in favor of Buffett as origin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've done these same analyses before as well, and more. This is the correct analysis to do if you're looking to build an alpha-generative trading strategy. It is not necessarily the correct analysis to do if you want to measure actual CEO performance.

If you want to measure CEO performance, you need to look at growth in fundamentals, not share price. The share price is going to reflect the market's beliefs about the CEOs. Which, if the market is efficient (as it seems to be for these variables), should show exactly no effect. If there were an effect here manifest in share price returns, we could all read this article and arbitrage it away. This would mean that the next person who looked for this effect would conclude "CEO performance has no correlation to share price returns!".

I'm kind of surprised they would do all of this statistical work and not be aware of this gaping hole in their reasoning. Now they do make the point at the end that they're arguing against stock-based compensation here, which is a good point. If the market prices in your value as a CEO the moment you're hired, you don't want to have share-price based compensation. You want comp tied to growth in fundamentals.

<comment><USER2> > You want comp tied to growth in fundamentals.

This has the same problem as tying it to the market. You don't know what the baseline is. Would a good CEO always grow the fundamentals? What if it's a declining industry? And vice versa.

<comment><USER13> It is a problem, but it's not the same problem. You can try to address the issue of secular trends in the industry by looking at say, performance relative to industry peers. How you define industry peers of course is a bit tricky.

Another option is to look at share price returns from the day before the new CEO was announced. That would incorporate the market pricing in the new CEO. However, I don't think this analysis did that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The lead author is a friend of mine. The beautiful thing is that he got an...MBA from Stanford.

I'm consistently intrigued by his observations about the world. He doesn't let his own background get in the way of questioning established wisdom. The fund he runs now is based on a belief that private equity is seriously flawed...which he discovered by working as an analyst for one of the top firms.

He hosts a fantastic weekly newsletter with a lot of quantitative insights - can discover his strategy and sign up here:

[http://verdadcap.com/strategy/](http://verdadcap.com/strategy/)

<comment><USER15> And the management team is...all MBAs :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not sure this proves anything at all.

To play devil's advocate: what if top CEO's (whether by school or by track record) look for harder challenges?

Someone once said Dara Khosrowshahi took the CEO job of Uber not to make money, but because anyone willing to take that job is somehow who wants to play the CEO game on "hard mode".

If everyone's taking a job where there's a 50% chance of failure for their personal skill level -- which means the more skilled CEO's are taking the harder jobs, and the less skilled CEO's are taking the "safer" harder-to-mess- up jobs -- then statistics will look like CEO skills don't make a difference... even though they do.

And since employment markets (in general) tend to funnel higher performers to harder jobs (because that's economically efficient), this doesn't seem implausible.

<comment><USER17> >Over the past year, we set out to answer these questions. We created a database of approximately 8,500 CEOs and their characteristics, each individually mapped to their respective companies for the duration of their tenure, and pulled company fundamentals from Compustat, stock returns from the University of Chicago's Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP), CEO tenure and education from BoardEx, and long-form CEO biographies from Capital IQ. We then ran a battery of tests on the new data set, looking for correlation, persistence, and predictive power.

...Nevermind that, I heard that some guy took the job because he liked challenges.

Maybe Dara was already wealthy and the marginal utility of the money at Uber wasn't a factor? Maybe this would lead him to beleive that his own decision making an knowledge would be superior and he wouldnt listen to his peers. Soooo many variables.

It never ceases to amaze me we can dismiss data driven ideas in a blink of an eye because it doesn't fit a narrative we've developed through anecdotes.

<comment><USER18> You're absolutely correct, some of the time.

On the other hand, at other times, academic researchers can conjure up an armada of buzz words and hot air balloons to support a position that even very limited real-world experience and common sense proves laughable misguided.

<comment><USER19> "common sense" and "real-world experience" are frequently euphemisms for "everyone knows that's how it works".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Even if "firm performance is not predicted by the educational background of the CEOs", it does not follow that an MBA is worthless.

To draw a parallel, I work with many software engineers both with and without CS degrees, and there seems to be no correlation (or even a slight negative correlation) between performance and those with a degree. That does not mean CS degrees are worthless! It means once you have _already selected_ for folks with a successful career in software, the degree has less predictive capability.

<comment><USER21> Bingo. If you look at successful people you're probably going to find a pretty diverse set of backgrounds in addition to the developers with CS majors from top schools. But doesn't mean that spending your 20s as a ski bum is actually a recommended path for most professional careers—even if it does make for a cool story if you get to the point people are writing magazine articles about you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I always figured to be an effective leader requires knowing your product. For software companies that means working in their field so you understand the tech or problem area then can make better decisions. You can complement your leadership by getting an MBA which rounds out the rough edges of business.

Career MBAs who have no experience of the area of the business are red flags in my experience. It's like a manager who isn't technical. They make wrong decisions by themselves or listen to the wrong people.

