Ask HN: Value of our 4 year old startup? - <AUTHOR>

We've received an offer to directly buy 51% of our shares, resulting in an early stage partial exit (not funding for company). I have a feeling that it's a fairly low offer, and I am hoping to get some insight from people who are familiar with these sorts of deals.
EDIT: Sorry for following formatting, it was submitted as a hierarchical bullet list
The facts as I see them: - We founded our company 4 years ago (5 founders)
  - Still 100% owned by founders - Pivoted twice, each time reusing most of our previous work
  - Saw some revenue after our first pivot, but found a better idea
- Currently based in Australia (would move to US though) - First sale of current product this year
  - 3 year contract with a total of over US$650K (in british pounds)
  - To small/medium sized company in a very large worldwide industry
  - we see this as a small deal, and discounted at that for our first client
  - 50% of the revenue goes to a partner company that made the sale
    - Many more sales in the pipeline, and bigger ones
    - They've recently loaned us some money to support feature development
      - In exchange for 3 year worldwide exclusivity on sales
      - (Early stage venture funding very hard to get in Australia, and 4 years is a long time!)
      - Loan payback conditional on them making sales - We have Windows, OS X, iOS and Android clients for our product
Our product is first to market and significantly more advanced than those of our competitors - we have the benefit of having worked on a related system for years before pivoting to this, whereas our competitors are coming from different backgrounds. Every company we've demonstrated to has been hugely excited about it - we save them time and money in a few ways. The standard software contracts in this industry are 3-5 years and for large sums of money.
If you can accept all this at face value - what sort of back of the napkin calculations would you come up with for a valuation? I will answer any requests for more detail if I can do so without revealing who we are or too much about what we do. We're in stealth mode.
Giving up control of our company isn't ideal, but the offer IS directly for the shares, rather than for being able to grow the team. You accumulate a few bills when you self-fund a startup for 4 years.
Coincidently (really), I'm visiting friends in L.A. for the next two weeks. If any serious investor out there is interested in a demo and potentially working towards making an investment in our company I could meet. I would love to add a couple of engineers to the team and investors with the right connections could help us go after the relevant deals in the enormous US market for our product.
Perhaps it's naive to ask this way in a forum such as this but I am our startup's core hacker - not the guy usually dealing with the business end. This post is not an indication of a rift in the founding team - I am simply a substantial shareholder in this and I have decided to collect data from a community that I respect. Either way, I am primarily concerned with finding out if the partial exit offer is reasonable or not. <comment><AUTHOR> Ah, the formatted hierarchy of the 'facts' paragraph was lost during submission, sorry for that. Also i'm not sure why this hasn't appeared in the 'Ask' section, perhaps I submitted this in the wrong way.

</comment><comment><USER2> how much has been offered?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't want to skew the responses by sharing that - i'm hoping for back of the napkin calculations by those with experience in the area.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Gallery of Open Source Ruby on Rails Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.opensourcerails.com/ <comment><USER2> For more information on Ruby-based tools and libraries make sure to check out the Ruby Toolbox <https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/by_name>.

It's my first stop when I have a specific problem I am tackling.

<comment><USER3> Sadly, whenever you try to suggest a project you get the message :

>Project suggestions are currently under maintenance and are disabled. They will be back with a vengeance soon!

But it has been this way for a long time (check out the comments below on this blog post : [https://www.ruby- toolbox.com/blog/2012/07/18/State_of_the_To...](https://www.ruby- toolbox.com/blog/2012/07/18/State_of_the_Toolbox) ). I wish either he would take some help and ship the "improved" suggestions feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi there,

First of all, this is a fantastic resource, so thank you very much for putting it together. As somebody constantly working to improve his Rails knowledge I can see I'll get a lot out of this kind of thing.

Secondly, again from a learner's perspective, what would be fantastic for me would be if you could see what's in the Gemfile for each project at a glance. This is because, similar to the enterprise Java world, a lot of my problem solving efforts with Ruby are spent on the plumbing of components to each other, so being able to look at well-coded examples of this plumbing would be incredibly helpful.

Thanks again!

</comment><comment><USER5> I often wonder how other projects have tackled a similar problem to one I am tackling - today's example being multi-day events on a calendar. This list will make it much easier to see projects where there might be overlap. Thanks for the effort.

And I love the design.

