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Mistakes You Should Never Make

sethbannon.com

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Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#281

Post by larrys »

jacquesm wrote: post #240
larrys wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Without making any value judgements about the operations of this particular company, one valuable lesson from the post is: do not ever use the Bank of America Payroll feature." There are actually all sorts of gotchas in business that happen as a result of some assumption that you make as far as a process being carried out that never has happened. Using BofA wasn't the sole problem here it was being asleep at the swi…

IMO the biggest problem here was not accurately forecasting liquidity, if they had done that they would have seen within two months that something was badly wrong. Excess cash in a business that can not be explained should be just as worrisome as having too little. The latter is an indication that someone is raiding the till in some creative way, the former that you are not paying someone that you should be paying, w…

"Excess cash in a business that can not be explained should be just as worrisome"

Really good point. As it happens one day recently I questioned my wife why our personal account had so much money in it.

It turned out that she had transferred her money into it that should have went into another account.

This was after correcting problems where she had payed some personal bills out of our account because the bank bill paying "default" for her was set to our joint account rather than her own account.

So she switched it so default bill payment now = her account. So now I have a different problem. She pays our bills out of her account. Which (in addition to the above mentioned wrong deposit) has created even more havoc.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#282

Post by cullenking »

tptacek wrote: post #249
bravo22 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. You could pull in sometimes 250-500K as a consulting company, specially if you outsource some aspects of projects. S-Corp is ideal for that.

The FICA cap is 115k.

The SS side of FICA is 115k. Medicare has no limit and is at 1.45%

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#283

Post by calibraxis »

jacquesm wrote: post #279
calibraxis wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem if you disagree; just a couple observations: - any "shock" people have about corporations/investors routinely lying is hopefully fake. Or at least brief. - simply read the charts and see how transparently YC misleads those who don't think through basic statistics: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/04...

Now we're solidly into threadjacking territory, we're not going to make this about gender in start-ups. You can argue about that until the cows come home, it has nothing to do with the subject at hand, which is the activities of the founders of YC and their relationship with YC. To know more about the subject you want to pull this thread into you'd have to know a ton more about the YC applicant pool than is publicly…

Didn't discuss gender; just pointed out that Washington Post called out YC's blatantly misleading stats.

(Since you're passionately discussing oppression, hopefully one day women will work for themselves, not "working for YOU". That is, needing to rent their bodies to guys like you, via labor markets. Anyway, thanks for everyone's time.)

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#284

Post by jeffcrigler »

Seth shows a lot of courage to do this. I have done three start ups. My first one was successful and got bought by Lexis/Nexis... but it wasn't very lucrative. The second one was a complete disaster and I spend $40 million on a pipe dream and my VC's had to take me out. The third one was a success still waiting to materialize as it was sold and I have yet to see the dividend. But at ever step i made lots of mistakes (including falling behind on payroll taxes) and each of these were learning opportunities. I give kudos to Seth for sharing this and am more hopeful now than before that he can make Amicus successful in the long term.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#285

Post by jasonwocky »

tptacek wrote: post #153
bravo22 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually as an S-Corp owner all the corporate income is taxed as REGULAR INCOME. It doesn't become a capital gains tax -- which is what I assume you mean by investment income. However the US government wants you to also pay Social Security and Medicare tax, which you only pay on employment income. Therefore they force you to take a "reasonable"[1] salary from the company. Everything else left in the company's account…

It's taxed as regular income, but the premise under which it's exempt from the payroll taxes every other worker has to pay is that it's not normal income, but rather the return from an investment in the company. For people in our industry, it's hard to see a definition of "reasonable" that would be financially beneficial. You start a tech company. You pull $100k out every year, putting you right smack in the middle o…

> To support that (sorry) scam, you claim $50k is your "reasonable" salary --- putting you way on the low side of the industry. How convenient.

I don't know. What salary would you take for your honest-to-god dream job?

