Are you 100% sure you're "not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise"? Silver Lake has its hands in a lot of companies. Odds are someone you work with in the WordPress world is connected, or one of the companies you work with.
That's the problem with a vague checkbox like that where the guidance is "talk to your lawyer." What happens when he decides he has a problem with you and uses your clicking that checkbox against you? Are you sure you can fend that off from every angle someone with his resources can attack? Can the lawyer you can afford?
You're part of it as of 2 hours ago when you replied to Matt's comment in TFA asking who should step in to replace the people that he locked out of the previous team? Or were you on the team before that comment?
> Matt: We should find some new team reps to replace them, do you have any suggestions?
> Blake: I’m of course happy to do whatever it takes to make WordPress Accessible. How can I jump in and help?
This article largely came out of frustration with my peers investing lots of energy in developing LLM accessibility review. I spent a year doing it myself. Now I'm done. (Props to those we reference in the article.) My focus is now on quicker scalability for rules-based accessibility tests.
LLM-generated descriptions miss lots of context. For instance, depending on the site and content, we might mention people's races or fashion. Other times we don't.
everyone should be taking this stuff seriously. EU's accessibility act is set to be implemented in 2025 and the US congress also has a bill in the works that mandates greater accessibility across all governments.
We're pre-revenue. Our salaries would be covered by a few interested investors. Current thinking: Unless we get a strategic benefit from taking money from the investor, we shouldn't.
I'm really just curious if some data exists that shows startups that paid salaries survive longer than startups that don't.
Any data would be heavily skewed. I had about 5 projects designed to be commercial, only one of which was registered as a "startup", and that was long after making revenue. Our salary was about $40/month up until acquisition, but does that really count as paid salaries? However we took out a lot more from the bank for personal use, including flights and equipment.
We eventually sold it because we were getting into debt and the half-assed consulting we were doing to pay the bills just didn't allow us to focus on it. It would have gone much further if we could live off the salaries.
Ya. Totally. The good manager is my Plan B if I don't get an offer I want. We have loyal clients that most companies are hot for + a great workflow, so hopefully that translates into more than just a job..
Super solid. We have a workflow that allows devs or designers with under 3 yrs of experience to develop sites that usually require pros with > 5 yrs. That means lower overhead of us and stronger profit.
Similar to real-estate to a certain degree. A lot of it is based upon prior experience and having sold like businesses usually. Many also belong to trade groups or similar organizations that provide deal information that they can look up anonymized deals and find like values etc.
It is hard to hack your way through this one if you want accurate information to maximize your valuation.
I'd also encourage the potential buyer to value the business first, with providing only some basic data points, and that way you know if there is even a real opportunity for both parties. Cause if you are thinking you are getting some multiple of revenue (or net) and they are saying the book of business is worth $50k, you could be off by an insurmountable number and better to know that earlier then later.
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