<comment><USER23> >> I always figured to be an effective leader requires knowing your product.

One of the best bosses I ever had was when I worked at a small manufacturing company.

This guy spent a ton of time with our customers and our products, came up with improvements, made lots of fixes, found other products our customers could use, made some people really happy.

Then he went through the production floor. Looked at everything a fresh set of eyes, why do we do this, why don't we do this. Sped up production, saved money, simplified things, made everyone's life easier.

Next stop was the office. Why do we touch this document 5 times through 4 people? Why do we do this backwards? How come this person doesn't do anything all day? Let's move this schedule around.

It was about that time the owners fired him for petty shit even though we had record sales and profits for the 3 years he was here. Lesson learned, don't try to make any changes or recommendations that come a little too close to home.

<comment><USER24> Interesting story. I'm curious about the "petty shit" part. Did he step on the owners' toes? Did he have an abrasive personality? Was he fudging his expense reports?

Also curious what happened after he left. Did sales/profits drop? Did his legacy of reforms carry on?

<comment><USER23> Things are starting to go back down, but they're staying in the black at least for now.

Petty things would be exposing inefficiencies in the owner's pet departments, usually consisting of underperforming employees that are family members, and the owners undermining random decisions he made just to spite him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The basic unit of information for a human being is a story, not a number or a fact. So it doesn't surprise me that we're obsessed with something as trivial as how Elon Musk's $1/day diet shaped him into an entrepreneur[1].

I don't think it's a bad thing to have a vague awareness of the things that make people successful: unafraid of failure, hard work & dedication, true passion about what you're creating.

But I think it does actively hurt you if you overfit what causes success, because you focus way to much on getting the little things right that you miss the big picture.

[1] [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/tesla-spacex-elon-musk-latest-zip2-technology-entrepreneurship- business-queens-university-a8274186.html)

<comment><USER26> > unafraid of failure, hard work & dedication, true passion about what you're > creating

I would say those are in equal measure things that make people _unsuccessful_. You better be afraid to fail or you will follow too many stupid ideas. You can burn yourself out working too hard on the wrong thing. You can be really passionate about something that basically nobody except you wants or needs. Conversely, a lot of things that nobody really is passionate about can make a lot of money.

I will also say that Elon Musk has not been successful in real business terms (creating a sustainable, profitable company) except that one time with PayPal and that could be down to good luck and timing. Nowadays, there's too much cheap and dumb money chasing too many "next big things", so it's hard to tell fact from fiction.

In my estimation, success really comes down to:

1) showing up

2) timing

3) luck

There's lots of people that are _almost_ Elon Musk or _almost_ Mark Zuckerberg or _almost_ Steve Jobs. It's a gamble, but at least you get to choose which table to play on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't find changes to share price to be the most convincing indicators of performance, though I agree you'd probably be hard pressed to find a better "generalizable" statistic. Fundamentally, I think measuring talent is an astonishingly hard problem.

</comment><comment><USER28> My biggest takeaway from this is to invest in a company right when the CEO changes if they CEO came from a failed company. Assuming "strong track record" is priced into the stock of a company picking up a new CEO that's good, I also assume "weak track record" is priced in to the opposite. Since success afterwards is basically chance, it would be a discount.

</comment><comment><USER29> Freakonomics Radio had a nice podcast series, The Secret Life of a CEO, that looked into the effect of CEOs on companies among other interesting stuff like how is a CEO chosen, what happens when they are fired, etc.

[http://freakonomics.com/ceos/](http://freakonomics.com/ceos/)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is kind of crazy. Presumably, there is a correlation between going to a good business school and getting a job with a good business (which generates market-beating returns). So you would expect some kind of correlation just because people think MBAs are valuable...but no.

In particular, "Elite MBAs did perform relatively well as CEOs in healthcare and consumer staples". Not significant statistically but the reason this is true is because both healthcare and staples (until recently) have had a killer run.

So I don't think share price performance is the best metric but...even then...you would still expect to see something totally different to the actual results. The stuff that looks at the portfolios of bankers is more understandable...but this has been shown elsewhere (generally, poor fund managers do better).

</comment><comment><USER31> The success of a company rests on thousands of factors one of which is the CEO. Even the best CEO can't ensure success when all other factors are against it, but a mediocre CEO will sometimes fail when all favors are in their favor.

Which is to say. When trying to figure out if a CEO is 'worth it' don't like at company success as a metric. You need to look across the industry and find "big obviusly avoidable but extremely costly mistakes" and see how much they cost, and ask: is it worth it if they can avoid all thoses issues.

</comment><comment><USER32> I see a few critical problems with this research.