</comment><comment><USER6> For more information, see the blog post that details what we're planning on doing this time around: <http://www.opensourcerails.com/relaunch/>

<comment><USER7> It'd be a fantastic learning tool if one could find all projects using a certain gem or search through the code bases. GitHub searches are often too broad and will come up with projects that are less than desirable role models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice. I'd like to see something like this that wasn't limited to Rails app, but rather any open source app that could be deployed on PaaS providers like Heroku easily.

<comment><USER2> Try searching on <http://www.github.com>. There is a lot of open source apps/boilerplate listed there that you can leverage. Most of the apps listed on the OP site host code on Github.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Around 2 years ago there was a beautiful education app on Github built with rails. I heard they got acquired by google and, all of a sudden, all sources are gone.

Does anyone remember what was the name of that app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Is it Fedena? <http://www.fedena.com/>

<comment><USER9> No :( but it was something similar

<comment><AUTHOR> Email me (firstname.lastname@example.com) if you remember it. I'll try to track it down and revive it if I can!

The old opensourcerails site directory is searchable here: <http://www.opensourcerails.com/projects/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great! I've been struggling to find good example apps for things like Symfony2 on the PHP side - are you planning on expanding to other languages/frameworks?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we'd love to expand to additional languages frameworks in the future. We'll need a core maintainer for each new gallery (we're not PHP guys) but I would happy to help set things up.

<comment><USER10> Do let me know if you get closer to that then - I'd be interested in curating such a thing :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great! I was just thinking about learning Ruby so this will be helpful when I wanna to check out real Ruby code.

</comment><comment><USER12> Idly, it's a little annoying that missing the trailing / on a url breaks things.

eg.

       http://www.opensourcerails.com/lobsters/  <--- works
       http://www.opensourcerails.com/lobsters   <--- doesn't work

Site's great tho. Good work~

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thanks for the bug report. Issue has been fixed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice job. Looks better and easier to browse than the old site.

</comment><comment><USER14> I basically learned Rails by looking at the Spree source, so this would have been incredibly helpful. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER15> What a fantastic resource for anyone learning Rails. Looking at other people's code can be very educational.

</comment><comment><USER16> Cool! Anyone know of any open source JSON REST APIs built on Rails?

<comment><USER17> I just noticed one of the first apps listed, Gitlab has a json API implementation using the Grape gem, which looks very clean.

<https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq> (check out lib/api.rb and lib/api/*)

Maybe there's someone who can tell us about their experience with Grape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great to see this site coming back to life. Thanks, Jacques!

</comment><comment><USER19> This is awesome. Good work!

</comment><comment><USER20> That is some awesome shit!

</comment><comment><USER21> Fuck yes

</comment><comment><USER22> Was trysqlinjection.com taken?</comment>


Thousands of e-mails lifted from Syrian dictator Assad's personal account - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/thousands-of-e-mails-lifted-from-syrian-dictator-assads-personal-account.ars?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+Featured+Content%29 <comment><USER2> This is interesting, but why not link to the original guardian article [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/14/assad-emails- lif...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/14/assad-emails-lift-lid- inner-circle) ?</comment>


Learning organization: A fine example of a management fad [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://academicpublishingplatforms.com/downloads/pdfs/beh/volume32/201805181423_34_BEH_2018_Vol14_Issue3_Slobodan_Adzic_Learning_organization_pp.477-487.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I have stumbled on this paper while researching the term. I don't have a solid experience on this topic, but I believe that the learning organisation principles have a place as a part of company culture rather than aiming at defining the management style. WDYT?</comment>


The science behind what motivates us to get up for work every day - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-science-of-what-motivates-us-to-get-up-for-work-every-day

<comment><USER2> While the article is interesting and insightful there is no peer reviewed scientific article linked to it so the title is misleading. Overall I like the read though, psychologists have frequently found money to be a less-motivating factor then emotions in terms of work.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _The science behind what motivates us to get up for work every day_

Another egregious misuse of the word "science" to dress up someone's subjective philosophical observations.</comment>


Amazon expects to lose half a billion dollars in the next three months - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/24/5934647/amazon-expands-hardware-expects-wider-losses

<comment><USER2> _" Citigroup downgraded Amazon's stock yesterday based on the price cuts it instituted on its Amazon Web Services division."_

As usual, analysts don't understand Amazon's long term strategy. AWS is a brilliant move, and create an incredibly powerful vendor lock-in.

