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On Starting a Software Business

stephaniehurlburt.com

91–100 of 154 posts

Re: On Starting a Software Business

#91
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Can you elaborate

In the Bay area everyone is assumed to be in tech unless otherwise noted, so this sort of uninformed response to "I'm a computer guy" is generally not seen

I am in SF right now for a couple days and the vast majority of people I run across are NOT in tech. Where are the tech people? Where can I run into potential investors in SF?

When people say Bay Area I think they really mean Palo Alto!

Re: On Starting a Software Business

#92
post #8

Interesting about the 50-50 split. If you talk to most people in the valley, they would probably tell you this is the worst thing you can do. That is, if you're looking from the perspective of a VC.

It's not the 50-50 split that's bad, it's the part where you don't talk about vesting. I have a friend who confounded a startup with another guy. It started with my friend agreeing to put in $20K and some advice, the other guy working full time, for a 50-50 split. After one year my friend has put in $200k+, worked full time building business, marketing, etc, while the other founder does his own job poorly.

They agree my friend deserves more equity, but can't agree between a 70-30 or 80-20 split, so other founder hires lawyer and holds my friend hostage for a lucrative buyout. Company is now worth significant amount of money almost solely to my friends hard work/investment, but legally he can't move forward until co-founder signs off on every decision.

Re: On Starting a Software Business

#94
OT, but referring to the article: why are so many websites allergic to serving basic HTML these days? You get a lovely white page with a Javascript blocker if you try to open this article. What's particularly offensive about this one is that all the raw data is loaded in correctly anyways - the JS appears to just fiddle with making it look right, and there's no default style for if that doesn't happen.

Re: On Starting a Software Business

#95
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accenture revenue in 2016, $32.9 billion. Consulting definitely scales.

The point is scaling without increasing linearly the number of employees. Accenture has approx. 400K employees

A succinct way of putting it is there is a finite profit margin on consulting.

Re: On Starting a Software Business

#96
post #49

Consulting doesn't scale, software does. One pragmatic strategy to find product/customers: 1) Pick an industry 2) Ask someone in that industry what they use spreadsheets for 3) Build something better There is a lot of 'cybernetic' processes that are a mix of humans with domain knowledge and machines with spreadsheets for schemaless storage and querying. Generally the move is to encode the domain knowledge into code a…

Accenture revenue in 2016, $32.9 billion. Consulting definitely scales.

Sure, but with When people say "it scales" they are largely referring to the cost of serving incremental customers. Software does that well, consulting doesn't.

Re: On Starting a Software Business

#97
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Bay area everyone is assumed to be in tech unless otherwise noted, so this sort of uninformed response to "I'm a computer guy" is generally not seen

I am in SF right now for a couple days and the vast majority of people I run across are NOT in tech. Where are the tech people? Where can I run into potential investors in SF? When people say Bay Area I think they really mean Palo Alto!

Interesting. In my experience, at any given function, at bars, in parks, or anywhere really in the bay area, talking to anyone has around 50% chance to be someone working at some sort of tech company. Not necessarily an engineer, but certainly close enough to probably know computers to a reasonable level.

Re: On Starting a Software Business

#98

OT, but referring to the article: why are so many websites allergic to serving basic HTML these days? You get a lovely white page with a Javascript blocker if you try to open this article. What's particularly offensive about this one is that all the raw data is loaded in correctly anyways - the JS appears to just fiddle with making it look right, and there's no default style for if that doesn't happen.

It also doesn't look right if you turn off CSS styling.

Re: On Starting a Software Business

#99
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In English s'il vous plait?

Basically it's saying for every extra dollar you want to earn in consulting you must hire more engineers. For traditional software you can continue to sell the same bits over and over and not hire an extra engineer for the Nth sale.

Tell that to Uber's 15,000 employees.

Re: On Starting a Software Business

#100
post #51

This is a person who obviously has a lot of talent and a lot of specialised knowledge. I doubt most people can get properly paid consulting work or get to product stage as fast as she clearly could.

I was thinking a bay area network, as in "got a call from Netflix," but yes.
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