The first in the section "Do MBAs Make Better CEOs?". If the labour market is efficient we would NOT expect CEOs with MBAs to outperform CEOs without MBAs due to selection effects. We may expect them to outperform if we sample randomly from the general population that has MBAs versus that which does not, but this is not the sampling scheme in effect. If boards are able to accurately select non-MBA CEOs whose other characteristics compensate for the lack of an MBA, then we would expect a zero within-group correlation in the selected population. It is like if I was to hire a quantitative researcher for a machine learning research team. I could pick a PhD from a top school, or I could allow a non-PhD into my team as long as their other characteristics are sufficiently great (e.g. competition math in high school), but after appropriate selection effects there is no within-group correlation between holding a PhD and not holding one. If I looked at the average PhD versus the average non-PhD in the general population though, then an effect becomes apparent, but that's not the sampling scheme I've used.

The second problem is in the section "Is CEO Performance Persistent?". They used stock market returns which is flawed as expected CEO performance should be baked into the stock price from the beginning, meaning we expect zero excess return in the second sample even if the CEO was truly exceptional. This section would unlikely pass peer review into a top finance journal.

The only valid thing I can see is research about "Share Price Performance for CEOs Who Ran Multiple Companies", since nobody knows the second company ahead of time so the information shouldn't be baked into the price. But a lot of details are missing. Skewness and kurtosis of returns will impact the way they've quantized the data, among other things.

All in all, unpersuasive.

</comment><comment><USER33> The design is interesting but the test itself is kinda pointless. Fama-French explains about 30% of stock return variation at best so by using stock performance as a measurement you are mostly testing signal (highly credited CEOs) against noise (residual returns).

Another thing is you have to specify your position on EMH here. If you believe the semi-strong form then everything about the CEO should be priced-in immediately after the announcement, which means it will not have a persistent impact on stock return when you slice and dice time periods.

IMO the CEO is just one input out of thousands that influence a stock's performance, which is implied by a lot of asset pricing studies already.

Also managing a public company is an unbelievably complicated job. You have to be one of the "best and the brightest" just to keep the boat bearly afloat sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER34> When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact. - Warren Buffett

The business that the company is in matters much more than any individual CEO or their background.

</comment><comment><USER35> I am thinking about starting MBA in the fall (having MS in CS from a Top 10 US school), just because I can and it could be helpful for running my own companies. Talk me out of it please!

(I might do a PhD in ML in parallel if I feel crazy enough)

<comment><USER36> How would the MBA help in "starting & running a company"? I think the PhD may provide a better launchpad to starting something up. You may want to correlate startup founders to MBA degrees at the time of founding if you need hard data.

<comment><USER35> That's why I am asking because I have some doubts. But there are specific entrepreneur/innovation oriented MBAs oriented in dealing with VCs, negotiation, strategy from initial state etc. Of course those are just guidelines, but I was thinking it's good to have all things on the radar instead of trying to invent all business processes myself alongside all the tech that needs to be developed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not only might there be issues with choosing CEOs based on pedigree and past performance (related to share value), but even the measurement of share value is arguably a weak indicator of company health and profitability.

Many institutions and media organizations are focused on quarterly or annual share price, but those numbers can be temporarily inflated if the company is willing to take actions that would damage itself longer term. And when I say "would", I actually mean "usually do". Also, global and industry factors can push a whole sector up or down for months or years.

<comment><USER9> I would argue the efficiency of the market produces an excellent correlation between company health and stock valuation over long periods.

But even if you disagree, isn't that just another way of arriving to the authors same conclusion?

If share price is a terrible proxy for company health, then why are we paying CEOs based on it? And if it _is_ a good proxy for company performance, _then it 's proving that CEOs are being grossly overpaid for what are essentially random outcomes._ Under both scenarios, something is terribly wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just to throw yet another caveat into an already delicious stew, stock price is an imperfect proxy for what we would really be trying to measure, which is the creation of value.

</comment><comment><USER39> > _Headhunters and corporate boards often look for CEOs with a track record of > creating value at another company when choosing whom to hire. But if past > performance doesn't predict future results, then they might be looking at an > irrelevant variable._

I don't understand this. I would imagine there is lot of accumulated knowledge, connections, network, skills etc. that are involved in taking day to day or strategic decisions.

Not irrelevant at all if my money was at stake.

</comment><comment><USER40> I just want to point out to those who are excited about confirming their preconceived bias that MBAs don't matter: according to this result, MBA CEOs outperformed non MBA CEOs by 0.04% per month. That's quite a bit of alpha.

EDIT: yes, the individual means are not statistically significant but given the large effect

a) where is the p-value b) there is no statistical significance reported of the difference between MBA and non-MBA performance, only of individual means

<comment><USER41> Except... the study also points out that this is not a statistically significant difference. How do you miss that?

<comment><USER40> I didn't. Statistical significance is complicated. In a noisy data set, you have to also look at the magnitude of the effect - and its huge here. Note that they don't report p-value magnitude, which matters. They also don't report statistical significance of difference, only of individual effects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Here's my question: how do you create incentive structures towards sustainable operation? Is this even possible or feasible inside of a company, or is it the market's job to operate such structures, using corporate formation, dissolution, aggregation and division?

