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Mistakes You Should Never Make

sethbannon.com

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Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#51

Post by Aaronontheweb »

tptacek wrote: post #33

Of all the financial mistakes you can possibly make running a company, withholding payroll taxes and then failing to remit them is probably the worst. Be thankful you caught this before the liability exceeded your available funds, because company operators are apparently routinely held personally liable when there's a shortfall, and I'm not sure that debt is even dischargeable in bankruptcy. What's worse, minor versi…

We've had issues with our state taxes because we changed from an LLC to a C-corp and even though our lawyers took care of everything at the Delaware and Federal level (as far as new tax IDs go), they completely forgot to do this in California where we operate. They're not large liabilities thankfully but it's been a persistent headache for going on two years.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#52

Post by sethbannon »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #30

Seth, Thank you so much for posting this. We all make mistakes, and for each of those, there could be ten thousand HN'ers who would come along behind us and say something like "But how could you do X? That's stupid!" Everybody wants to read business porn. Nobody wants to sit down and hear the ways they will likely screw up. Guess which one is more effective. We need this. This took guts to do. It is one of the more u…

Thanks, Daniel.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#54

Post by mattangriffel »

sethbannon wrote: post #25
smalter wrote: post #19

Amazing article. As advertised, it's not a self-aggrandizing "mistakes" post that points you at the end to the author's next venture. It's full of the kinds of things that keep me up at night. It reminds me of something similar that happened to me: I was running Adwords for the first time. The dashboard wasn't showing that any of my ads had run, and it kept telling me to up my bid amount. I kept upping it and upping…

Thanks for the kind comment, Walter. I'm based in NYC but I'll drop you a line next time I'm back in SF.

Great Jones and Bowery is in NYC ;)

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#55

Post by dreamweapon »

gatehouse wrote: post #45
dreamweapon wrote: post #21

Mistake 1: Taxes This thing about not noticing that you weren't paying payroll taxes wasn't a "mistake." It was pure head-in-assery. How can you "miss" the fact that you weren't being subtracted for payroll taxes? One quarterly / annual review after another, for 3 years? It's like running a personal budget, and "missing" the fact that you aren't paying rent.

It boils down to not having a handle on the general ledger, which if not suicide is at least reckless self-endangerment. But I think it is plausible for someone who is administrativaphobic. But there is a reason this is mistake #1 .

Or on another, much deeper level it boils down to:

"OMG look we're so HAWT, we're co-founders after all, not gutless employees, and we're only in our 20s, doing all these amazing things, and we have this cool office and all these smart, hip people working for us.. and umm, budgets? due diligence? CPAs? What are those?"

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#56

Post by dogecoinbase »

[deleted] wrote: post #41
nicholasjbs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the first paragraph of the post: On the way, my co-founder and our CTO stopped me and said “I’m resigning. And I’m going to tell the team why.” He then told me that he had lost trust in me as a CEO and as a person.

[deleted]

This right here is the actual value that YC derives from the existence of HN -- they can correlate these "anonymous" logins with other logins from the same IP space/etc and figure out who's mudslinging against whom.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#57

Post by DanielBMarkham »

tptacek wrote: post #33

Of all the financial mistakes you can possibly make running a company, withholding payroll taxes and then failing to remit them is probably the worst. Be thankful you caught this before the liability exceeded your available funds, because company operators are apparently routinely held personally liable when there's a shortfall, and I'm not sure that debt is even dischargeable in bankruptcy. What's worse, minor versi…

You can even get in trouble when you don't owe anything.

Moving in and out of W-2/Corp-to-corp status many years ago, we set some consultants up on W-2. Then we changed up the mix, went back to just me, and I went on W-2 with another consulting firm for a while.

Got a letter from the state tax guys. Even though nothing was owed, we were supposed to file forms with all zeroes on them. There was a fine, yadda yadda.

Unfortunately, logic, reason, and common sense are not a reliable guide here.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#58

Post by MadManE »

otterley wrote: post #37
MadManE wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This cannot be overstated. If you give the sales team any room or freedom, they will make your life hell trying to keep up with "features" that outdo everyone else just so they can get their commission check. They don't have to deal with anything beyond signing of the purchase, so they don't care that it sinks everyone else to get that purchase.

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

I agree. But just because something should happen, doesn't mean that it will.

I don't work with a startup, or even in the tech industry, but this is an issue that takes up ~25% of my time. I have to keep pushing back on sales to make sure that they're not selling something that's physically impossible, or just plain stupid (but sounds good).

This is something that cuts across business in America in general, I think.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#59

Post by mattangriffel »

[deleted] wrote: post #41
nicholasjbs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the first paragraph of the post: On the way, my co-founder and our CTO stopped me and said “I’m resigning. And I’m going to tell the team why.” He then told me that he had lost trust in me as a CEO and as a person.

[deleted]

The way I read the post, Seth mentioned a number of readers why he lost their trust.

Specifically:

- Poorly defined co-founder relationships - Not being explicit about hacks - Telling a half-truth

You're free to disagree about whether these are the important reasons why Seth lost their trust, but to say that he didn't address the reasons why is just untrue.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#60

Post by BinaryIdiot »

SheepSlapper wrote: post #20
octo_t wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredibly common behaviour amongst sales people. Or what is also common is 'oh, funny you should mention that, we have a team working on that feature as we speak'. 90% of the time it is fine, contracts tend to be organised for several months in advance, long enough for you to get a feature in place.

As a developer, I've been on the receiving end of "we promised the client we could do this, and they've already paid us, so get to it" more times than I can count... it's my least favorite salesman trait, by far.

Same here; the worst is when they want a feature that's technically impossible.
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