

Tips for Startup Companies (2006) - vinutheraj
http://philip.greenspun.com/business/startup-tips

======
donniefitz2
I read a lot of articles on startups, and the take away is usually a few small
nuggets of value. I think this is first article I have read in a while that
has a lot of value. It was good. Read it.

~~~
ojbyrne
Philip's writings were definitely ahead of their time. He changed my life.

"It is because these guys were the best programmers who understood the
problems of their customers." sums it up.

------
angstrom
"Your competitors can probably get a home equity loan at 6 percent on their
McMansions. How much cheaper can your cost of capital possibly be?"

Oh sweet blast from the past.

------
smanek
_A less obvious approach is to insist that the venture capitalists buy some of
your common shares at the time of the investment. There are a lot of venture
capitalists and not too many good companies. If your company is attractive,
you can probably find a firm that will agree to put $10 million into the
company and, say, $3 million into your pocket. Then if the enterprise stumbles
and ends up being sold for, say, $9 million, you won't feel like a total
idiot._

Is this still the case? Are VCs willing to do deals like this (especially
early on, say in a Series A round)?

------
ShardPhoenix
The bit about preferring hypothetical questions over past achievements in
interviews sounds dubious to me. The current practice seems to be "behavioral"
questions like "tell me about a time you had to deal with <specific type of
problem x>, and how you personally contributed to solving it", the idea
apparently being that what someone _claims_ (or imagines) they would do in a
given situation is a much weaker indicator of their realistic future behaviour
than what they actually _did_ in that situation in the past. In other words,
actions speak louder than words. However, this is different than simply
letting someone brag in general terms about some project they were a part of -
the more specific nature of the questioning allows you to get at what the
person's real contribution was.

I haven't seen the actual research though (I think behavioral interviewing at
least claims to be based on research evidence).

~~~
vinutheraj
That works when your aim is to find out the behaviour of character of a
person, which is not the aim of a technical interview question. Basically the
aim of the technical question is to find out how the person thinks and how
creative a solution he works out, and how his thinking process works, not to
find out his behavioral characteristics.

So it doesn't depend whether if it is an actual situation the candidate has
gone through or if it is a hypothetical situation. In the case of a candidate
applying for a first job for instance, this is a pretty good way of
questioning I think !

------
BerislavLopac
I'm curious about the participation rights -- is there any chance to avoid
this altogether? Basically, this means that all that the company gets from the
VC is a loan, in return for a part of the company. I'm still far from needing
a VC, but at the moment I don't see myself allowing this clause.