It seems very hard to create an incentive structure that won't be gamed.

</comment><comment><USER43> Author is ignoring factors which are inconvenient due to the difficulty of measuring them.

Let's take a famous example - Steve Jobs. Booted from his own company, then NeXT was a middling success (because of its acquisition), and Pixar was a much larger success but much more because of John Lasseter than anything Jobs did. Was there anything there to suggest that Jobs was going to be as successful as he was with turn-of-the-century Apple? How could somebody who was _that_ successful at the helm not have similarly suceeded in his previous ventures? At the same time, can any sane person say that Apple was destined to take off like a rocket, that Jobs was merely lucky to be in the CEO role when it happened and take all the credit, that therefore anybody else could've been CEO and Apple still would've turned out to be wildly successful? That is _patently ridiculous_.

People are not islands. People can be more than the sum of their circles. Jobs was as successful as he was because he was in the right company _plus_ at the right time _plus_ with the right people around him (Jony Ive present, John Sculley absent, etc.).

Now, the author doesn't mention this because the author has no way of quantifying the, for lack of a better encompassing term, "cultural fit" of any given CEO candidate with any given corporate setting. But just because the author does not understand the relationship _does not mean that the relationship does not exist_. That the economy fails to judge CEOs properly and offer the correct opportunities to the correct candidates does not mean that all candidates are appropriate in all roles with their performance more or less in the hands of fate. Getting a random result for non-random inputs is not evidence of randomness but evidence of misunderstanding the inputs or of a poor metric.

Postscript: boards are completely justified in firing CEOs for poor performance ostensibly due to external, macroeconomic factors. The captain's job is to weather storms, not return to Spain with naught but an excuse for why the King's colonial riches have sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic. Maybe the captain hired the wrong sailors who would've fared better in fairer weather. Maybe the captain was brought aboard a boat with a hole in the hull. But part of the captain's job is to make sure the ship is properly staffed and that holes are plugged. If they're not, then the captain doesn't get to cry foul for a storm exposing his incompetence. Jobs had his storms - the dot-com bust and the 2008 recession. So what?

</comment><comment><USER44> Seems like they could just do a 15 year annuity that did X times the market avg price every two weeks. Make it transferable so CEOs could liquidate some for higher up front salary.

</comment><comment><USER45> I believe, just my belief, that a "good CEO" can install a great spirit in the company, which trickles down through management to all employees.

</comment><comment><USER46> I love to hate on MBA types just as much as the next engineer, but this article contains a distracting logical fallacy right away:

That CEO pay increased because of a trend in aligning incentives (the analysis of the CEOs performance says nothing about this).

The article spends no time on this and is at best an ancillary point, it should have started with a general statement of how crazy CEO pay is and if it's worth it without dealing with the incentive nonsense at the beginning.

Otherwise good article.

<comment><USER47> But this was the justification in countless think pieces in the Economist, the NYT, and so on. Align the incentives of the CEO with the shareholders and magic will occur. The author is dueling with a ghost that you never saw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The rise in CEO pay, and tying CEO pay to stock performance, are entirely orthogonal issues. The fact that the article doesn't seem to realize this distinction, makes me question how much of the rest of the article is similarly flawed.

<comment><USER49> Can you elaborate on why they're "entirely orthogonal?" Since this increased compensation is stock, aren't they at least somewhat related?

<comment><USER48> You can pay someone the exact same target-compensation, while still shifting it away from cash, and towards stock. For example, giving someone a stock grant of 1000 shares of GOOG, instead of paying them $1.1M in cash.

<comment><USER42> There are still issues with this approach, although they're a bit more subtle. Think about Valeant circa 2015 -- definitely taking a short term approach of acquiring and stripping pharma companies, which did positively impact their stock price. But, they did it in an unsustainable manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Does anybody know what Figure 2a and 2b are trying to show ?

<comment><USER15> Don't know why they included two figures when two numbers would do (it appears the first graph in each is showing the definition of median and quartile).

If the top quartile of performers were consistently the top quartile, then the plots in Fig. 2B would be the same because their performance is persistent over two three-year periods. Same thing can be said of Fig. 2A but with the median.

The simpler and more intuitive way to show this would be a some way to display "skill performance", "chance performance", and "observed performance".

| </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-- | Skilled | Chance | Observed |

|</comment><comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment>+-----+</comment><comment>-|

| Median</comment><comment> | 50% | 25% | 25% |

| Top quartile | 25% | 6.25% | 7% |</comment>


Experimenting with same-provider DNS-over-HTTPS upgrade - <AUTHOR> https://blog.chromium.org/2019/09/experimenting-with-same-provider-dns.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20929720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20929720).</comment>


Ask HN: How should we split the equity? - <AUTHOR>

We are planning to start a startup next month. I am investing 35% of total investment and the rest of it comes from friends & family. I am the business guy and I ll be joined by a technical person.  He is not taking any pay cut while I ll be taking 50% of my original salary.  Now, should the other person be treated as co-founder or should he be treated as employee? How would you advise to split the equity? <comment><USER2> Break it down into the three roles that are described here, co-founder, investor and employee.