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#286

Post by jacquesm »

calibraxis wrote: post #283
jacquesm wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we're solidly into threadjacking territory, we're not going to make this about gender in start-ups. You can argue about that until the cows come home, it has nothing to do with the subject at hand, which is the activities of the founders of YC and their relationship with YC. To know more about the subject you want to pull this thread into you'd have to know a ton more about the YC applicant pool than is publicly…

Didn't discuss gender; just pointed out that Washington Post called out YC's blatantly misleading stats. (Since you're passionately discussing oppression, hopefully one day women will work for themselves, not "working for YOU". That is, needing to rent their bodies to guys like you, via labor markets. Anyway, thanks for everyone's time.)

I've worked for women and there are two women currently on my payroll. Would you rather they were unemployed? And as to them working for themselves I fully agree with you, which is exactly why I am assisting one of the two with her entrepreneurial ambitions. You're really totally out of touch here and I seriously wonder what it is that you are trying to achieve with all your un-founded mudslinging.

Also, you don't speak for everyone here, just for yourself.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#287

Post by [deleted] »

roel_v wrote: post #237
pyre wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two thoughts: 1. Was that really the phone company's money? My first thought on hearing that story was that the $6 in change was from people putting money into the broken phone, realizing it was broken, and leaving without their money. Does the phone company really deserve money that the phone 'eats' when it doesn't deliver the service that people are giving it money for? 2. If you sent the phone company that $6 toda…

"2. If you sent the phone company that $6 today, they would file criminal charges, because that cheque is an admission of guilt for stealing money from them." Uhm, yeah, pardon my French, but that's complete bullshit.

[deleted]

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#288

Post by otterley »

UVB-76 wrote: post #150
otterley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salespeople who sell products by providing false information are committing fraud on behalf of the company and should be fired.

This is just how things work in a lot of industries. You promise the world to make a sale, then once you've signed, work frantically to make the vision you sold a reality. If you were open and honest, you wouldn't sell a thing. The only people who lose out are those who take salespeople on their word and don't get everything agreed in writing. Never take a salesperson on their word.

> If you were open and honest, you wouldn't sell a thing.

Or you could, you know, make stuff worth buying.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#289

Post by SoftwareMaven »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #188
larrys wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In reality, though, the main point that you missed is that in a world made of shades of gray, the only person you can ever truly rely on is yourself. If you don't have scruples and you don't have honor, you don't have anything." Well let me put it this way. I don't think you understand my point about nuances and that I (once again) don't feel any of this is black and white. As an example the honor that I might displ…

The thing my grandfather taught me was that you live with all of your decisions for the rest of your life. When you make decisions which put other people at risk, you take on the risk that you are going to make someones life harder, possibly much harder. What is perhaps even more important is that no amount of "I'm so sorry I did that ..." will ever undo it. Sometimes its little things, like taking the last serving b…

Unfortunately, some people never come to understand that. Being able to recognize consequences before acting (and changing behavior as a result) is, IMO, the definition of wisdom.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#290

Post by girvo »

afro88 wrote: post #207
sethbannon wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that you made this HN account only to comment on this post. I've learned that getting into a back-and-forth with anonymous posters on HN is never a good idea, but I'll respond just this once. 1. You're absolutely right. I majorly screwed up here. I say so as much in the post. 2. I think people can reasonably disagree here. An example: a potential customer asks a sales guy during a demo "...and will we be able t…

> 2. I think people can reasonably disagree here. An example: a potential customer asks a sales guy during a demo "...and will we be able to export a list of our users?" Answer: "yes, absolutely". The customer signs. The sales person then runs to dev team and says "we need to build this export functionality before they launch". Did the potential customer think that feature already existed? Probably. Is anyone being h…

Look, ethically, I totally agree with you.

Practically though, if you've worked in sales, you'll know that what the OP is talking about isn't just something that happens often, but is basically the life-blood of some rather large companies.

Now, I dislike it because it puts the impetus on the developers to deal with it if it goes wrong, and that sort of crunch-time stress is just crazy, but it's also not something that the OP has come up with on his own...

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