I can't imagine migrating our infrastructure to any another vendor, even if there was a similar offering (there isn't), at a lower cost. The level of flexibility, scalability and efficiency via automation is light years ahead of everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER3> They should make a new commercial about their packages being delivered in 8 minutes by angels and flying potatoes.</comment>


It's Time to Kill the Casual Interview - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dconrad/its-time-to-kill-the-casual-interview-42717f078f62 <comment><USER2> This is going to lead to: 1\. Nepotism 2\. People getting started in the industry are put at a disadvantage 3\. Life will be even harder for minorities in tech.

<comment><AUTHOR> Quite the contrary. Informal interviews provide no real information and cause interviewers to fall-back to stereotyping and unconscious bias. Formal interviews, done right, provide real data.</comment></comment>


Please don't theme our apps - <AUTHOR> https://stopthemingmy.app <comment><USER2> Maybe an open letter to Gnome 3 devs to support theming properly would be more helpful.</comment>


The Moral Machine experiment - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0637-6 <comment><AUTHOR> Link to the survey experiment in case you are curious to take it:

[http://moralmachine.mit.edu](http://moralmachine.mit.edu)

I would love to read some comments on the scientific validity of the findings. I tried to answer the survey by applying road law blindly to each situation. Although the survey results did catch that I gave the highest value to rules following, it also suggested I attributed higher value to athletic people and to a higher perceived social value...leading me to speculate: does this experiment really measure what it thinks it does?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wasn't sure to post original pay-walled paper (which I did) or one of the news coverage links. Here is coverage on motherboard:

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evw3w7/driverless...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evw3w7/driverless- cars-spare-young-people-over-old-in-a-car-accident-moral-machine-survey-finds)

<comment><USER2> I think everyone here knows about sci-hub, so I'd always post the original pay-walled paper.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Etch a Sketch and Python - <AUTHOR> http://sunnybala.com/2018/09/10/python-etch-a-sketch.html <comment><USER2> Wow. How long did the Great Wave drawing take?

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, super impressive. Great job.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you!</comment></comment>


Parsing – REBOL Users Guide - <AUTHOR> http://www.rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore-15.html <comment><USER2> More than a decade later, Rebol (and its newer offspring Red red-lang.org) are still in regular use on my team.

A cool thing about Rebol's (and Red's) PEGs are that they can easily parse and process the diverse datatypes of its parent source.

REBOL Parser in 10 Lines [http://www.rebol.net/cookbook/recipes/0042.html](http://www.rebol.net/cookbook/recipes/0042.html)

And:

[http://blog.hostilefork.com/why-rebol-red-parse- cool/](http://blog.hostilefork.com/why-rebol-red-parse-cool/) "But even more impressively, it can work on the symbolic structure of code itself. While Rebol and Red are both like Lisp in being homoiconic, when you see something like PARSE applied on code itself... you know you're looking at something very cool."

<comment><USER3> Could you please go into agonizing detail on your team's use of REBOL? I've never been more excited for a language than Red/RedSystem, but hear so little in the wild on it or its older brother. All the parse examples I've seen have been pretty basic, but I hear it is powerful.

<comment><USER4> I can't answer for QuantumAphid, but I have used REBOL (v2) extensively for graphics post-production utilities for my old studio. It was the only way that I could provide programming services for all the departments I had to support.

Of course I wrote a number of simple utilities, but I also did several large and comprehensive applications with complete user interfaces. I could staple together a fully styled interface with custom widgets in an afternoon compared with (at best) several days for equivalent functionality with other toolkits. Most of my large programs communicated with our production management database using XMLRPC.

The GUIs including things like a full graphical Avid-style editorial timeline, a multi-panel interface for managing data on the review playback system, one that mimicked the playback system interface (complete with reflections and drop shadows) to make the operator feel at home... Even one with a wise cracking virtual assistant that guided the operator through the task. All of these were operational and bug free in a fraction of the time that would have been consumed by Python/wx.

Just as important as simple and flexible GUIs were the built in parsing, binary and image processing. I could make a shot slates (images with text noting the shot number and production) quickly and easily because anything you could show in the GUI could be exported as an image. I did complete stereo audio processing for Editorial inside REBOL with no external libraries -- it was simple and fast. When I later had to replicate this utility in Python I finally threw up my hands and shelled out to sox.

In general, these tools were rock solid, fast, easy and attractive to use.

So it's a great language, and Red seems like it will be a worthy successor. The learning curve to use it effectively is a bit steep because it has many differences from ALGOL derived languages. But once you figure it out, you'll never want to give it up!