You are both co-founders. He is taking considerable risk along with you and neither the product nor the market have been proved yet. Split the founder's equity 50-50 with identical terms.

Your investment, along with the rest of the F&F money should be written up as convertible notes. You will get that money back (plus interest) in the form of cash or stock (at a discounted conversion) when the company succeeds. Obviously, since he is not an investor, your co-founder won't get any of that.

Finally, you are both employees. Since you are also both co-founders you typically don't issue additional equity. However, if you both feel it is the fair thing to do then you could issue stock options to yourself, as the CEO, to make up for the salary cut. 5%, vesting over 4 years, would be typical for a CEO (with salary), but then even a fully-paid CTO would expect to get 2-3%. All things being equal, and assuming you don't both take employee stock options (because it is just more paperwork) I would say that your 50% salary cut is worth a couple of percent in options, at most.

The big variable here isn't your personal stake in the company, it is the success of that company. It is important that all parties feel that the split is equitable and they are full engaged in the process. Treating the guy who has chosen to join you at this early (and very risky) stage as anything less than a cofounder could make the difference between him making a superhuman effort to help the company succeed and treating it as just a job. Deal with the investment and compensation issues seperatly.

Oh, and take the hit to pay a decent attorney to get all this written up (corp docs, co-founder docs, stock plan, convertible notes) and filed properly. A few $k now will save major problems down the road and make your company much more appealing to investors.

Good luck with the startup :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an awesome piece of advice. Making everyone feel that we are making an equitable split is the key.

<comment><USER3> The key is that everyone feels the split was equitable in 1,3,5 and 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> None of this makes sense?

      > He is not taking any pay cut ...

Pay cut from what?

      > I'll be taking 50% of my original salary.

What original salary?

      > I am the business guy ...

This really does not bode well. What will you do? What do you know? What experience do you have? How will you be spending your time? How much time will you be putting in? How much time will the technical guy be putting in? What other activities do either of you have? Why do you call this a "start up" and not just a "small business"?

Does your "technical guy" know you're posting this? Why would you consider having an employee when you have no income?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are working in an enterprise now. We both are in same team. The pay cut is from the actual salary which we are drawing in the current company.

I have 10 years of experience and the other guy have 6 years of experience. I ll be handling product design, marketing, sales and investor relations. We both are going to work full time on this.

We are yet to discuss about equity. I want to make sure that I handle it in a fair way.

<comment><USER3> If what you see as fair involves more equity for you, then at best your position _might_ be seen as biased. If your goal is to be wealthier than your cofounder should things go well, then perhaps.you're optimizing on the wrong thing. Unequal equity is unlikely to increase the odds of success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the technical person is not making an "investment" [in uncompensated time] they sound like an employee. I would think that equity for an employee should be enough that they want to stick around.

That said, don't expect "co-founder" performance from an employee. If you think you need the technical person to be as committed as you are, you should align their goals with yours i.e. make them a co-founder.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have just started a little project with a business guy and we both know we need each other. HE has frontend some cash to get it off the ground but was willing to give me 49% of the business which means we are both happy and we both have enough of the business to want to stay up late and bust our balls.

From my point of view equity is to keep people interested , feel that they need to really put in the effort and it can be a trade off for a lower salary whilst it is starting. An employee will always want to go home at the end of the day.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds more like a Quora question. Lot of such questions could be answered on that forum. Try checking it out. Plus, its not always easy to start a startup and have name tags to your roles. If you are doing that, you have missed the most fundamental part of startup101. but i know a lot of startups still do that, and I don't like that.</comment>


Going Serverless: From Common Lisp and CGI to AWS Lambda and API Gateway - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@glikson/going-serverless-from-common-lisp-and-cgi-to-aws-lambda-and-api-gateway-9fba46c84fb8 <comment><USER2> I don't get why Lambda gets all the love while Google Cloud Functions doesn't.

I've tried both, and GCF is vastly superior in many ways.

1) Developer experience is pretty terrible in Lambda, whereas GCF is compatible with Express.js to the point where you can simply pass in an Express app instance to it (which makes vendor lock-in a moot point as well). Develop your app more or less like you normally would, and just export it to GCF. Job done.

2) Deploying is a simple cli command away, even with native binaries.

3) No API Gateway necessary for HTTP functions.

4) It's now compatible with Cloud SQL so you don't have to give up your traditional database.

5) No crazy IAM permissions hoops to jump through to get anything to work.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Google.

