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Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

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Re: Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

#201

Post by trevelyan »

axod wrote: post #63
drinko wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg, The idea was that always that she would be a full co-founder. We agreed on a low equity split initially because of the asymmetric risk we were taking. The idea was always to increase her stake 6 months into the project, but not in the way it happened. I met her through a friend, and 3 months ago would have been proud to call her my cofounder. I am going to learn to hack regardless, I am just trying to figure out…

It doesn't sound particularly like she believed in the idea. I think in retrospect it would have been better to offer 50% and the same salary as you. Going forward though, I'd say definitely learn to hack. Also find people who might help not because of a salary, but because they think the idea is cool and want to be part of it.

Learn to hack. Giving any employee a hazy equity offer with promises to "scale it up" is a bad idea. The better your prospects get the more she is likely to feel screwed. And the worse they get, the less motivating the prospect of continuing seems.

Any scaling equity package should be linked to dates and performance goals. You basically said you didn't want her to own the company unless it succeeded, when success was contingent on her.

Sounds like she trusted you. Then stopped trusting you. Then left a few months later. You screwed up. Go apologize.

Re: Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

#202

Post by davidw »

nostrademons wrote: post #106
mixmax wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can counter that with a real world example. I've done a startup that succeeded and got a pretty neat product out (which btw. included FPGA programming, hardware, mobile technology, and web technology - not exactly easy stuff..) and we had contractors do everything. No hackers aboard. And it worked. So it can be done.

I get the feeling that there's an exception to almost every startup rule. In my personal experience, I've never seen outsourcing work well, or really work at all. The first startup I worked at spent $300k to setup an office in China, paying their developers about $10-15k/year. It would've been a great deal, except that the China office produced nothing and sucked up the complete time of both the CTO and chief scienti…

> I get the feeling that there's an exception to almost every startup rule.

Well, it would be a lot easier if it were just a collection of rules to follow;-)

I'd be interested to hear what mixmax did, in what field, in order to succeed without technical people, although it's mainly academic interest, as I'm definitely "technical people" myself.

Re: Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

#203

Post by swombat »

wanorris wrote: post #189
andreyf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More data points: I've had experiences with only two startups which outsourced their initial code - and both regretted it deeply (ended up in complete rewrites).

Yet another data point that agrees with you. I and a couple of friends of mine did the technical work for a startup on a contract basis 2-3 years ago. We were working in our spare time, and it seemed like a fun project, and a good occasion to learn Rails. Of course, little did we realize that they were planning to pay us with money they hadn't actually raised yet. We did end up completing the working demo for them, b…

Data points work best in groups. Here's more.

We outsourced initial development of a prototype, it cost us little money but much time, and the quality of the output was appalling (from both a user and a technical perspective). It was functional on a very pedantic level, but mostly useless.

Daniel

Re: Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

#204

Post by drinko »

trevelyan wrote: post #201
axod wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't sound particularly like she believed in the idea. I think in retrospect it would have been better to offer 50% and the same salary as you. Going forward though, I'd say definitely learn to hack. Also find people who might help not because of a salary, but because they think the idea is cool and want to be part of it.

Learn to hack. Giving any employee a hazy equity offer with promises to "scale it up" is a bad idea. The better your prospects get the more she is likely to feel screwed. And the worse they get, the less motivating the prospect of continuing seems. Any scaling equity package should be linked to dates and performance goals. You basically said you didn't want her to own the company unless it succeeded, when success was…

She wasn't initially hired as an employee - it was more of a contract agreement to develop the beta, with the option to come on as a full partner if we were working well together.

It wasn't a hazy equity offer.

Re: Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

#205

Post by flipbrad »

cstejerean wrote: post #171
flipbrad wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

note that she took a pay cut because she wanted a greater stake in the company. does that fit with her not believing in it? it does sound like she didn't have the experience or the maturity to whittle down to an achievable project, however. learn to code, maybe that plus this experience will make you a much stronger manager and designer next time around.

if I read it correctly she REFUSED to take a paycut.

you're absolutely right, I apologise.

Point remains that asking for equity does not fit with expectation of failure.

Re: Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

#206

Post by samuel »

Buff, that's bad luck. You are in a difficult situation but I really envy your bravery. Definitely you are commited with your project, and I hope that will be the key for your success.

Developing the app yourself it's not an option, unless you have a decent background in programming, with obviously it's not the case. Some knowledge of how things work may be worthwhile, though.

You need to find a good developer: if he or she is in the US, India or Europe is irrelevant. The problem is you can't know if someone is good developer or not, as you are not one yourself. A safe bet would be an entrepeneur with experience who could show you his past work but it will be expensive so definitely you need to raise more money.

It's easier to find an undergraduate willing to do the job but that will be like playing the russian roulette, may be it will work but may be it won't.

Something I don't understand is: what are you have been doing in the last year? If you don't code, and you don't have customers yet, Why did you quit your job?

Re: Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

#207

Post by tomh »

crux_ wrote: post #170
pchristensen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age doesn't have much to do with gender. If she was male I would have called her "The Django Guy". There's not a great corresponding female version of guy - chick sounds chauvinist, lady sounds to formal (think of how "The Django Gentleman" would sound). "The Django Woman" doesn't work either. What would you have said? More choices from Encarta Thesaurus: lass, miss, young woman, mademoiselle, daughter, lassie, madem…

??? What about "gal"? I guess Encarta isn't very knowledgeable about the American West.

"The Django Gal." Nice. I see a country music spinoff in YouTube any day now: "A rough and tough tale of battling Pythonistas in Tulsa."

Re: Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

#208

Post by abijlani »

Being in startup is hard enough but now having to learn coding and fix someone else's code is not the path you should go down. I think outsourcing to get it to releasable state is very good option. Your focus should be managing the product expectations and seeking your next round of funding, not coding. In addition, think about the fact that your Django developer still owns 35% equity even after leaving you high and dry. I recommend taking a corporate attorney's advice on how you can get her to give you back that stake or start another company.

Re: Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

#209

Post by tomh »

huhtenberg wrote: post #169
Kaizyn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, from what we have been told so far, this is a medical startup. Which means that there's a good deal of regulations and rules that someone has to learn how the company should handle. Since they took investment money, that means that there are investors to cope with. Also, there's that inconvenient issue of working with potential users to learn what they need. Again, because this is related to the medical field,…

From what I gather it's a social networking site for people with certain medical condition(s). I might be wrong but this is hardly a "medical startup" and thus it's not likely to require extensive certification/compliance paperwork (if any at all). Besides this paperwork would've needed to be handled by the lawyers. I can see the logic in your UI comment, but again - 12 months ? That's enough to design and polish the…

Not so fast - there are laws on the books like HIPAA that govern patient confidentiality and protectected health information. If she's selling to 'covered entities' under HIPAA they have to subscribe to a certain level of security or anonymity in their systems.

Why do you think MSFT and GOOG are so slow to enter this space? Because of all the hidden rules, regulations and pitfalls of the medical industry. Our poster probably has a good handle on this, or has been working hard to get a handle on this in the last 12 months.

Re: Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

#210

Post by greyman »

pistoriusp wrote: post #86

Does anyone else think that a salary of $6,900 is too much? I even think that $3,000 is too much... Of course my situation in South Africa might be a lot cheaper. I got away with $1,250 per month, and even then I was able to live pretty comfortably.

Absolutely. I live in Eastern Europe, working as a software developer in a big company, and my salary is around $2000. I would be more than happy to work for $6,900 with 0% equity as long as the founder would pay me. ;-)
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