<comment><USER3> Awesome! Thanks for the long post. I'm primarily a Python user, but recognize it as for what it is (reasonably easy to learn and equally limiting scripting tool). I think Rebol is pretty cool, but have been waiting for the speed that Red promises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Red [1] is language based on Rebol that among other things improves PARSE dialect [2]

[1] [http://www.github.com/red/red](http://www.github.com/red/red)

[2] [http://www.red-lang.org/2013/11/041-introducing- parse.html](http://www.red-lang.org/2013/11/041-introducing-parse.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of perl6. Why don't more languages support grammars like this?

Fun example: [https://github.com/perl6/perl6-examples/blob/master/categori...](https://github.com/perl6/perl6-examples/blob/master/categories/interpreters/lisp.pl#L34)

<comment><USER7> Here's that fun example written in Rebol parse:

        digits:     charset "1234567890"
        char:       charset [#"a" - #"z" "+/-*"]  ;; chars allowed in a symbol
        not-quot:   complement charset {"}
        esc-string: [{\"} | not-quot]

        bool:   ["#t" | "#f"]
        float:  [opt "+-" any digits "." some digits]
        number: [opt "+-" some digits]
        symbol: [some char]
        quot:   [#"'" [sexp | atom]]
        string: [{"} any esc-string {"}]

        statement: [sexp | atom | space | newline]
        sexp: ["(" any statement ")"]
        atom: [bool | float | number | quot | symbol | string]

        lisp-rule: [some statement]

NB. I wrote this "off the cuff" so I don't expect it to be flawless! Also there are no capture rules provided in my example (unlike perl6 grammars which provides this automatically).

<comment><USER8> It's worth noting that this grammar is a bit more restrictive than the Perl 6 equivalent. In particular, "\d" in Perl includes not only 0 through 9, but _any_ Unicode character that's classified as a "digit". The Perl 6 grammar documentation features this in an example of using arbitrary methods in grammars: [https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars.html#Methods_in_Gra...](https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars.html#Methods_in_Grammar)

<comment><USER7> I think the Perl 6 example should really use [0-9] instead of \d because it's unlikely that unicode numerals are allowed (in the Common Lisp spec).

Anyway neither example fully covers the Common Lisp spec for a number atom (for eg. scientific notation or rationals).

<comment><USER8> I don't think covering all of the Common Lisp spec is required to be Greenspun-compliant ;)

<comment><USER7> In that case Rebol is already Greenspun-compliant ;-)

        (print (multiply (add 1 2) 3))

... will print an answer of 9

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The designer of REBOL, not surprisingly, is a pretty interesting and impressive fellow.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath)</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way to build Javascript widgets today? - <AUTHOR>

We're working on moving our site from a straight-up ROR app to hypermedia API on the back-end (still running on Rails) and Javascript/HTML5 on the front.
I've used everything from raw Javascript to jQuery to Dojo to build client-side components against a REST API before, and I'm comfortable with going that direction, but I'm asking the community here if something has come along that supersedes these tools for this sort of application?
In particular we want to develop a modular set of controls that can operate in a stand-alone fashion, composed only of client-side code but can also be combined and hosted in existing Rails-served pages as well as static HTML.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> JQuery still seems to be king at the moment. There's some pushback against it in this new world of a mobile web since it adds size to low-bandwidth pages, but there doesn't seem to be a risk that it'll be dethroned any time soon.

If I were looking to make a portable and semi-futureproof toolkit right now, I'd use jQuery as a base, but limit myself to some big features, like dom queries, events, and ajax. Then I'd make sure I had it sandboxed inside all my code via anonymous functions (function($) { /* my code */ })(jQuery); so I could swap in a lighter replacement later on without a headache.

<comment><USER3> jquery is codesmell of all codesmells

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Check out <https://github.com/component>

</comment><comment><USER4> Moving stuff into CSS seems to be a good direction. i.e. you don't have to code shadows/animations/etc. in JS anymore.</comment>


Google reportedly met with Telegram founder Pavel Durov to discuss acquisition - <AUTHOR> http://tech.eu/brief/google-telegram-acquisition-pavel-durov/ <comment><USER2> Besides the user base, buying the open messaging platform it's an interesting movement considering Google decided to get rid of xmpp and close their Hangouts client.</comment>


Show HN: Code for Planet Earth - <AUTHOR> https://codeforplanetearth.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, This is a job borad for developers who like to work on products that could impact climate change. I'd love to hear feedback.</comment>