<comment><USER3> I feel the same about Azure Functions but I think its all dependant upon which provider you're in bed with at the time. If some one has plenty on AWS and is happy with those resources on AWS they will likely try or use Lambda

<comment><USER4> I'll respond to you and GP. Lambda is more challenging to use than Azure Functions and GCF. I should know, I use Lambda every day. To be honest the overall developer experience with almost any tool on AWS is more painful compared to Google Cloud or Azure.

I think the reason AWS gets all the love is, GCF only came out of beta very recently. Azure doesn't generally get as much press as AWS or Google Cloud.

As a secondary issue, "why use something with a poorer developer experience"? My answer: AWS's tools are quite complicated but it's also clear to me that Amazon takes AWS very seriously. My interactions with Google Cloud's products, support, and account management have left me with concerns about their long term commitment. This is a personal gut feel. I trust Amazon and Bezos' commitment to AWS. Focus and commitment are things we're all aware Google has had issues with in the past. As far as Microsoft is concerned, I see the great strides they're making and I would consider Azure for future projects. I'm growing to trust Nadella's Microsoft. It's clear they're betting the farm on multi-platform and cloud. Time will tell. Again this is just a personal viewpoint.

Lastly, once you climb the hill of learning IAM, CloudFormation, etc... you can be quite productive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I will never understand why people are attracted to the Lambda SAM style of programming. Sure there are scalability benefits but it comes at the cost of complexity, development time, vendor lock in, wildly variable p95/p99 numbers, a nightmare debugging experience and costs that are expensive and fluctuating.

You could just build a Docker web app eg Rails/Play, deployed in ECS or Elastic Beanstalk with the same scalability in easily 1/10 the time and complexity. And if you get sick of AWS trivially move it to GCP, Azure or on- premise.

<comment><USER6> I don't use SAM but I do use Lambda and I disagree with everything you say here. FaaS allows me to completely eliminate web server junk from my brain. I only have to think about individual functions (routes) that takes some input and produce an output. Essentially I can focus completely on my business domain.

<comment><USER7> without fine-tuning. How do you handle database connection pooling? yes, lambda can scale as a function, but not as a wrapper around database (yet)

<comment><USER8> I think the answer to this right now is either: \- DynamoDB \- Aurora In my case I am going to go with Aurora as I am deploying Django applications with Lambda

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone heard of implementing an architecture where you have normal server backend architecture, while using serverless to handle traffic spikes and any failover? If you properly modularize your backend codebase, it shouldn't be excessively costly to duplicate it across a serverless architecture and in some sort of node instance.

My biggest issue with serverless is the high cost at scale, which could be mitigated with this type of architecture. Are there any other benefits or concerns regarding something like this?

<comment><USER10> Sounds more expensive than scaling up more servers on demand.

<comment><USER11> What I hear a lot is that the scaling can take too long. I wonder if a hybrid where you use lambda as a temporary buffer would be the most cost effective.

<comment><USER12> In my experience using AWS, you can spin up new autoscaled instances pretty quickly. I don't even have a custom AMI, I use a generic image and run startup scripts to kick off my server software. Takes < 3 minutes to spin up a new one and start accepting requests.

If that's not fast enough, you can bake an AMI and scale more proactively (e.g. scale when your server is 70% utilized rather than 95%)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most of these articles I read about AWS Lambda (they rarely mention API Gatweway because it's expensive) sound like paid marketing.

I've seen just API Gateway costing more than entire infrastructure costs of similarly sized websites.

If you can properly saturate EC2 it will be significantly less expensive than Lambda but with lambda you have to pay API GW and the vendor lock-in price.

I've started flagging these submissions.

<comment><USER14> That calculation doesn't include the salary of the person managing those EC2 instances. Lambda is easier to manage and costs less time than an EC2 box. SSH keys, backups, AMI base images, system updates , it all adds up. Ansible and terraform are so far removed from the core competency of any company that you really need to ask yourself, for any second you spend working on them: is this worth it? At almost no company's scale* is it so.

Salary is a hidden cost people often forget. Or time spent by your programmer's debugging infra; time not spent creating value. Frustration from having to deal with TF or ansible in the first place.

These are all benefits of a serverless solution which cost aware criticisms should at least try to quantify and take into account.

Signed, not-a-shill.

* I'll rephrase: a significant amount of companies don't have the luxury of being so swamped by requests they can saturate EC2 boxes and make the devops overhead (which, I'm arguing, is big but _relatively_ constant/"sub linear") worth the price difference (which scales linearly). Significant enough for these articles to have a raison d'être.

<comment><USER15> In my experience, the developer time it takes to get a serverless application running (on AWS anyway) far exceeds the benefits that serverless brings. We spent over six months on a project written in serverless that we could never really get working properly. We dumped all that code and rewrote it on a standard LAMP stack in less than half that time. Factoring in that the problem was better understood the second time around, it would still have been cheaper to build it the way we are from the beginning.

