I've worked at Google and they take search quality very seriously. In fact, the search quality guys are not allowed to talk to the ads guys to avoid exactly this type of influence.
Sure money matters, and there is an "apparent" conflict. But in reality, the better the search results are, the more likely that users will use the search engine, which leads to more $$$. There is plenty of literature that demonstrates how serving poor search results will actually result in less ad revenue.
So James, being a former Googler, did you find that Google held back on search quality in favour of ad revenue?
A very interesting article indeed. Not much new, though. I am curious, though .. many co-founders with very successful exits make the top 0.05% or 0.01% in terms of networth, but they're new money. They're not part of the 0.01% closed circle. What happens to them, usually? Are they accepted into the 0.01% circle once they've made enough money to afford it, or are they treated like a wealthier bottom half of the top 1%?
And for the wealthy people who have pledged 50%+ of their wealth to charity - where do they fall in all this classification?
I don't have any statistics to back up my points but I would think the following would be the case...
With the exception of really tremendous exits, let say a pretty successful cofounder gets between .5 million and 5 million (I'm making these numbers up but Id assume these are pretty reasonable guesses for a majority of moderately successful exits). So if thats the case you have a nice chunk of net worth but after an exit you may not have much cash flow to keep up with the big hitters who have a tremendous stream of cash coming in consistently.
Im certainly not arguing that the co-founder with the successful exit is in a bad position - just that their cash flow may be comparatively low compared to someone else who has an ongoing "money printing machine" so to say.
Our approach was:
1. Sketch mockups on paper, iterate until happy.
2. Sketch mockups in Photoshop, iterate until happy with every little detail.
3. Send photoshop mockups for slicing - get back HTML/CSS/JS
4. Convert static HTML files to static templates. In our case, it was Django templates. At this stage, we used dummy data so now the site would be served through django, exactly match the Photoshop images and the sliced HTML, data populated through views. That is, the static data is now hardcoded in the code rather than in the HTML.
5. Incrementally replace each view to serve data from DB instead of hardcoded. Data can be added to DB in Django using an interactive shell or using the admin interface. At this stage, we had our models flushed out and relationships between objects cleared up.
6. Add additional functionality such as forms and whatnot to actually accept input through the app.
7. Ajaxify everything to turn the website into a web app.
We didn't use any fancy tools beyond what's mentioned above.
When we raised our seed funding, I used several cap tables - none of which worked for me because they all made certain assumptions and didn't allow for reverse-calculations, which is what I needed. I found that a simple spreadsheet worked best in the end, but I had to review it a few times to make sure I didn't mess up the numbers.
In our case, the investor said: we value your company at X, we're willing to invest Y, and we need ESOP of Z%. From that, I had to reverse engineer the percentage and number of stocks that all involved would get.
The method that worked for me was to convert everything to number of shares and price per share before and after investing, and then calculate percentages based on shares / total shares for each party. This way, it's easy to calculate how many shares the investor gets based on the valuation (which determines pre-money share value), and final percentages based on total number shares after all is said and done.
A few things make a generic spreadsheet hard to create, and you should keep in mind:
- Is the investor paying based on % or share value?
- Are the ESOP stocks issues before or after the investment? (you get ripped off if it's before)
- Are you issuing new stocks or giving up a percentage of existing ones?
We tried them but had to change to a different vendor because the Blackberries didn't recognize their certificates and they had no plans to rectify that. We don't have much BB traffic, but didn't want to exclude BB users just because we wanted to be cheap.
I actually found the comments informative to gain better insight as to why people use different setups. I had assumed that same as what you said, which turned out to be less often true than I thought.
There is an option for SLA with a paid Google Apps account. Last I checked it was $50/year, but comes with much larger inbox (25G at Google vs. 10G max at Rackspace). Also better integration and push notifications on mobile for Google, if you care about that.
I've used rackspace hosted email before, both the regular and the exchange versions. It works nicely and the users were very happy. It gets expensive though if you want push notifications on the blackberry, even without the exchange.
Google Apps has the advantage that it comes with docs and gmail - not just a standard email :O)
