101–110 of 268 posts
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Dropbox has received a quarter of a billion dollars in funding.
According to Drew Houston at Websummit last week, they haven't spent any of that money.
Can somebody explain the difference between salary, payroll, and personnel? As far as I can tell, this money goes to employees. However, with a sum of roughly $3.8M, this seems a bit high for 6 employees over 2 years ($270k+/employee/yr), so that can't be right..
Dammit. That sucks. I am (well, was) a paying member of Everpix and I loved it. It was very great. It surprises me that this is how I found out about the closing. They haven't sent out the notifications to members yet, it seems. Guess I now have to look for another similarly seamless remote backup of my photo library. Any suggestions?
We're sending out emails in batches. We will also be in touch about refunds and downloads.
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Let me break this down a bit: USD 500k at USD 2k/man day = 250 man days A US man year has ~235 man days, so that's just roughly 1 external FTE for a year. Not so much, actually.
That would be a very high fill rate (5 days a week) for such high prices.
Why would you do this? Examples:
* a team to write the Android port(s)
* a Web design team
* QA
* HR
* Legal ($$$$$)
* etc.
All of these will be at different rates. You might outsource parts of the technology to hit your other growth goals.
It's somehow ironic that a service provider whose name contains 'ever' and promised to store your photos for ever has to shutdown after only two years. As a user, I tend more and more to go with well established providers to avoid such situations. 40 days isn't much to migrate away from a service either. On the other hand, users have probably to be glad that the service wasn't shut down with immediate effect.
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Looks to like it died because they spent too much by being in the Bay Area. Seriously... they're spending ~$1k/employee/month for office space in a "co-working venue" in SF.
Well in defense of that - it's easy to underestimate the value of a good, creative, productive workspace.
See also: Their $35k/month (Over $5/paying customer!) AWS bill, when they probably could have done the non-sexy startup thing and just leased a couple of beefy VPS servers for a fraction of that.
[Everpix] lost the $50,000 first prize
[at TechCrunch Disrupt] to Shaker, a
bizarre kind of Second Life-meets-Facebook
social network that raised $15 million and
hasn't been heard from in a year.
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I do not hold an MBA, but have a few friends that do and this seems like an inaccurate generalization. My understanding is that MBA's can have varied focus areas, with a varying curriculum. For example, MBA's can be focused on: Finance, Marketing, Management, etc, and yes, Entrepreneurship.
How can you have formal education in Entrepreneurship? It's pretty much on job type of learning. Not trying to be snarky but I'm genuinely curious.
Almost every job has quite a bit "on the job" learning that you won't get in your academic studies. An MBA still teaches a lot of the skills, whether they be in finance, business planning, networking, IP issues, or presenting, that are useful for entrepreneurs. I imagine an MBA focused specifically on entrepreneurship would have even more useful stuff in the curriculum. Would be great if someone with such a qualification could chime in. A friend of mine with an MBA had one course where the main project was to basically to development a business from scratch and pitch it to real investors. Several students went on to launch those businesses after school.
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When you go down the VC path, they expect hypergrowth; certain doors are opened and others are closed. Personally, next time around I minimize dependence on funding.
VC kids treat themselves like kings and never truly get to hacking. What ever happened to internal hardware? Build, setting up, and tuning servers is one of the most fun parts of running a service. When you get millions in funding its easy to piss away on the highest tier services. When you start from the ground up, every cent is managed.
As someone who has worked in this space, I can tell you that the skills simply do not exist. They don't hire for them, because they all ("all") use outsourced hosting and deployment frameworks that insulate them from these things.
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Do you think they were better off by having their own servers ? (Honest question we use AWS and Rackspace, and we feel the pain of Monthly bills as well).
This should be fairly easy to price out, right? I suggest you start by simply comparing the cost of dedicated hosting-provided hardware. This is the middle ground between owning your own stuff and something like AWS. Pricing out the cost of owning your own servers can be tricky since you need to account for a number of factors: * Initial cost of hardware - don't forget to include things like network switches, remote…
Of course, raw hosting costs are only part of the calculation. You have to include sysadmin time and salary.