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I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

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Re: I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

#161

Post by red_blobs »

I feel like many startup founders, including Patrick, build the technology and hope the business will follow...usually with an unsuccessful outcome.

He's great at marketing. He should have spent a year building a network of employers with lower-tech solutions and then expanded it out with starfighter.

I've been following Patrick since the BoS days and all of his products have been pretty low profit. Enough to support himself only (some, not even this much) (I'm not including consulting, only products or services)

Money is the lifeblood of all companies and you will need it to truly change the world.

Re: I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

#163

Post by fecak »

tptacek wrote: post #156
fecak wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met with Patrick for a couple hours this spring to talk about Starfighter and recruiting and such (I've been in recruiting for almost 20 years), and I shared some of the challenges the industry has faced. Patrick shared some anecdotes about his brief experience (at the time) on the recruiting side of the business, and it does take some time to get to the point where you don't take rejection personally. Recruiting i…

That's really interesting! Our experience was: we didn't need to do any outbound sales work at all (our entire client base was cold inbounds), and we could close a contract with 1-2 phone calls. Our referrals I think with 1 exception? all got interviews. But we're sourcing non-traditional candidates, and the --- you know what, I'm getting ahead of myself on a blog post I'm still tuning up. In any case, that might exp…

The outbound sourcing work is the worst part without doubt, but the game took care of that for you. That, and the fact that it was backed by people with good industry names, was the beauty of Starfighter. I told Patrick that you already had the two hardest parts covered - engaging with qualified candidates and establishing credibility.

You also had cred with the hiring folks, so that was taken care of as well - hiring clients were going to be easy to identify without much effort.

The hard part would be scaling it to some degree - Patrick and you/Erin wouldn't be able to talk to every candidate if you were going to make serious $, and then you'd have to hire actual recruiters (who are wildly unpopular), and then you're starting to approach the problem of being like everyone else (other than the game) if the recruiters behave like...recruiters.

If you ever want to discuss recruiting stuff, I'm easy to find.

Re: I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

#164

Post by idlewords »

icebraining wrote: post #138
idlewords wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for businesses like "running a website" this threat is overrated, to the point of absurdity, but again: willing to accept that I'm the weirdo.

I wonder if you'll say the same when Pinboard gets sued for copyright infringement by its archival feature. I hope it never happens, but saying "it's just a website" is a little cavalier. (Yes, it merely takes an publicly available work that the users could download themselves, and makes it available to each individually. That's essentially what Aereo did, and look at them now.)

I'm not saying there's no legal exposure. My point is that no one is going to slip and fall on your website, and leave you on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in personal liability.

If I was building an Internet of Things blender I would incorporate in a heartbeat.

Re: I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

#165

Post by blfr »

aeden wrote: post #13
chatmasta wrote: post #8

What I like most about the long term vision for Atlas is that, if it's truly "as easy as spinning up an EC2 instance" to form a new corporation, then it will be possible for a single entrepreneur to create complex global corporate structures previously limited only to multinational corporations. How nice would it be, as say, a digital nomad, to be able to have a single "holding company" based in HK, and dynamically c…

Slightly OT, but countries tend to dislike this brave new world where they cannot obviously and clearly collect taxes on business owners that reside in their country. It is going to be a tough day if the other shoe drops on this. No idea what it will look like if it happens though.

We should have gone VAT-only (or VAT-mostly with some land and excise taxes thrown in) a long time ago. Perhaps we finally will.

Re: I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

#167

Post by caseysoftware »

stevoski wrote: post #109

Patrick writes in the article: > I never thought I could build a Fog Creek, but I saw a bunch of other geeks building Poker Co-pilot and Perfect Table Plan and skeet-shooting scoring software, and I was pretty sure I could at least do something like that. I'm the geek who built (and continues to run) Poker Copilot. Patrick got the order of events backwards. What actually happened is that I started Poker Copilot in a…

Don't forget, there was the chimney sweep software guy too. :)

/oldschool

Re: I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

#169

Post by qohen »

smoyer wrote: post #132
dave_sullivan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Accelerando (great book if you're into this stuff) "My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five, incorporated?" "Uh." Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. "Hold on a moment." When the retinal pattern…

I just reread Accelerando and had forgotten how good it was.

And, the book is -- legitimately -- available for free, in a variety of formats -- details on the author's blog:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

This free ebook edition is made available by kind consent of my publishers, Ace and Orbit, under a Creative Commons license with certain restrictions attached. In particular, you may not create derivative works or use the work for commercial gain.

Re: I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

#170

Post by anexprogrammer »

antoinevg wrote: post #148
basisword wrote: post #48

First time I've seen Atlas. I'm immediately worried. If someone starts a company using this I presume it's subject to US laws? What does this mean: 1. For taxes? If I live in the UK and start my business with Atlas does the US get the corporation tax revenue or the UK (or a split of the two)? 2. For data security/privacy? Is the data I store now subject to access by the US government through National Security letters…

We're based in South Africa and joined the Stripe Atlas beta earlier this year. Solving the incorporation problem is only the first of many problems. --- Please understand that none of the following is a criticism of Stripe. If we hadn't been accepted to the beta we'd be dead in the water right now and our customers would have been screwed. I also expect the solutions to become easier as more people in more countries…

Possibly stupid question for you.

Why did you chose Atlas (ie US Incorporation), giving those micro-scale multinational issues, rather than incorporate in SA?

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