<comment><USER16> Was that due more to lack of training? I am first and foremost a developer, but I've spent weeks understanding AWS from a netops, devops and development standpoint.

I'm also working on certifications mostly as a method to force me to learn in a structure manner, my company will pay for them, and they still have some market value.

<comment><USER17> Training also takes time.

<comment><USER16> Are you proposing that developers shouldn't study and learn about whatever infrastructure they are using?

<comment><USER17> I'm not proposing anything. I'm saying that training should be factored in when considering development costs. The notion that training is always a one- time investment that can be pretty much ignored if you plan to stick with some tech long-term is a fallacy.

<comment><USER16> Things get added to AWS all of the time, but if are using the same set of services, training is a one time thing. Amazon doesn't just pull the rug out from under you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Serverless is a latest heavily marketed fad.

There are some edge cases where it's useful - education, low use throw away bots - other than that it's all marketing bs.

<comment><USER19> > Serverless is a latest heavily marketed fad.

Serverless is the future of the Industry.

Lambda is not Serverless , it's just a FaaS which is a component of an entire Serverless Architecture.

Most specifically the majority of services provided by AWS and in the Cloud already are Serverless :

\- Pay per usage ( GB , Execution , API Call )

\- No Scaling or Provisioning ( SQS , CloudFront , Firebase )

\- High Avaibility by default ( SQS , CloudFront , Firebase )

\- Auto Scaling by default ( Azure CosmosDB , Firebase )

\- Little to no technical limits for the service ( GCloud DataStore , S3 etc... )

If you have very little knowledge about something you shouldn't criticize it , that make you sounds even more ignorant.

Most of the stuff that people actually use on AWS (S3 , CloudFront , SQS , SNS ) are delivered with a serverless architecture in mind.

Again , if you are thinking "Lambda === Serverless" you really need to read more about this topic.

<comment><USER20> Wait, we're calling S3, Firebase and any sort of metered charge scheme (aka pay per usage) "serverless" now? That's news to me, I've apparently been using serverless since I started programming as a full-time career 10 years ago!

Here I thought most of those were just "cloud" services or "third party APIs".

<comment><USER19> > I've apparently been using serverless since I started programming as a full- > time career 10 years ago!

You have indeed.

As I mentioned above , S3 is a serverless service.

Last time I checked , you don't provisioned , partition or scale S3 this is done by AWS behind the scene.

Same for Firebase , same for many services.

Now the move is into the "compute" aspect of thing and the architecture.

Lambda basically replace, in a limited way , the compute aspect of your architecture (EC2) but obviously it has it's limits.

There is a confusion between "Serverless Framework" which is an automation of Lambda + API Gateway + CloudFormation , and "Serverless Computing" which is basically an "event driven" , "pay per execution" , "auto scaling / self healing" architecture.

<comment><USER20> I probably should have added a `/s` somewhere in my post; my internal sense of "this doesn't sound right" is coming from a desire to enforce a distinction between "cloud", "API" and "serverless".

To my mind, serverless is exclusively limited to FaaS or similar means of _deploying code without visibility of the underlying server it runs on_. S3 isn't about code deployment, it's a third-party API that stores data. EC2, docker et. al. at least have instances of servers you see, even if you automate away the management portion- that makes them cloudy, but not serverless.

Maybe my understanding of serverless is completely at odds with what the industry is, and if so I have learned something new and am chuffed.

<comment><USER21> > deploying code without visibility of the underlying server it runs on

Well I take issue with this, I think Kubeless and Riff are definitely serverless, even though I need a Kubernetes cluster provisioned (and it obviously has servers in it). I can get visibility into those servers, or I can run them in a managed way where there will be no visibility.

Both ways are serverless, I think this because they are FaaS solutions and because of the way the runtime environment is dynamically provisioned. I don't have to know or care what server it's on. I'm not sure that's what makes it "serverless" but there is definitely room for questions between "serverless" and "Serverless" with a capital S. And in at least one of those (Riff) it's actually cold/pods all go offline at rest, so not warm processes running on any server until it is called (scale to zero.) You just have an API gateway that is always online, and it starts the workers in response to events. It's hopefully lightweight compared to your app / suite of microservices / the kubeless version of what I'm describing, where each function has a memory footprint that doesn't evaporate when it's not in use.

Regardless of whether you're using FaaS or not, the pricing model for servers as scale grows seems to be quite favorable compared to same size "all-lambda" solutions, and based on the feedback in this thread and prior ones, I think there's a compelling benefit to price predictability if you take the time to estimate how big your computers need to be and, say, order enough reserved instances to cover something like the capacity you will need for the year.

You can always scale past that to grow when needed, but reserved instances are cheaper than ordinary instances, and ordinary instances are cheaper than an equivalent amount of CPU time on Lambda. I get how this kind of negates the benefits, but not really. It depends entirely on the pricing model and how much you use. If you can fit in the free tier, it's much less compelling.

But you can start with a really small cluster if you can scale your worker deployments' pods all the way to zero without causing a downtime event. (But if you're now groaning because I've got you managing a cluster of nodes again, then your priorities might be different than mine too...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Moreover, given the minimal traffic this web tutorial is targeting — the > backend is likely to easily fits the free tier of cloud providers. So, the > infrastructure cost will be essentially zero. And you can't beat zero cost, > really.

Right up until it hits the frontpage of HN...

<comment><USER23> HN frontpage traffic is not as high as you might think ... the websites that go down from it are probably just poorly built.

<comment><USER22> I don't think this setup will go down, but it could certainly end up costing much more than $0.

<comment><USER24> The free tier is 1M requests. If they're very lightweight, it should easily handle the spike without extra cost. I've been on HN front-page a few times and the traffic is never that high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> At my company we have a few small basic API's now running on Lambda and API Gateway. We're a big AWS shop and I can't envision us ever moving to Google or Azure, so vendor lock-in isn't much of a concern. At first local development was a bit challenging, but frameworks like Serverless help with that.

Also, many don't know this, but you can run and debug AWS Lambda locally with AWS' own tooling. Using this to build out and test Lambda's before creating them with Terraform has been priceless: [https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam- cli](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-cli)

</comment><comment><USER26> So this is question I've wanted to ask for awhile.

Is AWS Lambda _really_ "serverless", or is the server part just buried so deep in the stack that the app devs can disregard it?

And if it is truly "serverless", what mechanism is being used to "serve" the function calls? How is this radically different from say a REST-api that auto- routes function names from url POSTs and GETs?

I suppose I could look all this stuff up, but to be honest having a quick rundown of this tech stack here on HN sure would save me the time.

Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER27> Obviously it does have servers and is quite similar to the router you describe. It's also similar to the old CGI and FastCGI systems.

It's only serverless in the sense that you don't have to use servers as a _unit of account_ ; at no point do you have to say "how many servers are we paying for?" or "what sort of servers should we get/lease/instantiate on EC2".

<comment><USER28> Rarely the meaning of a technology name is "obvious", this particular name is pretty misleading (every single tutorial about the topic starts explaining that serverless doesn't really mean serverless). The first time I heard about serverless, I imagined some kind of decentralized technology, but as we all know, it turned out to be a marketing thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's a pity that Lambda doesn't directly support Lisp or Scheme.

<comment><USER30> I think that you can create standalone executables and load those with lambda. I think they need to be statically linked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can someone remind me what serverless does better than existing tech?</comment>


Quality in open source: testing CRIU - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/694593/4d6291b3f727791a/ <comment><USER2> When I first heard the dev of CRIU interviewed on FLOSS Weekly it blew my mind.

From "Torvalds said I will not merge this crazy talk" into being able to halt active TCP connections and then horse whisper them to another container (since this is popular with OpenVZ) made me drop jaw while driving the car. I realized then I will never understand a Unix system enough to be taken seriously, and this guy is hot migrating them, long before this container stuff was cool!

</comment><comment><USER3> Quality as in no bugs is good but that doesn't mean it's quality _code_. I've seen bloated and horrible code pass static analysis as well as less bloated but just as horrible pass cyclomatic complexity tests. Sadly I don't think there is an automated way to gauge quality from the perspective of a programmer.

<comment><USER4> And the reason for that is quality is a relative metric which is almost impossible to quantify.

        * Static analysis looking for bugs per thousand lines of code
        * Idiomatic code adopting language specific preferences
        * Code that is easy to maintain but is slow as molasses
        * Code that works well enough and was written super fast
        * Code that is microoptimized to the extreme, is super fast, but difficult to maintain due to inline ASM

For certain cases, each of these could be considered quality or atrocity. It is all about context.

<comment><USER5> > I once had an engineering professor who claimed that the answer to every > engineering question is "it depends"

[http://danluu.com/julialang/](http://danluu.com/julialang/)

<comment><USER4> Clearly you learned from a wise professor! Also a huge fan of virtually all of Dan Luu's writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> CRIU is definitely neat, but can someone tell me what the use case is for it? Perhaps more specifically what is the use case in the era of microservices and designing for failure?

Has anyone used it for anything non-trivial?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main scenario is live migration of containers. We have live migration feature in OpenVZ since 2005. But it was always in-kernel implementation of checkpointing Linux processes ([https://openvz.org/Checkpointing_internals](https://openvz.org/Checkpointing_internals)). Linux kernel developers won't accept our patches to vanilla and we decided to implement C/R in userspace. Others scenarios are here [https://criu.org/Usage_scenarios](https://criu.org/Usage_scenarios)</comment></comment>